The focal point of this podcast episode resides in the compelling intersection of trauma recovery and parapsychology, as elucidated by Dr. Beth Hedva. Throughout our discourse, Dr. Hedva delineates her extensive journey, commencing with her childhood experiences of precognition and culminating in her advanced studies in transpersonal and clinical psychology. She articulates the necessity of integrating psychic, psychological, and spiritual dimensions in therapeutic practices, particularly in the context of trauma, which she identifies as a profound catalyst for healing and transformation. Our conversation delves into the nuanced understanding of how psychic disturbances can serve as sophisticated psychological defenses, ultimately guiding individuals toward healing not only themselves but also their communities. As we traverse these intricate themes, we invite listeners to contemplate how their own experiences with trauma may offer insights into their life's purpose and the broader human condition.

As we delve into the intricate interplay between trauma and parapsychology, the conversation with Dr. Beth Hedva illuminates the profound connections between psychological experiences and the spiritual dimensions that often accompany them. Dr. Hedva, with her extensive background in both clinical and transpersonal psychology, articulates her journey into the realm of psychic phenomena and the healing potentials that lie therein. From her childhood experiences of precognition to her academic pursuits in parapsychology, she has cultivated a unique perspective on how psychic disturbances can manifest as psychological defenses, often intertwined with deep emotional traumas. Through her work, she emphasizes the need for an integrative approach that braids together the psychological, the psychic, and the spiritual, advocating for a therapeutic methodology that respects and utilizes the full spectrum of human experience.

In discussing her experiences in trauma recovery, particularly in settings like Indonesia after the tsunami, Dr. Hedva elucidates the complexities of addressing both natural disasters and their accompanying spiritual crises. She highlights the importance of recognizing the cultural contexts in which trauma occurs, asserting that spiritual beliefs and practices can play a crucial role in healing. By empowering individuals with the tools to harness their psychic resources, she aims to facilitate not only personal healing but also communal restoration. Dr. Hedva’s insights challenge the often rigid boundaries of traditional psychology, inviting us to consider a more holistic view that embraces the mystery and depth of human experience, ultimately fostering a greater understanding of our interconnectedness and shared humanity.

Takeaways:

• The podcast emphasizes the importance of integrating psychological, spiritual, and psychic aspects in healing practices.
• Dr. Beth Hedva's work illustrates how psychic disturbances can serve as sophisticated psychological defenses during traumatic experiences.
• The discussion highlights the necessity of understanding diverse cultural perspectives on trauma and healing, particularly in parapsychology.
• Listeners are encouraged to utilize their psychic resources to gain insights into their life purposes and the lessons from their traumatic events.

Links referenced in this episode:

• Hedva.com
• paranormaldailynews.com
• deadlydepartedpodcast.com
• betrayaltrustforgiveness.com

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• John F. Kennedy University
• Institute for Parapsychology
• Paranormal Daily News
• Lloyd Auerbach
• Dr. Beth Hedva
• International Council of Psychologists
• Dr. Manti Satya Dharma
• First Nations
• Stanislav Grof
• Assagioli
• Edith Fiore
• Brian Williams
• Jerry Sulphin
• Psychical Research Foundation
• Office of Paranormal Investigation
• Barbara Tedlock

As a child, I was having precognitive genes.

And then of course, in my teens, I started working with people who had died in my dreams and found out that I had healing energy in my hands, all kinds of things.

And studied parapsychology at the Institute for Parapsychology when I was 18.

Wow.

I went into transpersonal psychology and clinical psychology at John F. Kennedy University.

So I have master's in both of those.

Wow.

And then for my PhD, I chose to.

Because it seemed to me that things were missing about braiding together this.

Welcome to the Deadly Departed podcast, where the veil between the living and the dead is just a whisper away.

I'm Jock, and along with my colleagues in Paranormal Daily News, we will be your guides through the shadowy realms of the paranormal and the unexplained.

In each episode, we will dive into the eerie and the enigmatic with the help of today's leading experts in parapsychology, science and the supernatural, prepare to uncover the secrets that lurk in the dark and explore the mysteries that defy explanation.

Let's embark on this journey now.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, ladies and gentlemen, wherever you are in the world.

This is Jock here.

This is Deadly Departed.

And today I'm excited today.

Cause I have got a brilliant guest that I was connected with with Lloyd Urbacher, head of Parapsychology and PDN, who connected myself and Dr. Beth Hedva, who has got a tremendous history in trauma therapy.

She's a psychologist living in Canada.

It's pretty cold at the moment there, as you can imagine.

And she's also recognized by the humanitarian missions and all over the world for dealing with trauma.

And she has a particular interest in a field of research that I am really excited about.

And there's not many experts in the world in this field.

And today I'm really excited to dive into this.

Dr. Beth Hedville, welcome to Deadly Departed.

How are you?

Thank you.

Hi.

I'm doing really well.

Thank you, Jacques.

That's a great intro.

And I'm really happy to be here.

I'm so happy to be here.

And I want to, as much as I love to introduce people and tell them a little bit, I think it's very important that you tell people all about you and the work and everything that you do so that we can give them a full kind of background on where you've come from and where you are now before we dive into the really exciting part.

So absolutely.

Over to you.

Great.

So I'll just start kind of how I got into this field.

As a child, I was having precognitive genes.

And then, of course, in my teens, I started working with people who had died in my dreams and found out that I had healing energy in my hands, all kinds of things.

And studied parapsychology at the Institute for Parapsychology.

When I was 18, I went into transpersonal psychology and clinical psychology at John F. Kennedy University.

So I have master's in both of those.

And then for my PhD, chose to.

Because it seemed to me that things were missing about braiding together the psychic, the psychological, and the spiritual.

Everybody had their own little silo and they weren't integrating.

So that became my personal mission and what I observed in working with people who had psychic disturbances, both at the Institute for Parapsychology.

And then I briefly ran something called the Psychic Hotline, way, way back in the 80s, before it was a thing.

And it was to give people support for whatever their experiences were that they were having.

And I realized that underneath many of the people who were having psychic experiences, they were using their psychic resources as a very sophisticated psychological defense, you know, to be out of the way when trouble was coming at them sort of thing.

So to get a jump on that, and that under all of that was tremendous drama.

So that kind of led me into writing my first book called Betrayal, Trust and Forgiveness.

And I wish I had a copy.

I would show it to you.

It's available.

Don't worry about that, Beth, because I'm going to show it to people.

I have recently purchased it, so I don't have it here, so I'm definitely going to link it, and I'm looking forward to diving into it myself.

Good, thank you.

Because in that book, what I talk about how betrayal, which is actually a traumatic experience, is archetypal and universal.

And I go from personal betrayal wounds all the way to interpersonal betrayal wounds and society's betrayal body betrayals, betrayal of our planet, following this pattern that defines reactions.

But when we heal from those reactions, and it follows the same pattern for healing, it allows us to actually enter into and becoming emissaries for healing at every next level.

It's like our early betrayal wounds prepare us to become healers for ourselves, but also for our communities, for our families, for our circle community.

And so after that book came out, I was invited to go to Indonesia.

One of the.

My colleagues from the International Council of Psychologists somehow fell in love with my work.

And then four years later, the tsunami happened.

And, you know, because of my work and betrayal of the planet as a gateway to a new world.

Dr. Manti Satya Dharma invited me to develop a spiritually integrated program for recovery from trauma.

And in Indonesia, needless to say, psychic and spiritual resources are woven into every aspect of life.

Absolutely.

And that kind of led me to doing trauma recovery work in Aceh with First nations up here in Canada, in Haiti, of course, we know about the horrible earthquake that happened there.

And so how do we use our psychic and intuitive resources, our spiritual resources, to heal from these deep wounds?

That's become my specialty.

I absolutely love that because, as you know, that's one of my passions.

And I wholly believe that there's a distance.

We need to create bridges between the transpersonal, between parapsychology and also what mainstream science seems to pathologize.

Because I can imagine if I jump a little bit back into the tsunami side of things, mainstream science will look at people having trauma from a physical and an emotional point of view, but they don't seem to connect the spiritual and the psychic to this.

And I think there comes a time when you've exhausted all other avenues in the material world that we have to look beyond that into the spiritual realms, which obviously, as we both know, Grof, you know, Stanislav Grof, had amazing research over the years into that, as well as Assagioli and other proponents to that.

But I think there's still a lot that we need to do, and that's why I'm excited that there's this new field of research is very, very young in clinical parapsychology, especially the work that you're doing as well on the trauma side of things.

Now, how did you.

I mean, I know you've talked a little bit about your background and your interest on it, but have you had any traumatic experiences yourself that you were able to pinpoint and say, hey, wait a minute, this is not pathological in the material sense.

This is a spiritual problem that I need to face head on.

Well, of course I've had traumatic experiences.

It comes with living on planet Earth at this time in history.

And so that's the nature of being born in a body right now.

You know, it's archetypal.

And we're all confronting major shifts and changes and unexpected changes, and sometimes those are extremely harmful.

So, yes, when I was 11 years old, I was at summer camp and the Detroit riots happened a year after that.

When I got home, of course, you know, my stomping grounds, parts were burnt to the ground and all kinds of stuff.

And then my next year I was in junior high school and everything shifted And I discovered all kinds of things about racism and bigotry and prejudice.

Because the economic crisis was based on that.

That created the riots.

And then Martin Luther King was killed and Robert Kennedy was killed.

And I went into an existential crisis at 12 years old.

And it occurred to me that absolutely, perfectly clear, God did not exist in the universe.

That's kind of what kind of brought me to actually a profound spiritual opening.

Now, I won't go into the details of that, but that was like my first conscious awareness.

I had an experience at summer camp again.

And getting into a deep philosophical conversation with one of the counselors about, you know, if I didn't believe God existed, well, what.

And I was 12, so what did I know?

Didn't know.

This was a philosophical thing.

People talk about, if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?

Right.

So I thought about that for a long time.

And I eventually came to the conclusion that not only did it not make a sound, it didn't really exist unless we could perceive it.

But people on the other side of the world, people in front of me, even I did not exist.

And I decided I was gonna test my theory at summer camp.

So I began at such a young age as.

Well, it's crazy.

Well, you know, we come in with certain capacities, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so I fly in my dreams.

And so I decided I was going to see if I was actually.

What happened was I decided if I did not exist as I thought I did, then I was free and I could be and do anything.

And so I decided I would try to fly like I do in my dreams.

And in my dreams, I take a running leap.

And then I start to glide.

And so I, during scheduled free time, began doing that.

And another camp counselor.

Not levitating, mind you, I didn't levitate.

That would be one anomalous phenomena to witness for the camp counselors.

Exactly.

But as it was, one of my counselors got very, very upset with me about what was I doing.

And I was acting like this other counselor.

And I couldn't explain to him how this had nothing to do with the other counselor.

I was testing my theory.

He would have nothing to do with it.

And so then I had these deep feelings.

Anguish, existential angst, deeply.

And I realized that there was something that existed.

And I asked myself, something's making me feel this way.

What could it be?

And I decided that it was my own mind that created that.

And suddenly I had a vision of myself and the trees and people and Everything in the universe as teeny little slivers of a pie, and including me.

And this pie was what I would today call the collective unconscious.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that if I could learn to speak the language of that pie, I could have access to all of the inside understanding and knowledge of every other part of it.

And I instantly had this experience of.

I can't describe it, but feeling completely connected to and one with everything instead of separated from everything.

And that sent me on my journey that I realized the language of this great big mind pie was symbolic and I was gonna need to learn to speak that language.

So I began studying palmistry, tarot, astrology, numerology, everything I could get my hands on in my teens.

And I found my first book on palmistry that summer in my grandfather's library.

So that kind of launched me to the next level.

That must have also been a bit accepting because.

Recognizing that your grandfather had a book on palmistry because.

Yes, well, he was a mystic into the Kabbalah.

We're Jewish.

And so he always had an interest in the Kabbalah, which is all about, you know, it describes an atom of consciousness, you know.

Yeah.

So.

Yeah.

So, you know, I was lucky in that I was born into a family where I could discuss those things.

And I think people don't recognize and realize that there's a great deal of mysticism in the Judaism, in the Jewish.

And During World War II, there was a lot of paranormal investigation phenomena from both sides.

I know a little bit about the Jewish because I was a.

This is completely different.

But I was a bodyguard, and I protected a lot of Jewish installations in London and the UK and when they were getting attacked many, many years ago.

So I've had a great affinity with the Jewish and still do with the Jewish faith.

And when I came to Florida, I ended up working for a Jew hotel consortium and utilizing intuition and things like that in there.

So I don't understand, and people don't realize that there's a great deal of mysticism in the Jewish culture.

It's the foundation.

Absolutely.

But in terms of psychic experiences, once we start connecting and recognizing our psychological reactions, they become gateways to a greater insight and understanding.

And our psychic resources, our ability to see, hear, sense, gut feelings, all of that guides us to be able to navigate the inner worlds of experience, whether they're personal, from our psychology, or taking us into the transpersonal states that are beyond our ordinary awareness.

And I rely a lot on the teachings that I found in ancient Egypt where they talk about us having 12 senses, not five.

And so when I teach, I teach people about those 12 senses and how they can use them.

That's fascinating.

So when.

When you worked in the tsunami and other disasters, what kind of.

How was it accepted, for a start?

Because I know it's very difficult for us to talk about intuition.

It's difficult for us to talk about the transpersonal.

There's still those bridges that are missing.

But I can imagine that, say, for instance, in the tsunami, when you got there, how did you bridge that gap between.

Look, this trauma goes way beyond.

They may be having anomalous experiences.

They may be.

Because it's interwoven there.

How did you get that accepted?

That maybe there's even a potential of spiritual intrusion, psychological imbalance from maybe spiritual intrusions from the trauma.

And also, did the trauma act as the gateway?

Right.

So when we're dealing with trauma recovery, it has different stages.

And so the first stage is triage.

And if you're in the midst of a crisis where something just happened, the main thing we as healers and helpers can do is to be present and to transmit healing energy and to breathe and to then give survivors who are really struggling very concrete tools.

This is where you get your tents or shelter.

This is where you get your food.

Here's some water.

It's not.

We're not dealing with those deeper questions at that time.

The next stage is the crisis phase.

And during the crisis phase of recovery, that's when we.

And that's when I was in Indonesia and in Haiti.

And most often we can begin doing the psychological and psychospiritual work during that time.

Now in Indonesia and in Banda Aceh, where they lost 170,000 people in one day without wave, on top of 30 years of civil war, where they were already missing 30,000 civilians over the course of 30 years.

And so it was a unique situation because it was a double trauma, social trauma and natural disaster trauma.

Yeah.

And so in Banda Aceh, it's 90% actually more.

Actually, probably Indonesia is 90% Muslim, bande chess, even more.

And the capacity to integrate spirituality into the trainings was very easy.

First of all, they pray five times a day, so we're taking breaks for prayer.

Right.

So that's a start.

And then I had people in the trainings learn how to do energy work.

So to be able to calm and soothe themselves.

Right.

Using the breath, but also to be able to actually experience healing energy and to be able to give that to themselves and then to offer that to others.

Also we had people Break down into small groups and identify their reactions.

And when you can name your reaction and you can name your feelings, you can begin to heal it.

That's part of the crisis work.

And so we developed programs.

Each person in the training, and the training was training trainers who were going to be helping others to identify their reactions and then to make a list of ways that they could heal those reactions.

So it might be breath work, it might be energy work, it might be using a prayer ritual from the Al Quran, which is common in their culture.

It might be, you know, again, the thing about spirituality.

Now, interestingly enough, in that program, I was doing a demonstration of hands on healing plus guided healing work.

And in the midst of that, the microphones that we had and the amplifier that we had somehow switched stations.

And instead of hearing our voices, a song, an acehnese song, started playing.

And everybody's scrambling, trying to figure out what's going on.

And the.

It occurs to me, because I know this kind of thing, I asked, what's the song?

What's playing?

And the song that.

And I was working with a fellow who lost his mother in the tsunami.

And so the song that was playing was a song about mother's love.

Wow.

Yeah.

Now, what a synchronicity.

Well, exactly now.

And what does it mean and how do we interpret it?

This is where parapsychology comes in.

Parapsychology is a science not just about the phenomena and having the experience, it's about how do we investigate it.

And so then we need to be objective.

And so it could have been that his mother spirit was coming in to give him support.

It could have been that it was the group energy that loves that song and, you know, flipped the station.

It could have been my own psychokinetic energy doing that has nothing to do with a ghost or a spirit.

And so it's not up to me to interpret that as much as it's for the person having the experience to make sense out of that.

And sometimes we can help a person by the questions we ask, begin to determine what it is.

So that's again, a really good example of the integration of parapsychology.

And also when I was in, you know, they have spirits, big spirits, nature spirits.

In Indonesia, it's not uncommon that somebody will be dealing with possession.

So, you know, that's a whole other conversation that was separate from, you know, the trauma and crisis.

Yeah.

But anyway, I want to speak about the last stage of crisis recovery, the next two stages.

So we deal with the crisis work, we draw in our resources but then there's a phase that now we need to discover not just the meaning, but how do we activate that and live a new life because our old life has been completely destroyed.

And so that's the next phase is we need to go through the grieving, receiving guidance and support from inner sources and outer sources.

And then we develop a new sense of life purpose which includes bringing healing not just to ourselves, but our community.

So those are the stages of healing using psychic resources.

I love the example that you bring in, Beth, about how to bridge the parapsychological aspect of it.

Because as we know, parapsychology, what we can.

What can we measure?

You know, it has this scientific foundation, but I totally believe, and I think this is where clinical parapsychology bridges transpersonal.

Because we need to find a way of.

Of measuring the lived experience.

Exactly.

And I think your work is so fundamental in that nature to be able to bridge both of these disciplines.

Right.

And actually, you reminded me there was one other option that I forgot to mention.

It could have been a short in the wire.

It could have been absolutely nothing paranormal.

Absolutely.

And so, you know, we need to investigate the physical, the energetic, the emotional and psychological, and then the, you know, otherworldly, as you put it.

You know, it's interesting as well because you mentioned something which you know, I'm passionate about, and I know there's a lot of people still go against it, this whole idea of possession obsession.

I kind of turned my own face.

Dsi, Direct spiritual intrusion in my own research.

But when I got to know Dr. Richard Gallagher, who, as you know, he's written a number of books and papers on demonic possession, is him for being not even a psychologist, but a psychiatrist and saying just exactly what you were saying.

Hey, look, we've investigated all material aspects.

We've measured everything that we know in science, and there is no explanation that we can come up with that we can actually label this as something pathological.

I think it was brilliant to have the DSM start to take in spiritual crisis as part of its new make.

And I hope that we expand on it, because I don't think it's anywhere near.

It needs more.

But for him, for me and him to have that discussion and him to say, you know, he then had to change his viewpoint and the paradigm of everything that you believe in.

It goes to show that there's an opening there.

There's a potential there for us in clinical parapsychology to bridge almost two divides that exist.

And I think it's also important to recognize because right now I'm working with a research team and I know that you've probably had Loyd Auerbach as a guest as well.

Oh, absolutely, yeah.

He's phenomenal.

Yeah.

And he's amazing.

I love working with Lloyd, so.

Excuse me for a second.

So in the research, there can sometimes be a fascination with the phenomena itself, but we need to remember that when researchers are working with human subjects, we need to have that sensitivity to human reality, to the relationship.

And so the ethics and the ethical standards that need to be developed, particularly in relationship to parapsychology, are very important.

And there has been a universal declaration of ethical principles for psychologists that that was founded by, and not founded, but adopted by the International Union of Psychological Sciences and the International association of Applied Sciences and even more important, the International association of Cross Cultural Psychology.

Because cultures and different parts of the world internationally deal with these phenomena differently.

Absolutely.

Very unique.

Completely different to what we, the east and the west, completely different.

The way they look at it and how they accept it.

What we would essentially refute.

Like, even in the Philippines and other countries, they're like, well, this is normal.

And in Brazil and the rise of spiritism in Brazil, there's a great deal that we need to.

And I think we don't tend to learn from each other.

We tend to think, well, this is the way we do it in the west, so this is the right way.

But what can we learn from other cultures?

What's the ethnography that we can pick up?

Yes, to help us bridge these gaps.

Exactly.

And it's happening more and more.

A couple years ago, I was facilitating a training in Cambodia about recovery from genocide.

You know, during the Pol Pot taking over Cambodia and getting rid of the monarchy, 2 million people were killed.

And I won't go into their whole story, but now we have intergenerational trauma.

And so I was working at the Trans Cultural Psychosocial Hospital.

And in Cambodia, Dr. Sophiara Chim talks about PTSD being a Western reaction to trauma.

What they have more in Cambodia is something that healers call bakspat, which translates as broken courage.

And broken courage has a lot of the same symptoms as ptsd, but it's missing quite a few of the symptoms that go with broken courage or double fear, it's sometimes called.

And in his recovery program, he includes things like Buddhist ceremonies for the dead or working with a mom along with a soul retrieval, because that's really big in Cambodia.

When I was in Cambodia, I went with a friend and I noticed that.

And this is One of their folk traditions, people would take a bird if you're having troubles, and they would pray with the bird and set it free and the bird would then take your troubles away.

And so that, you know, you go to, you know, there are so many different folk traditions.

Yeah.

And what we know is that energy follows thought.

So by doing these simple rituals, it allows us to shift our awareness, our attention and open space for healing that might not have been there before.

So there's a lot we have to learn from other cultures, particularly indigenous and Asian.

Do you think, Beth, that I understand that we have this great internal capacity to heal ourselves and our mind is a psychological building blocks of our reality.

I totally believe that.

But in these cultures as well, I think there's an element where they would think it's an external agency that's helping them.

And maybe it's an external agency that is.

It's a spirit guide or it's a, you know, as the shamans would, Would.

Would bring in and invoke the powers of these spirits.

Do you think there's a way that we can bridge that gap from what we perceive into accepting that there is a spiritual age?

And can we measure it so that we get some form of evidentially pattern to it?

Because I totally believe that, that we can.

We can find a way of getting empirical evidence, even from a lived experience or from.

Even for the potential of a deep healing, maybe a spontaneous healing, but maybe there's other information that supports the hypothesis that this is a other agency that's intervened.

So, you know, you're really bringing up an important point of that borderline between.

Especially when we're looking at things like possession or contact with the deadly departed as you describe them.

You know, so there's a wonderful book by a woman named Barbara Tedlin that might not be her last name.

It's called Woman in a Shaman's Body.

She is and her husband have been trained by Guatemalan shamans and she did research.

Tedlock is her last name.

Barbara Tedlock.

She did research on shamanism worldwide.

And what I loved about what she said, and this is she was describing a particular group from South America that eludes me right now.

There are two paths in shaman shamanism.

One is the male path and one is the female path.

And the male path.

You don't have to be a man.

It just depends who you're trained by.

The male path is very commanding and demanding and they demand that spirit leave.

And it's very, yeah, active and dynamic.

And then the feminine path is, you Go internally and you work in the inner kind of what we would call astral plane.

And you work with the person who's having the experience, and you help them discover what it is that's attracting that spirit and heal what that is and then release the spirit.

So that sounds very Jungian type.

Yeah, it's the.

You know, it's an ancient technique and method.

You know, it's just in psychology, we don't believe anything until we discover it ourselves in Western psychology.

So this is very much a Western psychological approach.

You know, therapy is all about you do your own work.

But in conventional psychotherapy, we don't necessarily hold the possibility that there are so many spirits and supports, as well as, you know, challenging spirits.

I always say, when it comes down to it is like, just because you're sitting next to somebody on the bus doesn't mean you have to have a conversation with that person, take them home.

No, that's true.

You know, from the work and the years of experience I've had in this field, I, as you know, totally of the opinion, and my hypothesis has always been that there is definitely spiritual intrusion that happens there.

And there's so much evidence that points toward it in various cultures, and yet we still find it very difficult to even look toward that being a problem.

And I've also maintained, and I don't know.

I don't know how you feel about this, that having this direct spiritual intrusion or this intervention or it being potentially an obsessive can be the catalyst to material disturbances, psychological disturbances that then manifest as schizophrenia or a psychosis.

I totally believe that a lot of.

Well, I would say perceive rather than believe.

But a lot of the schizophrenia examples or cases that we have really have a spiritual foundation rather than a psychological or a materialistic imbalance in the brain.

Yes, that's a potential.

But why don't we start looking at spiritual intrusion as being a reality as well?

And let's expand on what the DSM 5 framework is saying.

And this is so much your specialty.

I would love to hear more, maybe even an example, a case study from your own experience of somebody you worked with who was clearly having what we would call psychotic process, whether it's bipolar, early psychosis is what it's called now, or schizophrenia.

I've had a couple of cases that come to mind.

This is actually me, and this is your interview, so I should.

But I'm sure that our audience is interested in.

So I've had a couple of cases, I've worked with a couple of schizophrenic patients over the years who had exhausted all of.

I spoke to Lloyd about this as well.

It was more a reframing, had exhausted every psychiatric thing.

They were on drugs.

One woman was in a Scottish psychiatric hospital.

And I was asked to go in and have a look, take a look at this case.

And the other person and their family had been battling with schizophrenia over many, many years.

Actually I'm still in touch with that person.

And all it took was to identify the, the type of intrusion that was happening and the spiritual imbalance and to really start to educate.

See, my whole belief or my whole way of looking at it is to reframe and educate the person and give them the power that they already have in them.

It's nothing that I do that's amazingly magic in any way that people would think of that.

But it's giving them the education, it's.

It's helping them to recognize the power they have in themselves and also utilizing the powers of prayer and things like that.

And in these two particular cases, and I still work with people now, I would say if I had a 90% plus success rate of actually reversing the whole schizophrenic episode.

And that's.

See, that's why I wanted you to bring that forward.

In my own experience when I've worked with that, I think and this is where we might diverge, but maybe it's also because of my experience and lack of experience in the way that you've worked is to work with western science, for example, to take some medication.

Because what I perceive to be happening is there's such an over activation of the neurons and the thinking.

And so I think of medication, it's almost like there are live wires always active.

And I think of the medication as putting a coating around those wires so that they're not always firing, but it just dampens it down.

So then a person can begin to have some agency or some self awareness.

So they can then from a place of self awareness begin to recognize the distinction between a delusion, imagination, an actual conversation with internal and conversation with spirits and also with real people.

But that there needs to be enough of a settling for somebody to be able to have the ability to witness and observe themselves.

And what I have found is that's the challenging part with psychosis is that the capacity for self reflection is sometimes greatly impaired.

Yeah, I think, see, one of the things that I do as well, which is a bit unique is so if you look at the work of Dr. Cal Wickland, 30 years among the Dead.

I kind of developed a way of as well when I work with these people is I'm looking for an evidential pattern.

So I call it primitive evidence.

So utilizing maybe a mediumistic capacity that I have, is able to identify the evidence of the intrusion, which then gives me a whole, you know, a wider view, whole kind of view of the whole situation.

And then I can look at it from, okay, we've now got that evidence, We've got that.

That pattern.

We've now created the story, and so now we know where to go with it.

Whereas in a lot of approaches, there doesn't seem to be any evidential pattern.

And this is some of the problem I have with people that maybe deal a very pragmatic approach to just say a prayer.

And if it goes, it goes.

For me, that's not enough.

There has to be some kind of evidence for.

Which is why I love it from a parapsychological point of view, is that if I can bridge the lived experience, the evidence, and the pragmatism and the framework, then we have something potentially groundbreaking that can be another framework to help people through psychosis, mental health, imbalances, potentially schizophrenia.

I'm passionate about the fact that I think schizophrenia is 90% spiritual and 10% a materialistic imbalance, maybe in the brain.

And so I think we need to try and develop this evidentiary way of looking at the framework differently.

And I think that's where maybe Stanislav Grof, I love him, but I think that was missing.

There was very much a pragmatic way of looking at things.

And there's some cases in his work where I think, well, if you'd have held on longer, we might even have got some kind of empirical evidence from that case, which doesn't actually happen.

So I think there's a great deal that we can look at.

And in trauma, I think, with your work as well, I'm sure with the work that you've done in many of these different indigenous cultures, there probably is an evidentially pattern to it that would give us more information to work with.

Well, I look forward to that being established.

One of the patterns that I have observed in working with people who are dealing with ghosts, for example, or with possession as well, is.

And this is just how I framed it from my experience.

Is that what you're calling these intrusions?

Sometimes they're not negative, sometimes they're positive?

Absolutely.

You know, and so I see it as these ghosts or spirits come for one of three reasons, either to give us help or to get help from Us or for something that we are needing to learn about ourselves.

And sometimes it's a combination of those.

And so when I'm working with people like this, when I was in now, it's really interesting because when I was in Haiti, I had the good fortune to meet and do ceremony with voodoo priestess and priest.

And when I went to say goodbye to them and they had a woman who was no longer a woman, she was carrying a male spirit, she was possessed by a male spirit.

And it was so clear and obvious to me that she was indeed not a she.

It was this spirit that was within her, moving her, speaking, looking through.

And the intensity of the gaze, it was clearly that it was not her.

I just.

Because I had met her once before.

And so, you know, we don't have a context for that.

But the voodoo religion and Western African religions definitely do.

Yeah, they do.

Yeah, they just do, you know, and.

Even people would be surprised to find out that even though Buddhism is not a religion, you know, philosophy as it is, it still has a context for that as well.

It does.

As does in every indigenous or even every religious.

Even in Muslim religion, they have a context for it.

And it's been there.

I mean, if we look at back in ancient Samaria, they had a context for this in understanding it.

And so I think we have to look at this potential that exists for our trauma to come from not just your own existential crisis, but from a spiritual agency.

Well, I think that it starts with our own crisis and then it goes beyond.

Exactly.

So Edith Fiore, I don't know if you know her, she really researched this.

She's a psychologist as well, and she talks about how when we are lonely, when we are in grief, we become vulnerable to attracting spirits.

Absolutely.

And so we need to then deal with those deeper issues.

What is it?

You know, loneliness is an existential concern.

When we're feeling helpless, lonely, full of doubt and grief.

Yes, Those are the vulnerabilities.

And it's interesting.

There's a fellow, Crombe, he was from.

Jean Luc Crombe, maybe is his name.

He was the head of research on healing from Notre Dame Hospital in Quebec.

And he discovered that there's a difference between healing and curing.

And healing is about encompassing and making somebody whole, whereas curing is.

You cut out what it is.

That is the problem now when we're dealing with.

Yeah, very interesting.

It is interesting.

Yeah, yeah.

And that there are healers in ancient and indigenous cultures and there are cures also.

And what he said is that in his research There are barriers to healing that are what I call an existential crisis.

When you're feeling lonely, when you're feeling doubt or worry, when you're feeling hopeless or helpless, that will be a barrier to integrating what you're going through, feeling whole and healed.

Healing isn't like if you're a cancer patient or terminally ill.

It might not be about curing the cancer, but it might be about becoming whole with your life and ready to transition.

I think there's a lot of.

There's a lot of power in healing.

I think people don't understand it even to my point.

I don't.

I've seen my wife.

My wife is a phenomenal healer.

She's written a lot of books on it.

I've seen people come to her that had a spiritual issue and she's worked with them and their physical world has changed, their physiology has changed.

There was one person, a soldier.

I'm an ex veteran, so I'm connected to a soldier that came to my wife who's.

The doctors couldn't understand anything.

His veins were bursting and bleeding and he was bedridden and he couldn't.

It just wouldn't heal.

And you get a soldier who's not really.

I mean, when I was a soldier, I had a spiritual foundation, but it's not something you would come out and talk about because it's very much frowned upon.

You know, if you went to see the chaplain, you know, there was hardly anybody ever went there, you know, so I would go to see a chaplain, you know, have a chaplain's group meeting, and there'd be like four of us there, not a lot of people.

But she started working with a gentleman and it reversed.

And his legs, they healed.

And it was a spiritual problem, not a physiological and biological problem.

And I've seen, and there's many cases where in different cultures they've worked with, there's a. I mean, Dr. Wayne Dyer used to say, the spiritual solution to every problem.

So true.

There's a spiritual solution, I also believe, to a physiological problem.

And even look at some of the people that had.

I can't remember her name now, but she had the near death experience and she was.

What's her name?

She was stage four cancer.

She was only given days to live, and yet she had this near death experience.

She learned that what was causing it was a psychological imbalance, was a spiritual imbalance.

And when she rectified that, she healed.

Yeah, yeah.

And what you're really describing is that there is a source of healing that comes through Our awareness and also that it's energetic.

It's like there's, there's a.

And what I know when, when I'm doing healing work with people, whether it's psychological healing work or hands on healing, I'm not the healer.

What I am doing is simply being an emissary for an infinite source of healing.

And it resonates with that source within the person that activates whatever it is that they need.

Whether it's awareness, whether it's physiological, whether it's, you know, a new strength or capacity that they discover or a problem from the past that they can resolve.

It's not up to me.

It's.

There's an intelligence within us that guides our healing.

I love.

There was an old saying when I was developing, I mean, we were always developing.

I've been a medium for a very, very long time, but when I was developing, still developing, but going through the training in the church and going into the church, they're the same.

From spirit through spirit to spirit to recognize that this divine essence, the animating force of all that exists, is a spiritual force.

And this is why I believe our mind is a psychological building blocks of our reality, which is a spiritual force.

And when you harness that power, then things happen existentially to you.

Things change, your world changes and your worldview changes.

I think there's.

I'm doing some research at the moment for my dissertation on grief and the power of transformation.

But also utilizing ritual and even psychedelic is a way of creating an after death communication to facilitate a potential.

I'm being challenged at the moment because I don't believe you can heal grief.

And that might sound shocking.

I've always said there's no way that you can heal grief.

Grief is something that we have to integrate and it has to become part of us.

Right.

But that's what healing is about.

So we think that's the difference between curing and healing.

I find it fascinating.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, we don't cure grief.

We don't cut grief out and forgive and forget it.

Right.

It's about.

It becomes a part of us that informs us and gives us wisdom and insight and knowledge about the human condition.

Absolutely.

And other elements, other aspects.

I totally believe and I've said that many times, grief can be your greatest teacher or it can be your greatest nemesis.

And it brings me back to a point that you mentioned that you said earlier on, because you said that there's also a potential negative aspect to the grief because we can open ourselves up to possessions, spiritual problem and I do see that.

I see where people are grieving so, so bad that they turn to maybe an occult practice or they turn to a spiritual practice that they don't have any control over and they're not able to, they don't understand it.

So they open themselves up to intrusion and then you have the issues that then cause within their mind, then it potentially can turn into some kind of pathological result, you know, psychosis, schizophrenia, any other.

And it affects even just depression, you know, I mean, and things that are.

Anxiety, you know, one of the things is worldwide anxiety and depression is the greatest mental health concern.

I'm trying to remember it was something like how many billions of people are dealing with mental health issues now.

Especially because we're living in a time of crisis and climate change and humanitarian crises.

And so we're in the midst of really needing to find methods to integrate these really challenging experiences and come forward to really build a new world.

Not just heal ourselves, but really bring healing forward using all of the resources that we have, including our capacity to gain wisdom from our experiences, which can then guide us to not only live a better life for ourselves, but contribute to the world in a new way.

This is why I think as well it's so clinical.

Parapsychology is so important.

There's been some great research done by Professor Chris Rowe, Cal Cooper and people at Northampton as well university that I've read where there is a deep therapeutic potential to parapsychology.

That we're only just.

Yeah, we're only just on the precipice now.

We're just at the edge.

And that there's such a potential to bridge between the transpersonal and the parapsychological to really affect deep healing.

Exactly.

And transformation.

Yes.

Because that's what we're being called for right now in the ancient world.

In ancient Egypt they said essentially that there is no separation between the physical and the spiritual.

That everything in our physical world is a representation of spiritual principle.

Everything, Everything we experience, everything that we deal with and everything.

Even the microphone that I have speaking through.

That's why I love the analogy of the Buddhists philosophy uses of interconnectedness.

That's a relation to everything, to every law, to every principle, to every experience.

Everything is interconnected.

Yes.

And we're living in right now a world of great separation and divisiveness.

And how I am understanding that is that it's requiring us as a species to find a way to get larger in our understanding that can hold the paradox that it's not all or Nothing.

That it's not us and them, that it really is all of us all together.

And we're in a massive opportunity for great discovery from a whole different dimension of consciousness.

That's the transpersonal.

But the way that we can get there is by using those psychic resources to see in a new way, listen in a new way sense, in a new way develop spiritual discernment to know which is the path that leads us back down into the karmic conditions.

And we're just doing the same old, same old.

And which is the path and it's not this one or that one, but the path that leads us to the realization of who we are as spiritual beings and why we're born on planet Earth.

You know, I mean there's so many distinctions that we are in the process right now of discovering.

And that's one of the more.

Those are two of the more advanced senses that the Egyptians talk about, the sense of spiritual discernment and the sense of realization.

Do you think Beth, that er, focus in the parapsychological field, although we don't have much support in it, it's very much frowned on.

But do you think there's a time now that we are at this time now in the world where parapsychology could really be a gateway to our own transformation between what we measure and how we bring in the lived experience in a transpersonal form, that there's so much that we can learn because people don't realize that parapsych psychology has a fundamental, it really has a scientific basis.

I mean look at the history of the spr, look at the forefathers before us that went.

And they were scientists first.

They were.

But this is a problem with reductionistic science, evidence based science, which is the brainchild of the modern man.

And we really need to understand that there is also something called mystery.

And there's a lot.

No matter how much we are able to learn, there's always going to be more.

And how do we embrace existential uncertainty?

If we can embrace it as a mystery and be enthralled by the possibility of entering into something we know nothing about, not with trepidation and fear, but with curiosity, well now then we might be able to actually discover something.

But right now, unfortunately, within the field of parapsychology, because it's defined as a Western science, it's in a battle right now with quote, conventional contemporary scientific method.

And scientific method as it's been defined, may or may not be the most appropriate method to unravel that mystery.

Beth, what are you going to be working on now for the next, you know, the next stage of your research?

And what are you doing at the moment to continue your research and your work?

Well, frankly, I'm doing too many things.

Yeah.

But I'll start with just on the parapsychological.

That avenue.

I'm on a team right now with some wonderful colleagues.

Brian Williams, who's the director of the Psychical Research foundation, and he's in New Mexico, and Jerry Sulphin, who is.

I think he's.

I cannot remember.

I'm sorry, Jerry, forgive me.

I can't remember the name of the university that he's working with.

But brilliant.

And has been involved in parapsychology forever and ever.

And then Lloyd Auerbach, of course, who we know, who's founded the Office of Paranormal Investigation.

And so during COVID they invited me to join their team to work with a family that was dealing with a poltergeist situation during lockdown.

And Jerry has developed something he calls echo, which is about anomalous communal kinetic.

A, C, K. I'm really bad at acronyms.

Kinetic occurrences, episodic kinetic occurrences.

There we go.

So anomalous communal episodic kinetic occurrences, which has to do with a systemic approach to the energy of a system, not just an individual.

And that fits in very nicely with family therapy and family systems.

So working with the three of them has been very interesting and exciting.

And then we published something, and now we're dealing with all of the potential.

Yay.

That's great.

And.

Oh, that's horrible.

You know, that comes from anything inside.

You know, it's funny because, yeah, I spoke to Lloyd about this.

I read the paper, and it's fascinating.

And I do believe because Lloyd has actually asked all you.

You guys are going to be coming on for a group chat on Deadly Departed to talk about the paper and to talk about the research because it's a fascinating.

It's fascinating research.

And any new research that you put out there, it's going to have its supporters and it's going to have its naysayers.

Exactly.

And in parapsychology is particularly a field called anomalous psychology, which, you know, continues to look at these anomalies as psychological manifestations and projections that are more along the continuum of a psychological syndrome or delusion, which, you know, look, I've had too many personal Experiences.

Just the other day a week ago, met somebody who's a healer, and we got to talking, and suddenly I finally met somebody else who had the same experiences as me.

I could never wear watches because they would always speed up, slow down, or stop, you know.

And he said, yeah, that happened to me, too, but now it's not happening, and I can wear a watch.

And I said, yeah, you know, I can now, too, most of the time.

And he said, you know, I think it's because there's no more resistance.

The energy is just flowing through.

And it was like, 100% believe that.

Yeah, light bulbs aren't flashing as much as they used to.

Now, you know, I'm finding another way to work with the intensity of energy, which I experienced as anxiety.

But once I'm able to work with it energetically, anxiety shifts and the phenomena shifts.

That's absolutely fascinating.

And that's probably another conversation we can have, because I've had many experiences.

I don't wear an apple watch because I can't, because it mucks up.

And I've gone through so many computers and so many experiences that way.

And it's also.

Especially if I'm dealing with a lot of energy from dealing with potential cases and things like that, it can actually.

This can manifest.

So that'll be for another conversation.

Beth, it's been an absolute pleasure and a delight having you on.

And we could continue going on and on and on.

I'd love to have you back for another discussion on another subject, because there's so much that we can unpack that we haven't done today.

But I'm also mindful of keeping your time and mindful of.

Of everybody out there.

So what is the final word that you'd like to say to people out there about trauma and parapsychology?

So the key is, how are we using our psychic resources?

And if we've had a traumatic event, we need to recognize that we can use our inner resources, our capacity to deeply feel, to use clairvoyance to see from a new perspective, to open our inner ear, to receive guidance on what we need for healing that can address the trauma, and to develop those more advanced psychic resources to really gain insight and discern what are we really here for.

And where does that traumatic experience fit in with the purpose of my life and all that I've been through?

How do we create the story of our life that allows us to fulfill a greater purpose in being here on planet Earth?

How do we learn from our stories?

That's fascinating, Beth.

Thank you so much for being my guest today.

Ladies and gentlemen, this has been a fascinating conversation.

You will find in the links below to connect, you can go and read Beth's book.

And also as with our guests, we will have their book promoted on the magazine.

If you've got any questions that you would like to ask Beth, this is really important, then you can send them into us and obviously you can join our free community for parapsychological research or for people interested in the field.

We have that on the Para News Network and you can put those questions in that group.

And also, ladies and gentlemen, keep your eye out for our new journal that we're launching.

We're in the process of developing that now.

And this is to give more support, more of a voice to what we do in parapsychology and transpersonal fields as well.

Please keep in touch with us.

Read Beth's book.

If you've got any questions, please send them into us.

And I can't wait to have you back again, Dr. Beth Hedva.

I can't wait to get Lloyd and you and Brian and everybody on there so we can talk about Echo and all the other research that's going on this very exciting time.

Thank you for being with me.

Thank you for spending your time with me and everybody who's listening out there.

This is what we do this for, ladies and gentlemen, that this conversation could maybe sow a seed of change in your mind.

Because remember, your mind is a psychological building blocks of your reality.

We'll be back very soon with another guest and another fascinating conversation.

God blessed.

This is Jock, this is Deadly Departed.

Thanks for tuning in to Deadly Departed.

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Until then, keep questioning, stay curious and never stop seeking the truth.