From Sceptic to Scottish-style Medium A Personal Journey for Annah Elizabeth
Updated: Nov 14, 2022
onlinemediumreadings.com/annahelizabeth
Annah's Diary for her Tour of Scotland 2022.
Date | Details |
13th November | Lochgely Spiritualist Church, 37-39 Bank street, Lochgelly, fife, KY5 9QG 5pm -6.15pm. |
20th November | Launch service for the new Penicuik and Borders Spiritualist Church 6 pm onwards |
21st to 22nd November | Annah can be boked for one to one private readings in Penicuik Scotland. |
22nd November | Working with Marc Stuart to run a circle for the Penicuik and Borders Spiritualist Church in Penicuik from 7 pm at 22 John Street. |
11th December | Dunfermline Spiritualist Church, 3 Lady Campbells Walk Dunfermline 6 pm till 7 pm |
14th December | feathers of love and light spiritualist Sanctuary, The Burnbank Center Burnbank Road Hamilton ML3 0NA from 7.30 pm |
Growing up in what I call ‘The Bible Belt’ of North Carolina, U.S.A., I have always been a sceptic when it came to anything ‘magical’ or ‘spiritual.’ Though I cannot pinpoint where I learned such things, I tended to associate anything you could not address scientifically as ‘taboo’ and some things, like connecting with spirits, as ‘The Devil’s Work’. Now I work as a fully-fledged medium, trained in traditional Scottish Style Mediumship, doing Zoom readings on the platform onlinemediumreading.com !
What I am learning
is that there are both similarities and differences between how Americans and the Scottish view Spiritualism; with some who embrace it and others who fear it. As Marc has shared with me, Scotland traces Spiritualism back to the ancient tribes of Celts. Whereas in England they were wiped out by the Romans twenty centuries ago, the Scottish people resisted and the Celts continued to prosper. Their beliefs were not exactly what we would call Spiritualism, but spirit-based beliefs. This evolved into magical superstition and views. According to some sources, Scotland is considered to have had the highest per capita number of people—mostly women—murdered or executed for witchcraft than any other country in the world. This, as Marc tells us, is now believed to have been mediumship described as ‘magic’. The last known person jailed for Witchcraft occurred in the twentieth century. Medium Helen Duncan, like Marc Stuart, was often referred to as The Scottish Medium. Now, in the twenty-first century, you will find a Spiritualist Church in every Scottish town, excepting a few. In Scotland, Spiritualism is a recognized religion. Within Spiritualist church services, Mediums work on what they refer to as ‘platforms’, bringing forth evidence of a spirit and sharing a short message from that spirit.
As is often the case with people like me, it took an undeniable, life-altering event—several of them, actually—before I became a believer. The first happened thirty years ago when my deceased son came to me in a dream. And, yet, I knew in my heart of hearts, that it was not some random dream but a visitation from him. Years later, my then-best friend’s mother, whom I hardly knew, began showing herself to me. Once, again, I doubted her presence as she never spoke and, even though a part of me knew it was her, just as it had been my son’s spirit, I passed it off as some figment of my imagination. I now know, since training with Marc Stuart Medium, that she was communicating with me; I just did not understand this at the time.
Flash forward to 2011,
where I was presenting my body of work on healing grief and trauma for the first time in a large, public forum. At the end of the event, a woman approached and said, ‘I don’t normally do this, and I don’t know what you know about me, but I am a medium, and your son is here.’ I had no clue what a ‘medium’ was. She then proceeded to hold up her hands in gesture and say, ‘Your son is here, and he is showing me a ring’, as she mimicked holding a small object between her fingers and wiggling them back and forth. In that moment, my world became so much smaller, and I became a believer that there were some people who could actually communicate with those on the other side of what I now know to be ‘The Veil’; ‘Heaven’ as some call it; or, as is recognized in Scotland, ‘The Spiritual Plane’, or ‘after death existence’.
You see, Neighbour, before my son’s funeral, my mother said she wanted to bury a gift with him and asked if she could purchase a ring to place on one of his fingers. As I have said too many times to count, ‘There were only three people on the planet who knew about that request, and one of them likely forgot about it five minutes after I asked him if it was okay’. Those three people were my mom, my then-husband, and myself. I had never written about it. I had never told anyone about it. This is not some traditional means of honouring the dead at burial. There was absolutely no way this woman could have known this, unless my child were telling her about it. That night, on the way home, my son appeared in the seat next to me in the car. In that first instance, I saw him at the age he would have been at the time and just as real as you and I. ‘Hi, Mom’, he said. And then he was gone. Again. Little did I know that, in eleven years to come, I would be working as a Medium, on a yet-unknown platform called Zoom, to provide Spiritual Mediumship readings for people all over the world.
Follow me now to the year 2016
and a session with my long-time massage therapist. ‘I’ve been taking this training as continuing education’, she said, ‘and I’m wondering if you’d let me practice on you’. I asked what it was, and she made some mention about working with Angels and energy. It made no sense to me, but I trusted her and figured I had nothing to lose and she everything to gain. At one point while I was lying there, I felt a big heat sensation on the right side of my body. My first instinct was to tell her to stop whatever the ‘F*@K’ she was doing, but something inside of me told me to just wait and ask her about it.
When she was all done, I asked her what she was doing. ‘Oh, that’s where we remove anger’, she said. The modality she was using is called Integrated Energy Therapy®, which works on removing trauma energies that get trapped in nine cellular memory areas of the body. True story: I had a Calvin and Hobbes tee-shirt that said, ‘Every day of my life I’m forced to add one more name to the list of people who piss me off’. It was not uncommon for me to come home at the end of a day and say how ‘This pissed me off’ or ‘That pissed me off’. Over the next couple of months, my practitioner practiced on me at the beginning of my sessions, and I distinctly remember encountering a situation one day and thinking, ‘Wow, that would have pissed me off, but I’m kind of calm about it’.
Within months of that realization, another serendipitous event occurred when a woman showed up at one of my five-week trainings and when I introduced myself to her, she moved a guidebook toward me and said, ‘I’m teaching this weekend class soon and I think you’d be interested in it’. At first, I was a little put off that she was trying to sell me something that cost almost four times the class she was taking with me, but this little voice—what I now know to be my guides—said to me, ‘Hey, you know that thing that was life-changing for you? That’s that thing and you can train to do that for other people’. Within the year I had taken all three levels and then received certification to not only practice, but to train other people how to use this energy healing modality to help others. ‘Sometimes we cannot talk or analyse our conflict or grief away because our bodies are storing the negative and limiting energies’, became a narrative for my work. It was during those energy healing sessions that I first began receiving what I now know to be messages from Spirit, connecting events to the trauma energies my clients were releasing. And a couple years in, clients began asking me to do spiritual readings. I resisted until there were too many ‘coincidences’ to ignore.
Scotland
Another life-altering event happened two years ago, one that left me asking the question, ‘How does someone start Life over, again?’ and ‘Where in the world might I do that?’ Scotland began showing up everywhere: In a random email; on street signs and the name of a city I was detoured through; a Scottish tam on a doorknob of my first housesitting job; in Netflix recommendations…and the list goes on an on. And then, eighteen months ago, I attended a spiritual event and met a medium whose information said she had done work in Scotland. Turns out that she, too, trains mediums and when I asked her about her program, she told me she was being guided to send me to Marc Stuart.
‘You can’t make this shit up’, (pardon my French) has become a refrain. At the time of this writing, it has been almost seven months since I began working in Marc’s training program and I have learned so much. First and foremost, I have learned that our ability to connect to Spirit is universal, though some of us may dismiss the ability, as I did, for many years. I have learned to hone the ways in which Spirit communicates with me, and I have had the privilege and honour of connecting people with deceased loved ones and spirit guides alike. One of the
many things I appreciate most about the Scottish-style mediumship methods is that the first and foremost goal is to provide clear evidence of the spirit coming forth, like the medium at that event did for me, and then to provide the sitter with some helpful or healing message.
Whether you are a sceptic, just curious, or experiencing your own connections to Spirit that you are unsure of, I invite you to join one of our training circles. I promise you; you likely will leave with an entirely new perspective, helpful information, and a message from someone on the other side of The Veil. If you are like me, you will also leave in awe at the power and wonder of the eternal nature that is our energetic connection between this realm and the next.
And now my journey has come full circle – excuse the obvious play on words. While in Scotland, I will have the honour of working on Spiritualist Church Platforms, including a new Spiritualist Church that Marc is organizing. One of the services at which I will be a providing medium, is the Dunfermline Spiritualist Church, which dates back over a century! I am looking forward to all these events, getting to know Scotland’s lands, her people, her rich history, her culture, and to soak in even more knowledge about Scottish Spiritualism as I wander around this great land for the next three months.
References:
Celts
https://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/celts/factfile/religion.shtml
https://electricscotland.com/history/articles/secrets.htm
Bible Belt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_Belt
Scottish Witchcraft
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/witches-scotland-pardon-apology