In 1987, Elaine and her husband, Mark, who is now serving as the county executive, began teaching classes that put principles of neuro-linguistic programming, also called NLP, together with Spiritualist ideas. Teaching people to make spirit contact often took several years by the old method of having people sit in development circles. The Thomases found that their new techniques, which focus on physical movements, belief systems, and guided meditations, could cut the process down to a weekend. For those who want more training, Elaine offers a two-year program that results in certification as a Spiritualist minister or healer.
Part of her method involves giving messages to members of the class while students concentrate on watching her body, especially her eye movements. If she looks upward, she is getting visual information. If she looks to the side, she is using auditory channels. If she looks down, she is going into the realm of feeling. Breathing is also important. Breathing high in the chest encourages clairvoyance, or clear sight. Breath from the diaphragm brings clair-audience, or clear hearing, and breath that moves the belly is for clairsentience, or clear feeling. By changing our posture, our eye position, and our breathing, we can change the spirit channels we are using, she said. If one channel is not delivering, we should switch.
Among the messages Elaine gave that day were some for me. Her guides told her I was extremely focused. She said I seemed easygoing, but underneath I was full of strong opinions. Elaine said I could stop worrying about how my work was going to turn out. It would develop as I did it, and I could afford to relax.
A jury of my peers might agree with the first two points. I didn’t. I thought Elaine was projecting her own fears about having a journalist observe her class. As for the third point, I had heard it before.
Gretchen told me much the same thing in a more lyrical manner. “You’re on the train. You’ll get there,” she said during one of the Monday night five-dollar readings. “You can relax.”
Sherry Lee said the spirits had already written my book. “You can relax.”
Patricia Price promised spirit guides were following me to make sure I got what I needed. “You can relax.”
I had relaxed. It didn’t suit me.
Then Elaine scored.
She said I was intent on a question, but it was the wrong question. Instead of asking whether I should be doing this, I ought to be thinking about how to make it fit with other things that I valued, such as family and friends. She never said what “this” was.
If I’d been listening as Elaine said that to someone else, I would have dismissed her statement as vague and all-purpose. But her message wasn’t for someone else. It was for me, and I had spent the day before wrestling with whether to quit because writing required too much. Even if Elaine has twenty stock messages that fit everyone, she gave this one to me, and it reached into my deepest conflicts.
Elaine’s message was so completely on target that I could feel it spreading through me like a wave. She skewered a central fallacy in how I think. I dramatize conflicts into either-or propositions. I know better, but in crisis I forget my own best advice. The answer is in the middle. It’s not either-or. It’s in the middle.
Elaine’s words spoke so concisely to my thoughts and needs that I was shaken. I looked at my watch. It was 3:25 on Saturday afternoon. That was the moment when I crossed over from being someone who was amused and sometimes amazed by the mediums’ occasional scores and became someone who considered that they might have something useful to say.
Had someone told her of my struggles? When I returned home, I called Shelley to ask whether she talked to Elaine about me.
“I’d never do that,” she said. “You know I wouldn’t.”
Later Elaine warned me against telling too much about her workshop because she was writing her own book. Everybody in Lily Dale was writing a book it seemed. I reassured her. I wasn’t doing ten easy lessons in how to talk to dead people. How could I? I still didn’t believe it could be done.
If she was such a great medium, why didn’t she know that? And why didn’t she know that I wouldn’t steal her stuff? There it was again. The Lily Dale bounce. Elaine gave me one message that convinced me, and, before it could settle, she said something else that took my confidence away.
I felt like Faye Dunaway being slapped by Jack Nicholson in Chinatown: “She’s my daughter.” Wap. “She’s my sister.” Wap. “She’s my daughter.” Wap. There was no right answer.
During a guided meditation we were to envision the sun coming toward us. We were also to think of a pyramid of light coming down and infusing our bodies with brilliance.
“Breathe in the Christ light,” Elaine said.
How did Christ get in this? I wondered but didn’t break the mood by asking. No one objected to Christ’s appearance at our séance. The light and our breathing were vehicles we would use to move into temples of light and healing where we would contact those who could help us, Elaine said.
During one meditation, she took us down a path that led to three temples. We were to choose one and go in. In my mind’s eye, I saw my grandmother and my uncle. He was standing behind her, holding her elbow in a protective, guiding way. It was a gesture I’d seen him make a thousand times as she prepared to cross a street or navigate a curb. I could see them clearly. They didn’t say anything, but they looked wonderful.
After meditations, Elaine invited students to tell what came to them. A lot of people had seen relatives. Some saw ancestors they had never met. One woman saw her dog. She had recently put the dog to sleep. In her vision he was a puppy again, and he thanked her.
A student named Ann began crying.
“I saw my daughter, running toward me, holding out her arms. She was so happy,” Ann said.
“I want you to know your daughter is at peace,” Elaine soothed her. “As much as you want her with you, she’s still just as solid and real as she ever was.”
“She’s not dead,” Ann said.
Ordinarily I would have laughed, but Ann was in such pain that Elaine’s mistake seemed terrible. Elaine didn’t miss a beat. Mediums confuse the dead with the living all the time. Anyone who can’t recover quickly won’t last long.
“Is there some kind of estrangement?” Elaine asked. “It’s as though she is dead to you.”
Ann nodded. She was sobbing harder now and apologizing every time she caught her breath. “I don’t usually do this.”
“What you saw are her true feelings,” Elaine said. “I’m going to tell you that within three years she will be holding you in her arms. Everything is going to seem like an obstacle to that, but it’s going to happen. They’re telling me there are walls inside of walls, but they will fall down.
“I’m getting chills over it,” the medium said. That’s her sign that she’s right. It’s the sign for a lot of people.
As part of our lessons, we were to allow ourselves to experience whatever we saw, heard, or felt, and then we were to say whatever came to us. We might think, This is just imagination. But that was not to stop us.
“We’re imagining reality,” Elaine said.
She gave us a prayer to say before beginning our message sessions.
“Oh, God, as we open the door to communication in the unity of the Holy Spirit, the great I Am presence of the Universe, we give thanks, for we know that the words spoken are filled with your love, truth, wisdom, and understanding of the highest. Amen.”
Setting our intentions is essential, she said.
“When giving a message, we hold that person in the palm of our hand because we open up soul to soul. So if you don’t have something healing to say, please keep it to yourself,” she said.
Elaine never tells people they are going to die, even though she sometimes sees visions that make her think they might. The future is nothing more than probability unfolding and could be changed, she said.
“I’ve seen too many people who were supposed to die and didn’t,” she said.
At the same time, if our intentions are to hel
p, we are not to worry that our messages might hurt anyone.
“If it’s about healing and it’s spoken in truth and a feeling of love, we can do no harm,” she said. We could count on our perceptions just as she counted on her spirit guides.
“They’ve never let me down,” she said.
She and her co-leader, a phone company employee named Charles, told stories about miraculous healings. A child healed of sickle cell anemia and a woman cured of multiple sclerosis were among the most dramatic, but backaches and headaches were also mentioned, as was one event during which Elaine said her children healed their father after transporting themselves astrally into his body and cruising around a bit. Charles told us he had participated in helping people recover from terminal illnesses.
“I know you might have the idea that this can’t be done. Please set that aside. This energy can go through lead, through walls. Superman, Superwoman, they all do this. The energy is going where it needs to go for the highest and the best,” he said.
Elaine assured us that we already knew how to do what she was teaching us. We’d done it as children but forgotten how. She urged us to give up our ideas about whether what we said was right or wrong. Focus on healing, she said.
I worried about the idea that so many people needed healing. Was she saying everybody was sick?
Not exactly.
“People have gotten so out of touch with their feelings and their gut that they need a mirror that’s going to be kind and loving,” she said. Our messages would be that.
I’d heard Lauren say much the same thing. “If people could get their heads and their hearts together, I’d be out of business,” she said.
As green as we were at giving messages, Elaine said we ought to proceed with full confidence in our abilities. “It’s not ‘Oh, God, give me this.’ It’s ‘Thank you for what you’re going to give us.’”
Don’t try, our teachers told us. And don’t analyze. Experience. We could analyze later.
Late Saturday afternoon we sat in two rows facing one another. We were about to play spirit chairs. My row stayed put while the people in the facing seats moved to their left after having exchanged messages. As each person sat before us, we were to say our prayer and then look into his or her eyes.
My first partner was Jim. On the first day, Jim volunteered to say the prayer before breakfast. He stepped up to the task with such energy and gave such a resounding blessing that I decided to stay away from him. So much positive energy jangled my nerves. But there he was.
As I looked into his eyes, my mind went blank. Nothing. Not a word. Not an image. I could meditate a thousand hours trying for such a total void and never reach it.
I had to say something.
“You’re someone who really throws yourself into what you do.” This was weak, and I was cheating. Everyone in the room knew that about him.
I looked more deeply into his eyes. They were a soft brown.
“Oh,” I gasped, and, then, as though we were at a masquerade ball and he’d taken off a mask, I said, full of surprise, “that’s who you are.”
In an instant I felt as though I’d moved from seeing what he looked like to seeing who he was.
“Being so out there costs you something, doesn’t it?” I went on. “You’re really quite shy and sensitive. You’d like to withdraw, but you don’t. You’re quite brave. You stay connected with people and keep trying because you know that’s the way to live the best life. You seek the truth even when it’s hard to do. You ought to be very proud of your courage.”
The connection was so intimate that it rattled me. I began to talk faster and faster. Words flew out of my mouth before I thought them, and I knew I was right. I could read it in his eyes. I felt powerful and full of knowledge that I hadn’t imagined five minutes before.
Then Jim gave me a message. He said I came to the workshop as a skeptic, but I was being changed. He said I was there for a spiritual experience. I’d heard that perhaps a dozen times in Lily Dale, and I was tired of hearing it. My spirituality was fine, if you please. I was there to write a book.
I thanked him, trying not to sound churlish.
Next came Sally. I said the prayer, and I looked into her eyes. They had a glint that Jim’s didn’t. They were less wide but full of life. In an earlier exercise, when Charles asked us to demonstrate joy, Sally had thrown her clenched fists over her head and let out a piercing whoop. The explosion startled us all. One woman clutched her chest and said, “Don’t do that.”
“You have a great fountain of joy in you,” I said, talking slow, feeling cheesy because I was cheating again. Then I morphed into my new self—fast-talking Chris.
“You have to protect that joy. It’s your great gift. It’s a gift for everyone around you. You don’t understand how important it is. Don’t let anything cause that fountain to lessen. If you do, you’ll be robbed, but so will all the people who need to feel that joy. You’ve allowed what other people think and want to come ahead of that joy, and you must stop doing that.”
What the hell was I doing? I was gushing like a broken hydrant. I never tell people who they are. I never give advice to strangers. I don’t tell. I ask. That’s my business. To watch, to listen, to stay under cover.
Finally, I finished my spiel, came back to my true self, and asked weakly, “Does any of this make any sense to you?”
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you. I’ve had some bad experiences in the past couple of years, and I think they really caused me to withdraw from other people. I was not as outgoing as I used be. I guess I had dampened down my joy.”
“Oh,” I said.
She hugged me and then gave me a message. She said I was smart and tended to underestimate that. She said I had knowledge other people needed. She said I shouldn’t waste that intelligence.
I didn’t want to hear this. For all my life as a reporter, I believed that if I used my talent and intelligence well, people would benefit. I believed that every story had the potential to change how people saw the world. But I’d stretched myself as far as I could. The world hadn’t changed. I hadn’t enlightened anyone. I no longer wanted to trot out my intelligence, my theories, myself, in pursuit of some big vision. I felt like a trained monkey always dancing around hoping someone would throw out a penny. Instead, they threw tomatoes—you’re not dancing fast enough; you’re not dancing well enough; the monkey down the street is dancing better.
I thanked her. I didn’t like her message, but, as Elaine did before her, Sally seemed to have picked up my current state of mind. Or was I reading into it? Was I taking general statements and using them in my own ways? I didn’t know. Maybe we were all doing that. Maybe the whole class was using our mysteriously sharpened intuition to connect with another kind of consciousness and at the same time using the same intuition and consciousness to eke meaning out of whatever was said to us.
Another Jim was my next partner. He looked dazed.
“I can’t believe what’s happening here,” he said. “I’m really getting things. This message giving was the part of the workshop I was most skeptical about. I never thought this would happen.”
I knew he wanted to write a book because he had already told me so, but this time I didn’t use what I knew. I looked into his eyes and started talking. Again my boldness startled me. He didn’t seem interested in what I was saying, but I couldn’t stop.
I urged that he be more open about his own sensitivity. I told him that like a snail he needed to come out of his shell in order to move forward. I was talking as fast as I could, and all of it was drivel. I sounded like one of the mediums at the Stump who tells all the men that they’re misunderstood and all the women that they give too much to others.
I hate people who foist ill-founded opinions on others. Why was I doing this? I finally wound down enough to shut up. I think we were both immensely relieved.
Jim’s messages to me were of a different nature. He was seeing pictures. He saw children’s building blocks with letter
s on them. He saw the words “super heroes.” Then he got a vision of a forest and fields and horses running. None of this meant anything to me. I told him so.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
Now that he had his legs under him, he was ready to run with those visions. Messages he was getting meant far less to Jim than the ones he was giving. I understood completely. Our own powers were so strange and so powerful that we no longer cared what people could tell us. We wanted to know what we could tell them.
My next partner listened to my impassioned, hackneyed message with smiling impatience. Then she interrupted.
“What I really want to know is where I should go to school.”
Psychics had told her she should become a nurse, but she didn’t want to. I asked a few questions about her career plans. I shut my eyes. Nothing. As we began to discuss her plans again, a trainer tapped me on the shoulder.
“Try not to talk to each other. You’re often blocking what you can get from spirit.”
I closed my eyes. In the upper right edge of the blackness I saw a little figure with a nurse’s cap on.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “All I see is a nurse. I know that’s no good.”
After the exercise ended, Elaine asked for comments. People flung their hands in the air and waved them like school kids.
“Now we know enough to be dangerous,” said a tall young woman with a thick braid hanging down her back.
“I’m good at this,” shouted Beth the hypnotherapist as she pumped her fist into the air.
“You’re good now, but wait until tomorrow when you’ll be really good,” Elaine said.
I left the fire hall thinking I’d experienced a connection so intimate and so powerful that it was scary. Did mediums feel this? If so, maybe what I took to be a lack of communication skills was a shield that they put up to protect themselves. If they felt such intimacy with every person who sat in their parlor, no wonder they wanted to hide during ordinary conversations. Maybe that’s why they seemed not to listen to others and why I always had the feeling that they might break off the conversation any minute. I’d do the same thing if I were hooked up to such intensity day after day. I’d get some reserve and keep as much of it as I could.
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