I have been involved in metaphysics since 1972, and was fortunate enough to have been raised within an Irish-Cornish family who all followed a metaphysical path.
My aunt was a famous spiritual healer who practiced for decades in the south-east of England, while my step-father was a well-known homeopath and spiritual healer in Devon. My mother was also a gifted trance medium and animal healer, and remains one of my wisest teachers in this and other lives.
Often, when trauma happens to us, something opens in our psychic awareness. At the age of nine, I went to live with my mother (whom I had not seen for five long, sad years) and my father abruptly left my life (I was not to have any contact with him at all for 16 years). We choose our parents to learn certain karmic lessons, and my most precious gift in losing both of my parents at such a young age has made me a more available mother, a skill I may not have managed to accomplish without these early trials.
Back then, I felt alone and full of grief and rage, and started to pray for help. I was in a new school, with a step-father and mother I did not remember and away from everything familiar to my old life.
When help came, it arrived in the form of shamanic training with a focus on nature communication in Wales. My first teacher was an old tree that stood on its own at the edge of our meadow on our small hobby farm, and I would spend eight hours a day wrapped within its branches, receiving healing energy and love. (25 years later, I returned to this tree to thank it for its teachings, and asked permission to carry a small branch of it onwards into the rest of my life, a wonderful gift.)
After a year in Wales, with the departure of my father and my dear brother (whom I would not see for 20 years) to New Zealand to begin their new life, my family moved to Johannesburg, South Africa at the height of the apartheid years in 1972.
There, I continued my training in psychic development within the safety and responsibility of The Protea Spiritualist Fellowship, Johannesburg and attended fortnightly closed circles, as the only child in a room of adults, alongside my mother.
I remain grateful for the calm and protective wisdom of all the mediums I worked with during those years, especially Ian Bremner and Helen Stone, from whom I learned much about boundaries, holding the space in a safe and powerful way, how to communicate with spirit and how to enhance the growth of others. I seemed to ‘graduate’ through the layers of clairvoyance development, at first seeing animals in spirit, beloved pets of circle members who were able to confirm their existence for me, and then on to loved ones in spirit. During this time I was also becoming a rescue medium, assisting those caught between life and death, with many of these souls being children. As a child myself, I guess they found it easier to talk to me, and I found working with them an honour.
By the age of 16, I was invited onto the Spiritualist Church platform as a medium in Johannesburg and enjoyed a wonderful relationship with my primary guide, Len Taylor, who happened to also be my mother's father, my grandfather who had died as a captain of a submarine torpedoed in World War 2. We never knew each other in the Physical in this life, but we were close friends in spiritual life. He taught me how to expand my clairvoyance – upon which I was lazily depending, like a tennis player might by using a right serve more than a left – into the realms of clairaudience (hearing) and deeper clairsentience (feeling). He also added rewards and humour to his lessons, and would play me cartoons across the ceiling of my bedroom after lights were out, and dance with me to old tunes.
At age 17, I studied Zen-Buddhism with a wonderful monk whom I recall looking about 25 instead of his usual 45 and was fascinated by their creation concepts and of course of the karmic focuses.
I also became a nurse at the big Johannesburg General, and was drawn to assisting with the transition of life into death for my patients in cardiac, emergency and oncology wards. It seemed that I would always be there, at the time of passing, for me to witness the array of soul colours, the deep sense of release in the room and the experience of feeling incredibly honored to be present at this auspicious moment. I still hold these people in my hearts with gratitude for such a learning at such an age - Mr Mac, Mrs Stephens, Dorothy, to name a few. Then there were the many earthbound spirits that walked the corridors, with something left to tell the living, and I have appreciated their conversations too.
Over the next two decades, I moved into spiritual art, drawing other people's guides and loved ones in spirit (especially children) who lingered beside them; teaching psychic development and healing workshops – and getting on with my life, becoming a writer, journalist and travel correspondent in London, Frankfurt, Greece and Geneva. I married, became a mother (of ultimately four children – almost a boatload) and lived in the East Bay area of San Francisco where I trained in clinical hypnotherapy at one of the oldest and most respected training institutes in California, HCH. Its director, Holly Holmes-Meredith remains one of my most powerful teachers, and the HCH curriculum continues to lead in the field of hypnotherapy.
I finally settled in Canberra, Australia, which the aboriginals describe as the ‘heart chakra’ of Australia, and which is, in actual fact, a bird sanctuary, the skies full of Cockatoos, Rosella Parrots and Galahs – glorious to behold every day!
In 1996, I was formally recognized by a global gathering of shamans as a Shaman, after over 20 years of apprenticeship.
At present, I travel annually and run personal and spiritual development workshops all over the world, in addition to hypnotherapy practice and training in Past Life, Spirit Releasement and other masterclasses for facilitators and individuals – and write books, spend time with my children and appreciate my life, with all its richness of experience.
I look forward to working with you and discovering more about your wisdom and experience of life also.
Lucy Baker C.C.H.T.
Australia
