Connecting With Spirit; A Journey Into Trance Mediumship

Welcome back! In this episode, I interview trance medium Milada Rice-Henke, who shares her journey of growing up with a deep connection to spirit. She shares her experience with connecting to spirit and offers advice for those new to mediumship or just beginning to connect with spirit. She emphasizes that we are all connected to spirit and encourages self-acceptance and trust in the natural connection. 

Milada describes her own experiences of clairvoyance and clairsentience and advises new mediums to stay connected and trust the information they receive, even if it seems nonsensical. She also discusses the process of going into a trance and emphasizes the importance of mindfulness and focusing on feelings rather than thoughts. Milada also talks about connecting with spirit guides and suggests paying attention to personal interests and fascinations with particular ancient cultures as a way to cultivate a relationship with them. Milada emphasizes the importance of cultivating inner peace as a way to raise one’s own vibration and positively impact others. 

Welcome everybody to another episode of the show. I am so excited to have my good friend, Milada Rice-Henke, come onto this wonderful show to describe everything that she knows about spirit and help us understand more about spirit. Milada is a trance medium and a holder of space and she is so wonderful with spirit, so connected with spirit.

I cannot wait to ask her all sorts of questions because Milada shares trance mediumship readings. She does trance demonstrations. She gives trance and reiki healing. She offers spiritual chats to help people deepen their path. She gives mentoring in trance and also assists in teaching several trance mediumship courses. Milada, thank you so much for coming on, and welcome.

Thank you. I’m so happy to be here as well. My favorite topic in the world. 

Creative Childhood And Spirit Connection

One of the things that fascinates me is you’re a transmedium and you’re so into spirit. How did you grow up? What was your childhood like? I would think that it’s a far cry from the way most people start. What was your childhood like?

I was a very intellectual child. I say that not saying I was some Mensa brain person, but I had a tendency to be very reflective and curious. I did a lot of reading and I was a musician. From a young age, my mother was also a musician and I took piano and violin lessons and spent a lot of time doing musicianship-type things, both holistically and in groups. I had a tendency to be able to float away. People would comment when I was little that my playing was very touching.

I think that was an early indicator of my connection to spirit because I would float off into this abyss of beauty and bliss. I took it for granted that this is how it is. I had a connection to spirit from an early age and had experiences, had some connections of spirit people visiting and things like that. I was also blessed because my parents didn’t deter any of that. They didn’t make a big deal of it that they didn’t say, “You shouldn’t be doing this or thinking this or feeling this.” They went with the flow on it. That’s how childhood was for me. It was a wonderful time. 

I can imagine. It sounds like your parents were very open and very accepting. Whatever it is, that’s great. You started piano at age three and violin at age six. That’s pretty amazing to start so early. What was it like to be focused on music at such an early age?

(t was a part of life. It’s like when you’re in a culture where the culture immerses you. That would have been something in the United States that I was involved with if I was living in another country where the beautiful culture was immersing me, and its ways of being. I think it’s similar to a family full of musicians because I was accustomed to my mother practicing the piano and singing. When I was little, I would lay underneath the piano and I would listen to her practicing her vocalises and things like that and I got to where I would memorize things and know things.

Being in that musical experience, it seemed like that was what everybody did to me. I didn’t know any differently. Now, I will say that practicing and the discipline of practice was a challenge for me as it is for many kids. I had a tendency to go off and make up songs or play everything fast. Things that were fast, I played slow. Things that were slow, I played fast. I was very experimental, curious, and creative. Sometimes my teachers had their hands full with me in that way, to get me to do the basic things and practice and do my exercises and scales and things like that. The creativity, they didn’t have a challenge with. It was the discipline part of things that they had the challenge with. 

How would you say your creative side and your creative mind allowed you to open up your spirit? Was that a factor? I know that the creative side of our brains allows us to get that much closer. What was it like for you? How are music and creativity ramp into connecting with spirit?

As you’ve said, that side of our brain is so key. I feel that purity of creative force is like a portal into spirit because when we are engaged with that vibrational part of ourselves that is beyond the thinking mind, and by thinking mind, I mean the one that makes your grocery list and says, “I have these twelve things I have to get done today,” or the part that’s worrying about things, the part that drifts off or notices the beautiful colors of Mother Earth around us, or the part that starts to dream into something lovely that we’ve done or would like to do or see a sunset. It’s very pure.

That part of myself was so active from the time that I was even a toddler and very small. That was the most active part of myself. Because of that, I think that entryway into the spirit, that openness to the spirit was very natural for me. I also had a tendency to drift off and be very dreamy. I remember in first grade that I’d be reading and I would be so engaged in the book that I was reading that no one could get my attention because I would be reading and dreaming and everything floating out there and picturing, visualizing everything. Some of the kids would make bets on how long it would take to get my attention. At the time, it probably hurt my feelings, but I look back at it and chuckle now because it was kids being kids. That dreaminess was a huge portal to spirit for me.

It sounds like if I’m understanding you, it’s that daydream state that allowed you to drift away, which I guess is somewhat similar to music. 

It’s so similar. It was truly the gateway to the trance mediumship of the past number of years here as well because those things were developing before I ever engaged with the trance mediumship. I didn’t realize it. I didn’t even know what trance mediumship was, but it was a very natural flow in that connection.

Would you say when you were playing your music, you started to feel differently or you started to feel more of a flow or there is different vibration? What did it feel like when you were playing your music? Did you feel like an evolution, a change, or something going on?

I didn’t feel an evolution. It’s interesting. I think I worked in reverse order in the sense that the drifting away during the music, the imaginative feeling, and the connecting with, I would say connecting with the divine while playing came first. What I had to learn was the technical side of things. Perhaps it’s the opposite of what it could be for some people. Everybody is different, so I’m sure we have a perpetual state of affairs when it comes to trying to describe everybody’s experiences here. For me, it was having to come back down to earth and learn how to be more analytical with my practicing and with my playing. 

The other interesting thing that I’ve discovered over the last number of years with trance, and it is quite similar, is that if I’ve learned a piece for violin or piano and I am off in the dream state of playing in the flow, shall we say, and I engage with my conscious mind, I will fall off the wagon and come unglued. There’ll be mistakes, there’ll be issues, there’ll be things that happen.

I either need to stay in that state of magic and creativity when I’m playing or I need to come into playing. for example, in an orchestral piece, you have to have that awareness of the conductor and the people around you. You cannot drift off. When I’m doing something like that, I have to engage with the logical side of my brain and stay very aware of that, so I don’t disappear into the abyss. If I’m in that abyss and I’m in the creativity and the divine area of things, I need to stay there because for a second, if I drift into the logical mind, it’s like the wheels come off the cart. 

That’s amazing. You were talking about allowing yourself to get in the flow and it sounds like there’s a vibrational state in there. What would you say about the vibrations? What vibrations were you feeling? What feelings were you undergoing? I’ve heard you talk before about togetherness and joy, but what other feelings were you getting as you get into that flow state? 

it’s an awakening of the heart space, the heart chakra. If we’re talking about different sensations that a person feels, I often will feel and I can feel it even now speaking with you about this. I feel the top of my head lighting up. I can feel all this beautiful energy around the top of my head and down the back of my head, across my shoulders, and the back of my neck. I feel the heart space radiating and being alive. Those are the same feelings that I have when I’m playing music and when I’m working in different mediumistic aspects. 

All of this sensation Is a vibration. It’s like a very fine vibration. You think about a vibration, like if you go to an amusement park and you go on the bumper cars or something, you can feel all that vibrating underneath you. It’s almost a shaky low, I’m not saying low isn’t bad. It’s a lower-feeling vibration. It’s a slower, more intense vibration. The feeling I feel Is a very fine, very subtle, very soft vibration. It can be quite continuous if I stay in that flow. It can be a very continuous feeling. I do have to make positive choices in terms of coming out of that flow for doing things like driving and grocery shopping and all that sort of thing. You don’t want me driving around like that. 

I think you’d be rather reckless on the way. 

I make a very conscious decision of like, intense on what am I doing right now, what am I engaged in, let’s be here now. 

Raising Vibration

Be here now, that’s a great phrase. What I’ve got to say is you’re talking about vibration, you’re talking about feeling the energy around you right now. What I’ve noticed in the short time that we’ve been on together is that your camera has started out perfectly, then I started to notice the image of you and the energy around you starting to change and start to become more not you. It looked very much like you do when we go into a trance circle. The image of you starts to change. You can see the energy on the screen and it’s happening right now. 

Sorry about that. 

No, don’t worry. That’s spirit talking, but that’s the energy. That’s the vibration surrounding you. We even tried to get a different camera and it’s still happening and it’s the energy, it’s spirit, it’s the vibration you were talking about. That’s what’s so amazing. The more that you’re doing that, the more you’re connecting, the more you’re becoming quite connected to spirit. We’re talking about vibration. I’ve been asked by a lot of people, how can you raise your own vibration? Because everybody thinks, “This is vibration.” How can you raise it? What advice would you have for somebody who’s tuning in? How could they raise their vibration?

I love this question. I love this because it’s what our world needs. Every single one of us in that aspect of love, peace, and contentment. A few things that I would say is, first of all, don’t give up your peace for unnecessary things, especially, as we move throughout our day. As people of the modern world, there are one million things that we’re expected to do, and our nervous systems are constantly challenged by jobs, electronics, family, and responsibilities.

Don't give up your peace.

My first suggestion would be to start to practice being in a state of peacefulness within yourself. I’ll talk more about getting there in a second. Not to give up that peace for things like traffic, for things like my dry cleaning didn’t get done on time. My favorite soup is out of stock at the grocery store. There’s a long line at Starbucks. My kid is sick. Those things that we don’t have to come out of our peace or that are frustrations. 

Stay in your peace. Start to cultivate a sense of peacefulness within yourself. People will say, “But how do I even get there? I’m in such a state of intense fight or flight right now.” By no means in saying this, am I diminishing anyone’s state of their lives, because I know there are many challenging things out there for us today but truly, doing things that are peaceful. Start to cultivate that in yourself, just like everything else in life. 

Americans, we’re so good at learning things and we get better and better at our jobs, we get better and better at family resources and things like that as we learn. What about cultivating and becoming more proficient at maintaining our inner peace and taking care of our nervous systems and things like that? Meditation is wonderful. Let’s do that a couple of times a day for a few minutes even 5 minutes, 10 minutes, or 15 minutes. 

There are lots of other things, like being in nature. Sitting quietly with a family pet, sitting and gazing at a sunset. Listening to some music that refreshes us. Having a quiet meal. Turn the lights down and put some candles on to quiet the nervous system. There are so many things that we can do and it doesn’t have to be something that feels overwhelming to a person to start to cultivate this. Set an intention that in each doorway that you walk through in your home, you come back to your peace.

Make a little intention, like a tiny little habit. You walk through the door from your house into your garage, you change to that element of peace within yourself feeling it within yourself. That’s one thing that I would recommend with raising your vibration. I don’t know if I should go here yet, Chris, but you had a question, like the main question of the day. 

Your main question is what’s the biggest thing that you can recommend to somebody? Yes, if it’s appropriate.

It relates to this question totally because I feel that so many of us are not in touch with ourselves. This is such a buzzword in society. Take me time, take personal time, and all of this. I’m talking about something even deeper than that. It’s not about the doing, it’s about the being and getting in touch with the vibration that is you. 

Take time to sit and sense your own vibration because within you is this beautiful divine vibration. I promise you this, all of you. There’s not a single being on this planet that doesn’t have a beautiful vibration within. That inner guru, that beautiful sense of who you are is within you. In relation to raising your vibration, in relation to finding your inner peace, and in relation to the biggest takeaway, the most important thing that I could share with you would be to start to cultivate and find that vibration within yourself. 

When you find that and you start to sit with it and allow that to be present, that very fine, beautiful vibration, your vibration is raised. End of story. There are lots of things you can do, but that’s the essential key for all humanity, is to find that inner guru, that inner wise self, whatever you want to call it, whatever works for you. 

That’s beautiful. I love your idea of focusing on the peace and moving even throughout your house, through a door, or throughout a different position and always coming back to your peace and coming back to your calm state of being and allowing the world, letting go of every day even though it may feel like you cannot work with it. As you said, as long as you’re in your peace, you can work with anything. 

You can. Again, no diminishing of the challenges that others are experiencing and that we may experience in our lifetimes. I certainly don’t want to do that, but the greatest tool that we have is to be able to remain within that understanding that everything is okay, even when it’s not okay. That’s our peace within, and that’s the true vibration of ourselves. That is what transfers to everything else. Everyone will be affected by it. Your family will be affected by it, your friends will be affected by it, and your pets, and the work that you do. If you cultivate that within yourself, everyone around you will experience it. Even if they don’t know what they’re experiencing, they will experience it. 

How To Affect People

That’s a great segue. Now the next question is how can you then affect other people through your peace and your connection to love? How can you impact others? How can you help them raise not only their vibration but also their love of everything and as they go there, they’re raising their own spiritual awareness? How can you affect others?

We’re good nowadays at things like social media and sharing. That’s wonderful. We have lots of practitioners out there. There are many options available, but each person has to develop that within themselves. That is something that is not external. In our world, I think especially in America and maybe other places, but I only know America right now. It seems like we do so much reaching out to the external to try to find what we’re looking for. 

We’re used to ordering it from Amazon or we’re used to going and getting our Starbucks drinks or whatever it is that we’re doing. I don’t want to diminish any of those things because sometimes you need a little coffee. Seeking within is the answer. As far as affecting others, you will be amazed at how, and I mean you in the greater sense of the word, how the world responds to a peaceful you. As you are driving down the highway in traffic, and you are completely at peace with the fact that there are too many cars and too many people rushing around and too many red lights and you are with the flow. Everyone is my neighbor and it’s all good. It’s all good. It’s fine.

Sometimes when I’m driving, it takes me 20 minutes, or 30 minutes to get into town because I live in the country. When I’m driving, I think to myself, “Look at all of these neighbors on the road together. We’re together on the road.” It might sound a little Pollyanna-ish, but it shifts my mindset. It helps me to feel more connected and to not be so uncomfortable with traffic and things like that. 

That peacefulness will transfer to the traffic, I promise you. You will see things differently and whether you know it or not, your beautiful auric field will be expanding and affecting others. It will change so much about how others respond to you and respond to each other in your presence as well. That’s the biggest thing that I would say about helping others and affecting others. Of course, if there is a call for it to share that with others, we can never tell others what to do. We can only make suggestions and be available. 

Being available to others in whatever way that you feel called to. Some of us have meditation groups and things like that. I know you have this beautiful podcast and your book and that you’re very involved with mediumship and the messages that you bring are so incredibly beautiful. Each of us has those gifts of what is our calling to share with others. 

You will find that those gifts are enhanced by the practice of bringing that internal self and that peace and that real divine nature that’s within you, allowing that to shine forth. Whatever it is that you’re doing, whether you’re in accounting or you’re a yoga instructor or you’re a teacher or you’re a mom or you’re a dog walker. Whatever it is you’re doing will be affected by this. I promise you. 

What’s your thought given the fact that there’s this vibration and you’re talking about, “Look at my neighbors here.” It makes me want to ask you this question. What is your perception? What’s your thought about whether we are all connected? Are we all one? Is this unity? We hear this all the time. I know my answer. I’d love to hear your perspective on unity, consciousness, and connection. Are we all the same? Are we all connected? Are we all from the same source, etc.? What’s your take on that? 

I have always known this. It’s a funny thing. When I was very small, I had a guy visit me. I’m talking like I was 2 or 3. -I remember this and I remember being shown. It’s been a mystery to me until a couple of years ago what this was about, but I was shown this vision of all different little beings inside of a giant body. Everyone is doing their part. It’s almost as if you were watching the cells in a body or something like that. I remember feeling very frustrated as a small child thinking to myself, “Are we a science experiment? What is this?”

It wasn’t until a few years ago in one of Mark Bedwood’s classes that I realized that my guide was trying to show me the interconnectedness of all life and how all of us are working together in this one body of energy, the one source, the oneness that we all are. My spirit guides will always say, “I am you and you are me,” because I do believe that we are all one. That being said, it might not seem that way. Why is that? Where are we looking from? If you imagine a funnel, are we looking from the bottom of the funnel at the cellular level? 

One cell looks at another cell and knows that I’m one of a billion cells inside of this organism. I don’t know how many cells are in an organism, but a billion sounds good. Am I looking from the very highest vantage points and seeing that we are all one and we are an interconnected web of closeness and we’re here for that reason to realize that our being affects the being of others? 

Our disharmony affects the being of others. Our harmony and peacefulness affect the being of others. I’m in complete agreement with you, Chris. We are all one. There are times when it’s not easy to remember that. We see hardship happening or things that appear very cruel and it’s difficult to imagine that we are one with another who may be causing those things, for example. 

It makes me think of the old image of the drop of water that is part of the ocean. You cannot tell that there’s any difference, but you know that the droplet of water is part of the ocean and the ocean is part of that water. They’re one and the same thing. Does the water droplet know that it’s separate or does it know that it’s part of the ocean? That’s what the Bible has had.

Isn’t that beautiful? I love that. I love that analogy and I remember one of Mark’s guides, Mark Bedwood, talking about the waves of the ocean. The waves of the ocean do not separate the ocean from the ocean. They are part of the ocean. I love the water analogies.

Connecting With Spirit

Perhaps you can describe Mark Bedwood, your teacher. Who is he? How do you connect with him? Let’s also go back to some of your background. You started out connecting with spirit at a young age and then you went off to start studying with different people. Could you walk us through how you first connected with the spirit? What did you do after that and how did it progress?

First connecting with spirit, when I was a little kid, things would happen that I would be aware of. I remember the experience I described earlier about my spirit guide, giving me that vision. Other times, when I would be sick or something like that, I would know that there was a presence in the room. I see like little sparkly lights and things like that where I felt like it was some sort of angelic being. 

If we ever were in an old building or an old house, I remember my parents at one point. I think I was probably about six, they were looking at houses in our area and many of them were from the Victorian time. I remember saying to my mom at one point, “There’s a little girl here, Mom, and she’s up here and she got very sick and she’s sad.” I was like, “I don’t think I want to live in this house because this makes me uncomfortable.” There wasn’t anything wrong. It was something that I didn’t know how to deal with at that age but that stuff would happen with me from time to time. 

As a teenager, I had an experience that made me very nervous because I backed my car out of the driveway and thought that there was a person behind me. It was a spirit person. He went poof into thin air. It scared me to death at that point because I thought I had run over someone. There was no one there, to be clear. It was a spirit person and he went poof into the air. 

Otherwise, your insurance rates would go through the roof. 

At that point, I turned my gifts off for a while, or at least so I thought. I was in a state of I don’t think this is something that I want to be seeing anymore. No, thank you. From that point, for probably about ten years I had fairly minimal experiences. I still once in a while would get a feeling of something, but I was doing my best to not engage in the experience. By the time I was in my 30s, I met a woman named Laurie Ann Manns, who’s a fantastic evidential medium. 

This is a medium that as she sits with you, she’s having a conversation with your spirit friends as she’s talking to you at the same time. The information is coming like a steam train. I met her, I went to a reading with her and I didn’t know why I was going because, at that point, I didn’t have many close loved ones in spirit. She looked at me and she was like, “Why are you here?” I was like, “I’m not sure.” She’s like, “Oh, know why you’re here. You’re here because you need a teacher.” She’s like, “You are a medium, I see it.” 

I attended her classes and her circles and started to learn about evidential mediumship and how to make those connections and hold a link in all of that. A few years into that, Laurie told me, “You need to meet with this guy, Mark Bedwood. He’s this incredible trance medium from Australia. I’ve never had a trance reading like this before. You need to get a reading.” I went to a reading with him and that was March of 2020. In that reading, I had had for a long time this pain in my heart chakra. 

It was from a failed relationship and the surrounding circumstances of that, that I was holding so deeply in my heart. During that reading, Mark’s guide, Ignatius, I felt, and he told me, he’s like, “Can I take some of the pain from you?” I was like, “Really?” I could feel him reach out and it was like when you pull a sliver from your finger, it was the soft pull and suddenly it was flooded with love and it was gone. That feeling was gone. I thought to myself, I need to learn about this. This is miraculous. I signed up for classes with Mark and that’s how I learned about trance mediumship.

What a story. That’s amazing. It sounds like it was a path that spirit has laid for you to the point where you’re at the door and next thing you know, everything falls into place. That’s amazing. You mentioned for a decade or more, you might have suppressed your connection to spirit and then everything has this way of coming about. 

When you were first connecting and you were first learning how to connect with spirit in your early days, and I think you touched on this earlier, what did it feel like? For those people who might either be trying to understand the process or might be curious about it or perhaps they’re trying to learn it themselves. What did it feel like? What were you doing? Take us through a moment in Milada’s spirit connection. 

I remember having a lot of self-doubt. If you are new to mediumship, the first thing I want to say about that is that you are new to the practice of mediumship. You are not new to the connection with spirit. None of us are. Say to yourself, “I am spirit so my connection to spirit is natural.” That’s the first thing that I would want to say to you because I had a lot of self-doubt about this. A lot of that came from the misconceived notion that I was somehow separate from the spirit world.

That I was somehow making a connection that was difficult or unnatural or magic. We get these ideas that this stuff is magic, but it’s natural. We are sensitive beings. The feelings that I would get, back to your question, I’m going off on a divergence here. I primarily was clairvoyant. That means that I would see pictures in my head. There are lots of ways that you can experience the spirit, of course, and in the mediumship world, we call those claires, but I primarily saw pictures and movies in my head which is clairvoyance. 

I also had clairsentience, which is the feelings, like I was describing before, how the top of my head was very vibrational and you feel little tingles or energy or electricity or whatnot. We have those feelings as well, but I tended to pay attention and acknowledge the movies or the pictures in my head more because it helped me to have something to link into and feel more strongly about. That’s the first thing. The second thing that I’d like to share with anyone who’s newly working with mediumship is to keep moving through the information that’s being provided. 

Imagine now that you plug the vacuum cleaner into the wall and if the vacuum cleaner is plugged into the wall and it gets pulled a little bit, it’ll make this roaring sound and it will stop for a second then it’ll engage again. It’s the same thing for our connection to a spirit person. We are plugged in. Our auric field is connecting with them. If we disconnect, then the information in that flow is going to also have a break or be disconnected. The more that you can continue to stay with that spirit person, stay with the information that’s being provided, even if it seems nonsensical. 

I see twelve rubber duckies and I don’t know why I see twelve rubber duckies and this person is talking about McDonald’s Happy Meals. I don’t know why I’m seeing it. Even if it seems nonsensical, go ahead and share it and continue with the flow of information because when we stop and we doubt ourselves, all we’re doing is unplugging. You can plug it back in too. That’s the other thing I would say. You lose the link. You drop the link you can get back into it and you can continue. You go back to the last thing that they provided and you start to talk about that again and make a reconnection, just like plugging the vacuum cleaner into the wall. I don’t know if that helps if that’s what you’re asking.

That’s great. It very much sounds like giving what you get because it’s that doubting mind that gets in the way of your unplugging. Make sure that you’re giving what you’re getting and you’re off to the races. That’s the one thing. Also, you were talking about, we are spirit. That’s what I’ve been talking about in this show. We are spirit. If we know that we’re spirit, then it’s that much easier to talk to spirit, communicate with spirit, because it’s like you and I having a communication right now. I was having a regular conversation with your spirit. You can have a conversation with spirit. No different. Get out of the way. Get outside yourself. That’s all you need to do.

Isn’t that the human thing? All of the things we’ve talked about today are us getting in the way of ourselves and getting in the way of putting things in front of our peace or putting things in front of our connection as a spiritual being. Dusting that off, it’s removing the tablecloth from the beautiful wood table to allow it to shine. Let it be. 

It’s so well put. Always allow ourselves to get out of the way no matter what we’re doing because our ego mind wants to mess us up.

It’s true. That’s where we get into trouble. We think that we’re in charge of things and we think that we’re controlling things with that mind wants to do all the things and check the boxes. We’ll find that there’s so much more power in letting go and allowing the bigger power and divine power within us to handle things. It’s so much more powerful. It’s a beautiful thing.

Going Into Trance

When you speak about allowing our minds to get in the way, how do you get out of the way so that you can go into a trance? What does trance feel like for you? 

This is a question that a number of years ago I would have had more difficulty answering because of my childhood and working with music. I did this almost accidentally and seamlessly. It was one of those things where I was so practiced at drifting off that I didn’t know what I was doing. I needed a good teacher to help me understand the logistics of this. Imagine that you’ve had a day of doing all sorts of things and you’re getting ready to go to your trance practice or your circle or whatever and your mind is a little bit on the busy side and you don’t know how you’re going to get out of that state of mind. 

This is my suggestion. I learned this from my teacher, Mark Bedwood, but it is the process that I was doing that I didn’t realize I was doing. That is to go with a feeling, not thoughts. By feeling, I don’t mean, “I feel sad today, so I’m going to immerse myself in sadness.” That’s part of your thinking mind. I’m talking about the feeling. How you feel inside, you can feel your heart when you love someone. You can feel the top of your head when a cool wind comes across the top of your head and you can feel that breeze. 

You can feel how it feels when that joy and that peace comes into being. It’s about a mindfulness thing. You can go through the different senses. You can sit there and you can say, “I feel the air around me. I can feel the chair that I’m sitting on. I can feel the breath going in and out of my body. I can hear a song far away.” You can do a mindfulness exercise like that and you’re into the feelings. You can feel the spirit. That’s what I do. I start to ask spirit to approach me. I can feel their presence. I can feel it right now saying this. They’re starting to come closer because I said something. 

As I feel their presence and that beautiful sense, I start to drift away and allow them to put me in a cocoon. It’s so lovely. It feels like you’re held in this beautiful cocoon of love and then drift away. It is about mindfulness because if you are focused on thinking, you cannot think yourself into a meditation. You cannot think yourself into trance mediumship. You cannot think yourself into the most creative moment of your life. It comes from inspiration. It’s the feelings. It’s not the thoughts.

How do know that you’re all the way down and out of the way? I guess perhaps you don’t. You mentioned you cannot thank yourself. How do you understand that you’ve gotten out of the way properly? 

There are lots of variations of that. This can be controversial in the trance mediumship world. I’ll say this.

We love controversy. Here we go.

What I would like to say is that personally, this is me as a person. I don’t like to say that one way is right and one way is wrong because everyone is so very different from one another. I have known people that give the most stunning messages from spirit and they’re in a very light state of trance. That means that they have some awareness about what’s being said. They have some sense of perhaps pictures and things that are happening, but they are of a softer mind, a more passive mind because trance mediumship is a passive mind. It means our mind is not working for us. 

We’re not sitting there making a list of groceries or thinking, “I need to remind Chris about such and such.” No. Our mind is in a softened state. There are some folks that give the most incredible messages and they may still have that awareness. There are others that are in a medium state of awareness where maybe a couple of things filter through. They just have an impression of something for some reason. There’s a state where you have no idea what happened. You feel like you had the most wonderful nap, or you’ve been in a healing room for that time, and the time seems to pass very quickly. 

In that deep state, which I also like to call an expansive state, because sometimes we get caught up in some antics of “I need to go deeper.” You think that you’re dropping down and maybe that doesn’t work for you. Maybe it works better for you to feel that you’re expanding into the energy of spirit or that you’re walking into the energy of spirit. Everybody has a different way of working. By all means, make sure to embrace which works for you, but in that deeper state or that expansive state, you probably don’t know what happened. 

You may have a feeling like you’re coming out of a trance and you have this feeling of sweetness or bliss or peace or a feeling that there are many ancestors around the room with all of the participants or something. That’s how you know that you’re in a deeper state. It’s that something happened to everybody else in the room and you took a nap. 

Communicating With Spirit Guides

Since you’re working with spirit guides, one question I often get is how can I communicate with my spirit guides. How can I learn who they are? Why cannot I hear them? How do I connect with my spirit guides? I want to know my spirit guides. Will they help me? What would you say to the person who asks, “How can I connect to my spirit guides?” 

The first thing I would say is that you are connected to your spirit guides. I think the idea that we aren’t connected somehow, we have to wash it away from ourselves entirely because we are connected. The first thing I would say in conjunction with that, hinging to that, is when you start to feel a sense of something or intrigue with something, for example for me, going back to childhood, I look back at this, and it’s so obvious. I had these strange connections to Egypt and India. I know it sounds cliché to have the Egyptian connection. Many of us do.

I knew things about some of the Vedic history that one shouldn’t know as a small child. Let’s say you have a fascination with a particular culture or a particular part of history and it seems to call you and you don’t know why that is. I have a friend who has a deep connection with English tutor society and she has connectivity there. Listen to that and start to gently cultivate that. That is one way of starting to realize some of the people who are the guides that are with you. 

Develop a relationship. Just like any friendship, if you don’t take time with it, conscious time, so our guides are always with us, believe it or not, even though you might not have awareness of their ways of working with us. They’re still working with us, but you can have a beautiful conscious relationship. It’s like friends, if we don’t call and go for coffee, we lose touch. We don’t know what they’re up to. They don’t know what we’re up to. You guys know what you’re up to anyway. Spend time with them. Have conversations. Fit and blend with them. 

Sit down and again, I harp on meditation all of the time, but perhaps you even want to sit in a semi-awakened state where you’re asking spirit like I can feel them right now pressing in closer as I’m talking about them. Taking that time and saying, “Come close to me. I want to feel what it feels like for you to be close to me.” Bring your attention to that. Much of our lives is about learning to bring attention to certain things and awareness to certain things. It’s the same thing with spirit guides. 

It’s taking that time and making the effort to bring your awareness there. By bringing your awareness, I don’t mean you’re like, “I want a guide that is a Roman emperor and they’re going to look like this and they’re going to be this.” You might draw a Roman emperor to you doing that, but maybe it’s not that subtle, beautiful energy that’s standing behind you waiting to come forward. 

There’s quite a high opportunity there that this Roman emperor is going to come forward and perhaps give you information, and that’s all good. There may be this beautiful, subtle energy that’s been working with you and it is the chance to come forward with your permission and your allowance. I hope that helps. 

It sounds like both the allowance and the invitation, the intention, and setting the intention perhaps is key. That’s what I’m always telling people. When you set that intention, you create that magnetic loving pull to you. I love the way that you’re saying to pay attention to your internal feelings about where your passion is, and where your interests lie. You were talking about your cultures or time periods. For the longest time, I always loved Egyptian history. I was fascinated by it. I didn’t know why. 

Same thing with the Middle Ages and there are certain time frames that fascinate me. I could sit here and read all day and devour all this information. Why? It’s either A) It’s multiple past lives that are coming up to bubble to the surface saying, “Hi, I’m here,” or B) It’s my spirit guide saying, “Hi, I’m here.” Either way, it’s all good. They’re like, “Wake up, smell the coffee. We’re here. We want to talk to you.” That’s what’s so funny. It’s like everybody says, “I want to connect to my spirit guy, but I cannot hear them.” 

It’s like the ego mind. You have to get out of the way and let them talk to you. When you allow that and invite them, they will talk to you. It goes back almost to the feeling of the hypnagogic state. Sometimes you’ll be between the waking and sleeping state as you drift off to sleep. It’s so easy for them to connect with you because you’re not thinking anymore. Your logical analytical mind has already drifted away. 

That’s so true. That very early in the morning when you first wake up, if you wake up early in the morning as I do, but you start to open your eyes. If you wait just a moment, you can feel the beautiful presence of spirit in that first waking moment, because your mind has been still for hours on end. It’s only doing the work that it must do to repair the physical being in the brain while you’re sleeping and if you’re traveling or things like that. It’s so still and quiet that if you give it a moment lying there, you can feel the spirit and it’s stunning. 

It’s stunning if you take that second to do so. I love what you said about multiple past lives and spirit guides. People say, “I cannot hear my spirit guides.” Quite often, I cannot hear them either. I don’t have a clear audience. That means hearing the spirit inside of my head in their own voice. I don’t hear that very often, but I know things, I feel things, I see things, I get impressions, I get sensations. 

Don’t discount the messages that you are receiving because you want a certain type of message. Receive the messages that you are receiving. Be open and aware of the connections that you do have because I guarantee every single being has them. You just have to be open to receiving them and allow them and don’t put a framework that puts a block up. Allow them to be there. 

Ashram Kripa And Physical Mediumship

That’s beautifully said. Tell me what you’re doing now. Where are you heading? What are you working on? What are you developing? I understand you’re doing something about an ashram kripa. You’re also doing some physical mediumship. Perhaps you can talk about those two things that you’re currently working on. 

It’s been in the works for a while. I started to get this impression from one of my guides about an online ashram. It’s funny because I kept feeling like I needed to go to an ashram. I need to be at an ashram. It wasn’t quite that. I kept thinking, what is this? As I was paying attention and listening, and then I started to work with Mark Bedwood on it, the realization came that my guides were asking me to start an online ashram. 

By ashram, I mean a spiritual space for contemplation, unconditional love, for peace, something that would begin to offer people a place to sit together in community or Satsang. Satsang means community sitting together for the truth. I don’t mean truth like I’m not suggesting that we’re going to scour Plato’s Republic and it might be a good exercise in a bigger perspective even than that, even though that’s a wonderful work of art. Sitting together and experiencing spirit together. 

I have several meditation times available right now on the ashram, Ashram Kripa. Kripa is a name that was given to me by Spirit. It came in October of 2022. I received this message and it was so clear that it was undeniable for me. That’s where Kripa came from because it means divine grace. That’s what we want to share with others. It’s that gentle grace of spirit with the ashram. More are coming. Hopefully, discussion groups about spiritual topics where we can all share our ideas together as a group or as a community. 

Hopefully, the Kirtan chant is coming, and hopefully, more meditation times. I don’t know what else is coming, but the spirit will lead the way. We have that going. I’m involved with Debbie Charlton and Julie Kedles, different physical mediumship circles. Those are a couple of names that are on Facebook with mediumship that you can find pretty easily if you’re looking. Physical mediumship isn’t always something that I’m pursuing. It’s just something that’s happening gradually. I don’t have this strong desire to pursue it the way some have, but it seems like it’s something that happens. If spirit wishes to use me that way, that’s fine with me. We’ll do whatever needs to be done. 

You’re out there, Beckham Call. There you go. Milada, this is fantastic. Tell us where people are and how people can get in contact with you if they have any questions or if they’d like to have any additional information or contact you. 

The website is AshramKripa.com and also Ashram Kripa on Facebook. I do have another website, but that’s going to be merged with the ashram website. For now, we’ll leave that one out. You’re welcome to find me on Facebook Messenger, Milada Rice-Henke, that’s fine too. Whatever works for you as far as contact. I do hope that if something calls to you today, please feel free to reach out or if you’d like to join our meditations, it’s our privilege to have you together with us. 

Thank you so much, Milada, for being on the show. For anybody who is looking to connect, by all means, keep on joining us and always rate and subscribe. We’re always here. We will see you next time. 

Thank you.

Milada, thank you so much for joining us and we will see you all next time. Until later. Bye for now.