marja de vries
A Guide for Raising Your Child
By Mary Bell Nyman
Source: p. 122 - 136, "Messages from Thomas - Raising Psychic Children" by James Twyman © 2003; published by Findhorn Press, Scotland; placed on this website with permission from the publisher.
When I was three years old, my mother was killed in a car crash. She left five children under the age of six. We were devastated because she was physically gone, but comforted because she hung around us as a spirit for several years until she thought we were strong enough to be on our own. We all saw her spirit clairvoyantly but talking about it ceased because the adults kept telling us she was gone. The thing I remember most about her as a spirit was she radiated a soft, gold energy of love and compassion. I often felt her gentleness enfold me and was deeply comforted by her, even though I cried for her body to return. Because I experienced her so clearly, I never lost my ability to see a spirit in or out of a body. That was a tremendous gift to me from her.
I often fought sleep as a young child because of several spirits that were hanging around in our house. Even now I remember them clearly. I saw these spirits as a deep, navy blue molecular-like energy that moved through the rooms. They were so sad, that I was often frightened of them. They were lower level beings, stuck in the astral plane who wanted to communicate. A spirit, just like a person, can be stuck in such a low vibration that they can’t see anything happier or brighter than the dense depression or sadness around them. As adults, we have several choices in how we handle these people, but at the age of three and without the psychic training I have now, I didn’t understand how to work with them. I was told every night that no one was there and yet I could see them. The adults got angry with me if I talked about spirits, but I couldn’t help it! Little did I know that being able to see spirits and knowing that each of us is a spirit living in a body, would change my life as I grew older. My greatest tradedy became my greatest gift; I have used this ability to work with spirit in education, meditation, and in hospice, where I help people die peacefully.
After graduating from college, I worked with multi-handicapped children, including children who were deaf and blind. As a speech therapist, eliciting communication from and reaching these kids emotionally was my greatest challenge, until I remembered a childhood game my brothers and sister and I had played. We sent telepathic thoughts and mental image pictures to each other and tried to guess what the other sibling was thinking. When I tried the same game with these children they responded with delight! They couldn’t hear my words but they could read my thoughts and became aware that I could read theirs. I learned a lot about listening and respecting the feelings and needs of these children. Using my intuition, it became easier to respond to the kids, and they made excellent progress.
I later took classes in meditation and clairvoyant reading at the Berkeley Psychic Institute (BPI). BPI was created by Lewis Bostwick as a sanctuary for psychic, sensitive people in 1975. People learned how to use and refine their psychic skills. I was taught that we each have a personal energy space, called an aura, and each person is responsible for keeping his space “clean” and full of only his or her energy – no one else’s. We are “energy sponges” who are unknowingly picking up the feelings, thoughts, and energies of people we interact with, care about, or think about during the course of day. I learned at BPI that feeling only my own energy – with nobody else’s energy inside my space – felt really good! This didn’t mean I disconnected emotionally from people I loved; in fact, I was able to feel more love because I had more of my own energy to give. It meant I could return people’s energies to them in an gentle, friendly way, and reclaim my own from all the people and places where I’d sent it over the years. This improved my health and my sense of well being. Best of all, these techniques were easy – and fun!
Lewis’s wife, Susan, founded the children’s psychic school, Yin Yang, after her two children were born. She eveloped most of the curriculum we used with the kids, creating a school that would validate children’s spirits along with their minds. When I took over the school in 1980, we had five children and over the years it developed into three pre-schools. My partner, Natasha Lynn, ran the two elementary schools for psychic children. Over half of these children were born in our birth center run by the Church of Asclepion, affiliated with BPI. I learned how to be a spiritual midwife (one who works with the spirit of the child instead of the body) and was present when a number of these babies came into the world. We started our communication with the spirit of the child while it was still in utero. A team of clairvoyants would read the family agreements and look to see why this particular spirit was joining this family and what each person hoped to learn from on another.
It was wonderful to have that communication with the baby as a spirit. When the little body finally arrived, the baby would open its eyes and there would be the spirit we had been communicating with for nine months, saying hello telepathically. The baby was so excited to be here and loved that it was honored and recognized as both a spirit and a body. As a clairvoyant spiritual midwife, I noticed that while a spirit is waiting to take a body, it anchors into the left eye of the mother. The spirit moves back and forth between the Godhead and this new body, finishing old karma and clearing the way for this new life. Here we have a spirit with lifetimes of information and a brand new body. The spirit fully integrates into the body between the first and second years. As a child grows, he uses all his pastlife information, and merges his spiritual knowledge with his new physical body. Just like you can remember what you were doing five years ago, so can a one-year-old. Much more of their awareness is in the spiritual realm than in the physical body. In the first four years, children rely more on their spiritual information than on the body’s life experience. In most children, it is around age six that the body gets programmed to accept the physical reality over the spiritual one. We all came in as psychic children; our spiritual abilities never go away, they just get covered over with invalidation and non-permission to communicate our truth. Psychic means “soul essence” and being psychic means being your innate spiritual self.
One of the many miracle birth stories involved a baby who was in a difficult breech position. The clairvoyant team communicated with him to rotate in the womb, and one hour later, he was born headfirst. Another story is of Pamela, who was born at home surrounded by her family with several of us holding space for her birth. She was a playful spirit and telepathically gave her mom encouragement throughout the labor process. Funny things happened that made us all laugh. An alarm clock went off that hadn’t been set, a delivery man came with a package that had three yellow ducks in it but no gift card of any kind, and the family cat knocked over a box of ping pong balls that scattered all over the floor. We laughed and told stories the whole day so when Pamela arrived, all of us were in high spirits and felt blessed. I swear she was smiling at us a minute after she was born and she continues to have a great sense of humor as a young adult. Each birth was unique and each family felt blessed to have their child born into so much love and acknowledgement. We validated both the spirit as well as the body, and were ahead of our time by creating a sacred sanctuary for our children to experience life from both perspectives. Each child was declared a free spirit before the umbilical cord was cut, and validated as a spirit for what they came to manifest this lifetime. When a child has both sides honored from day one, they grow in love and certainty, and carry that grace with them their whole lives.
The Yin Yang Seminaries for psychic children were located in Santa Rosa, Berkeley, and San Jose, California. Yin Yang was considered part of BPI. As a graduate of BPI, I combined my teaching skills with my psychic abilities. All the teachers at Yin Yang were unique in that they were all trained in clairvoyance and completed a minimum three years of training as a clairvoyant healer and psychic reader. The children ranged in age from six months to 12 years and were able to validate, explore, and own their personal spiritual abilities.
The teachers were the guides, and the children were the creators. As psychic teachers, we communicated with the spirit of the child, recognizing the eternal soul present in a little body. We acknowledged the free will of each spirit and what their spiritual intent was for this lifetime. Children were not taught how to be psychic – they already were! The goal of meditation was to get the child to focus on his own world, to look within for answers to the problems in his universe, and separate other people’s energy, ideas, and concepts from his. Doing so freed the spirit of the child so that he could innocently explore the world with new eyes. Creative expression, discovery, and scientific examination become magical when the child is the explorer, open to all experience and given permission to find his own truth.
Teachers were trained to use their psychic tools to create a safe haven for children where they could use their natural psychic abilities.The children were also trained in the academic areas of math, reading, writing, science, language, socialization skills, and problem solving. Allowing children space and permission to grow and have all the knowledge they acquired from past lives, in their present body, was an essential part of the process at Yin Yang. We served as spiritual guides who helped the children discover and enhance their spiritual autonomy and communication with the Source – God. Unfortunately, due to the rising cost of liability insurance, the schools closed in the early 1990’s.
I would like to share some of the techniques for meditating and some of the psychic games we played so that parents and educators may begin to understand how to communicate with the spirit of a child. Anyone can learn these tools and practice them with their children or students. I will also share some of the daily routines we did at Yin Yang, and the levels of spiritual communication we offered all of the families. Hopefully, in years to come, all children will be educated as both a spiritual being and a body.
Each morning, as a child said good-bye to his parents at the classroom door, he learned to make spiritual separations. This meant pulling his energy out of his parent’s space, allowing them to have their day, and also sending the parent’s energy back to them, from his space. This is like hanging up the phone and disconnecting until you see each other again. It gives both parents and children freedom to enjoy being themselves until they come back together at the end of the day. Children disconnected by putting their parents’ energy in an imaginary soap bubble and releasing their energy with an “I love you, Mom, I love you, Dad, see you later,” and popping it. They used an imaginary magnet to call their energy back from their parents’ space as well. I observed that because each person had space, neither parent nor child felt guilty about having to leave each other for the day.
Before entering the classroom, the child learned to ground and match the energy set for the day. By grounding, I mean making an energy connection from the base of the spine to the center of the earth. Children like to imagine a monkey tail, a giant redwood tree, a flower, waterfall, or merry-go-round pole, to use for a grounding cord. This allows any foreign energy to be released, making it easy for the spirit of the child to be present inside her body. When children matched the energy of the school, it meant matching a vibration set for permission to learn and discover for themselves. This vibration was usually a color: blue for certainty, pink for happiness, green for growth, etcetera. This allowed the child to separate from home and say “hello” to school, being present (right here) in the moment.
As she entered the classroom, she experienced moving from her independent workspace to group lessons to stations in the post office, library, store, computer, measuring centers, sewing, art, or listening centers. These workstations are similar to those used in Montessori schools. The child also prepared and served snacks which involved many skills, including solving problems in incredible ways. Here is one of my favorite examples. One child was “snack person.” This involved putting a mat and cup with each child’s name on it on the table, then filling the cup with juice and passing out graham crackers. Lisa, a three-year-old, was snack person and began filling the cups with juice. Several cups she filled to the brim and then the remaining cups contained only drops of juice. Instead of trying to cut in with adult energy and fix it, I waited to see what would happen. As the kids came to eat, several complained they didn’t have juice. The ones with the full cups poured theirs into the empty cups (now considering these was mostly two- and three-year-olds, a lot of the juice graced the tables!).The kids who had very little juice thanked them and all agreed it was a good thing there were sponges! Watching how children heal conflict and solve problems always impressed me. Left to their own, they figure it out and are so gentle with each other.
The children also participated in three meditation circles a day. The first was a morning circle where they said hello to their own space (a bubble or aura) and called their energy into their body. They also owned the space called Yin Yang – again, remembering that the energy of the school was set for the children, not the adults. The next circle (mid-day) was a business circle, where meditation skills were used and business was shared with fellow classmates. The children showed a deep respect for each other’s individual space. They learned to use conflict resolution to solve their differences instead of fighting, and they became adept at expressing their feelings and getting their needs met. The last meditation was a closing circle that ended their day at school and prepared them for returning home. Meditation teaches a child to go within and say hello to his own universe. Here, a child defines his physical and spiritual space with a bubble. (Adults call this the aura). By allowing the child to have and enjoy his bubble, he learns permission to allow others their own space. Children who are in their bodies learn more quickly and have more fun. It gives them the permission to be themselves and to manifest what they came to do this lifetime.
When we taught children to meditate, it worked well because we had been meditating for several years ourselves. All the teachers knew how to go within themselves to a silent space, turn off the noise in their minds, and just be present with themselves. Here in this quiet space, we discover the spirit part of ourselves. It was easy for us Yin Yang teachers to give ourselves a quick healing to release unneeded energy so we could meditate and have our attention on ourselves.
Children meditate the same way. They sit with their eyes closed, in silence, grounded to the earth, becoming more aware of themselves. The morning circle would open with a child ringing a bell while another child lit a candle. A third child held a picture board depicting kids meditating and asked the other children to ground their bodies, make a bubble, and be inside themselves. Next they would create a rose (an energetic protection tool), finish their business, and fill in with a gold sun (an energy tool to replenish the body).
Energy takes no effort to move. It is similar to plugging an electrical cord into a wall socket. Even though we don’t see the electricity move through the electric cord, we know it is there because of the outward manifestation of light. When the grounding cord is plugged into the center of the earth, the energy in the body flows like water, allowing anything foreign to be released and your body to be filled with life-force energy. Children made their grounding cord as big around as their hips and had fun trying on many different kinds of grounding cords. They also learned to ground their own classroom, making the grounding cord as wide as the room.
To heal themselves, they began by putting an imaginary wascloth in one ear and out the other, pulling it back and forth to clean out the center of their head. When everyone else’s energy is out of their head, children find it easy to visualize and see the answers to problems. Children learn how to validate their own work, take responsibility for what they create, and enjoy that creation. Instead of learning and trying to please someone outside themselves, they took great delight in learning for self-discovery. They weren’t guilty if they made a mistake but saw it as a positive part of the discovery process. Instead of becoming critical they remained curious; curiosity opened kids up where critical energy closed them down. We found children stayed excited and open to learning all school year.
The aura is a big bubble around the body. It is sort of like a magnet and sometimes things get attracted to the bubble and stick there. With their eyes closed, children looked inside their bubble to check on its color each day. They cleaned out their bubble with an imaginary sponge, wringing any yucky energy down their grounding cord and into the center of the earth. (Here the energy was transmuted back into neutral energy and given to the earth.) They filled their bubble with a special color that felt right to them along with a quality of energy. This could be blue happy energy or pink flower energy, for exemple. Children learned to see who was visiting inside their bubble and then sent that person’s energy back to them, owning the bubble as their own space.
Next they created imaginary soap bubbles, filled them with energy and popped them, releasing the energy back to a neutral form. They worked a lot on dichotomies; foods they liked or didn’t like, things that made them happy or sad, things they liked about being an older sibling and things they didn’t like. This gave them permission to own both sides of an issue and work through it.
Then they created a rose just outside their space. The rose symbolizes individual autonomy. It reminded them of good psychic manners, keeping their own energy in, and holding the boundary of their own space. This is similar to the yard around a house with the sidewalk marking the end of the property and the common area of the street. Children enjoyed putting up a rose and letting it mark the edge of their space. When their space was clear and just the way they wanted it, they would fill in with a big gold sun (the size of their whole body) full of happy energy and go about their day. This gold sun energy was their own unique life force and helped the kids maintain optimal health. The Yin Yangers were rarely ever sick.
These children were also conscious clairvoyant. They were aware of their astral travels, could talk about their dreams, past lives, and gave each other healings. But most of all, they had permission from the day they were born, to be themselves. They were recognized as eternal beings, who returned to a human life on Earth and were treated with honor and respect. Children give back what they learn, and the Yin Yangers were full of love and life; even now as they enter their twenties, they walk in grace.
We also worked with each family as a unit, offering spiritual counseling by looking at how the family relates as a whole to the child. In this spiritual counseling, or family reading, the teacher clairvoyantly read the agreements between family members. As a spirit, each of us agreed to come and be part of our family and to learn certain lessons together. When families learn to communicate as spiritual beings in bodies, they begin to give each person space to create their own life experience rather than becoming responsible or controlling of each other. Each person in the family finds their unique expression of their own path, communicating through love, growth, encouragement, and amusement. Because the parents understand what the spirit of their child came to learn this lifetime, they gently guide them on their path. Parents also learn how to be generous towards themselves and nurture themselves while being a parent, creating a win-win situation for the whole family.
This was the basic format we used when working with the children and their families. Many miraculous things happened as the children found permission to be themselves – souls manifesting through their bodies. One of my favorite stories is about a girl I will call Ann. One day I found myself teaching but was tired and not feeling well. I decided to take the kids on a library field trip for some new books. It would be an easy way to end the day and fun for all of us, but I wanted to find the old books to return.
While sitting in front of a bookcase and searching for “Farmer John goes To the Barnyard,” I was frustrated because I had twelve of the thirteen books I wanted. Ann walked up to me and suddenly I felt heat pulsing in my hand. I looked down, only to see her materialize the missing book in my hand, molecule by molecule, complete with library card! Nothing in my life had prepared me for that experience! I was just flabbergasted. Blown away. Dumbfounded.Then she looked at me, with a twinkle in her eye, and asked if she could ride in the front seat with me when we went to the library. (I hadn’t even said we were going to the library yet.) What could I do? I said yes!
I couldn’t talk about what happened that day for awhile. It rocked my whole sense of reality, and I had no explanation for it. I just knew that I had experienced it and I wasn’t crazy. Later the next week, Ann went to Mexico with her family for a vacation. While there, she was playing with her mother’s earrings and lost one. Her mom scolded and reminded Ann that she had not asked permission to wear them and the earrings were not hers. Later that day, they went down to the restaurant for lunch. Her dad felt a funny vibration under his menu and lifting it, discovered the missing earring. Ann looked at him and said, “Now mommy can’t be mad at me.” Needless to say, Ann got our attention.
The last time she materialized something, that I know of, was at Sunday school. They were having apples and raisins for snack and she wanted graham crackers. The Sunday school teacher explained to her she didn’t have any crackers, but would get them for the next week. Ann then materialized a pack of graham crackers in her hand, and seeing her, another girl did the same thing. It surprised all of us, but we took it in stride. We protected the children so they wouldn’t be exploited. None of us had set out to teach those types of psychic abilities to the children; it happened because the energy of school was set at permission to discover and no one ever told these children they had physical limitations. Amazed as we were, we all chose to keep it in house, so to speak. As a young child Mark used to levitate toys. He didn’t do it often, but we captured it on film as he lazily played with one of his toys, turning it around in the air. These kids just demonstrated that all children are more capable than we give them credit for.
Not every child used its psychic abilities in the way Ann and Mark did. Some of the more common things happened at the lunch table. Paul once said to Lizzy, “Remember when you were a boy and I was a girl and we lived in China?” He went on to relate it to whatever they were doing, but my ears perked up when I heard his question. It was fun to hear them speak of their past lives; we never tried to elicit that information but rather gave them permission to speak openly about their experiences. Another strong ability the kids had was healing. Healing means the ability to make a change, spiritually or physically. Once I was meditating and trying to get rid of a migraine headache. A two-year-old came up to me and said, “Your mom’s in your head.” With that she put her little hand on my head and pulled energy out of my space, instantly ending the migraine I had been trying to heal for over two hours in a split second! I was amazed. Then she asked me if I would play with her. Absolutely!
Ramon taught me a lesson about healing I will never forget. He was on the playground while the rest of the children were lined up at the gate, ready to go in from recess. Ramon ran up to us, but tripped and slid face first into the gate breaking two boards. That was a hard head! He scraped the whole side of his face into a bloody mess. I jokingly pointed out to Ramon that he had two new healing projects – healing his face and fixing the gate! All the kids stood around Ramon as blood trickled down his face and asked, “What should we do?” Ramon became our science project. After cleaning off his face, we put some of his blood on a slide and looked at it under a microscope. When we were all through, Ramon used his hand to direct his own healing energy to his face. Then, he went outside with a hammer and nails and had a grand time fixing the gate. The next day when Ramon came to school, there was no sign of the scrape from the day before – he had completely healed it. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it. I guess Ramon took his healing project pretty serioisly!
Lee Ann woke her parents up to her screaming one morning and was in a state of semi-consciousness. She was talking about a little girl who was dying somewhere in a house fire. She was in anguish because of the little girl’s pain. Try as they might, her parents could not get Lee Ann to wake up. About ten minutes later, the girl died and Lee Ann snapped out of the dream-like state. “She’s gone now, it’s okay,” she told her parents. “I had to help her.” They could only wonder who the child was and how Lee Ann was connected to her. Once she was awake, she took it all in stride, and went about her day as usual. Her only comment was that the girl had been her best friend once. The parents never did figure out who the mystery girl was. Another little girl named Missie, arrived at school one day and announced her mom was pregnant with a baby boy and his name was Todd. I congratulated the mom at the close of school, only to hear her tell me she wasn’t pregnant. The next morning, she came in looking rather embarrassed and told me she had taken a home pregnancy test and guess what? She was pregnant. Eight months later Todd was born. These types of stories happened all the time. When I first started with the Yin Yang children there were only five of them, so in our meditation circle, I suggested we call in their friends, and expected to have some more two-year-olds arrive at the school. Instead, the next month 10 women in our community found out they were pregnant! Never under estimate the power of children!
When Michael was two years old he painted a picture with a toothbrush that looked like nothing more than lines until he made the final downward stroke, adding on a mane and front leg. He looked up at me and said,”horse.” It was an incredible picture that looked like a Japanese line painting. I couldn’t believe a two-year-old had created the picture in front of me. Children have no limits and they taught me this over and over again. One morning I came to school in a lousy space. I had had a disagreement with my boyfriend, was low on cash, and feeling pressure from all sides. Typical life issues for most of us. When I took the children in to meditate that morning, they politely waited until everyone was seated and then they all got up and walked out of the room. When I asked where they were going, they told me very nicely that my energy was yucky that day and they did not want to meditate with me. Busted by two-year-olds! I could only agree with them and meditated until my space was clear again and we all resumed our day. I loved them for their honesty. They did not judge me, just stated the facts as they saw them. They gave me time to get it back together just like all the days I had done the same for them. It didn’t matter that I was the teacher. Another time, I had a toothache. There were no substitute teachers available that day so I had to teach anyway. I gathered all the kids together and told them I wasn’t feeling good and asked them to be gentle with me that day. They were amazing. They played and read books and the day flew by. I was off to the dentist office before I knew it. As a team, we helped each other.
Children all around the world are tuned in psychically and aware of each other. Little ones under age three are the most capable psychics on the planet! And guess what? They aren’t trying or taking it seriously. They are playing! When I teach a clairvoyant class for adults, the hardest part is getting people out of effort so they can actualy see clairvoyantly. Once they begin to play with energy and relax, their clairvoyant abilities open right up. All of us have a mental image picture-making machine in the back of the head, similar to a slide projector. With children, the images are focused one at a time and they are able to read and send mental image pictures quiet clearly. In adults, the energy gets jammed up and it is like trying to see a slide in a projector where there are five slides crammed into one slot. Then all you see is black! Once the logjam is cleared, an adult can see just as well. Seeing these pictures and communicating them to someone is what a clairvoyant does when they give a psychic reading. As adults, we sit down and do a formal reading, but children are reading all the time. They constantly make running comments on people they meet, asking the darnest questions and saying the most outrageous things, most of which are true! All of us have been amazed at some of the things kids come up with. It takes an awesome parent to not turn that ability off in them. Instead, a parent can learn to enhance it and teach them when it is appropriate to communicate certain things.
The best way to teach children to enhance their abilities and keep them is to learn to do it yourself and make it part of your everyday language. For example, each morning when you wake up, ask your child about their dreams and what they mean to them. As a parent, listen. Instead of putting an adult interpretation on it, see what they come up with. Then, as you go about your day, include energy tools as well as physical ones. Talking out loud, you can mention you have a blue tree grounding cord today, so your energy is strong and happy that day. Children may acknowledge what color theirs is as well, or not, either way is okay. But you better believe they will be looking to see if what you’re saying is true! Later when you get into the car, you can ask what kind of grounding cord should be given to the car for a safe journey to the store. Let them choose one and help you. After shopping, you can say, “I’m calling all my energy back to my bubble and saying good-bye to the store.” They will imitate you whether they voice it or not. It isn’t like you have to do a running commentary on your energy tools all day. Just mention them several times a day, just like you would say, “Okay it’s time to put on our shoes to go to the store.” You blend the two worlds together so they have permission to have both of them. As adults, we can help hold open the door to spirituality so that our children don’t have to lose touch with their spiritual side as they grow up. The Maori Indians in New Zealand insisted the school board allow spiritual information be taught in the classroom as well as the academic material, because their children weren’t capable of separating two sides. Perhaps in the future, many more of us will create schools that teach the whole child – spirit, mind, and body. Having accomplished it in the 1980’s, I know we can do it again.
Mary Bell Nyman teaches meditation, healing, and clairvoyant classes, and does clairvoyant readings through the Psychic Horizons Center in Boulder, Colorado. She formerly directed three pre-schools and two elementary schools for the Berkeley Psychic Institute in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has worked extensively with clairvoyantly gifted children, and multi-handicapped children. For more information about her work: contact Mary Bell Nyman, 1535 Spruce St. Suite 123, Boulder, CO 80303, USA, 303-440-7171.)