Life, Death & Consciousiness: An interview with Psychic Medium John Edward

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Just about everyone knows John Edward, the medium, author and lecturer who, for the past 30 years, has helped thousands with his uncanny ability to predict future events and communicate with those who have crossed over to the Other Side. Deeply compelling, often startling and occasionally humorous, John’s down-to-earth approach has earned him a vast and loyal following.

In 2000, John pioneered the psychic phenomena genre with the television program “Crossing Over with John Edward” on the Syfy network. It was the first television show syndicated worldwide devoted to psychic mediumship and it would go on to run for four seasons. John followed up that success with another television program, “John Edward Cross Country,” which debuted on the WE network in 2006 and ran for three seasons.

He is the author of the critically-acclaimed, New York Times bestsellers One Last Time, Crossing Over: The Stories Behind the Stories, What if God Were the Sun, After Life: Answers from the Other Side, Practical Praying: Using the Rosary to Enhance Your Life, Final Beginnings, Infinite Quest and Fallen Masters.

In 2007, John launched a digital network to deliver real-time content internationally, culminating in the creation of the online community, “Evolve.” Members of “Evolve” have exclusive access to view John’s weekly web series, “Evolve with John Edward,” which features member readings, celebrity interviews and assorted metaphysical and lifestyle content. The ninth season of the series concluded this past May. Additional benefits of “Evolve” include receiving a membership welcome pack, the opportunity to meet John at one of his live events, the chance to win tickets and private readings, access to John’s online novel, Above and Beyond, and more.

He took time out of his busy schedule, just following a tour of Australia, to speak with The Edge about his career. Having watched John on television, like thousands of others, I began by asking him where he has been.

We haven’t seen you on television for years. Why did you leave TV and how has your work as a medium evolved since we’ve seen you last?
One of the questions people will ask me is, “What are you doing now?” and the reason why they ask me that is they think that my career began on TV and that it would end with TV.

In reality, before the show “Crossing Over,” I was already doing this work for 15 years, so I had a very thriving clientele from all around the country and parts of the world. The TV show kind of blew that lid off the cover, but I did “Crossing Over” for four years. I thought I was done with television. For two years I was not on television, but I did another show for about three seasons, and then I made a conscious decision to come off of television.

It was wildly unpopular for people who were in my circle, because they were like, “Why would you leave a successful show?” I felt like I wasn’t being challenged. I did seven years of television and both shows had a similar kind of feeling to them.

“Crossing Over” was the only show of its kind. It was a show where I stood in front of an audience full of people, which was kind of what my events are. “Crossing Over” was actually built on watching my events and trying to transpose that to the TV audience. And then, when I came back to TV, the second incarnation of it, they wanted it to be different, so they followed me on the road doing my events and then I would do follow-ups and go home with the people and they would explain who came through and I’d watch their video and look at their photos.

It became clear in that first season that people really did not want me to go back and visit with the people again, which was kind of unique. They wanted to see the follow-ups, but they didn’t want to see me do it because they felt like that audience member, that family, who got the reading now got me twice, and they hadn’t even gotten me once — and it’s not fair. We listened to the feedback, which was loud, and we still did the follow-ups, but the producers did them. I didn’t do them.

So, I essentially did “Crossing Over” themed shows for seven seasons and well over 700 or 800 shows, and I kind of felt like, I need to do something different, and I was guided to do something online.

I’m pretty ambitious. I felt like I pioneered this a little bit on TV, making it more of the everyday mainstream, so then I wanted to do it online. I left TV to develop an online presence, kind of like a psychic community, and it had multiple incarnations. It’s reincarnated and now it’s in its official phase which is called “Evolve.”

How have I evolved? I’ve evolved into “Evolve,” an online destination behind a pay wall. It’s a community of folks who are really serious about the subject matter, not folks who are just taking a chance. I do an online show once a week, and we talk about how to get people to evolve. We talk about different topics that are spiritual. We have different guests come on who range from a doctor of behavioral therapy, to a doctor that deals with grief, to one of my favorite guests of all time, a young woman who wrote a book called, Skinny is the New Healthy,” talking about body image.

We’ve had celebrities come on, but they are not really what people want, which is kind of refreshing, to be honest, because in TV it was always about celebrity, celebrity, celebrity. The online folks tell me, “No, we want this to be about us.” It’s about providing people with insights, information, tools, how to develop spiritually, and how to have conversations with like-minded people. Every week an episode airs, and we are just about ready to launch in September a new platform. The site got a whole makeover and we’re launching the tenth season of Evolve.

So, when people say, “Where has the show gone?” it’s morphed into iPads and iPhones, and gives me the opportunity to be international. Online I get a chance to talk about topical things. I get a chance to talk about the astrology of things. I get a chance to talk about the numerology of things, and plan for it in some way, and you can’t do that with something that is being syndicated.

Does the topic matter you have with “Evolve” correspond with your personal interest in what you like to explore?
It does, actually. The community, the people, are a vocal bunch, so they have no problem telling you what they’re interested in, what they want to see more of. People ask me, “Do you teach a lot on social media?” and I say, “Actually, if you go to my social media it is about like TV and food.” You would think that I am a TV critic or a restaurant critic. Because we talk about real life.

You know how people use social media for professional reasons to promote things? We don’t really do that. We use my social media and my co-host’s social media to say things like, “Hey, we just found Halo Top Creamery ice cream, and it’s like 240 calories a pint.”

I just saw that online, that you love ice cream.
Oh, my God! I love ice cream. I could literally sit down and skip food for like a pint of Häagen Dazs vanilla and chocolate, but that’s like 2,000 calories. Weight and food are real struggles that people have, and we talk about how we evolve through that on the show.

We are very open about struggles. I was talking to my co-host about emotional eating and then I realized that some of the same things that she had I actually had. It was a little bit of a discovery while we’re having the conversation, and people kind of relate to that. They relate to what we’re talking about, and then we bring people in to talk about it.

So we bring on Frank Sepe, a fitness guy extraordinaire, to talk about what it takes to do what he does. Our guests offer a lot of positive reinforcements, and then those people become part of the community. Dianne Gray is somebody we’ve had on quite a bit, and she does a segment called “Gray Gardens,” a little play on words there. She is the person who is in charge of the Elizabeth Kübler-Ross Foundation, the godmother of the Beyond Death and Dying movement. So Dianne comes on and talks about palliative care and hospice, so we’ll have conversations about what people need to be discussing when they are dealing with loss, what can you do and what resources are available to take away the stigma of death and palliative care.

Quite honestly, Tim, we’re doing things with “Evolve” that I would never be allowed to do on TV, ever — and that’s what I’m doing on “Evolve.” Being psychic, you have a futurist view of what is coming when it comes to trends, and I started to see what was happening with TV, and I didn’t want to be a part of it. I knew then that I would never be allowed to have these conversations because TV was moving into much more of a conflict resolution reality-based thing, which I find fake. I did not fit into that. Over the last decade I probably have had, no joke, 30 meetings with different production companies and networks who told me, “Hey, we want you to come back. You are the real deal. You’re the original who started all this.” Then they would like pitch me what their ideas are and I just would be like, “I can’t. I don’t have to be on TV.”

Thank God! I don’t need that. I didn’t need it before. I don’t need it now. For me, it has given me the luxury of going, “Yeah, this is going to be something that is going to enhance what I’m doing,” and I have a passion and I have a mission, and when those two things come together I’m pretty unstoppable. I want to leave people better than when I find them, and I want to inspire them.

I have never had a desire for fame. I don’t have a need to be recognized. So, when you take all of that away, for me TV is just a platform. Now it’s like, do I want to utilize this platform or do I not want to utilize it? Is this platform going to be beneficial for the subject matter or is it going to be detrimental to anybody that I work with.

I just feel like the dumbing down of society through where TV’s been and people allowing it to happen has created a lack of, I don’t want to say empathy, but almost like a de-sensitizing, I think that’s the right word, a desensitizing about how people observe. Sometimes I feel like I’m at the zoo and I’m watching people and I’m surprised by how really amazingly smart, intelligent people watch shows like, “Real Housewives” of anywhere. One of my favorite moments of recent television viewing happened on the show called “The Newsroom.” Jeff Daniels did a speech in one of the episodes that, if I thought I wouldn’t get in trouble for doing it, I would record it and then put it on my social media, because it was exactly what I felt.

I feel like where we are now in a political sense is a complete reflection of where we came from for an entertainment sense. It almost paved the way for what is happening — and I think all of this, from a societal, anthropological observing way, is scary.

Do you think all of that that we’re experiencing now is eventually going to implode on itself and we’ll be able to rebuild it in a more holistic way?
God, I hope so. I have these conversations with my kids and I feel like, “Listen, I know you can’t change the world in five seconds.” You know, a cruise ship can’t take a hard left. It has to slowly chart a new course. But sometimes when that cruise ship hits something, it actually just has to capsize and we have to get the people off the boat. I think that there’s some serious stuff coming in the world.

I’ve had a philosophy for my entire career where I say that 20 percent of the population is very cynical and they believe nothing, right? And there’s 20 percent of the population who are the believers of anything and everything, right? Both sides. I think the average person somewhere falls in between.

I think you could say 20 percent of the people, no matter what is happening politically, are going to stand behind their candidate, whatever side of the aisle you are on — and I’m really not political. And then you have the opposite end of the spectrum — and then people get polarized in that capacity in between. I feel like there’s going to have to be a huge wakeup call.

I’m not going to lie. I am really not political in any shape, way or form. I literally look at the issues and have various different opinions on both sides, to the point that I wouldn’t even know what I was politically. So, I took a test to see where my belief is. I am literally spot in the middle. So, I told my wife, “I don’t even have a party!”

She goes, “You are legitimately a centrist. That means that you’re issue-based and you can go both ways.”

I’m like, “Huh! Talk about being a Libra.”

I look at what’s happening in the world and it’s scary for me as a person, but it’s also scary as a dad. My son’s going to be 15, and he’s a very mature 15. His 15 is like 20. He’s like me when I was his age. And, my daughter is extremely mature as well.

But today you have to have conversations about things that you wouldn’t think that you have to have conversations about, because they can’t escape it. Nobody can. At one point politics was like religion; it’s something that you respected and if you had a different opinion, then you don’t talk about it. But now politics is no longer politics; it’s topical and you can’t escape it. It’s almost like it attacks you every day. I think that is now the blending of what we talked about, which is the desensitizing of our society.

I just tweeted last night that it’s really about a commodity of consciousness. That’s how my guides show it to me. People think the currency of the world is money, but the true currency of the world is energy, and whoever is controlling the energy is really the one who is in control, because you can get paid for energy, right? I get paid for energy. My time is paid by people who come to me for readings, and what do I work with? I work with energy.

What we’re having now is the commodity of consciousness that’s being traded — and that’s creating and infusing really strong division between all of us.

My wife and I had a conversation last year, which I would say was kind of heated. We had different opinions about immigration, and I looked at her and said, “What’s really funny is that you and I have never been political in our entire 25-year history, and now we’re having a heated conversation about immigration.” Astrologically that shows on a global level that this is what’s happening around the world, so it’s normal and it’s supposed to be happening.

What’s weird is that something like immigration created division, and even though we talked about building a wall with Mexico, what’s really happening is that the walls that are being built in the United States on a consciousness level are far greater at keeping each other out, keeping us from being able to see over those walls.

Now people are living inside their own conscious community, and it’s almost like Hunger Game-esque energy-wise, where people are in districts and people in power are kind of talking about it. So, it’s kind of scary. We now have all these TV shows that are filled with Dystopian societies, like “Walking Dead” and “Into the Badlands,” and movies like “The Hunger Games.” As an observer of energy, I am seeing shows like “House of Cards,” like “The Man in High Castle.” I am just looking at all of this without judgment.

This is what’s in my head, and you’re catching me right at the moment of what I’m feeling and what I’m looking at — at this commodity of consciousness that is taking place. Just yesterday I listened to all the transgender stuff that came out of left field, and people are saying, “This is completely out of left field.” I’m like, “But it’s not. It’s not out of left field.”

I think there are people sitting around a conference room laughing at how the country is in a complete state of panic and disarray, watching tweets and watching Facebook and watching this and watching the news media — and how controlling all of it is.

As a person who views energy, standing back looking at the current state of energy right now, I do see the wall being built, but it’s not the Mexican wall. It’s the wall of divisions and belief systems — and those walls are getting higher and stronger. People can’t see over those walls, and if they can’t see over those walls, then they can’t have the sympathy and empathy of understanding somebody else’s place. Again, I feel like I’m at the zoo and I’m just watching the animals, going, “Oh, this interesting. Now, look at the behavior over here. Oh, look at the behavior over here.” But, at a certain point it’s a little scary, because I feel like all the cages are open.

Say you are with your “Evolve” community and you’re walking through the zoo with them looking at these open cages. Do you have any recommendation on how to walk along their journey in this environment?
I’ve not really tackled this. I’ve tried to remain out of this with the “Evolve” community. Because of the walls that have become so high at the moment, I have found that people want to put you in a lane.

Last night, I tweeted something about a Canadian person. A Canadian member of “Evolve” tweeted and said she’s not an American citizen, and she doesn’t know if she has a right to say this, but she cannot understand how people can say that they are coming from a place of like love and Christianity and support a narcissistic individual who’s negative.

I responded by saying I don’t understand it either. It’s like we’re turning into 50 States of Cray, as in crazy, because that’s what it feels like. And a woman wrote back, “Love you, John, but I disagree with you and your opinions. You’re just like the mainstream media trying to influence people with whatever the bullshit.”

Now, that immediately tells me that that woman is one, a Trump supporter, and two, she is coming from a place of wanting to make America great. She wants to stop us from being attacked, and all of these things. I’m sitting back going, “Great, but on AOL’s homescreen today it says that North Korea wants to now actually attack us, and we’re in a place of realistic danger because of our perspective in the world.”

I ask people, how many of you guys have actually traveled outside the United States? Most people will be like, “Well, we don’t have to.”

I respond, “Right, you don’t have to, but I do, so when I’m in Mexico and somebody asks me where I’m from and I lie and say Canada because I don’t want to have to deal with the fact that their entire country has been relegated as being like ‘rapists’ and ‘bad hombres.’ It’s an uncomfortable thing. Being in Australia, being in the U.K., now I’m headed to South Africa, it’s a very, very interesting thing when you have a more global world view about how we’re being viewed as a country.

If you’re in middle America and you’re just worried about the fact that you can’t pay your bills and you don’t have a job, I understand that you don’t care about that, but that is going to affect you being able to have a job if the economy in your world has been destabilized and you’re being excluded as a player because the person that is representing us has a certain perspective.

Again, that’s me being at the zoo. Having just come from Australia and listening to their intellectual people talking on their news programs, if you’re in the media, then you’re now tarnished. It’s part of the division. It’s dividing people, creating groups that can attack you for having a difference of opinion. And then you have the other side of people who are so trying to be politically correct and trying to keep the normalization of society. I don’t think people with experience are going to be able to confront this without confronting it in a stronger way.

I was in bed — and this is not being political again, because I really don’t have a political side — sitting there watching TV and flipping through the channels, and I heard the president of the United States say that he was more presidential than everyone outside of Abraham Lincoln. I don’t understand. My brain does not allow that in. I can’t imagine somebody saying that. You’re basically saying that you can blow away every single person that came before you. On so many levels that was wrong. I think that you pay tribute to your history.

When the TV show “Medium” came on the air and it was based on Alison DuBois, I will never, ever forget getting a phone call from her when her show was launching. She said, “I just wanted to reach out and say thank you to you.”

I didn’t even know her, and I’m like, “What? Okay.”

She said, “I need to say thank you because if it wasn’t for you, there would not be a me.”

I asked, “Well, what do you mean?”

She said, “You broke through the glass ceiling. And you made it possible for people like me. And I know that you don’t break a glass ceiling without getting cut, bloodied, and scarred. So, I just wanted to say thank you.”

I lost it on the phone because nobody has ever said that to me, and I thought that was the coolest thing. And I was like, “I might have done that, but I wouldn’t have been able to do that if it was not for George Anderson, Suzanne Northrup, Char Margolis, if it wasn’t for those people who came before me because I built on that.”

That’s humanity. That’s recognizing that you’re one grain on the sand, and not the beach. So, it’s a little disheartening for me from a spiritual standpoint to hear the president say that. I have a hard time with people who come from a place of spirituality or Christianity and are tolerant of this kind of behavior. I just wonder what the tipping point is going to be for them. My concern is that something big is going to happen and when that big thing happens, it’s now going to fuel all these conscious communities and that commodity consciousness thing is just going to be intensified.

From my perspective I just see a political party that is trying to co-opt social media — propaganda, 21st century style.
That’s what scares me. But, what scares me more is that people don’t remember the history of how this happened before, you know?

Like I said to someone who is gay, “They’re not attacking gay rights, they’re attacking a very small part of what the LGBTQ community, and it’s isolating that one group. They’re not going after gay men, they’re not going after lesbians, they’re just going after the transgender people, this little piece over here and it’s only in this section.”

And she turned around and she said to me, “I’m sure lots of people in Germany during World War II kind of felt the same way, when they were coming for different people and people were disappearing. And it was like, ‘Well, they’re not coming for these people, and they’re not coming for these people, they’re not coming for these people.’ I’m sure it’s a similar thing.”

And I go, “Right.” Back then people didn’t know what to do and didn’t know how to rise up. I feel like I’ve been saying the same thing for probably about 18 months now: “Well, what do you do?” I’ve never voted in my life. I’ve never registered. I never thought it mattered because when I was in fourth grade I was very confident and I had a conversation with my cousin about politics.

I was like, “The popular vote elects a president.”

He said to me in a condescending way, because he was 7 years old, “Actually, it doesn’t.”

And I’m like, “No. I just studied it in school!”

And he goes, “Actually, it doesn’t.”

He goes, “There’s something called the electoral college, and the electoral college elects the president.” I remember thinking, “Oh, no, he’s wrong!”

The next day I went to school and I talked to my teacher and she made a face like, “Well, he is actually not wrong.” I remember the moment clear as a bell. I was like, “Well, f*** this! I don’t want to….it’s like you lied!” I felt like I was lied to.

Something happened to me when I was in whatever grade when I thought, “Well, then my vote doesn’t matter,” and I kind of applied that.

I know now and I say this to everybody, your vote matters on the local level and all that kind of stuff, but ultimately these people who are elected are operating like they are living at 38,000 feet and everybody else is on the ground. When you see elected people who don’t want to have town hall meetings because they don’t want to be yelled at, that means they don’t want to be accountable.

I don’t know. I just don’t understand what’s taking place, and I don’t know what the solution is. I just know that it is bad.

One of the most popular mediums in the country on TV now is Tyler Henry, the Hollywood medium, and it seems to me that program has gone the reality TV route, just focusing on famous people, and it seems to not be the direction you went on your show.
That’s why I got out. This is not a secret. I’m sure if you’ve had Hollywood meetings they would tell you, I’m known as being difficult, challenging, temperamental, not easy, because I would never do anything like that.

I would be like, “No, that’s stupid. No, I’m not doing that.” And the reason why is I have a long, long, long history of working with families — parents who have lost kids. I am not putting myself in a light that is going to take away from all of these kids that came through and used me as their tool. It’s never going to happen.

It’s just not who I am, because I know at the end of the day when I cross over and I have to do my life review and I have to look back and reflect, there is not going to be any moment that I am going to be like, “Oh, I sold out there or I sold out for a paycheck, or I sold out for fame.” That is not important to me. Thank God.

I don’t fit into where TV is now. If TV would allow me to do what I do, I would do it. I don’t know if the TV audience and the way they’ve been trained to watch TV today want to sit there and watch how it takes 10 minutes to get information through and what the real process is like.

How do you introduce what you do at your events?
In the beginning when I do my events I say to people, “I have to unite the room energetically,” and I say to them, “Okay, guys, do you think we’re coming from a place in the world that is united or divided?” and they all say, “Divided,” and I go, “Look at that! One question and I united the entire room.”

So, it’s a matter of knowing in life what questions to actually ask and what answers to seek questions to, to be able to live an empowered, evolved, enlightened, enriched, balanced, spiritual life. Part of that is to be able to look at different perspectives.

I actually blend what is happening energetically and globally into my events. I talk about these things in a lighter kind of way to make it non-political, but in an energetic way.

I say, “What is the greatest divide that we have, for real?” People will say, “politics,” and I’ll say, “No, it’s not politics. It’s grief. The greatest divide that we all deal with is grief, and it is a guarantee that you are going to deal with it. Death is the guarantee that you get when you are born.”

There is this thing that takes place, which is shock and surprise. I don’t understand why people are shocked and surprised that someone passes, because it is a guarantee. The true issue is that we only spend 1 percent of our life dealing with death and 99 percent of our life ignoring the fact that it is going to happen. If people have more conversations about the concept of death, if people have conversations about their belief systems, about after death, if people have concepts and conversations about all things surrounding that, it would alleviate a lot of the angst — but it doesn’t mean that the grief is going to go away.

Death becomes the ultimate divide, and grief becomes the thing that builds on that division — and a medium is somebody to help show that there is a bridge between both, but the true work has to happen with the client.

I talk a lot about that. It’s really about understanding that it is going to happen. We’re all going to go, and it’s going to happen at different times, but what we do in-between when we’re born and when we pass is live, and that’s what we address.

So, regarding the readings that come through during my events, the people who get read, I always say, are the teaching souls who are coming through for the event. Those teaching souls come through for their family, but the event is really for the people who are not read, because they are listening and hearing everybody else’s reading.

I really see my events as being a classroom of teaching, and that a bunch of like-minded energies and souls in a similar place in their lives are being brought together universally by their loved ones and friends, their guides, for me to meet up with them.

It’s like we’re at a marathon. If you’re running in a marathon, there is a check-in point and people give you water, rub you down with a towel, whatever they do at a check-in point. I feel like at some point that’s where I’m meeting folks, at that spiritual check-in point, where it might help them deal with something that’s going on or prepare them for what’s coming up or maybe give them tools to understand things differently. A lot of times people will say that after they leave an event they feel like they found their faith back, because they were angry at God or religion for the loss.

So, that’s my path, that’s my goal, that’s my mission. That’s why I travel the world. That’s why I do what I do.

Are most souls who come through and share information through you doing so because they have had a difficult time reaching their loved ones on this side?
I think the better way to say it is they are connecting. They are coming through, they are with them, but it’s the living who are a bit foggy about what’s taking place. That’s what I use as an analogy.

I say that when we go into the grief place, it’s like driving on the highway of life. The road signs are there, but if a fog rolls in you can’t see them. Right? If the fog rolls in you can’t see the signs that are on the side of the road, but they’re there. I feel like we have to work on our grief, and by working on our grief we lift that fog and then you can see the signs that are in your life.

I feel like they want us to know that they’re with us, they want us to know that they’re okay, but you know what? They’re not a job-finding service. They’re not a dating service. They can’t fix things. They can’t give you the winning lottery numbers. It’s no different than when you’re in school and mom or dad can’t walk into your classroom and give you the answer on a test. This is the classroom of life. Those loved ones and friends who are watching us are with us and are looking over us and are participating in our lives. I know that, but they also know that we are evolving through our classroom of life and learning the lessons that we need to learn as a soul before we graduate to join up with them again. So, they have to allow us to kind of learn our lessons. They help when they can, they guide where they can, and they assist where they can, but too many people expect, demand, feel like they are entitled to a bigger message from them.

This is where I think TV does a really big disservice. TV is highly edited now, and I don’t think it allows a reading to breathe and it doesn’t show the subtlety. If you took episodes of “Crossing Over” and you matched it to episodes of any of the TV shows in the last five years that are on the supernatural, “Crossing Over” from a produced standpoint is a documentary, and these shows are produced.

I’m not joking, I was really difficult with “Crossing Over” because I would tell them they can’t edit out of sequence. They can edit for time, but not for content. They can’t change the message. You can’t make TV.

An executive once came and said that he wanted to take a reading out of a show, and I went, “Why?” And he said, well this woman’s reaction is kind of like non-reacting, and I like looked at him and I went, “Dude! She lost her son and her son’s coming through. She’s in shock.”

He goes, “But, it doesn’t make good TV. She doesn’t react. She’s not emoting.”

The producer is looking at me and the executive producer is looking at me and I was like, “Nobody in this office is calling this woman to tell her that her son’s reading is not making it into the show because she didn’t cry. If you want to call her in front of all of us and say, ‘On behalf of the studio that’s happening, but not on my name. That’s not happening.”

Do you have any recommendations for the people who will be coming to see you live in the Upper Midwest?
I think that if somebody is thinking about coming and they feel like they need a reading, don’t come. Stay home. Go work with a therapist because that’s really where they need to put their money and energy. They need to be ready to be part of a process where they are not read.

If someone feels that they are open to experiencing it, that they’ll allow anybody to come through, but they could be content watching the process happening and celebrate watching the process happening while managing the normal human disappointment of, “Gee, I wish I would have gotten read, but wow, that woman really needed that, or that guy really needed that or there, for the Grace of God goes I, I’m so happy I wasn’t that family,” then those folks can come.

Make a list of names, know initials, know dates, know anniversaries, know your family, but you don’t need to bring anything. People think that if they show up hours early it’s going to increase their chances. That if they get up in the front of the room it makes a difference. It doesn’t matter where in the room you’re sitting.

Know your family. Know that if you were married more than once that your in-laws from your previous marriage can come through. People who have been gone for 30 years can come through.

I tell folks, “Understand that I’m going to give you information, not entertainment, so I’m not performing, I’m teaching. It’s not a show. It’s an event.” For me, it’s about giving information. I ready people with what to expect, and I will say right in the beginning, “I’m sorry I’m going to disappoint you, but I’m not talking about butterflies and feathers and angel wings. I’m not talking about tattoos and photos and jewelry. I’m not talking about dragonflies and finding change or orbs in photos. All those things are real, but I’m not going to stand in front of an audience of 100 people and say, “Did somebody here find a feather?”

Have I gotten those messages? I did 20 years ago. Now, I feel like we’re in a different spot, like we’re going to advance the subject matter to the next level and intellectualize it and take the emotional side out of it so that the real healing can begin. I always tell people, “I’m not going to make you cry. I’m going to make you think.”

I get the sense that your events are about talking about the continuum, life, death, life, and how it’s always flowing.
Yeah. And, if you came to the three events in the Midwest, you would see three separate events. Legitimately, you would hear some of the same framework of what I teach, but you would watch three separate events.

What I love, for me what’s fun, is the security. Everything is hired locally, so I meet the security guys that night, like five minutes before I walk out. For example, when I was in Canada there was a smart-ass security guard who was an off duty cop, and he says, “Dude, what do you do?”

And I was like, “Really?” If you’re a security guy and you’re getting hired for a detail, aren’t you going to look up and ask what the job is exactly?

So I say, “You’re going to tell me that you didn’t check out who I was to make sure you know what you’re walking into?”

He laughed again.

I was like, “C’mon. That’s not being psychic. It’s being human. My dad was a cop. I know how you think!”

So, he started to laugh.

I’ve got 200 people waiting for me in a room. I’m not going to take my energy to deal with a security guard. So, at the end of the event, the same guy who was kind of a dick in the beginning walks up to me at the end and he said, “Hi. I just gotta tell you, can I be honest?”

I went, “Yeah.”

And he goes, “This is a hard event for me.”

And I said, “Tell me why.”

He goes, “Well, I was having a crisis of faith before this event. I was questioning a lot of the hard, dogmatic principles of my Christian fundamental background. And you go against that.”

I said, “Well, I go against the man-made part of it. I don’t go against the spiritual part of it.”

And he goes, “I know that. And then I watched the healing that took place in this room. And there’s no way you would know this stuff, these people. I talked to a couple of them, about five, afterwards. This was life-changing for me. I want to say thank you. Thank you for hiring me. You gave me a lot to think about as a dad and as a grandfather.

And I said, “Thank you for saying that.”

He didn’t buy a ticket to be in the room. He got hired to be there, but I know that universally he needed to be there. So the only way that he was going to get in that room universally would have been if he got hired. So, the universe made it possible for him to get hired.

So, I’m looking at how all this stuff plays out, and I’m in awe. I’m in awe of the universe. I have been for 30 years. I just sit back and just go, like, “Wow! How cool!”

I guess I’m hoping that I’m able to inspire people to say how cool in their own lives energetically. My grandmother, when she was alive, used to get mad at me when I would talk like this because I used to read in her house. I was 18, 17 years old, and she would hear the clients come out and she would hear me say to them, “You know, don’t come back to me for a year,” or “Maybe go find somebody else that does this so that you can have a different perspective.”

She would like look at me and say, “What is your problem, like why do you do that?”

I’m like, “Why do I do what?”

She would go, “Why do you tell people to go see other people or why do you tell them not to come back and see you?”

I’m like, “Because I’m one instrument in the orchestra. And, maybe somebody else is going to be able to get something that I couldn’t. Why?”

She would go, “You’re going to have no business!”

I would crack up laughing and think, “Grandma. It’s okay.”

I’ll be 48 in October. I’ve had this perspective for 30 years. The people who are supposed to find me are going to find me. It’s about raising awareness, putting something positive in the universe, giving people an opportunity to think. I think it’s really important that people are thinking for themselves and not thinking what other people tell them to. I don’t like when somebody tells you what to think.


For more information on John Edward, visit Johnedward.net.

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Tim Miejan
Tim Miejan is a writer who served as former editor and publisher of The Edge for twenty-five years. Contact him at t.miejan.25@gmail.com.

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