Each life, each spirit entity, is unique, with its own set of experiences, challenges, and learnings. Yet each life and spirit entity is also a piece of the journey that is the world’s existence. We can shape the world’s future—our future—through the efforts of our spirits, whether they are working to the good from this side, or from the higher side.

When we evolve to a certain level we become one with the higher, one with the collective energy. As individual evolution becomes higher, individual personalities become less important. We move from “mine” to “ours,” from “I” to “we.” Our physical lives give us the opportunities that our spirits need to make these transitions. And through these transitions, we influence and shape the world’s energy.

Each of us has an absolutely different mission, and each mission has infinitely many paths that can take you to it. The people who enter our lives (on the earth or spirit planes) all have reasons for doing so, regardless of how long they stay or what it seems we accomplish as a result of their presence.

It is an amazing choreography. Even though it doesn’t always feel that way, the people who come into your life come together for good purposes. Even when you think this is not the case, or that the outcome is less than you hoped for, we are all working toward a positive end. Sometimes the people who have the greatest roles in revealing lessons and leading to progress are the people who are the most challenging. Challenge is a form of questioning, of problems that present opportunities.

At one point in her life, Rita worked for a company that was incredibly difficult because the owner liked to play mind games with people. If you were on his good side it wasn’t so bad, but when you were on his bad side, he made your work life nearly impossible.

After Rita had been at the company for some time, the owner offered her an astonishing promotion. But it immediately became clear that there were many strings attached to the offer. Ultimately, Rita felt the only choice that she had was to leave the company, so she did. She went to a new job, where her interactions with clients resulted in a series of paintings that she otherwise would never have thought to do.

The people who push you in these ways are often pushing you toward where you are supposed to be in the bigger picture, even when it seems that all they’re doing is pushing your buttons, or forcing you toward difficult situations.

Spirit communication provides validation that the journey that is your life has value, purpose, and meaning. Those who have passed to the higher side can reach back to you to show you there is more to existence than physical life. Your passage through this physical life is an opportunity for your spirit to grow and evolve and for the events of your life to contribute to growth and evolution for others.

Your spirit is here on the earth plane, living as a physical entity, because there are lessons for you to learn. These lessons often come in the form of challenges. You face problems, adversity, even crises. You wouldn’t consciously choose these circumstances because they are often hard and painful and involve loss and suffering.

But these are the experiences that are your soul’s lessons. They are what you point to as defining moments in your life. From them you make changes—sometimes forced—in the outward ways of your life. You see and experience these changes. The inward changes that accompany them are not so obvious or visible. They reflect the personal growth that results from confronting the challenge.

It’s not that this is the only way your soul can evolve, through the lessons of problems and difficulty. Rather, it’s that the problems and difficulties are the events that force you to pay attention to your soul’s mission. You learn just as much (if not more) from situations of loving kindness, of goodness for the highest intent. One goal of healing is to increase the learning that comes from good.

The Hierophant, August 1991, oil on canvas. Rita worked on a series of paintings based on the Tarot in the early 1990s. In the Tarot deck, the Hierophant card is the symbol of all that is spiritual coming together. Recently a teacher of Rita’s sat in trance and told her of a rabbi in full regalia who was her guide. When Rita showed him the painting, he smiled and said, “That’s him.”

Your life touches the lives of countless others. This is most obvious in your immediate circle of contact—your family, friends, neighbors, co-workers. You form bonds and connections with these people through which you send and receive energy.

Sometimes people enter your life, or you enter someone else’s life, for a specific purpose and this is clear from the moment you meet. The purpose might be limited and defined. A mechanic who opens a shop on your commute route just when your car needs repair. A woman ahead of you in line at the grocery store who tells the clerk that a position has become available in her company just when you’re looking for a job. A security officer who happens to drive by when you’re walking through a nearly deserted parking garage after working late. Circumstances such as these are constant reminders that the energy of the universe is there to help you in times of need, small and large.

Sometimes the contact is amazingly brief. A woman who profoundly changed Rita’s life was someone she spent just five minutes with at a holiday party in 1995. Grace was studying art, and wanted to meet Rita because Rita was a professional artist. Grace was 92 years old, a tiny woman who walked a mile and a half from her house to the School of Fine Arts in Boston, where she studied figure drawing.

After talking with Grace, Rita thought to herself, “If she’s not too old to learn, I’m not too old to learn!” Rita then made the decision to return to college for her graduate degree, setting aside her worries about possibly being the oldest person in her class (she wasn’t).

Other times, your life becomes entwined with the life of someone else for reasons that aren’t very clear. This is particularly true for mediums whose role is to bring people into contact with messages and information that will be profoundly moving, and then to drop from the picture. From a Spiritualist perspective, this is the key purpose of mediumistic abilities.

Sometimes you think people come into your life for you to help them, and they end up helping you instead, in ways you didn’t know you needed help. When Susan met Alan, he had some substance abuse problems. Susan thought she could help him, and before long she became involved in an extramarital affair with him. Her marriage was difficult, and she found comfort in helping Alan.

But Alan’s substance abuse problem was significant, and as he slid into decline he became less comforting and more challenging. In a flash of insight born of Alan’s problems, Susan realized she needed to redirect her energy toward working on the problems in her marriage.

As much as we like to focus on the positives of psychic and mediumistic abilities, it’s a reality that they occasionally reveal challenges and problems. When this happens, surround the situation with as much white light as you can. You probably can’t stop the situation from unfolding; it clearly is necessary for those who will experience learning as a result.

Also send healing prayers, to help those who are caught in the situation to pull from it the information and insight that moves them in the direction of what is for their highest intent.

Spirit connection is so amazingly powerful that you might be tempted to look at it as the heal-all for our planet, the world environment that supports us. This is a pretty good temptation, as temptations go! As with all tools, you must learn how to use your psychical (mediumistic) gifts to bring spirit connection into your life and to apply its insights for your good and growth as well as for the common good and growth.

The world—our world community—doubled in size from the 1960s to the 1990s. In the space of a single generation, twice as many spirits entered earth plane existences. We see the consequences of this population growth as an incredible drain on resources, environmental as well as social. Although the energy of the universe is endless in its capacity to support life, boundaries and limits define the Earth’s ability to do the same. As we draw from the Earth to sustain our physical lives, it becomes increasingly important for us to replenish and restore its environment.

Energy is an endless flow, a continuous exchange. The universe gives to us, we give to the universe. There is no loss, only exchange. Resources don’t really become depleted; they just change form. There is an abundance of all that we need out there—we just have to remember to ask.

Change, all change, starts with you. You probably could argue that it stays with you, too, because in reality all you can change is yourself. You can change your thoughts and actions, your beliefs and behaviors. The differences might sometimes seem so small as to be inconsequential, but they have significant ramifications nonetheless.

We’ve talked a lot about your free will and how it shapes your path through this life. Students frequently ask Rita, “What happens when someone else sends you healing and you don’t want to accept it?” Perhaps you sense your time of passing is near and you don’t want to delay it, or you just don’t want this healing energy that’s being sent to you.

Your higher self, in conjunction with your gatekeeper (main spirit guide), guard access to your spirit. Your higher self decides whether to let the healing in. This is often related to the journey you’ve agreed to embark upon in this lifetime. You agree, before you enter this life, to what you will do and accept. This agreement frames the choices you make.

If healing comes to you for your highest and best, it’s not intended to make everything better. It’s simply there for you to use if you choose. It won’t interfere with your soul’s path. If it’s your time to make your transition to the higher side, then you will, no matter what energy those on the earth plane try to send to you. And if it’s not, then you won’t.

All healing comes in love and goodness. It’s sometimes hard to believe that this is the core of our existence, the basis of the universe, when so much of what we see and hear in our everyday lives seems far removed from either love or goodness.

When we talk about the higher vibration of the higher side of life, we are talking about a place of light, a place of love and goodness. We come from there! Even in our physical forms we remain part of this love and light. You come to this earth plane existence to learn, but you are always connected to the source of your origin. Before, during, and after incarnation, we are always spirit.

Teresa, March 1991, oil on canvas. Rita sat with some friends doing readings, when above her friend Teresa’s head she saw a vision of a young nun praying. She mentioned it to Teresa and did a quick sketch, which was later to become a painting. Teresa stayed in storage for about nine years when Rita met an astrologer Terese, who was to become a good friend and who was fascinated by Rita’s spirit artwork. Rita told her she painted a painting of a young nun named Teresa and Terese asked Rita if the nun was actually St. Theresa, “The Little Flower.” Being of a different religious origin, Rita had not heard the story, so she showed her friend the painting. Terese became quite excited and brought a book that showed an actual photo of St. Theresa; they seemed to match.

We are all connected. Some connections are closer than others, but we are all connected as one. If one person hurts, it affects every one of us. Alone, your energy is powerful enough to shape the flow and direction of your personal life. But in combination with the energy of others, you become part of a whole that is far greater than the sum of its parts. Imagine what could happen if everyone would …

There are no limits to the good that we can accomplish when we pool our individual energies! Make your own list of healing prayers to further focus your energy for the highest intent. You might send healing when you …

Add your own reasons to send healing:

Many of us spend a lot of our time worrying about things we believe we cannot change. We don’t have to feel helpless in these situations. We can send out healing, do what we can on a spiritual level and on a psychic level and connect with the energy to transmute it to work toward the positive.

There is much strife and discord in our world, and it often seems so overwhelming that there is little hope for change. But change takes place one person at a time. And over time, this adds up to an amazing collective energy capable of changing—and that does in fact change—the vibrational pattern of energy throughout the world and the universe.

As insignificant as it might seem for you, as one person, to change the way you think, it is impossible for such a change to exist in isolation. Every thought, every action, affects the flow of energy in ways both obvious and obscure. More often than not, you don’t see the full and multiple outcomes of these changes.

We often use the metaphor of tossing a pebble into a pond and watching the shift in energy ripple outward from the point of impact, until ever so faintly those ripples reach the shore and echo back toward their center again. Even when you can no longer see them, the ripples are still moving through the water.

From our lives here on the earth plane, we cannot always see the outcome as being for the highest good. We have to trust that when we are working in light and for the higher good, the energy and the healing will go in that direction.

Avoid attachment to outcomes; that’s “I” energy, or ego energy, not healing. Send healing, send love. The body has an intelligence (as does the earth); the healing will go where it needs to go.

The same holds for those on the spirit side. They can send healing and love to the earth plane. You can also send healing and love to the higher side to help a spirit entity evolve to a higher place.

Many times, those on the higher side can see the bigger picture. In turning to the higher side for assistance and guidance, you can go to the master teachers, to the spirit guides, and to the infinite source (the God of your understanding) and ask them to send healing to the earth plane.

The energy of the universe belongs to all of us. It is ours. We can tap into this energy at any time to be of service. When you are sending healing to a disaster or to someone who is fixing a flat tire at the side of the road, you send positive energy out there. No matter how small, it matters—and it only takes a moment. All too often, we are so caught up in our own busy worlds that we don’t see the needs of others. We need to help those who are hurting. We need to take care of ourselves.

Fly high, and see the big picture!

The Least You Need to Know