Guy Spiro: Colette, I usually like to start by asking people to give us the Cliff Notes version of how you came to be who you are.

Colette Baron-Reid: Well, you know I am an intuitive counselor, but I came to this rather reluctantly. I had a career as a recording artist on the EMI music label that was starting to be successful. I had been doing readings as a means to make a living and I found that more and more people were requesting my services. I had never advertised, but after a few years I ended up with clients in 29 countries. When Hay House found me, I made a decision to leave music behind because I felt this was a service that was more important. When you turn it over to the universe and ask divine guidance what is my purpose and it shows it to you, you really can’t deny it.

GS: I think we all have to figure out how we can be of higher service.

CBR: Yeah, but it’s funny because I resisted it. I was like, Dear God, show me my next big record deal. When I say I reluctantly, I really didn’t feel comfortable with a lot of the labels that were applied to the work that I was doing. I felt, for example, that the term psychic was such an overused esoteric term implying the supernatural which has a connotation of something fearful and occult. I’ve read over 40,000 people now, and I believe the reason an intuitive can access information about a person, past, present and potential future, is because we share consciousness.

     What I’m trying to do now is revisit the experience, explore it from a different perspective and use different language. When I do demonstrations, I present readings to people in the audience and show them that it isn’t just me that can do this. I show the basic simple things to do. The bigger picture is that if this is true and we have this connection, then we must be connected to everyone, which is global consciousness. And if nature is a part of us and we are a part of it, then we can no longer look at it as a separate resource for us to dominate. In my next book, Messages from Spirit, which is going to be out May 1st, I address the idea that we can have a personal, individual conscious relationship with the divine and can receive messages through the natural world, through clouds, through voices, through listening to one another when our senses are amplified. We’re being nudged and told, “Listen to this. This applies to you.” The fact is that spirit can use all of us as communication devices.

GS: Would you say so that we can access it or that we do access it?

CBR: We can and do, but sometimes we don’t know we are or we refuse it. I think the greatest cross that we have to bear is that we live as ego selves. We have personalities and see ourselves as separate. The human journey is to come back to our communion with the divine. But we always have this goblin mind that is chattering away at us telling us that we are always separate. That is a key element for why we refuse to hear messages.

GS: I’ve always liked that line out of A Course In Miracles that says something like, “The voice of God is as loud as our willingness to listen to it.”

CBR: That’s right and also I think that we have certain lessons that we have to learn. I am a recovered alcoholic. I’m 22 years clean and sober, but I know that some of the ego choices that I made and some of the really unhealthy things that I did were part of my sharpening, if you will. I look back on some of those poor choices as being very necessary for my spiritual growth. In so doing, I know the guidance that I received and refused. It is about becoming conscious. It is all about being conscious and loving. That’s another thing. It’s all about love. I think that we can make major changes in the world, but we have to change.

GS: I find that it is all about individual illumination, then turning around to help as many other people as possible.

CBR: That is exactly it, because we are a we, not an I. We are only I as the I Am within us. The other thing is to make use of media.

GS: The way I usually put that is that mass consciousness creates and defines physical plane reality for us. In our time, mass consciousness and mass media become much the same thing.

CBR: Exactly. I have a TV show in development. I just signed in Los Angeles. The content is exactly what we’re talking about. It is about shared consciousness and I show it and demonstrate it and get people to recognize that the patterns that they have within them are very healable. Once we become conscious, we don’t have to keep repeating those things. We can make choices and stay in the moment. The very fact that this can even be on television is extraordinary. It’s because people are thinking about this.

GS: So what’s at the frontier for you now as far as your own learning and growth?

CBR: Humility. I’ve got to say humility!

[laughter]

GS: I’m so glad that I’ve already got that mastered.

[laughter]

CBR: I’ve got to tell you, this is all very humbling for me. I’ve been touring with Sylvia Brown. We are very different, but we share a sense of humor. I’d never been exposed to this audience. It is just very different and I am humbled by the amount of suffering that I’ve been exposed to and just how many people need love.

GS: We’ve got our knickers in knots in so many ways.

CBR: I’ve had to become more and more conscious. If you put yourself out there as a teacher you have to be willing to do your own work. I have to be present for all these people who are paying to see me. And I have to be willing to be wrong in public and to explore what that means and to really be very open to people. That’s a scary thing when you want people to like you.

GS: The willingness to be wrong is very important. That’s why the title of my monthly editorial column is “My Current Opinion.” I say that a current opinion is all that you can ever have as higher realities emerge.

CBR: Oh, I like it, you and I are in sync. Also we have to be willing to change and change is not always easy. I still have to conquer my fears and my character defects and do a daily inventory to check in with myself. Especially when you begin to get well known, which is quite an experience, and you’d better not start to believe your own press.

GS: Which happens all too often. You were talking before how you just found yourself doing these things when you hadn’t actually planned for it.

CBR: I had had experiences since I was a child. I shared a lot of detail about this in my first book, Remembering the Future, about my struggles with my capacity to experience the world outside of time and space in ways that were intrusive, certainly to my mother. She was a German immigrant and when I was between the ages of three and five, I had reccurring nightmares in very, very distinct detail of seeing body parts on the ground and seeing a man being pushed into an oven. I’d see a skinny, skinny man crying, sitting at a table with teeth and pulling metal out of teeth, and smelling the stench and seeing all these white clouds of ash. My mother pushed me away and we had a very strange relationship even though she was a beautiful, wonderful woman. I know that she was a little bit afraid of me and in my twenties and she told me why. She told me, “You used to tell me about these dreams that you had. Well, you are Jewish.”

     Things like that happened all my life. I was interested. I read books about it. I was fascinated. I had a psychic nanny who read cards. My father read Turkish coffee cups. But I went to law school. When I say I found myself doing readings, actually it came from a very specific incident. I was working as an aromatherapist and picking up very detailed information about people’s lives, like sexual abuse from clients on the table. In this incident I picked up even the name of the person. I shared it with the woman and it completely freaked her out. My massage business went down the tubes and my business as a reader became the mainstay of my living. That’s how it evolved. Every time they would come, I would say, “Don’t come back next year. I’m going to have a record deal.” Which of course I never got until fifteen or sixteen years later when I didn’t care anymore.

GS: You know how they say, “We plan and God laughs.”

CBR: I always laugh about that. I do believe that we manifest our purpose. I did manifest everything that I thought I wanted. It was an exquisite and painful lesson.

GS: I’ve been making the point to some people lately that we tend to think that we can manifest when the fact is that we do manifest. If that is the case, we might want to think about manifesting consciously.

CBR: My next book, which I am writing now, is called Intentional Wealth, which is not about money by the way, but is about consciousness. It is about being conscious of every aspect, every action that we do. We have to be conscious of what we do manifest.

GS: Speak to anything that you want to have our readers to know.

CBR: I really want people to start having fun with their spirituality. Even people who live in an urban environment will find and recognize that spirit will speak to them through the natural world, even in the city, even in an urban setting. We need to relearn the symbolic language of spirit. We are constantly in dialog with spirit because we are made of spirit, and in essence, spirit is talking to itself. When we ask for guidance, of course it is going to answer us. We just have to be willing to hear.

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Colette Baron-Reid is the author of several books and will be speaking at the Celebrate Your Life Conference, Friday, May 30–Sunday, June 1. For more information, see the advertisement in this issue, and visit Colette’s website at www.colettebaronreid.com.

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