The History of My Channel
I started the MysticReview YouTube channel in 2011, just a few months after I started this blog. I posted a couple of videos shortly after starting the channel and then lost access.
I tried to get the channel back several times over the years and finally decided it was gone for good.
Then, earlier this year, I started blogging as the Mystic Review again. So I decided to try to get the channel back one last time. I asked myself, what was my very oldest gmail? And this time, I got it right.
I recovered my original Google account and regained access to the channel. To me, this seemed like a good sign and I'm excited about doing videos again.
The video above is my intro to the channel. I’m a little ghostly in it, thanks to turning my ring light on too high, but the next one will be better. Also I mentioned a shared NDE in the video. My experience was actually not necessarily that, but I'll talk about it more in an upcoming video or podcast.
I also post all of the same content to my podcast The Mystic Review, which is available on most popular podcast apps!
What’s Up Next on the Channel
One of the reasons I wanted to access the YouTube channel (after returning to the Church) was to take down the card reading video I'd posted way back when. But now that I can take it down, I've decided I don't want to.
I will not be returning to tarot. But there are a couple of points I'd like to make about divination (using my old card reading video as an example) in a future post.
The main point of this post is that it all worked out. And I’m planning future videos on books, courses, events and media on topics like dreams, altered states, psychic phenomena and the paranormal.
I may talk about faith from time to time (both in the blog and on the channel) but it isn't going to be my primary focus. Having said that, I will be staying within the parameters of Catholicism proper.
If any the topics mentioned interest you please subscribe to the channel!
Learn more about the Rhine Institute at RhineOnline.org!
What's Up Next on the Blog
The best example of this is my renewed commitment to my online shop. This is people centered because two of my boys are interested in participating - and even if they aren't as committed as I am, I can still do art and talk to people at the same time. It is people friendly because I can take my items to my tarot reading events and possibly do other events and interact with even more people.
And here is the big thing - I think that I can finally ignore my inner critic long enough to be productive!
I never set out in a given spiritual direction due to any kind of calculation or left brain sort of decision. Instead I followed dreams and synchronicities and spiritual experience.
It's funny how things happen. Less than a week ago, I was ready to give up on this blog - which probably doesn't sound like a big deal to the average, or casual, blogger.
The truth is - real transformation isn't about doing at all. Real transformation is about energy. The energy that knocks things over and out of our way, the energy that helps us find the tools that we need most, the energy that shows us just how to apply what we have learned. This is the energy that helps us rebuild. This is the energy that makes the things that we build stand up all by themselves.

Last week I participated in a guided meditation in a course that I am taking. And I wanted to write about that experience even though it does not fit in here in the way I'd like.
The course is given by author of Writing Down Your Soul, Janet Connor. It is call Plug in for Writer's and I recommend it highly. During this, our third class, Janet lead us through a meditation aimed at removing blockages impeding our creative flow. We were to imagine each blockage as a rock. As Janet guided as gently through the meditation, I found a rock at each and every chakra. My rocks were made of different material. Each was a different shape, size and color.
At my first chakra, I found hematite. At my second an elongated piece of slate. At my third and fourth a sort of chalk. At my fifth a black rock, very like the deep dark and always slightly iridescent anthracite coal which is everywhere here in Northeast PA. At my sixth chakra small rusty shards. At my seventh a small gray stone of no particular type.
At felt a wonderful sense of release during the meditation but I also felt that there was more work to be done. That night I had two interesting experiences during sleep. In the first, I woke up to a voice speaking quietly but very clearly inside my head (as often happens to me at night). It said, "We couldn't remove all. Some are gone. And some are changed." I wrote down the message and went back to sleep and began to dream.
In the dream, I was thrilled to have been given a box that held a litter of new born wolf pups. Or so I thought. When I got home however I discovered that the box did not hold the actual puppies but a collection of soon to be hatched wolf eggs instead. Each egg had a different shape and size and, as I remember, there were five of them. Several of the eggs were round and rock-like - but I was quite sure that they were eggs nonetheless.
I was worried sick that the eggs might not hatch but in the end they did. Three of the egg-rocks yielded ducklings. One broke and I didn't see anything inside. I was happy to have ducks but still disappointed that there were no wolves. And then the last egg opened. Inside was a tiny perfect coal black wolf and I loved that wolf immediately.
I carried the tiny wolf everywhere with me in the dream and as I did it grew into a beautiful and affectionate animal with a variegated coat of brown and tan.
There's more to the dream than that but I wanted to comment here on the message which I am quite sure concerned the meditation I'd participated in earlier that day - and the symbolism of the dream. The rock-eggs were like the rocks I encountered in Janet's meditation. The coal black wolf paralleled my third chakra rock. Black rock. Black wolf. And now a third black to complete the circuit.
When I was nineteen, I left home for fifth or sixth or seventh time. My family had long since given up on stopping me, if they had ever really tried at all. I was living on my own for some time at that point but I liked to keep my parents updated. In the name of doing that, I met mother one rainy afternoon in a coffee shop on the main street of a town which I have, in an unexpected way, come back to. I told her I was leaving and I tried to tell her why.
The reasons, then and now, were murky. I was passionate about poetry in those days and I wanted to garner the experiences of a great writer. My mother didn't understand that, or perhaps she did, but I felt more misunderstood after that meeting than I had before. I sat in the old-fashioned vinyl and Formica booth long after she had left, writing poetry on a series of paper napkins. Pieced together they became this poem.
Pittston, On Leaving (1979)
There's nothing for me here. Only rain
and streets of wet magnesium.
These hundred panes are filled with a watery yellow light
but the corners of the shop are webbed with shadow.
There should be carriages and gas-lights here
but there is only a maroon and gold awning
out there across the street.
The tiny window panes run with rain, blur the words,
whatever words
glisten up above that awning.
Plate glass windows and clothes behind:
Kresge's yellow-purple cotton housecoats,
old display cases, nineteen-forties styles,
and everything looks so old.
My face, these shops, slip along grey-hound windows
lost their hold
and vanish.
Plans forgotten before the coffee's cold.
Promises I cannot forget.
And you within your distance.
Tomorrow is waiting in a shipping crate,
one more highway, one more home.
I can't stop now.
So this time it's Miami, because there's no place left
I haven't been
I take what was me in two-fisted filthy chunks
and wrench it out.
I am quite sure that those chunks, however awkward poetically, were black. Black as Northeast PA coal and blocked fifth chakra centers and the dark-bright promise of a newborn wolf. And I am equally sure that removing them was not as simple as I imagined. There is, I suspect, a message in all of that.
One last thing. Several years ago I had an odd and somewhat disturbing reading at a psychic fair. I was beaten down by life a bit that day, that year, that decade. And the reader I paid to hear that I was a phoenix or a swan told me I was a wolf instead. My immediate reaction was that I did not want to be a wolf at all. That I wanted to be something beautiful and transformational and winged. The reader saw that I wasn't pleased but he stuck to his assessment. "Some people are birds and some are sheep," he said firmly. "But you're a wolf, my dear. Whether you want to be or not."
Wolves are brave animals, both alone and in a pack, and I suspect that that was part of it. I didn't want to be brave then - or even really now. But the truth was that I was already brave whether I wanted to admit to it or not. I was brave at 15 or 17 or 19 - packing up my little VW bug to head out for parts unknown. I was braver still in the years that followed as I battled bad luck, tragedy and loss.
But there is a kind of bravery I still don't want - an owning of things which I would like to finish and be done with - even and especially because it seems I never will be. I want to write about the light and yet, despite my best efforts, I find myself pulled back to the dark stories and changing metaphors of fiction. Some things cannot be taken out, I am reminded. But I've yet to discover how they will be transformed.
It's hard to believe that my online course Lucid Dreaming and Living Lucidly taught by lucid dreaming author and expert Robert Waggoner (Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self
While I have not had a fully lucid dream so far, I have improved my dream recall and had one pre- or semi-lucid dream already. I take as a very good indicator that a fully lucid dream is within my reach.
Robert told me that this dream could be a Jungian 'big dream' or possibly an OBE (unrecognized because it didn't begin with the buzzing or humming that often launch OBEs). He went on to say that when people tell him about a vivid, complex and very coherent dream, he suspects an OBE "8 times out of 10." I found this information very validating.
I've had several very notable dreams since 2008. While none were as involved as that first dream of spirit, at least one was just as vivid and several others were also quite coherent (and / or unusually bright) - all supplied me with information I could not have otherwise known. I'm very interested in exploring both dreams and OBE and find the intersection of the two absolutely fascinating!
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| Current Favorite Footwear :) |
Psychic impressions come to me in many different ways. Some are faint and fleeting. Others stand out. Some are literal and some are symbolic. And I love the depth of meaning and the mystery that symbols can offer.
Sometimes the resource works because it triggers a new idea or approach to something. Sometimes, it is an agent of change or transformation. Both of these are good.
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I have not quite finished Journey of Souls
Over time, and with his patient's permission, Dr. Newton believes that he has interviewed hundreds of souls, questioning them on the specifics of spirit world, and receiving surprisingly consistent information.
In my dream experience, my guide was a woman in blue and the blue of her jewelry and clothing was vivid and incredibly beautiful - significant to me even as I dreamt it. I found it interesting to read in Dr. Newton's book that blue is frequently associated with spirit guides. This ran counter to my concept of spirit and color at that time (I would have expected white or violet to denote highly evolved spiritual energy).
Perhaps the most compelling parallel between my dream and Dr. Newton's description of the spirit world occurred in paragraph 13 of the dream and again in the last two paragraphs written. To summarize: during my dream journey to the spirit world (which I did not at the time conceptualize as the spiritual realm) my group attended a spiritual lecture. After returning to the everyday life of the dream, I found that the speaker we had listened to on our journey had died while we were away. As all other aspects of the dream were highly coherent, it seems unlikely that this wasn't significant.
In other words, the speaker could not have been gravely ill in the dream hospital, or already passed, and at the same time giving a spiritual lecture in another location. I did not understand the importance of this element until I read Dr. Newton's book. Coupled with the association of color and other symbolism of the dream, it clicked. My dream journey was indeed a journey of spirit.
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| Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash |
I am really enjoying the book The Frequency of Souls!
It was recommended to me by someone I met online. This was when I was recording my own EVPs. (MP3 to follow at some point). The person who gave me the recommendation was from the UK and had named a band after the book.
The Library Journal review of "The Frequency of Souls" follows.
"George Mahoney is a refrigerator engineer, married with two children, whose routine life is ready for a change when Niagara Spense is hired to replace a retired engineer called the Veteran. Niagara is a hefty, six-foot-tall woman who wears outrageous clothes and does not cover up the fact that she wears a hearing aid. She spends every moment outside the office in a trailer she has converted into a laboratory listening for the voices of deceased people she feels convinced are carried over sound waves.
George is a witness to her successful theory when the Veteran, who dies shortly after his retirement, speaks to them over her radio. George's obsession with Niagara leads him to discover not only the truth about his own past from his deceased family, but also the significance of his voice as a husband and father. Pulled together with heartfelt and humorous situations and characters, this delightful first novel keeps us entertained to the very last page. Recommended for all collections."




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