Answers from Beyond with Mark Nelson

In this Episode

• [00:39]Stephan introduces Mark Nelson, a psychic medium with clairvoyant, clairaudient, and clairsentient abilities. He has the rare ability to see and hear messages from friends and family who have crossed over to the other side.
• [07:22]Mark tells a story of when a woman who died of cancer came through and spoke to him at a funeral.
• [14:08]Mark shares an experience where he figured out three different people who went to the same high school.
• [21:43]Mark talks about how he deals with people who are skeptical of what he does.
• [28:57]Stephan asks Mark if the people who passed away violently communicate to him about their unresolved or unfinished business.
• [34:43]Do psychic mediums take on the emotions of people or objects they deal with?
• [42:55]Stephan shares what he learned in Akashic Records Reading from Ann Marie Pizarro, about getting a message from the Creator.
• [49:10]How does Mark do his reading for himself? What are the things he can get from himself as a psychic medium?
• [56:59]Mark shares how his depression elevated his career and mission, and how everything became more apparent when he was able to adjust his radiofrequency.
•  [62:24]Visit Mark Nelson’s website, markenelsonmedium.com, to learn more about him and check out how he can help you with his gifts.

Jump to Links and Resources

Mark, thank you for being on the show.

Stephan, it’s my pleasure. This is so much fun. I do my work as a psychic medium, and I still get a kick that we’ve got this, the Mark-Stephan thing kind of connection here.

Yeah, you know I used to go by Steve or Steven in my childhood because my aunt told me when I was probably five or six years old, that Stephan was a sissy name. Can you imagine a relative telling you that you have a sissy name? So then I went by Steve for the rest of my childhood until I finished high school. And I’m like, “Hey, wait a second, Stephan is a cool name,” so then I switch back. 

Yes, it’s cooler.

Yeah, so your brother’s name is Stephan?

It’s spelled like yours, but he goes by Steve.

The difference is that Stephen with a “ph” ends with an “en” and Stephan with a “ph” ends with an “an.”

There you go.

So I first want to understand for our listeners benefit, and actually for mine personally is, what’s the difference between a medium and a psychic?

Great question. All mediums are psychics, but not all psychics are mediums. So what that means on a very practical level, like my first experiences with experiencing however you want to describe this unique ability I have, is that I saw my father who had passed. So I’m able to see people who crossed over, who passed, and it started with him. And then I realized I could see other people who crossed over. But unlike some mediums, only prefer to convey messages as to that someone near you who’s crossed over, who has passed. Sometimes they’ll have messages, but it isn’t that simple, or it isn’t that cut and dry for me, because I’ll hear, for example, “Oh, your grandfather’s here, and he’s telling me to tell you blah, blah, blah.” But then it’ll turn around to where it’s like, “Stephan, and you’re supposed to do this business deal. I’m seeing that it sounds like a partnership with three people. A partnership is coming to you. Keep your eyes open for it, it’s going to be very useful and valuable.” Or, “That person you’re seeing is bad news,” I wouldn’t say it that way, but the idea is to provide usable information, provide something that you can apply, and take home with you do something with it.

Actionable insights.

Actionable information, my friend, yes.

And I imagined that it also could be helpful to provide some closure for somebody who feels like they didn’t get a chance to say goodbye, or they were concerned about the way that the person passed was very violent or turbulent or difficult, and they want some peace of mind for themselves. Is that also something that happens?

That happens quite a bit. I’ve done work with this group, it’s called Helping Parents Heal, and they focus on people who have lost children, be they adult children or infants, and everyone in between. Unfortunately, on a fairly regular basis can mean that someone has taken their own life, and so that can leave a gaping hole in someone’s psyche, heart, and mind for the rest of their days if a child of theirs took their own life. And so I’ve been able to provide insights that come through with messages that give people an ability to move forward a little bit. It’s up to the person that gets the information, to the point, people that they’re in pain, and you don’t see it. That’s the other thing, and you’d be surprised how many people walk around with this burden, but it isn’t just for young people. If you put your mother or father in a care facility of some kind, and then they’re there, this has happened a lot where someone will make a misdiagnosis, or there’ll be some kind of confusion about medical treatment that then would contribute to someone’s passing.

The idea is to provide some validation and comfort.

When that happens, people feel a lot of guilt, they think to themselves, had I done this differently, had I been made a better choice, had I been a better son or daughter? And I’ve been there more often, and I might have been able to prevent this from happening. And normally, the people that come through will say, “This was okay, I was ready, I didn’t want to stay longer.” And by the way, you were wearing a blue shirt that day, or I had this one very interesting one where everyone at the funeral kind of simultaneously or just spontaneously started moving like this waving their hands back and forth, it wasn’t overly religious, it was more like a 60s revival. And so when I brought that to his attention, he said that did happen, and then it brought more validation to some of the other points. This gentleman’s wife died at home, and she had cancer, there was nothing they could do. They tried everything they could, but she came through with saying, “I’m okay. This is what occurred, and I’m better now. There’s nothing that you could have done differently.” So the idea is to provide some validation and comfort. Believe me, people need it sometimes they walk around with these burdens, you know?

Speaking of people passing and leaving behind, like open loops and unanswered questions and burdens, there is an event that happened in your childhood that started this whole trajectory for you and made you aware of your special ability. Do you want to share a bit about this?

Sure. When I was 11, we used to live in New Jersey. My dad went to New York to see his mother, who was ill. And his car broke down, this is subpar as we know, he went into the wrong bar, got into a fight and was murdered in the bar in front of a bunch of people, but no one would testify because it was a mafia bar. If you have seen the movie, Goodfellas, it would not be unlike that. The guy was supposed to be a very well-known mafia enforcer, and my dad didn’t realize what he was getting into. He just went in for a beer, and he never came home. And we had a close coffin funeral, I never saw him again. So then, about a month after his funeral, which was just very jarring to say, “Hey, Dad, see you later,” and then he never comes home again.

Well, then he came home again, about a month after I saw him, it was like, in the early fall, and I’m trying to rake leaves and just be a little kid and kind of conduct life. And then I saw him in the driveway, and he was just being friendly, and said, “I’m okay.” It’s like he was trying to reassure me, but I wasn’t ready for it, and it was very difficult. Then I saw him again at school, and I’m thinking, alright, we weren’t raised in an environment, it wasn’t the right time where everyone was very touchy-feely. Most of the people that I knew when I was a kid, my mom, everybody else, we’re just trying to move forward and get over it. There’s nothing you can do. And so fairly not very, in some ways helpful, otherwise not, that was the advice I was given. So when I saw my dad again, I just freaked out, I thought, I’m cracking up, I’m losing my mind. And so, “Dad, please go away.” 

So I started to pay more attention to that voice.

And then flash forward about 25 years, I’m taking a walk one night after work, and thinking to myself, I wish my dad could have met my wife, wished he could have met our daughter, we just bought a new house and life was happening. And it was a good time, and it was a time of change. And I kept getting this persistent voice in my head telling me, “I had met them. I have seen your wife. I know Barbara. I met your daughter.” It’s like alright, I’m either having some kind of a mental problem, bet I have schizophrenia, I’ve heard it very generously called. Is it that? What is it? And so I asked this voice, “Tell me something I don’t know if you are my dad.” And this voice told me something about my brother, Glenn, who was living on the other side of the country at the time. So I called my mom, “All right, I just had a dream about Glenn, that he was working at a place that had an image of ivy on a white wall. Does that make any sense?” And she says, “Oh, yeah, he just got a job working at a place called the Ivy,” a little floral shop, frankly, and I described the logo for the place, the signage. So I started to pay more attention to that voice. I heard more messages, and I said, I am going to go, someone tells me this about Glenn or my mom or the family members, or that I forget it, and remember it. 

So I went out to a psychic bookstore and said, “I think I’m psychic. Can I try reading somebody?” They’re like, “Sure. Alright, read me, I’m the owner.” So I did, and I got this message, “I see a young man connected to you. He looks like he’s probably your son. It looks like he got beat up badly in a fight, and your dad is taking care of him. Does that make any sense?” And he said, “Yes, my son was beaten up by a bunch of boys and my father is taking care of him right now. And would you like to read for us?” So it went that rapidly. So I started to read, a part-time thing. I’ve been working in advertising and marketing, for most of my career, on the creative side of things as a writer and creative director person. And so when this happened, I can’t just act like that didn’t happen. So I started to do it and then to manage the time of it, I would start to do appointments on the phone. I’ve also realized I could do this by phone. I had no idea. And so I went from reading people in person in the store to reading them on the phone to most of my clients and then flash forward. Some clients of mine said, “Hey, there’s a TV show, they need psychics. You want to try it?” I was like, “Sure. I don’t know,” and so I did. I ended up doing a pilot for Fox TV, on psychics, and it was called Gifted. And I ended up winning that psychic competition. They interviewed 200 psychic mediums, they put six of us on the air for the show, and I won the title of Most Gifted, and so that kind of opened some doors and I’ve been doing TV and radio and all of that ever since.

Yeah, so I saw a clip I was doing my research before the episode, and was it on the Gifted show that you read these three different people, figured out that they went to the same high school and all of that? 

Yes. I get surprised, and I get shocked because I don’t know what I’m walking into. I don’t. These three young people sit down in front of me, and I was told they experienced something together. And so I sit there and all of a sudden, I start to see black boots, I see military-style boots, and I thought they served in Iraq or something. And then I see no, no, no, it’s in a school. And there’s police, and they’re shooting, and it’s like, and then it’s as if someone whispered in my ear, “They went to Columbine.” And it just kind of like, “Oh, crap. Okay.” All right. And so I said, “You guys went to the same high school.” “Yes.” “And then you went to Columbine High School.” And then I started to see things like, “You’re hiding in the library,” and he said, “No, I was hiding directly below the library,” “You’re at the back of the school, and you were wounded.” And then I just started to get these things, and it’s shocking to me sometimes, it is. I don’t know what I’m getting. But I find myself being surprised, and I find it validating because it’s hardly something you could plan or expect. It was fascinating.

Yeah. I mentioned you might get not just skepticism from some folks but kind of ostracized by some like considered maybe a freak of nature or something like that. I have a friend who was married to a woman who had a healing gift, she could touch somebody and heal them, and she was from South America, in the forest, I guess, the Amazon. And in her tribe, she would heal people, and then word got out to other tribes, so people would come from other tribes to get healings from her when she was little. And then she moved to North America, and she didn’t want to be considered a freak. So she didn’t let anybody know about her gift, her husband knew, but that’s it. She never practiced again, and she never healed anybody.

And a spooky kind of story, another friend of mine who’s a healer, actually a past guest on this podcast. I’m not gonna say who because I don’t want to break any confidence, but he pulled my friend aside and said, “Your wife has a gift, and she’s not using it.” And he’s kind of freaked out, like, “How do you know?” “She needs to use it. It will not be good if she doesn’t, it will be really bad for her,” and she still refused. And they ended up getting a divorce because, and you can’t change somebody, and they need a breakthrough, and you can’t do it for them, he just moved on. But that stuck with me like, “Wow, if you deny a gift from the Creator like that.” So anyway, I’m curious. How do you handle that kind of judgment?

I rely on what I hear.

Well, I will tell you this. I reserve the right to be wrong. You know the game of telephone where you tell me, and then I tell someone else, inevitably there’s going to be something dropped or lost, or emphasis might be changed. Well, I’m listening to people who don’t have physical bodies anymore. So I’m not using that as an ought for “Haha, that’s no big deal.” I believe that I’m right, way more often than I’m not. But just by being able to say, “Okay, I’m not going to get every one of them.” It frees me to say exactly what I’m seeing, hearing and feeling, and to be very straightforward about it, and that allows me to do better work. And so I would say to someone who thinks I’m skeptical, I encourage it. It’s like, you don’t have people go to great lengths to not tell me things before reading, and that’s fine. Sometimes a client would come to me, and they think they know what the most important thing is, and they might, often they do. But there are times when someone in spirit has a different message for them that could be perhaps more significant. So I try to rely on what I hear.

If someone calls me, I’ll say, “Let me tell you what I hear first. And if I don’t get to the thing that is most important to you, then you’ll have time to ask questions a little bit further on in the reading.” And so I’ll just say that I get a lot of clients from word of mouth, I don’t do much advertising, very little, but I do little. And so I rely on people saying positive things, you have to trust your gut, it’s almost like how you choose a lawyer, how you choose a doctor, you have to do a little homework, and I think I have very good reviews. That can be meaningful too, but I would just say, follow your nose if you’re trying to choose a psychic medium, who is it that you can connect to and relate to. I find that I end up having a number of my clients end up being friends because they get a vibe from me that makes sense for them. And it makes it easier, it’s almost like if someone walks in mentally closed, it feels a little harder to get through, but when it’s easy and relaxed, I just start hearing things bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, and it allows me to be a greater value.

I say that it’s fine to be a skeptic, but it’s kind of a slippery slope, I guess. Because if you’re a skeptic, it’s just a little bit further, and then you’re a cynic.

Yes. And how much is enough proof? The idea is that if I get close on a name or I get close on an event, but then I’m able to pick up other details, this is about random guessing. It’s not like consistently flipping coins because I get obscure details sometimes that there’s just no way anyone would know, and that’s okay. But, that’s the idea, frankly. So I try to provide actionable information, I try to make it relevant, and I also think that because of who I am, clients don’t come to me with, like, “Who was I in a past life?” I like to stick to the things that I can validate that they can validate. And it’s funny, they’ll say, “That doesn’t make any sense.” There’s this thing called psychic amnesia where you go, and you see a client, or someone comes to me, and this happened this one time.

I like to stick to the things that I and my clients can validate.

There’s a man here; his name begins with the letter J, he says he knows you very well. He has a very short name, begins with a J. And J is telling me this, this. And then there’s this woman that says, “Well, I wanted to speak to my husband, Joe.” And he would never say that. Well, Joe begins with the J, right? And Joe did say those things and that, Yeah, well, that makes sense. Yes, I want you to feel validated, but it isn’t exactly what you want him to hear. You can’t argue with the fact that I heard these things. Joe told me about them. Joe told me his name. So it’s just funny like they’ll say, “That doesn’t make any sense,” and then I’ll get a call, three or four weeks later, “Mark, you’re correct. This happened, this happened.” And so rather than me getting all full of myself, it’s more about, I’m glad I heard it correctly for you. I’m glad the information proved to be accurate. 

That’s a great position to take. I think it’s very humble and puts the message front and center instead of you’re kind of a celebrity like, I’ve been the medium who was voted or selected most gifted on this Fox TV show, etc.

I honestly feel that if I started to get full of myself, so to speak, I almost think that like my help, the other side would say, “Hey, let’s drop him, he’s a pain in the neck. We don’t want to be associated with that kind of person.” It just doesn’t make me any better at what I do, and I’m not like that, anyway, I’m just me.

That’s part of the reason why you were probably selected, right?

Well, I don’t wear a turban in case anybody wants to know. Turban does not work for me. No large gemstones in my head that seem a little over the top.

There’s this expression that I resonate with. And it’s the willing suspension of disbelief.

Yes. Oh, I love that. It’s accurate. But then in my field, I’m glad that you can come with me on it. But then if I provide specific details that are relevant to the issues that you’re facing, or the person that you want to be in touch with, at 1.1 is how much is enough? I get a name, let’s say this person said that there was a medical issue at the end of the life that was beyond their control that the doctor made a misdiagnosis, there was a lawsuit connected to it, don’t go through. This has happened, don’t go through the lawsuit. You’ll never prove it, but this is what occurred. Or literally, people call me, “I can’t find these gems that were in my house, they were stolen,” “Your brother-in-law’s wife took them or something.” I hear stuff like that, and the idea is to be again useful and to tell people something they didn’t know.

Do you ever solve crimes? Or are you asked to solve crimes?

I’ve worked once with the Justice Department, and they asked me if I could find a body. And I found bones turned out to be, I don’t know why, but I found animal bones in doing remote viewing where you look at it, they say okay, up near, there’s some large park up north in the San Jose area, and I described the spot where there was like a red pipe sticking out of the ground like a curb pipe that was like kind of random. I said there’s bones there and turned out to be animal bones, like a large carcass of some kind, but it’s like that didn’t help them. But on the other hand, I have been brought in on TV shows for like cold cases, or they’ll even know, but they want to see if there’s anything left like I’ve been involved with the Black Dahlia murder. This took place in LA in the 1940s, and people don’t know who was behind them. They think they know who the killer was for the Black Dahlia murder.

Well, this TV show brought me in and said you get anything here. They didn’t tell me any details, they just brought me in, and they told me it might have something to do with the Black Dahlia case. So it’s a house they call the sound in the house, on Franklin Avenue on the east side of Hollywood. I went in, and I saw a guy, it’s like, he was dressed in 1940s clothes, and then for some reason, it’s like, “Oh, you’re a doctor, and you killed several women here.” So before any producers or anyone could kind of like start talking around me and filling in any or giving me anything, I said, “If a doctor lived at this house that time of the Black Dahlia murder, he did it. He was the one that’s the guy.” They’re like, “Well, that kind of hit that.”

And then I was called in to investigate a property on Cielo drive next to where the Sharon Tate murders took place. The people who live there, this guy kind of has a house you walk in, and it’s like you’re back in the 1960s, the music is playing posters, the doors, there’s the Rolling Stones, and I can almost see why these people who died in 1969 might feel very at ease there. So I did feel like Sharon Tate’s spirit was there. And then another one of the victims came through rather loud and clear, and his name was Jay Sebring, he was a hairdresser, friend of Sharon Tate’s. And I got the name of Sharon Tate’s child. They were going to name her unborn son, I can’t remember the name now, but I got the name. What was funny too, is that I said that, “Sharon is here,” and they said, “Can you get her to do something in the camera here in the room?” and I said, “Sharon, if you’re here, can you do something to the camera that is focused on me,” and the camera turned off and on. They said, “Okay, alright. Well, please don’t ask her to do anything else like that anymore.” But it was so validating.

The idea is to be useful and to tell people something they didn’t know.

I keep running into stuff with the Sharon Tate or Manson murders. Someone gave me a knife to hold, and I didn’t know anything about it, but I said, “Oh, this was used in the in a murder.” There’s a guy that was associated with the Manson family. I can’t remember specifically Donald, or I think it was or somebody something like that. Anyway, it turns out that this knife had been found on the spawn ranch property in a bloody sock with a finger bone in there next to the sock. So it’s like, “Okay, well, that’s probably it.” The murderer has already been solved, but no one found the knife. It’s kind of weird, this lovely knit lady and then she got to know her, she was out walking her dog out at this ranch saw a little fabric sticking out of the ground. She thought that’s kind of weird, like someone’s clothes, piece of clothing sticking out on the ground, she started pulling on it and found a pile of bloody pants and bloody sock and the knife and the bone. It’s like, well, and this seems pretty interesting, so that’s about that. I’ve done that. I haven’t been involved in any active cases. So it’s been interesting.

So when you communicate with these people who have passed who had a violent end, do they feel unresolved to you? Does it feel like unfinished business or that they’re in kind of limbo because it was such a violent end?

Well, some of them are a little confused about what happened, or they can’t accept it, because they were supposed to go and do something important on Monday, instead, they were killed on Saturday night. In the case of Sharon Tate, she was not happy with the fact that everyone was focusing on the horrible last moments of her life. What I could hear was that we are beautiful again. We are beautiful again, and they don’t want to be only thought of as victims. It was interesting with Jay Sebring, I heard him say “I had big plans,” it was being recorded, they played back me saying it. And then when they played the recording, they heard a second voice saying I had big plans. So you had my voice saying, I had big plans. And then you hear this other voice saying I had big plans.

That’s wild. 

Yeah. And it’s called the electronic voice phenomena. So what happens is that you can ask a question, and then you wait, and you don’t hear anything. And then you playback the tape, masking it. And you’ll often hear other voices. I know that some TV shows have been known to fake it, or they’ll hear some garbled sound, and then they say, “Oh, that’s my Aunt Martha.” I can’t identify that I don’t know how much sound doctrine you’ve done here, but I think this is what I heard, “I had big plans” came through barely clear, and I’ve heard other things like that. We were on the Queen Mary. I’ll tell you two quick electronic voices went out on the Queen Mary. There’s a famous young man that died, he’s famous after he passed, he was crushed in a doorway on the Queen Mary. And so people were asking me, “How could this happen? The doors don’t close that quickly. It’s not like a mousetrap, they kind of roll shut.” And so the question was, was he drunk or was it a dare? What happened? And I heard it was a dare, and then they played back the tape of me saying, Oh, he did it on a dare to see if he could jump back and forth five times. And then you hear a separate voice saying it was a dare. So that’s kind of convincing, and just the sheer kind of like, I didn’t know what was going to be asked. I just hadn’t been rolling through. I knew the guy running the event I didn’t know he was going to ask. He didn’t know what he was going to ask. And then we get something that is kind of like, how could you have fake that? I don’t know. They can say things that you don’t expect, and it can be quite compelling.

Yeah. When you get into an environment where it’s like a haunted house or some horrible event took place there as the Queen Mary. So I did a haunted tour of the Queen Mary, and there’s this part. I think it’s in the bulkhead area in the front, where there was an explosion, another boat was colliding with the Queen Mary, and a whole bunch of people died. I was in that part of the boat, and I didn’t feel anything, but then other people were at the party, they’re like, “Ooh, this feels creepy.”

Power suggestions can certainly be the case sometimes. But I’ve been there too, I know, and I’ve wanted to tell you. I’ve heard things in different languages to where it’s like, or people have responded to electronic voice phenomena. I was in a now-closed hospital in East LA, and I went in, and I heard other young men in the former emergency room, they use it now for filming, I think they maybe even turning it into a senior home. So I’m in this room, and I heard this young man say, “I’m here,” “Oh, he’s here. He’s a young guy, and he’s like 15 years old, got killed riding a bike at night in the neighborhood.” And so my friends recorded it, and then they found me like, three weeks later, “You won’t believe we played this back, and we’ve heard electronic voice phenomena in Spanish, saying, ‘It’s me, it’s me, he’s talking about me.'” That was kind of interesting. And then I’ve done readings for people where I will phonetically sound out a word in another language, for one reading, I hear the words, “blah, blah, blah,” and he said, “Oh, you just said Christmas tree in Russian.” And it turned out to be very relevant for the reading because the mother had lost her daughter, right around Christmas. And so then I realized, “Oh, your daughter says, ‘You have not put your Christmas tree up this year because the holidays ruin for you, because of when I died and how I died.’” She was hit by a car walking on a dark street right before Christmas. And she just couldn’t get past it, but the daughter said, “Put up a Christmas tree.” It was pretty tough reading, but it’s just interesting how language doesn’t matter sometimes. It doesn’t.

If you walk into that bulkhead area, do you kind of emphatically take on the sadness and fear and other kinds of negative emotions, or you just quite separate from that, and you’re like, “Oh yeah, something terrible happened here.” That’s a real shame, and you’re able to kind of keep the boundary up.

I always ask for God to kind of keep an eye on me because sometimes I don’t know what I’m going to face.

If I took on the pain of everybody I’ve read for, I would be a basket case because so many of us, especially people that want to come to see me are dealing with some big issues, and many of them are painful, and they’re about loss and pain. And I lost parents, I lost a dad and stepdad, I’ve lost people, we all do it at a certain age. So if I’m to walk into an environment like that, I pray before I go in and I pray afterward, and I always ask for God to kind of keep an eye on me, because sometimes I don’t know what I’m going to face. I’ve been in places where there are very negative energies where people have been murdered, and I know that to be a fact. And so I’m told that after the fact, pretty bad things. I’m a pretty light-hearted guy, I like jokes, I like to play, you probably get a little bit of that just as we’ve talked.

Without the turban, though.

Only for very special occasions. People have to pay me extra to dress with the turban. God forbid. Yeah, so I try to go in, there’s just a great sense of loss, I’ve been on battlefields, I feel like I’m almost sweating when I think about like in Gettysburg in this one place, Little Round Top that had a very famous, bloody hand-to-hand battle. And I feel the angst and pain and fear there, but then I’ve learned to, “I’m going to separate myself, I’m going to put up a barrier, I’m not going to allow that to get to me.” If we’re on camera or not, I try to be conscious of where my mind goes, I try to direct my consciousness to a certain place for certain reasons. And it doesn’t mean that I put my head in the sand, but it’s like, “Yes, I know this occurred. This is a painful thing for these people.” I pray for them, I think prayer helps me a lot. I also meditate. Meditation helps me get used to knowing where my mind is going to go and then directing my thoughts towards something I want to focus on, or away from things that I don’t need to dwell on. You can be aware of it, but it doesn’t mean you have to hold it tight and let it simmer.

What kind of meditation do you do? Is it like TM, Transcendental Meditation, or Mindfulness Meditation?

I don’t know how to describe it, I guess, I do different kinds of meditation. One is like, I call it a ten-minute vacation, where I focus on one thing, then capable of not focusing on everything else. I will light a candle before reading, and it’s not that I need the ceremony, I’ll just focus on the flame for a little bit and take my mind away. If I don’t have a candle and I focus on my breathing. And then I also do other kinds of meditation where it’s like I need to go find something, I need to go hear something or learn something. So I’ll create a thing where, okay, I see myself walking on a road that I like, in the family back east, there’s this wonderful little road around the lake. And I picture in my mind. I see big pine trees, fresh air, and it gets darker, it’s up in Maine, it’s a beautiful location. And I can put it together in my head, and then I start walking with the idea that, “Okay, I’m walking on this road and I don’t know who I’m supposed to meet. So, I’m gonna be very patient and keep walking until that person shows up.” And that person, for me, can be a guide, guardian angel, one of my dads, my stepdad, or my dad. I’m very blessed to have two really good father figures in my life, really blessed in that respect. So I don’t know if one of them shows up or a grandfather, their grandmother, and in all of them depending on what I need to hear they tend to show up.

I’m guessing you’re not afraid of death, like one of the top fears of everyone is fear of death, dealing with fear of, I was gonna say the taxman, but no, that’s not it. What’s the other one?

Taxman, that’s legitimate.

Like the expression, nothing is more sure than death and taxes, right?

Well, I’m not looking forward to struggling to breathe or being in an accident or pain. Oddly enough, I got the wind knocked out of me on the bottom of pool ones when I was a kid. I remember laying on the bottom of the pool and thinking, “Get up, get up, get up, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.” And then I just laid there, and so I was conscious on the bottom of the pool thinking, “I can’t move, looking at myself and I’m not afraid right now.” And I was having this weird like, and I’m not afraid. I can see, but I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t do anything. And then people realized he’s laying on the bottom of the pool a little too long. Maybe we should go get him. I’m part of a big family. And so we’d like to knock each other around, and throw each other around, and punch and slug when we’re kids, this is just what we did. But I managed to catch an elbow I think in the solar plexus or something, and I just went under.

Consciousness survives the body.

And so, am I afraid of dying? I know for a fact I feel fortunate, I know that when I cross over, there will be people waiting for me. They have heard them come through for lots of other people. I’m convinced, without a shadow of a doubt, that it isn’t just dark, there’s life, there’s consciousness, there’s learning. In a nutshell, consciousness survives the body. I can’t say that enough for people. Consciousness survives the body. So I think we still retain the sense of who we are and what we’re like but we let go of some of the more frivolous things that might go like, “I’m so devastatingly handsome,” or “I’m rich or poor or whatever it is that you find great pride in,” that tends to become about as interesting is an old set of clothes that you don’t want to wear anymore.

That makes sense. Do you ever get messages that are directly from the Creator, or is it always through somebody who has passed and wants to send a message?

Well, for me, I’ve used the term God, Creator, Jesus, all of the above. And so, as we’re all going through the fear of COVID, fear of rioting, fear of all of these fears, I got a very strong message that, “Mark you and your family will be okay.” And I got it like, right where I’m sitting, my office looks out over a house, and the driveway and I have big rose bushes over there. And I did feel like I saw, okay, God’s talking to me, telling me it’s going to be okay. All right, I’m going to stop worrying, and it was helpful.

That’s great. And one thing I learned from an Akashic Records reading from Anne Marie Pizarro, I should have her on the podcast, she’s amazing, is that if I’m getting a message from the Creator, if I’m essentially like channeling something, then I can check to see is this me or is it the Creator? Just by asking the follow-up question, “Creator, God, is it you?”

That’s fascinating.

And that answer will be correct or true. That was powerful and a little bit of wisdom that I got from her. I got tons of great messages and insights, and stuff. Anyway, so just ask the Creator, “Is it you?” and that will help you to see if it is truly from the Creator or not.

All of our spiritual guides want us to be comfortable so that we’ll listen.

Well, what I get as well, is that sometimes it’s like, Okay, this is coming from your grandfather, or this is coming from someone else. What I would say is that I tend to think that we’re all connected at a certain point. Stephan, you are you, but I think each of us, it’s important to think it helps deal with people and their different aspects of God. We’re all connected, so if you can accept that, then even though this message may come through from someone that appears to be someone that we know and love, it may be through the Creator. That’s really how it is. I believe in guardian angels, guides, whoever you want to call them. And the message has been for me. It’s like whatever you are, whoever you’re comfortable with, your guardian angel or guide will appear in that way if you’re comfortable with a guy that looks like the butcher from down the street, you want to see him wearing a smock, I’ll show up, I don’t care. You want me to look like the nun that took care of you when you’re 12 years old? I’ll do that. You want me to be an Indian shaman? Fine, whatever you’re comfortable with. I don’t care.

It’s like, all we want all of our spiritual guides inside want us to be comfortable so that we’ll listen. We won’t get hung up with like, and I would never have a guide that looks like this. It’s like, alright, and you’re not comfortable with this, what would you like? It’s funny, one of my main guides is I call him Stephen, he’s my brother. Hey, he should have gone with a cooler version. And he looks like someone that I have done workshops with, like woodworking. So he explains things, in terms of like, you cut this way, and you do this tool this way. I can cut and do basic woodwork, but he kind of explains it to me in a way that I’m comfortable with it. So be patient with this, don’t force that sand, it’s all metaphors, but it’s useful to me, and I’m uncomfortable with it, I don’t challenge it. They just don’t want you to get hung up on the details, and it’s just I’m here for you, that’s where they appear.

Yeah. And we are all interconnected, we all are part of the Oneness or whatever you want to call it. I got this very powerful message. I do believe that there are no coincidences. So, one Saturday, I heard the story from Will Henshall, who was on this podcast, he is the founder of Focus@Will, used to be a famous musician too, with Londonbeat. And he said that when he had his heart attack, it was the widowmaker type of heart attack. Very few people make it through that. So he was dead for a while, they brought him back. And he had these images of Aspens everywhere, and it was just such a powerful image. So he didn’t even know what trees they were; he just knew what they looked like. And then when he was on his road to recovery, he had to figure out what kind of trees they were, and so he figured it out, maybe google it. And he found out their Aspens, and what he found out about them is that they’re all one organism. A whole bunch of these trees will interconnect at the root system, so it’s one big organism, and it’s a very powerful metaphor. And then the next day, I’m in this Oneness Meditation thing taught by Preethaji in India, and so she’s live streaming it, and there’s this whole thing about Aspens. That’s the weirdest thing because nobody ever talks about Aspens in my vicinity, and now twice in a row and the same weekend. So I knew that there was a message there and that wasn’t a coincidence. So anyway, when you were talking about how we are just all interconnected, I was thinking about the Aspens.

Well, it’s a perfect analogy. We’re all just different facets of who God the Creator is, we just look a little different, but it doesn’t matter. Well, if you kind of go up high enough, it’s like I think of myself as being the very tip of a large tree, and there’s a gazillion little countless little roots and things that stick out from the roots, but if you go high enough, it’s all one tree. But it’s fascinating to think that a forest of Aspen is a single organism. I also talk about how all rivers lead to the ocean. For me, a river, a stream, it could be a religion, some are bigger, some are smaller, but they all feed into the same source of energy and love.

We’re all just different facets of who God the Creator is, we just look a little different, but it doesn’t matter.

Beautiful. So, you’d mentioned that you try to focus on what is the actionable stuff for the person you’re reading for, but if you’re trying to read for yourself, like to learn about yourself, aren’t you curious about things like your past lives and stuff like that? Are you getting those kinds of messages about yourself?

I’ll ask for guidance. That’s particularly when I take a walk down the road. I don’t know what I’m supposed to know. I don’t know if this is the information I act on or not. But I ask to be guided, like, I don’t know what I should do, I need to go. Those little meditations, I don’t meditate for a long time, I don’t need to. I can’t imagine what I would do in two hours, I think I’d fall asleep. But if I take 15-20 minutes. I’m out, tooling around almost in this place in my mind or the universe, and that’s when I start to get some really useful information. What was interesting for me in a past life, I saw myself jumping off a boat with a gun in my hands like an amphibious assault. I’ve seen it happen a couple of times in my head where I’m jumping on the soldier, I’m jumping into the water, I’m getting shot, and I’m drowning. I have asthma, when I was a kid I had really bad asthma, it was debilitating and kept me from being in school and doing other things. I eventually outgrew it, but I almost drowned twice.

And I’ve also had a concussion surfing, that wasn’t good, but I was underwater unconscious for a long time. I got help pretty quickly there. I think that ties in, that night just had this flashing like several small boats, a friend of mine we were sailing around the Channel Islands, and I’m reaching with a whisker pole to grab, to pull up the mooring, which is like a floating anchor, in a sense. It’s anchored on the bottom underwater, but you pull up, and you just grab this mooring, and that’s where you go. And I swear, it’s like, I feel like I’m in a khaki uniform. I feel like this is not a whisker pole but a rifle, and I’m getting ready to make an assault, and I just get this thing. I really think that at one point, it was relevant, I pass live and seldom come up for clients, sometimes they do.

This one woman, she was having an affair with a married guy, and she was enthralled with him. And she told me that from the moment I met him, we seem to know each other. And so she was bending over backward, he was still involved with his family, she was having to circle him to be part of his life, getaway for a little bit, and she’d go wherever he had time. And then she asked me, “Why did I know him so well? Why am I so willing to get up in my life to try to be there with him even though the circumstances aren’t great?” And I got to sense, “Oh, you were his slave in a previous life. He owned you, he owns you. Now, what do you want to do about that?” And so she was like, “Oh, alright. Yes, that resonates. That explains why,” she said, “I felt like I knew him. He knew me.” But it was an unhealthy relationship for her, it would never be truly fulfilling. I’m not judging, I’m just saying it’s like, “He’s not gonna give up his wife and kids for you. Is that enough?” And she realized, “No.” “That’s just this whole, he owned you, that’s why you knew him, that’s why you were familiar. You must break that cycle.” So it’s interesting.

Wow. There’s another question I got to ask, and that is pets. Can I get a message from my cat who passed away? For example, can I get a message from my first dogs that I ever owned? Or is it purely from kind of the previous human realm?

Well, here’s the thing. I do accept reincarnation, I do believe that’s real, but I don’t think you’re gonna come back as a cat next time. I think that they are conscious beings. I think they make us better humans, and they make us better spirits, I believe that they are connected to us. But I’ll get that your pet wants to provide comfort, and they want to teach and educate. That’s kind of their role, and so they do that for us. I wish I could be more definitive, but they’ll come through and say, “Hey, you used to feed me spaghetti. I like that. Thank you. I love you.” Had this dog come through and the dog said he likes Goldie, who’s Goldie? And the woman laughed and said, “Okay, I have a gold-colored car, and I always say, ‘You want to go for a ride in Goldie’?”

That’s awesome. 

Yeah, so they’re conscious of things like Goldie, a carpet covered seat specifically for the dog. Like you built it out of plywood, and you put carpet on it so it’d be comfortable. The dog knows that and says thanks, and they show up, and they love us, they just do. 

That’s awesome. Our cat passed, I miss her terribly, but she was such a teacher for not just me but my wife as well, because now we have a nine-month-old baby. This is my wife’s first child, and our cat was her kind of test drive or her training wheels or whatever the word is. Pretty cool.

Well, they do teach us, they teach us to be patient. We have an older dog now, and she’s having health issues that are teaching me to be patient, to not scream and yell when she leaves us a large presence on the floor, because I don’t know that she’s conscious that she’s going to this, I think she’s becoming incontinent. And it’s not like a puppy that you could teach it to not do that. She’s been in our house for all our lives, and all of a sudden, she’s having this issue. It’s like, alright, it’s unpleasant when this happens, but I don’t know that she’s conscious of what’s happening. So I haven’t got quite the answer to it yet, but I don’t know if it’s a little trend or something bigger or something. We don’t know what’s going to happen next, but we’re now trying to figure out how to observe and keep her comfortable without having a lot of accidents in the house.

Yeah. Well, best of luck with that, that is challenging. We didn’t know that our cat was sick, and she ended up having cancer. And it went fast, but death is part of life. It’s all part of the bigger picture. Now, there’s one thing that we talked about before the recording that I do want to get in before we wrap up, and that is the role that depression had in elevating your career or mission in this gift. 

I went through clinical depression in my early 30s, which is related to work. I was trying to do this, trying to do that, and I just didn’t realize that. I see depression as several causes, at least in my case. I was getting into the habit of only looking for negative things and validating that I was depressed, and things are bad, and things are worse. And so a great doctor told me, “Okay, you’re only focusing on the negative. There are several things we can do for you.” And by the way, anyone who’s going through depression, don’t do it alone. Please seek help, get someone to help you reach out to people you love. What you’re going through is not illogical. I was beginning to think terrible things are illogical, but I was depressed. It caused me to redirect my thoughts, when you see something positive, take out a little notepad, keep a notepad with you something you can tuck in your pocket, record it, acknowledge it, write it down. I learned to get out of the habit of only focusing on the negative, and I began to focus on the positive.

It sounds like you were tuning your reticular activating system.

Yes, I was adjusting the radio frequency. And so it went from that to where I learned that I could control where my mind went for other things. And then, I could control my mind in going through meditation, and I can control what I allowed to affect me and what I wanted to pay attention to. When I was in depression, I realized I was turning off and not listening to so many things. I was just tuning out everything. And so when I started to tune into everything, I started to not only get the positive stuff, but I got other messages as well, things that come from outside my consciousness. So I was open to listening, because I was like, “Okay, no more shutting down. I’m staying open, and I’m gonna be open, I’m gonna listen.” And that’s when I began to get messages that I could validate. That started to help me, help my family, and then, I started to help other people.

Right, so it upped your game in terms of amplifying that receiver.

I optimized. 

Yeah. Very cool. 

Big optimization, though, which is what I love about what you do. 

Amazing. So if somebody wanted to work with you, how would they go about doing this? How do they get in touch? And what’s it like to work with you? 

If you go to my site, it’s marknelsonmedium.com, I do phone readings. I’m in the LA area, I’m allowing people to come to the house now. I used to give hugs all the time, and I’m gonna wait on that a little bit. If you want to wear a mask, you can, in truth, even before we became so concerned about COVID, about 90-95% of my readings were by phone, because I’ve been fortunate enough to have clients around the country and then Europe and South America and Asia. So I’ve kind of had a very broad reach. I just learned that it’s so much easier in some ways, because if someone is very emotional when they come to me, or they’re reacting to certain things I’m not trying to listen to you, I’m trying to listen to the person who’s here for you, the spirit who is here for you, and so I can do this by phone, it’s easier. One thing if someone does come to me, I’m very blessed, I can do something called psychometry. Where if you sit for me if you’re wearing a ring, let me hold your ring. And it helps me tune in, it’s like a tuning fork or like, “Hey, I want to hear from my mom. I brought her necklace that she wore all the time,” or this is a ring or old eyeglasses. I’ve held eyeglasses, shirts, toys. I did a psychometry presentation, and someone brought in a doll, a little sailor looked like a crackerjack style. And so I picked it up, and he’s surrounded by love, wherever I had brought up, and what happened was I didn’t know who brought things in, they would bring for psychometry they put it on a table. I picked up the doll, and I said, “This doll is surrounded by love,” and six women in the room started to crack up and laugh. And it turned out they’re all taking turns, taking photos of the doll, they were stuffing him down their cleavage and taking selfies with his little bow sticking out. So I interpreted that as being surrounded by love. But that was just kind of a funny little thing.

That’s awesome. Psychometry, that’s very cool.

So in-person psychometry or just by phone, it all works, marknelsonmedium.com.

Amazing. Well, this is such an inspiring episode. I want to sign up myself. I want to do some readings with you. And I do hope that you, the listeners, take advantage of Mark’s incredible gifts. And I’m a pretty good read on who’s legit. Thanks very much.

Thank you.

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