#180 Elissa Freeman: Connecting with Spirit Guides
Johnny Burke: Welcome to Closer to Venus. I’m Johnny Burke, and today’s guest is Elissa Freeman. She is an author, therapist, shamanic practitioner, and hypnotherapist. Her work includes dream analysis and tapping into your unconscious and universal messages to have a direct link to universal knowledge. In this episode, we’ll discuss how this connection with source helps you heal, live your purpose, and make the world a better place. Elissa, welcome to the program.
Elissa Freeman: Thank you very much for having me. It’s great to be here.
Johnny Burke: So, universal messages and universal knowledge. I like the sound of that already. So, tell us -your journey, I believe started with a relationship with a spirit guide, which spanned four decades.
Elissa Freeman: That’s right. That’s right. Something began before that when I was about nine years old. I found myself sitting in this room with all these adults around me, and they were all sitting on the floor. I. And at the front of the room was, this monk, and this monk was teaching everyone meditation techniques. I don’t quite know how I got to be there with all these adults at nine years old, but here I was sitting cross-legged amongst all these people. And I can remember when the monk looked at me dead in my eyes. And asked me why I should be there. The funny thing is that I was so nervous, and I was so overwhelmed that I couldn’t say anything, and all I did was just stare back. He just looked into my soul, and I’ve never felt anything quite like it. But I just sat there, probably looking like I was in shock or something. In the end, after he had looked at me for quite what felt like an age, a period, he ended up just moving on, and I thought I’d be thrown out at that point, but I wasn’t.
And I ended up spending a couple of days, with all these adults learning these coveted meditation techniques that were, one of the monks from Guru Maharaji.??? And that was my first introduction to meditation. Now I didn’t take it terribly seriously after that. I was at school, and I was doing my thing. I was just a kid, but it really wasn’t until I was 14 where I had this experience with my spirit guide. I was very grateful to my mother who introduced me to this. My mother was a psychic; at one point she said to me,” I have a spirit guide. Let’s do a meditation together, you can find yours, and my guide can help you. ” So we laid down on her big bed together and meditated.
Johnny Burke: Your mom did that?
Elissa Freeman: Mum,
Johnny Burke: So instead of talking about boys as a 14-year-old, your mom said, let’s skip that and go straight to the spirit guides. Is that what happened?
Elissa Freeman: Boys were still very important at that point.
Johnny Burke: Good.
Elissa Freeman: But, yes, I was introduced there. So we meditated, and I had an experience, and that experience with meeting my spirit guide has stayed with me, and I still meditate and go to that space to learn and get information.
Johnny Burke: Okay. So the meditation was more like a primer that kind of like prepared you for, meeting the spirit guide?
Elissa Freeman: 100%. In fact, that’s the only way that I can tap into it that I found anyway is through meditating.
Johnny Burke: what did the spirit guide look like? I mean, did you have a visual?
Elissa Freeman: I do have a visual, but I don’t know whether that’s so important because some people don’t experience that as a visual. I think we experience it all very differently. I’m a very visual person, so perhaps that’s why it was visual for me. And that’s changed over the years. So, the visuals changed numerous times, almost like my own growth. So perhaps it was as I grow, the spirit guides visual changes.
Johnny Burke: Really? It changes. I’ve never heard that before, but I have heard and tell me if you had similar experiences where spirit guides kind of come and go as you develop, as one develops, it’s almost like a baseball game where like one pitcher works for three or four innings, and then they switch to a lefty or something different, and then a closer comes in at the end of the game just to basically finish them off. I’ve heard that before where your spirit guides are there for certain stages of development. So you had the same one, though, for decades?
Elissa Freeman: Just one. One’s enough. Believe me. One is enough.
Johnny Burke: Right. So did he or she have a name?
Elissa Freeman: Yes, they do, but it’s not necessarily something that I’d like to share here. Yeah, it’s very, very personal.
Johnny Burke: What kind of messages were you getting?
Elissa Freeman: Okay. So I get all sorts of messages, and it often depends on if I have a question, so sometimes the spirit guide will answer questions, but sometimes I ask a question, and I get an answer to something else because I must have asked the wrong question. Some people might get the idea that spirit guides are kind of light and love and, and perhaps they are, but certainly, my spirit guide can be quite abrupt very strong, and there’s been more than once that I have been told off. So, I feel that sometimes my spirit guide gets quite exasperated
Johnny Burke: That doesn’t really surprise me.
Elissa Freeman: “Oh my goodness, really? Come on, Alyssa, come on.”
Johnny Burke: Do they ever curse?
Elissa Freeman: I have not heard that.
Johnny Burke: I have heard that
Elissa Freeman: No, but definitely frustration. There’s been a number of very strange things. There was one recently where, two years ago, I had heart surgery, and it took me quite a while to recover from that. I spent a lot of time meditating ’cause I was on my back for probably most of 18 months. I was told by all the health experts that I should be moving my body. And I should be doing, you know, exercise. But I was just so exhausted I couldn’t. And so I went into meditation, and I met my spirit guide and I was having a whinge about not being able to do anything for my body. And I was just lying around all the time. And my spirit guide said”, get down and give me 10″. And I was like, what? And they said.,”Get down and gimme 10 now. “And I went, what do you mean? In the meditation? “Yes, now. “
So in the meditation, I was visualizing myself doing 10 pushups, and I was like, this is really strange, this is really weird. They said it doesn’t matter whether you’re doing it physically or you are doing it in your mind; you still get all the benefits from it. So I was, basically, told off for not using this incredible aspect we have, which is here in our visualizations.
Johnny Burke: So, does your spirit guide also have a sense of humor or not necessarily?
Elissa Freeman: Oh, yes. yes. Sense of humor, not anger, but frustration- usually at me. …
Johnny Burke: I kind of suspected that, and I brought this up with another speaker a while back. and I said, I can just imagine them watching me or one of my friends not learning a lesson and just looking at another spirit guide and shaking their head; this guy’s never going to get it. What are they doing now? Or literally throwing their hands up in the air, apparently that’s true. What kind of messages has your spirit guide given you, especially ones that help you in your current work?
Elissa Freeman: Well, my current work, it’s strongly linked; if I am working with a client and I’m coaching a client, I’m doing some therapy with them, and perhaps there’s something I can’t quite connect with or I can’t quite work out. Then I can also use meditation for that, going to my spirit guide and just say, how can I help this person? And often, I’m told exactly what I need to help them with. Or they might say that’s not even the problem. It’s way underneath that. The reason why you can’t work it out is because that’s not the problem. Or something like that. So I am definitely guided to help my clients or they benefit from not just what I’ve learned in my studies, but also to that deeper level as well.
There was once before I was a coach, I was a fashion designer where I had this huge studio where I was making things. I had my machines, rolls of fabric, and everything there. One day when I turned up at my studio, I found that my things had been stolen, a couple of rolls of fabric and some tools had been stolen. I was devastated. I was just, you know, I was working my way up into putting together a fashion show, and this was just catastrophic. And I turned around and went home, and felt very, very sorry for myself. Eventually, I went to my room, and I meditated and spoke to my spirit guide, and I just wondered, why did this happen to me? Oh, no, why? What’s the reason? And my spirit guide said. What? Don’t you want to know who took it?
Johnny Burke: Interesting.
Elissa Freeman: And I said, ” I can know that?” And my spirit guide said,” Yeah.” And I said, “Well, who took it? “And they mentioned a person’s name. And this was someone I’d met once or twice, and I was working in a coffee shop that came and repaired the dishwasher. For some reason, we got to chat, and they said, “Oh look, if you ever in this area, pop in, “and gave me their address. And for some reason, I kept that. And that was the person’s name
Johnny Burke: Did you confront them?
Elissa Freeman: I did. So I had their address, and it was actually in the same suburb as my studio. I had never been to the place before, so I found the place and knocked on the door. There was no answer. So I left a little note on the door. This is pre-mobile phones and the internet, of course. So I wrote on a note. I just dropped in to say hi. And I put that on the door, and I went back to the studio and went about my business. Now, about 45 minutes later, he turns up at the studio. He turned up, and he was gray in the face, and he took me aside, and he said,” Oh, I was really out of it a few nights ago, and I broke in here.” and I said, “I know.” “And I took your things.'” And he was like,” How did you know?” And I just said,” Oh, I just sometimes know these things. ” And apologized profusely and brought everything back to me. That’s just one particularly good example, but certainly, from that moment on, I have never doubted a word, and it has steered me very well.
Johnny Burke: Sounds like it, and what you were describing before, like how you help your clients, and you consult with your spirit guide to figure out what the real problem is. And often, it’s something that is, as you said earlier, that’s not the real problem. It’s beneath that. It sounds like a mediumship reading where a medium is using her guides and perhaps the sitter’s guides to see what’s really going on. Do you see a parallel there?
Elissa Freeman: I do, except when I speak with my spirit guide, I’m not with my client.
Johnny Burke: All right. Okay.
Elissa Freeman: So this is something that I’ll do before a session or something like that. Particularly if there’s a tricky one. Or sometimes, if someone doesn’t really want to share with me, which I’m perfectly fine with, I do a lot of work with people, and they don’t need to tell me the problem necessarily, but they can just say, I have a problem, and I can work with that. That’s sometimes enough. So I guess perhaps there are similarities; maybe it’s all one thing anyway. Who knows?
Johnny Burke: It could be. That leads me to the next question. I don’t think you consider yourself or brand yourself a medium, but you did eventually become a shamanic practitioner and a hypnotherapist. And what prompted you to learn about shamanism and become a practitioner?
Elissa Freeman: I think that I’ve been unknowingly practicing it always, so I think it’s been something that’s just in me. it wasn’t until later in my life with my readings, you know, just, just research and reading, that I found that what I did and what shamans do tend to be fairly similar. I’ve studied shamanism from all different cultures, so I don’t connect to one particular culture, it’s more of a general thing, but basically, for me, a shamanic practitioner can connect with spirit and can interpret symbols and signs, et cetera, things like that, which I’ve been always doing. I only recently put a name to it because I’d been searching for a word I guess, that encompassed everything that I did anyway. and that one seems the closest.
Johnny Burke: You don’t really dabble in mediumship then?
Elissa Freeman: No, not really.
Johnny Burke: Mediumship and shamanism often overlap. I interviewed someone recently who is both. She does both. And there are certain things that she said a shaman can do that a medium can’t always do, so I thought that was really interesting. So, let’s talk about dream analysis. How is that part of your work, how did you discover it, and are you using it?
Elissa Freeman: Oh wow. Well, for a start, the reason why I use it is because it is immensely powerful. Dream analysis and hypnotherapy tend to go hand in hand really nicely because both of those things tap into that universal knowing. The universal knowledge that we are a part of. There’s no separation between us and spirit. It’s, we are part of it, and we are just part of us, and we are all one. Sometimes, that’s hard to get our head around. We can understand that intellectually not necessarily fully get it. And the reason for that is because we’re in our physical body.
But in regard to dream analysis, because we’re in this physical body and we have logic and all of this, we don’t often get to hear what our unconscious or universe- I see it as one- is telling us. We constantly have guidance; constantly if we are willing to see it, and it’s everywhere around us all the time. Some people might hear, okay, I’ve got the spirit guide that I can see. Not everyone has their guidance like that. That’s just how mine works. Whether that’s the same or different to anyone else, I don’t know. But I do know that we all get messages that guide us all the time. And dreams are one way that our unconscious will give us messages. It goes through filters, though. So, there are sometimes different filters like our beliefs, our upbringing, and our programming.
And there are all these things that this unconscious, pure unconscious message, which might be something like “you are powerful beyond measure. “The unconscious says, okay, I want you to know this, and it pops it up, but it goes through these filters of humanness, and these filters change the message into symbols, and it might pop up. One of the most powerful filters we have is our culture really changes. If this is one of the things dream analysis. If you’ve got a dream analysis book or you tend to look up your dream symbols online, I’d suggest you throw the book out and don’t look up those symbols. And I know some people might go, oh my goodness, that’s pretty full on.
Johnny Burke: You’re saying don’t look up the symbols. Question about dreams; What do you make of the dreams where you see a family member or friend who passed on in your dreams; I’ve been told many times it is them, but other people seem to doubt that, and they think no, that’s just a figment of your imagination; it makes no sense. How do you know if it is indeed them or if it’s just your imagination? Is there a way to do that?
Elissa Freeman: Yeah, so it could be one of two things. It could be them. It also could be that the message going through these filters that I was just mentioning changes into the visual experience of the memory of that person. Regardless, the message is still vital. That’s what’s important. And when it pops up, when this message, let’s say this, you are powerful beyond the message, and the universe pops it up, and it goes through their human filters, and perhaps in one of those, it may actually be a visual of that person who’s passed on. That’s possible. Right?
And once we get through all these filters, it might pop up as the visual of that person saying this thing to us. “You are powerful beyond measure.” Or it could be something that’s not those words at all. It could pop up as something like, a dog that’s sitting by your feet. What does that dream mean? But if you looked up dogs on the internet or in your dream analysis book, it might not be right for you because of these different filters that we have in our humanness. An example of this is, let’s just say you’ve got two people who both dream of a dragon.
One’s cultural background is Chinese, and one cultural background is British. And you are going to get very different meanings. That person, when they analyze it will be very different. Perhaps the Chinese person would see that as a very lucky symbol and there’s going to be something very fortunate. Whereas perhaps the person with the British background might see that as something like a danger. They’re polar opposites. This is why looking up the symbol of the Dragon is going to be really just the author’s interpretation.
Johnny Burke: Right, and it’s not necessarily going to be right for you.
Elissa Freeman: No, no. So that’s what’s important.
Johnny Burke: How about when you dream about a person or a very familiar place? You know them, but when you wake up and that fogginess for about 30 seconds passes, you think, who was that girl? I know her, but I’ve not met her. What is that?
Elissa Freeman: There can be a few different things here. It could be an overlapping of time. So this is where you get prophetic dreams and Deja vu. So, with prophetic dreams, you dream it without symbols. It is clearly what it is. You dream someone’s going to call you today, someone out of the blue you never expected. You wake up, and they call you. That’s a prophetic dream. Some people have those, and some people don’t. It’s direct. Sometimes things like what you’ve explained are like Deja Vu, but perhaps in a dream? Maybe there’s some time overlap there.
Johnny Burke: When you say time overlap, are you talking about maybe a past or a future life? Because I’ve heard that too.
Elissa Freeman: I think that because we’re human and we have this relationship with time, I think that that relationship with time keeps us human and in our bodies. But I think universally, that doesn’t exist. But I think it must exist for us in our human experience.
Johnny Burke: When you say it doesn’t exist, what does not exist?
Elissa Freeman: The lineal time,
Johnny Burke: Oh, okay.
Elissa Freeman: The past, present, and future. The fact that they exist all at once. So I think when we have Deja vu or a dream, like you just suggested, you knew that person, but then you woke up and you realized you didn’t know them, perhaps you haven’t met them yet. Perhaps it’s that universally time exists, as one thing, not lineal as past, present, and future. But I think we need to experience, past, past, present, and future in our human experience.
Johnny Burke: One woman I interviewed said, “I don’t believe there’s past lives because they’re all happening at once. To put it in human terms, that was probably another life. Maybe one I’ve not actually experienced physically yet. Does that make sense?
Elissa Freeman: Makes perfect sense. And because you said that and you feel that, I would agree with you. Now, someone else has had that same experience, it might be different for them. This is why it’s such an individual thing. It’s a direct link from your unconscious, from the universe to you. That’s why no one else can tell you what your dream means. I use processes with my clients where they can have a dream, and I’ll say, focus on your dreams. They’ll come to me with a dream, and then we’ll analyze it. Their symbols are theirs. I help them put the pieces together. But their symbols are theirs because it’s so unique. So if you had that experience in your dream that you felt was a past life or another present life, you want to see it
Johnny Burke: Another, present life in a different dimension? It felt very real, and it’s not the first time that’s happened. I was always really interested in that, and since you brought up dream analysis, I figured things like that have to come up with your clients.
Elissa Freeman: I think it’s really, really interesting that you say that too Johnny because, if that’s happened more than once, and it might, it’s a recurring theme, then what is happening there without a doubt is that you are being told something. You haven’t got it yet, so whatever the message is in there, it has to come back a few times and recur because it’s really important. And number two, you haven’t quite got it all yet.
Johnny Burke: And one of my shaman friends said something similar to what you just said: that is a recurring thing for you. It’ll eventually be revealed what that is. I’m not saying I had the same dream about the same girl, but dreams where a place or a person are really familiar.
Like, I remember one day I woke up, I thought, who was that? I got to find a way to get in touch with her, and then I thought, oh, that was a dream. I just think it’s very interesting how you do that, and you do the shamanic practice. Shamanism is really old. It’s probably the oldest mystical practice. What is it like? 30, 40,000 years old or older?
Elissa Freeman: Well, I think it is. This is the beginning of humankind.
Johnny Burke: Yeah, it could be. Yeah. Okay. What are the biggest takeaways from your experiences with spirit guides shamanism and Dream analysis? Are they all paths that wind up on the one path or not necessarily?
Elissa Freeman: I think there’s so much we don’t know. We are vast and immense, but our knowledge is so limited that, to answer your question to honestly, who knows? What I think is important is that if you get a sense of that, if that works for you and if that’s helping you. Then that’s what’s important because I believe that we are here to do good. We are here to make this world a better place for sure. However that comes to us, it is part of that whole big picture. The techniques are less important. Then what the outcome will be. The technique is just a tool that we use; the real focus here is on how they’re used and what difference they can make. It’s how the Universe connects with you.
[Johnny Burke: If we are listening to our spirit guides, ‘ I’ve been told many, many times, everyone has them, sometimes more than one. That is a way for us to connect with universal knowledge that we can all have access to. Right?
Elissa Freeman: Absolutely. But know, if people hear this interview and go, oh, I need to see this and hear this. It may not be how you are being guided. It could be through your dreams; it could be through the symbols that you see. It could be when you are walking down the street and there’s a crack in the footpath that pops to you and then you can work out from what that means in your life right then and there. It could be that little feather that you see. It could be the reflection of the clouds in the high-rise buildings, or glass windows. It doesn’t always necessarily need to be nature or necessarily in meditation. I just have an experience. Some people may have something similar, but you all have guidance. Everyone on planet Earth has that guidance, and sometimes it’s just simply that heart feeling or gut feeling.
Johnny Burke: The gut feeling of intuition, right?
Elissa Freeman: Many different ways that the messages come to us. And everyone has, I guess, their way that connects them with universe. That’s this whole big picture. Like I said, the tools are less important, but the message is what’s vital.
[Johnny Burke: Messages. Okay. So, how do you see the role of spirit guides evolving in the future? I mean, do you ever think we’ll see holistic medical buildings that have shamans and mediums and energy workers and spirit guides on floor two where you can talk to them? And I’m exaggerating a bit, but do you see the knowledge and the acceptance of these beings actually progressing, or not necessarily?
Elissa Freeman: I think it’s progressed so much in the recent past that it’s a logical progression and I can’t see it ever going backwards. Well, I think that science is starting to play a really powerful role here because finally, science has actually been doing studies on some of these more obscure tools and finding the truth in them. Years ago, meditation was, you know, nothing, and now they’re realizing how incredibly powerful it is for helping people with PTSD and anxiety and all different things that they’re now doctors are recommending, you know, only 10 years ago they wouldn’t have. So I think this is going to be a natural progression. It’s very exciting.
And I also think not everyone realizes it. And you think, okay, where do these spirit guides come from? Are they just people like you, Johnny, who have collected a life of all these podcasts that you’re doing, all this information that’s going into you; what’s to say that when you are a spiritual being, you’ve let go of your shell, you physical shell, that you are going to be guiding others? Who’s to say that’s not your whole purpose? It’s not just for this life. You are actually preparing.
Johnny Burke: I’d be a pretty snarky spirit guide, though, and I would probably get frustrated and get a little irritated with people who weren’t really taking my messages. But as people become more spiritually aware. Thinking that, from all the discussions all of us have had about ascension and raising our vibe, at some point in the future, people are going to say, “Of course, you have a spirit guide. Have you not been paying attention in school?” Is that like decades or centuries off in the future?
Elissa Freeman: I think that that is starting to happen already, and things like what you are doing are vital. It’s really difficult for me to predict that. I certainly hope, and I do believe that that is going to happen. Yeah. It’s happening already. Definitely, there are huge changes, and you talk to youth; when I talk to my kids and my kids’ friends, it is so different now. They’re so much more aware. I think that we really have to bank on that happening because we have to change the world has to change. There’s a lot that’s wonderful.
Johnny Burke: Here in the States, there are a lot of non-great things happening. We’re not going to go into that, but you’re right; it does have to change.
Elissa Freeman: And what we can do is do our very best to follow those feelings, follow our spirit guide. The spirit guide would never tell you to do anything that is harmful to you or others. You can follow that, knowing that is the truth. And that is a powerful message for you if you did get a message that told you to do something that was harmful to you or others, but that’s not your spirit guide. That’s not universal knowledge.
Johnny Burke: Good point. …
Elissa Freeman: Yes. So I think that that this is something that is, definitely we are going to see far, far more of. I don’t know about other places in the world, but when my mother was a psychic- she’s passed on now,when she was doing her psychic work, that was when I was a child. So when, as I was growing up through my childhood and teen years, mum was reading all the time, but it was secret. It was something that my mother said, don’t you ever tell anyone that I read.
Johnny Burke: That’s not true now though.
Elissa Freeman: No, it’s not true now because she was concerned she’d be arrested and jailed. This is just in my lifetime, seeing this. When people would call her up and want a reading, basically, it was only through recommendation; who recommended you? And it wasn’t someone she knew and trusted she wouldn’t read for them. Because it was illegal and punishable by law, and so we’ve really, in just my lifetime, I’ve seen it come. Yeah, well, I don’t know what it was like in other parts of the world, but this is Australia. We’ve come a lot further now. Now, of course, people can advertise their services and put it on social media. We can have these kinds of conversations.
Johnny Burke: Psychics and mediums are very common. Now. There’s a book for those of you who are curious called The Medium Explosion; it’s written by a man named Bob Ginsburg, who runs the Forever Family Foundation, which, among other things, actually tests mediums; tests them, and certifies them. The book is meant for that person who wants to explore finding a medium to get a reading from, but to be wary of the pitfalls and the things that they need to know about. So, it’s definitely good stuff. Elissa, thanks for coming onto the show tonight. great information, especially about the dream analysis. In the meantime, how can our listeners
find you online?
Elissa Freeman: Oh, it’s been great to be here. Thank you so much. And for your work, Johnny, the work that you do is so important, so I’m really, really happy to be here. So, yeah, if listeners want to connect, they can go to my website, which is elissafreeman.com au. Or on Instagram, which is Alyssa j Freeman.