Spirit Untethered: A Psychotherapist’s Journey from Terminal Cancer to Seeing the Dead

By Suzanne Grace Maiden

When you lose a loved one, the pain can feel unbearable, but what if you knew that the spirit of your loved one lived on? Author, psychotherapist, and psychic medium Suzanne Maiden can answer that—six months before she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, she began to see dead people.

In Spirit Untethered, Maiden recounts heartwarming stories of the deceased communicating messages of comfort and joy to loved ones left behind. Drawing on wisdom gleaned from both her own dance with death and her journey of mediumship, she illuminates the deathless nature of spirit and reveals that love is the vibration that links our world and spirit realms. If you’re a skeptic or have ever wondered whether death offers a deeper meaning, then this heartfelt memoir serves as a reminder and gift for you.

This personal narrative presents a collection of stories of spirit contact, shared by a woman whose experiences with cancer opened her to spiritual connection beyond her imagination.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9781982206536

Suzanne Grace Maiden

Suzanne Maiden is a psychotherapist specializing in grief and shock loss. She draws on her diverse experiences to help people heal. A wife, mother, and air force veteran, she enjoys cooking, gardening, and being in nature. She particularly loves flying in small airplanes with her husband and son to appease her wanderlust spirit. She currently lives in Peachtree City, Georgia.

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Copyright © 2018 Suzanne Grace Maiden.

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This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

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ISBN: 978-1-9822-0652-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-0654-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-0653-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018907456

Balboa Press rev. date: 10/29/2018

CONTENTS

Foreword by Barry Williams, PsyD

Introduction by Marjorie Woollacott, PhD

Chapter 1 The Call

Chapter 2 First Contact

Chapter 3 Diagnosis: Terminal Cancer

Chapter 4 The Naked Medium

Chapter 5 Animal Spirits

Chapter 6 Discouraging Friends and Unexpected Support

Chapter 7 Spirit Is Relentless

Chapter 8 Believe

Chapter 9 Signs

DEDICATION

For my heavenly father.

And, for Spirits who gifted me with concrete evidence and demonstrated that death is an illusion.

May these pages help broken hearts heal.

FOREWORD

by Barry Williams, PsyD

I met Suzanne and became her analyst seventeen years ago. At the time, she was still recovering from a major surgery to remove a large, deadly sarcoma from her midsection. Though her initial prognosis was somewhat optimistic, it went sharply downhill statistically after five years, and presently, she is living with a stage IV cancer diagnosis. The fact that she is still alive, vital, creative, and enthusiastic, filled with an understanding and wisdom about life, death, love, and meaning, is due in no small part to her spiritual experiences: namely, the unfolding revelation of the presence of the spirit world and the message of love and the continuity of life and death that she has been asked to convey.

I have had the privilege to bear witness to Suzanne’s deep, intense, and authentic journey of transformation—which has opened her inner eyes, ears, and heart to their living presence of the other world and its spirit inhabitants. Facing the grimmest diagnosis that pushed her beyond the threshold of the personal life, she has been opened to the message of enduring love. These unbidden messages come through to her and give life meaning, hope, and integrity; they provide great continuity and relatedness with all things. Suzanne’s process certainly encompasses what C. G. Jung referred to as the process of individuation.

A sure sign what Jung called this process of individuation is working in your life is the lack of clear, discernable pathways between where you started in childhood regarding your family and where you find yourself as an adult. That refining process of becoming profoundly and uniquely who you most inwardly are often requires you to leave behind old assumptions and expectations of life—particularly those that were placed on you by outer realities such as family, society, education, church, or culture. You do this in order to follow another path—another voice—which urges you to move toward and claim your truer nature.

Both Suzanne’s life story and this book that catalogues her journey invite us to move our awareness out of its comfortable home and into an expanded world. Within this world, the spirits of our ancestors want to find a way to communicate with us. They want to deliver important messages about the nature of life, death, and love. If we tend to make the mistake of thinking life is concrete, sensate, and rational, or that what you see is what you get, we may miss it. We may miss the miracles right in front of us because they cannot be defined by the rational and thinking mind.

We live in a spirit-filled universe whether we know it or not, or whether we want to know it or not. It can reveal itself to us from the outside, objectively through our perceptions, or inwardly, through intuition, dreams, an inner journey—or, in Suzanne’s case, the increasingly audible voices of the spirit world.

Oftentimes, these abilities begin with sacrifice and an initiatory process. For Suzanne, this involved a set of shocking traumatic deaths followed by nearly two decades of living with an ongoing, unfolding, metastatic cancer. These events took her out of her old life and forced her into a reality that she did not ask for or want.

Her personal story is noteworthy in itself, but what is truly extraordinary is the measure to which a mythic or archetypal pattern plays itself out through her, allowing, motivating, and defining her journey from what she would describe as a country club housewife to one who sees, one who hears, one who bridges the worlds of life and death, matter and spirit, one who brings the message that our waking, anxious world is so hungry to hear.

I believe it is safe to say that Suzanne’s gift of communication with the world of the dead derives in large part from her dominant dream motif. She has given me permission to reveal that she often dreams about snakes, and I think this tells a lot about her experience. Serpent symbolism is extensive and mysterious and goes in many different directions at once—it could indicate healing, aspects of the goddess, instinctual energies, guarding the treasure, the world from below, and much, much more. In this case, I believe the motifs of temptation, wisdom, and the primordial aspects of nature are the most important.

The serpent in the biblical Garden story, from a psychological perspective, is about the invitation toward consciousness. This consciousness is necessary for development and is in fact part of the unfolding drama of how the human world interacts with the reality of the divine world. The snakes in Suzanne’s dreams represent a similar calling that beckons her out of a state of unconsciousness and toward the path she is to follow, no matter the difficulty or the hardships. Seen from this angle, Suzanne’s gift is not the devil’s work—though some have suggested as much. Rather, it is an invitation to come into relationship with mystery.

Another aspect of the serpent imagery that is important here is wisdom. The wisdom of the serpent is the wisdom of nature. What the serpent knows is what nature knows, what the primordial unconscious knows. It has to do with an understanding that is so far beyond human cognition that it appears in the guise of a being that is nearly incomprehensible to humans. This being holds crucial knowledge that cannot be articulated. This knowledge is the third important aspect of serpent symbolism to help understand Suzanne’s gift and calling. We might call it an embodiment of the knowledge of the way things are. The dreams of snakes are thus an expression of a reality that seems mysterious, uncanny, or even frightening but which indicates that we have arrived at a deeper understanding than the rational mind can attain. The serpent world comes over and over to express to the dreamer what she cannot know but must relate to, and often by threatening her life.

The archetypal energies and patterns of initiation also play an important role in Suzanne’s journey. Individuation requires a series of initiations throughout life. Initiation always entails a separation from a static, accustomed life, the crossing of a threshold, and a reincorporation into a new status of consciousness. The initiate possesses a new level of wisdom that arises from the suffering this process entails, and this wisdom serves to change their very identity. Of course, Suzanne’s cancer has been a strong and singular motivating agent of initiation for her. It has lifted her out of her old identity; dismembered her both through surgeries and through a profound humbling by a disorienting, threshold liminality; and pieced her back together, not in the body so much as in her new orientation to the other world of the talking spirits.

What the serpents know cannot be transmitted through her until she crosses the threshold of the suffering of what she faces as an embodied being. The veil could not have been thinned enough for her to see and hear the messages of the dead had she not left her old corporeal reality and been forced into a new one. It is as if the spirits, like a dream, came to her unbidden, perhaps both pushing her across the threshold and seizing upon her when she emerged, so as to make her one of them; both allowing and demanding that she become a spirit speaker, the instrument of a message it is now time to hear.

Another helpful concept for an appreciation of Suzanne’s development as one who sees is the mythic theme of the hero’s journey. This journey of ego development that separates and differentiates the hero from the unconscious begins with a call to transformation. If the call is accepted, there is a passage through ordeals and ultimately the acquisition of the treasure of life. A deeper understanding of the hero’s journey, seen and experienced as a personal struggle, is the dawning awareness that you are being initiated by forces that are much greater than your ability to understand them. If you surrender and submit to this deeper process, another world opens to you, and it holds the promise of great meaning and fulfillment.

This is the nature of Suzanne’s path. Certainly, her hero’s journey to acquire her credentials as a therapist moved from her ordinary reality, though her studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute for a master’s degree, and on to licensure. But at the same time, she lived a hero’s journey through her confrontation with another force—one with whom she could not negotiate, no matter how much she doubted or struggled or denied it. It pushed her and nudged her even as she tried to keep her inner spirit story secret. Cancer pushed her, dreams pushed her, her emerging abilities and gifts as a therapist pushed her, and all the while, the spirit world would not leave her alone.

In the end, her true hero’s journey has been her willingness to submit to an initiation she was helpless to avoid. It’s as if she’d made a bargain: if she fought the call, it would kill her, and if she submitted to it, it would keep her alive and give her a new life—but in either case, it would be the end of the only life she’d known.

Her ability to hear that message has only resulted from her surrender to a process that promised to take her life—but which, at the same time, seems to be preserving it, perhaps even only for the sake passing the message along. For the most part, we cannot understand the demands that the totality of our being, the God nature of our lives, or the spirit world makes on us. We can only bow to the enormity and trust deeply that the path we’ve been set upon is the crucial path of our individuation journey; the one that promises us our destiny and that makes us into who we most inwardly are.

Spirit’s consistent message to Suzanne, and therefore to all of us, is actually quite simple: death itself is illusory. Love binds us all together. It is love that tethers us through the great cycle of life. The messages contained in the following pages are for all who question the cyclical nature of life and death, including the greatest question of all: if life continues after the body dies.

Barry S. Williams, M. Div., PsyD

Diplomate Jungian Analyst

Mara`akame

INTRODUCTION

by Marjorie Woollacott, PhD

I first met Suzanne Maiden at the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) Conference in Colorado in August 2017, where I heard the story of how she awakened to her own psychic and mediumship abilities. I was intrigued. How surprising it is, at this point in my life, to find myself intrigued—rather than dismissing such an account out of hand, as I would have done years ago. Before I had my own spiritual awakening, I was in a state of absolute certainty about the material basis of life and dismissed paranormal experiences such as those found in meditation and mediumship.

You may be wondering why Suzanne asked me, a neuroscientist, to write an introduction to her book—and why would I consider it. As a result of my own spiritual journey, I now have great uncertainty about the material basis of reality and curiosity about paranormal or spiritual phenomena. I have learned that it is only when we are uncertain about aspects of reality that we are curious enough to be intrigued by other possibilities.

As I noted above, I am a neuroscientist, specializing in