While I’ve been on radio shows which have been archived as podcasts, I was honored to be a guest for the first time on a proper podcast. I was interviewed by Gene “Bean” Baxter, of the legendary “Kevin and Bean” morning show that was on KROQ in Los Angeles for 30 years. Which is like a lifetime – in life and radio.
I’m honored that as of this week, the Go Beyond Here podcast joins Gene’s podcast on the new Podcast Radio network in the U.K., where a potential of 13 million radio listeners in London, Surrey, Manchester and Glasgow can listen to my spiritual conversations with singer-songwriters/composers. The episode with Gene where we kibbitzed about these metaphysical topics that I talk about on my music podcast airs Friday on Podcast Radio.
This seemingly vast and scary world can be small sometimes, especially in radio, and I was thankful that Gene and I had a mutual friend in radio, someone I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. Our friend’s wife brought me a gift, an apron, from their U.K. vacation years ago and I’ve been thinking about that apron, and – if I move across the pond, do I take all my stuff?
I’d like to think this mutual radio friend was still being a blessing – being helpful in this small way, from the Other Side, doing a mitzvah, just by opening the door and connecting me with someone who not only made it in Los Angeles radio in a legendary way, but is an inspiration in probably a more important way for me now, since Gene recently moved to the U.K. for Act 2. It can be scary to move to a new place where you don’t know anyone, but it’s also what makes life a great adventure for exploration of a new region, as well as of oneself. Even for a troglodyte.
I don’t know anyone else who made this same move, and at that later time in life, so Gene is my role model for this, a move I hope the universe opens for me as well. Everyone needs an Act 2. I recall in my conversation with someone I always love talking to – Air Supply’s Graham Russell, whose episode will air soon on Podcast Radio. His guardian angel from the Other Side showed a book with two halves for Graham, to which he agreed was how he felt about his life as well. The first half was his Air Supply career and the second half is what he’s doing now – composing music for Broadway-type musicals.
Sometimes in life, after waiting for something or someone to come into our lives that isn’t going to come, we need to create our own new chapter, to create new energy, so that a new situation that is positive, or new people who value you as much as you value them, can happen. It reminds me of what I thought was the all-time best song title, “Waiting for My Real Life to Begin,” by Colin Hay, because who hasn’t felt that way ?
Life can be scary – to go where you’ve never been, but that fear is exactly part of the excitement that tells us we’re alive, here in this human experience. That healthy fear and discomfort is where spiritual growth happens. And many of us have chosen these lives, these story lines we’re carving out as our life paths, to grow spiritually and not just be rest lives. When you don’t stretch yourself, it’s not living, is it?
I didn’t know I’d be interviewed by Gene at first, I thought I was giving him a private reading, doing a mitzvah, as I’ve done for many of my friends in radio and entertainment. But when I realized I was going to be a guest, and that he’s a skeptic, I thought this will be fun. Since I assume by virtue of what I do spiritually, people wouldn’t exactly think of such a person to be a curmudgeon or a skeptic, which I am on both counts. Proudly, in fact.
While I never listen back to a show that I’m the guest of on radio, because the cringe factor is too great, I did listen to this conversation with Gene (albeit, cringing) where he starts with the opening line, “You’re about to hear possibly the most memorable interview I’ve done here…” It was such an honor to be talking across the pond to this radio legend and to hear that, but cringe! And I was glad he prefaced my journalism credit, as this spiritual stuff I do is still fairly new compared to my writing career, and I find it easier to swallow when I preface that I’m a writer first, as my first guest British singer-songwriter Daniel Cainer wisely pointed out to me. My conversation with him, along with Cherie Currie’s and Crystal Gayle will re-air this weekend.
We touched on past lives, my favorite topic it seems, only because this was what blew the spiritual door wide open for me. A topic that I protested for years, rolling my eyes at any mention of the word “reincarnation.” Although it’s curious, I still never use that word. We went over something I’ve discussed with people on the spiritual path who also study past lives for example – karma debt. In all the years of doing past life readings and witnessing the many past life regressions on myself and others, I once asked the team of guides straight up during a regression about that since people often think we have to pay a debt to someone from a previous life. It’s the butt of jokes as well as material for songs I used to listen to on loop, like one famous one by the Indigo Girls. The guides’ reply to my inquisition was, “You see with your own eyes that every past life we go over is self-contained.” The life lessons we choose to learn, the roles we choose to play for others (whether tangentially for their story lines or as a primary player), these story arcs we choose as our life paths are self contained, there isn’t another life later where we pick up and say, “Oh, I have to pay person A back from life A because of yada yada…”
We also touched on pet readings in the episode with Gene, and yes, as a self-proclaimed non-pet person, it’s surprising to me the depth and time some pet readings go into, living or from the Other Side. I am continually amazed at what the messages are from the spiritual side of this physical plane we live on.
At the end, Gene asked one of the most interesting questions I’ve heard someone ask (it makes sense though, since, he has been doing this for decades) – when you die and find out there is no Other Side, no Heaven, that you’re just in the ground, how would you feel? I said, even if I wanted that part to be true, you could just blink and be in another plane. You may not even realize you left this body – which can happen, for example, if it’s a quick, unexpected passing. Although there is a longer version to that, which is, we often accumulate many layers of gunk – layers of lies, to others and ourselves, while we are here, and those layers of lower vibrational energies are heavy. And if one isn’t honest with oneself, or is always easily lying, even white lies, these layers are felt as our soul tries to unburden itself from these shells we call “bodies.” Which is why it’s so important to be honest to ourselves and others, to not have the heavy layers that are not good for our souls, since that can be a very tough time when we have to extract ourselves from our bodies when it’s time to go.
But my answer to his question is the very reason I begrudgingly now do a podcast that my radio friends have been pushing me for years to do – that we use the gifts we brought with us in this life to be of service. Hopefully these conversations about the spiritual plane can be of service to others, as I say in every one of my podcast episodes.