September 18, 2025 • 37 mins
Last week, my guest was Oscar Arias, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and former President of Costa Rica, who brought peace to Central America. This week, I continue to prove that Chatter That Matters has no boundaries, only journeys of those who overcome, who chase, who change their world and ours for the better.
My guest is Rima Berns-McGowan, a woman who has devoted her life to making the world a better place. She has walked many paths—scholar, author, community builder, politician and then made one of the most unexpected and courageous pivots imaginable: leaving politics to become a Medium connecting those who live here with those who have departed.
What ties it all together is her conviction in tikkun olam, a jewish concept meaning reapir of the world. Whether through evidence-based research, community activism, or channelling messages of love and healing from those who’ve passed, Rima’s life is devoted to building inclusion, belonging, and hope.
In this conversation, we explore:
How her family’s escape from apartheid South Africa shaped her identity and lifelong quest for justice.
The lessons she’s learned from academia, politics, and the people she’s served.
Why she believes our ancestors never leave us, and how as a Medium she can help bring messages from the other side that brings healing and forgiveness.
What her journey teaches us about choosing good over cynicism, compassion over division, and possibility over despair.
Suspend disbelief. Open your heart and listen to the many wonderful messages from Rima Berns-McGown, the Medium.
Presented by RBC, because they believe in stories of human possibility.
To learn more about Rima: IG - @rimabernsm or rimabythesea.com
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:05):
If you followed this show for some time, you know that Steve
Paikin has been a guest. I actually interviewed him live.
He's just a remarkable individual. He's become a close friend. And
on his new podcast, which I love, he had this guest on
Rima Burns McGown. The connective tissue
for me is genuinely, how do I make the world
(00:27):
a better place? Who was as expected because his
roster often includes politics, was an MPP in Ontario. Being
Canadian is, in fact being open
to integration of people who come from somewhere else.
But she switched courses midstream to become a
medium, someone that connects the people on the planet,
(00:50):
the people that have left them. I connect. There are a series of
steps that I go through to say, okay, spirit, I'm ready to work.
I knew I had to have her on the show. I just finished interviewing. We
spent an hour together. I could have spent the rest of my life talking to
her. She's so much beauty and good that works through
her. I think if we just all were able to be still and
(01:12):
quiet and feel inside for that good it is
there. All of us are capable of it, and we're capable
of connecting to it. And there is a greater
good. I am absolutely convinced of it. Last week,
if you listened to the show, it was on Oscar Arias, Nobel Peace Prize
winner and his life's quest and why I called the show Give Peace a
(01:34):
Chance. Well, I'm calling this show Give Good a Chance.
I hope you listen to all of it, suspend your disbelief
and just think about what she has to say,
who she is and why she's here. The quest to understand
what makes harmonious societies work and
(01:54):
how do you actually create inclusion became
very central. She's here to talk about identity,
belonging, and following a calling that might
defy convention, might have many of you
immediately dismiss. But I can promise you that
her quest resonates with purpose.
(02:21):
Hi, it's Tony Chapman. Thank you for listening to Chatter that Matters, presented by
rbc. If you can please subscribe to the podcast and
ratings and reviews, well, they're always welcome and they're always appreciated.
Rima, welcome to Chatter that Matters. Thank you, Tony. Thank you for
having me. I believe this is without scientific
(02:43):
research, but just by doing so many of these episodes that so
much of who we are today began with who we were as
a little person in our family's homes. You probably don't have a
lot of memories of your family leaving South Africa, but I'm sure that many
stories have been shared. So give us some context of what life was
Growing up with a family that probably felt they were going to spend a life
(03:05):
in a certain country and then ends up across the world to Canada.
I was only four when we left. There are some very, very
nascent memories from the before time. A lot of
it got filled in afterwards. I do remember the
journey and the fear that my parents had, but there was
never a doubt that they were leaving because
(03:28):
apartheid was wrong. And my dad was
so disgusted, felt after the Sharpville
massacre that he had to get involved in the struggle. But it was a
time when people who did were being shut out of work
or they were jailed or murdered. And my mother said, you know,
you have two small children now, so you have to really think
(03:50):
about them. And my dad said, well, in that case we can't stay.
And Canada was a country that seemed to offer
freedom and promise and the opposite of what South
Africa was all about about it offered inclusion as opposed to
exclusion. And so it was very much with that dream in
mind that my parents left South Africa with me
(04:13):
and my 18 month old brother and never
having seen snow, managed to arrive in Montreal on the
20th of January. That dream of creating
a good life in a country that could make room for
everybody was at the heart of their
journey and very much became, to
(04:35):
your point, at the heart of mine. In an article, I think
it was called Transitions, you talk about mixed race ancestry, you talk
about Jewish and Cape colored, you talked about this layered identity.
And at the same time you talk about how inclusive Montreal was. And I'm
sure compared to South Africa it was night and day. But did you feel that
your family truly belonged? That we were all in this together, that
(04:57):
there was no sense of hierarchy or class system or
racism or bias. So in South Africa, my family had been
considered white. Three of my four grandparents were Jewish.
They had come from refugee families escaping pogroms in
various parts of Europe. My father's mother
was in fact Afrikaner and Cape colored,
(05:19):
a fact that she had to keep quiet under apartheid or her
marriage to my grandfather would have been illegal. However,
when we moved to Canada, I
experienced an enormous amount of both
antisemitism and anti black racism while I was
growing up. Because as light as my skin is, it
(05:42):
was significantly darker than that of my Scots Irish
classmates and teachers. So I experienced
all of that. The assumption was that I was mixed. And you know,
it was still very much a time when the one drop rule
seemed to matter and the sense that there was some
black in me seemed to taint me. And I
(06:05):
experienced an enormous amount of that it was hard to talk about with
my parents because they had this idea that they'd come to such a perfect
place. And I was told that I didn't belong and that I'd never amount to
anything. And therefore, the quest to understand
what makes harmonious societies work and
how do you actually create inclusion became
(06:28):
very central. You know, your academic studies, your published
works, were really about a world where that
utopia didn't exist. There wasn't that sense of inclusion in
society. How did you connect the dots and say, even what's going on
in this world, even what's happening in Montreal, even when I'm hiding from my
parents, there is still hope for cultures that can
(06:50):
live and work and prosper together, that we're all one human race.
I did my PhD in international politics,
and my thesis, which was published by the University of Toronto Press,
was the integration of Somalis and
the Somali community as Muslims. It was
a comparative study between London, England and
(07:13):
Toronto. What was really powerful about that work
was that I think it showed that when you allow people
to be themselves and you allow them to feel
at home fully, they will feel
very invested in the country that they have
moved to and they will make it home
(07:36):
and in a really beautiful way. And that it is so
much more powerful than alienating them and telling them
that you will never belong here. What are a couple of things
we could do as a society? Because I see us more divided than we've
ever been. Let's counter that. Let's talk about a couple of things that we could
be thinking, doing as a country to live the lessons you
(07:58):
identified in your PhD and subsequent work. It only takes
actually looking at the facts of what has happened in Canada,
as compared with many other immigrant receiving countries
where we did such a much better job of
defining Canada to its core as a country
(08:18):
that is really good at integrating people
from all over the world. That being Canadian is
in fact being open to
integration of people who come from somewhere else at a very
deep level that goes beyond the multicultural
notions of food and dance and superficial things like that,
(08:41):
but really, really deep understanding that
to totally take people in, to give them a seat at the
table, makes us stronger in every possible
way. It makes us more socially cohesive. It makes us
a more harmonious society, certainly makes a richer
society culturally, and it makes us a stronger society
(09:03):
economically. You took this very successful academic
career. You describe yourself in an interview as an introvert. The last
place I should be is in politics. But you decide to run Beaches
East York, which has happened to be Where I live as the mpp. Why
politics? It was really students of mine who, and I use
this word in the fondest possible way, bullied me,
(09:24):
cajoled me, begged me, entreated me,
and actually got me elected. Former students of
mine had become very good organizers, and they're the ones who effectively
made it happen. And when I
initially agreed, I was terrified. The reason
my students wanted me to try was because
(09:46):
they said, you have such a good way of
articulating why Canada is stronger when it works for
everybody, and why society is stronger when nobody's losing
and everybody is winning. And there were many things, to be
honest, that I loved about my. And they
included the community work, which I really loved.
(10:08):
But I also loved my work in the legislature. When I
used to stand up and speak to a bill, and I used to bring
in experiences from my research or my academic life
or my work with people in community,
I would notice that the government ministers, because I was, of course, in the opposition,
the government ministers would put their phones down and listen to me.
(10:30):
And then at the end of it, they would all say, we always learn something.
Remember, you're building currency in politics. Advocacy people, as you
said, even the opposition enjoy you there.
And yet you choose not to seek reelection. Not everybody
was in it. And I should say we're recording this on the day
that Ken Dryden's funeral is occurring.
(10:53):
And Ken Dryden is a person who did
everything that he did, including going into politics, for all the right
reasons. He wanted to make the world a better place. And I think that if
everybody did, then politics really would be a place
where you could accomplish those goals. But right now,
it's a very bitter, nasty, super
(11:15):
partisan kind of place. The partisan politics
and the nastiness really, really got to me. And after four years,
I just didn't want to do it anymore. You make one of the most
interesting career changes, and that's when you
decide that you're going to move from being a political force to an
intuitive medium. The connective tissue for me
(11:37):
is genuinely, how do I make the world a better place? The
Hebrew phrase is tikkun olam. How do I mend the world? How do
I work to do that? And that is something that I
have tried to do in absolutely every
phase of my. Of my life. I've always
been intuitive. That intuition has always been there.
(12:00):
When I was a little kid, it started to rear its head in
ways that were almost too much, and then it kind of goes
away, but then it pokes itself up from time to time. And
I noticed it when I was doing research. I was doing a research
project at some point where I was interviewing a lot of people
who'd come to Canada from conflict afflicted
(12:23):
places. And I did 220 interviews with people, one
on one. I suddenly realized that I knew what they were going to tell me.
Not in general terms, but quite specifically, I knew what they were going to tell
me, which made me a really good interviewer because I knew
how to craft the next question so that it felt like
they were safe. When I got into politics, of all
(12:44):
places, my intuition seemed to get stronger. It
kept me safe and it enabled me to help other people.
I remember one case where I was canvassing not for myself,
but for another person. You know when you're can, you're supposed to be at a
door for 20 seconds max or 30aminute, and then you're supposed to
leave. And there was just something about the fellow I was
(13:07):
talking to. We were standing outside his little stoop and I
said, how long have you been here and why did you come? And he said,
oh, you don't want to know. And I said, no, I really do. And those
words flew out of my mouth. And part of my brain is thinking, you do.
You're not supposed to ask that. You do. I sat down on his stoop
and listened to him for an hour and a half. And at the end of
(13:28):
it I said, you need to speak to somebody. Here's the name of a
professional. And then I went on my way. And
two years later, during COVID I was crossing the street in
a completely different part of the riding. And he came up to
me and he said, oh my gosh, it's you, Rima. I
have to let you know, you saved my life. Wow. I
(13:51):
called the person you said, I listened to her. I wasn't planning to stay here,
I was planning to exit the world. And because of you,
I'm still here. So towards the end of my time in
politics, I decided to actually go off and
figure out what was going on. How did I know these things?
How was I able to know these things? What was I picking up
(14:13):
on? What was happening? What senses was I using?
And because I come at this from such an
evidence based perspective, I,
and I think this is partly due to Covid was able to
find people online to take
classes from, very grounded people.
(14:36):
But if you do this work properly,
you're doing it. Evidentially, what I rapidly
discovered, there are in fact a lot of people with
big brains and PhDs who start
with a Very realist paradigm. And
with looking for evidence and have come to the
(14:58):
conclusion that if we're going to be honest,
materialism is a paradigm just like anything else. Right. And so
when there's evidence of things happening that don't fit with that, then
you use scientific methodology and you go and study it.
And so there's a lot of evidence for what you might
call paranormal stuff. There's a lot to
(15:21):
back up the work that I find myself doing now.
So I'm curious what you do, because you're dealing with people's lives. You're dealing
with people's hopes and dreams. You know, this is a path that you're taking people
on. I think there are really strong ethics
that have to surround this work. And if somebody isn't doing it
ethically, then there's a big problem. And I think you need to
(15:44):
stay away from folks who are not being ethical about it.
So let's start with the idea that we have more
senses than the traditional five. And I think that
all of us have had some kind of experience. All of us,
by dint of being human, have some form of
intuitive ability. I think another way that it
(16:06):
appears for a lot of people is when we've been looking for places
to rent or buy and we've walked into
an apartment or a house and we've just gone, oh, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no. It just doesn't. It might look okay. It just doesn't feel
good. Or we'll walk into a room and
people will be. There won't be anything obvious on their faces, but you
(16:29):
know, they've just had a fight. You can feel it. We are using
the senses that I'm talking about, so we'll get a gut sense about
something. Or sometimes we'll have a
premonition. The phone will ring and we'll suddenly know who it is.
Or we'll have a dream in which we have a dream that somebody. Something
happens. And then it turns out a precognitive dream. It turns out to be
(16:51):
real. So there are all these other senses and ways that we're picking up
information. When I am doing a
reading for somebody, I will meditate. I'll get
a picture in my mind's eye, not with my physical eyes. And
then I'll get a feeling of who this person is
as I'm talking to the person. The sense of
(17:14):
who the person is, the essence of who they are. I'm able to describe enough
of them that the person can recognize if I'm connected to the
right person. And the more that we talk, the
stronger that connection will come. The things that
I'm given as evidence are things that
I will often say, you just. You can't make this stuff up. You just
(17:36):
can't. It's too specific, and it's not
something that you can Google. And it's something that's
very much about the relationship of the person who's coming
in, the person in spirit, and the person that I'm talking
to. And then once they're connected and
you are able to actually have a meaningful
(17:58):
conversation, if you will, that's where healing can
happen. How do you compartmentalize it? If you've had these
experiences with people and then you try to go back
to a normal day, or is there such a thing as a normal day
for you? Because people realize that you're a potential
gateway and therefore they're knocking on your door? First of all, I should say
(18:20):
that after having done this for a few years, readings get organized
from up there. It's our people up there. The people here are
the ones who have this. You know what? I feel like I should try this.
And maybe she's a good medium and maybe I can trust her. So they're the
ones who book an appointment or reach out and say, can we talk?
But it's the person up there who's like, I have a thing to say.
(18:42):
And this is the medium who can hear me. Like, this is the medium who
can interpret for me. Because not everybody can read for everybody
else, just as not everybody can be a therapist for everybody. But at the
same time, I also have control over when
I connect and how I connect. It is very,
very. Back to ethics. It's very unethical
(19:04):
for me to walk up to someone in a grocery
store or on the street and say, hey,
someone is here who wants to say something to you.
That could be just devastating for them, or they may not be
prepared to hear it, or they may be afraid like you would. That's just
rude. But, Rima, I want challenge you on that for a sec, because you said
(19:26):
the people up there are the ones that coming to me. If
someone up there is coming to you in that grocery store, how is
it unethical for you to approach somebody and say that?
There's two things. The first is that I don't walk around in the
grocery store. Connected. I disconnect.
Okay. The other thing, though, is that I have a friend who
(19:48):
at some point reached out to me and she said, I never,
ever, ever want to be connected to my mom who has
Passed on. I never do. Is there anything that would
compel me to? And I said, absolutely not. You always have the choice to
say no. If her mother really wanted to talk to
her and walked up to, you know, tapped some medium on the shoulder
(20:11):
in a grocery store where she was and said, can you please tell her, blah,
blah, blah, and the person did, that would not be something
that my friend would welcome. Okay. What I do
find is often, for instance, I have had
times where someone has come to see me
not telling me who they want to connect with. Like, they've made the
(20:33):
appointment, but they haven't told me who in spirit they've
wanted. And I've said, okay, so the person
who's coming forward is your mom or your dad or your grandmother
or your brother or whomever. And the first thing out of their mouths is, I
need to apologize to you and I want to say
sorry. They're leading with that.
(20:55):
Often the person here will say, huh, that's
interesting. A year ago, I wouldn't have been ready to hear that, but now I
am. So there's a way that you can get that message across
to someone, but accosting them in the grocery store? Not a great idea.
Before we get back to this amazing store story, and there's so much more
(21:17):
to come, I want to take a moment to talk to you about
rbc. And by the way, I'm not compelled to do so.
This isn't part of their sponsorship. They're here for the same reason
I'm here. We want to share stories of positivity and possibility
and proving that even in times like this, we can overcome
circumstances, chase dreams. What I want to share with you
(21:40):
is a new campaign that they've created called you'd Deserve, starring
Will Arnett. And why this ad struck such an emotional
chord with me is, yes, we live in this very convenient world,
and our phone's this vending machine, and the world's within arm's reach of
desire. But there are times when we need to sit
face to face with somebody that cares. There's times when we need
(22:03):
advice, we need help. We need a place to share an idea
and to make our dreams come true. And this is what this ad
says to me, that the DNA of RBC is people.
People that are there to help you get to where you need, want, and
deserve to go. So here's this wonderful new campaign called you
(22:23):
Deserve. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. What
makes a bank more than a bank? It's more than products,
apps, ATMs, it's being there when, you know,
with real people and real conversations. Let's face it,
life gets real. RBC is the bank that we Canadians
turn to for advice, because at the end of the day, that's what you deserve,
(22:46):
a track record, not some trend. Your idea of banking that's
personal happens here. RBC ideas happen here.
We need everybody to not just crawl, but to toddle
and then to walk and then to run and then to sprint, because we need
everybody sprinting, teaching people, bringing everybody
(23:09):
along, because we're going to need every voice. My guest today is Reema
Burns McGown, academically trained, evidence
based, devoted part of her career to serving the public.
And now as a medium, what's the
most powerful thing that's happened when
you're this conduit or medium between somebody here
(23:32):
and somebody is no longer here? I'm not even sure you can say no longer
here, but some here in a different manner. I think when you do this work
for any length of time, you come to recognize
we are energy beings having a physical
existence, not the other way around.
We're always here in one form or another.
(23:54):
And I can give you so, so, so many
powerful examples. There was a
young man who came to see me about a month ago, and I said, is
there somebody particular that you want to connect with? And he said, yes, but I
don't want to tell you who because I don't want it to come from me.
And I'm like, absolutely fair. I said, well, I can feel a few
(24:14):
people, and the first and strongest person feels like a
maternal figure, mother or grandmother. And I gave him very
specific examples of what she was
saying she looked like and was wearing. And he said, oh, my goodness, yes,
that's my grandmother, and she used to wear that. And I said, she
wants to say that she's really sorry
(24:36):
for having given you a really hard time for not having gone
to church enough. And the other thing that she was doing, which was
really beautiful, and this was like, the evidential thing is like, I kept saying, there's
so much emotion for you, so much love. And he said
the very last thing that he saw her
doing was this when she was in hospice and couldn't talk
(24:59):
anymore. But the main thing she wanted to get across
was that the rules of the church that she had been
given to understand them, that she thought was so important
lest you end up going to the bad place, were
nonsense. She said when she got across to the other
side, all she encountered was love and
(25:20):
acceptance, and there was no sense of okay, you followed
enough rules, and therefore, that's just not what happens.
It's just all love. So we are talking and somebody else comes
in. And then I said, oh, my goodness, did you
lose a young person recently? And he just
was like, yes. And I said, okay, there's somebody here.
(25:43):
He's wrapped in like, white swaddling cloths, like he's being
healed. And he wants to say he's really
sorry for the pain that he caused you and his family.
And he is somebody who had taken his own life, had
chosen to leave. And he said, I need
you to know that when I crossed over, all I met was love.
(26:06):
And it mattered because this was a very strong Catholic
family. And the grandmothers having come through here
first to say those set of rules that you
don't get to be embraced into love if you've taken
your own life. They're nonsense. You'll be healed.
And it was just so
(26:29):
incredibly beautiful. Do you believe that you meet up with the people
in your past life when you go to this place, which is all love? I
mean, do you reconnect with family and friends?
100%. And the thing that I've also come to really have
a sense of is that our ancestors, our loved ones
who cross over never leave us. They're constantly there,
(26:52):
helping us, supporting us. At moments of
emotional poignancy, that connection is always there.
You know, it's interesting. My wife talks about her three angels, which are her two
dogs in her past life and her husband, who she
lost. And one day I'm driving. We just started seeing
each other probably a couple months in, and these three birds land
(27:14):
on my windshield wiper and stop and look at me, and they
stare. And they stare. They stare. They look at each other and fly away. And
I called my wife and said, the most crazy thing just happened. I'm driving home
and we just literally started to see each other. She goes, oh, those are my
three angels. They're here to check you out. What's your sense
of death? Has this changed your fear of death? I am not afraid
(27:34):
of it at all anymore. And you know that thing that happens when you wake
up at three in the morning and you. You start doing that little
existential hamster wheeling thing? I don't do that
anymore, ever. It's gone. Because I feel like I have such
a much stronger sense of connection
to the bigger picture, for want of a better word.
(27:56):
I think when we become disconnected from what is going on,
big picture, that's what that middle of the night sense of like,
ha is all about. And how do you feel about
human beings now that you've had a chance to talk about us
in a different state, where it's all about love and
kindness and forgiveness and I'm
(28:18):
sorry I gave you all that pain. How come we become such
different people when we're inside these human beings that we're
greed and power? And let's go back to the beginning of the show and what
got you out of politics and the nastiness and the divide takes over.
There seems to be a fair amount of evidence that we don't
do this only once. That we cycle in and out in
(28:42):
different bodies and different genders and different relationships
with each other. That we do it with
some other energy beings who are there in multiple
incarnations, if you will. It's like we're soul groups
and soul families. And we go in and out, and some of us
are in spirit, while others of us are having a physical
(29:04):
experience. And we sort of help each other. Because the point
of all of this is to grow your soul. It's to be
better. It's to learn to be less
greedy, less mean, less
nasty to each other. To just learn how to be better.
But the argument then would be, the longer we advance as a human race,
(29:26):
collectively, we should all be getting better. Because we're all
getting better at improving our souls.
But I would argue that this time in history, I don't see a
lot of improvement in the human race. I mean, Let Them Eat Cake and
Rome is Burning has come back into a whole new
manifestation now. I think about that a lot as well. I don't think
(29:48):
this is a linear thing. I don't think progress is linear.
The idea that if you don't learn from history, you're condemned to repeat it is
absolutely true. It's not a question of a collective,
like the whole human race learning something. It's
almost like we have to learn it as
(30:08):
individual souls. There's still a lot about
how the soul works that I don't begin to understand. Another
question I have for you. And, I mean, I could talk to you for a
week. Do you fall in love up there? Do you
have relationships up there? Or is that what makes you want to go back
to Earth? Because you don't have the same sense of
(30:29):
adventure with another person? I don't know. But I think
that love means something different when we're
not trapped in a physical body. And so we don't have the
same boundaries or jealousies or sense of
like, I can only love one person, or
they're gonna be jealous. When my mom
(30:52):
died, it was in the early 2000s, and my
dad was not a person who. He was deeply loyal to my mom.
He adored my mom. She adored him. They had a wonderful
marriage, but he was only in his early late 60s, so
he wasn't okay being alone. And he re met
this woman who was the widow of a childhood friend of his,
(31:15):
and they struck up a connection. He'd been an architect, she'd
been a teacher. They were both artists. He
ended up in New Zealand at my cousin's house, borrowing a
car and driving around New Zealand wondering whether
he could have a relationship with somebody else,
anybody else, and not be disloyal
(31:37):
to my mom and my dad. I love him to bits, and I just adore
him, but he was not a particularly. He wasn't always
a person who was full of insights about himself. But as he was sitting
on that beach, he suddenly had the understanding
that there was absolutely no way he could be disloyal
to my mom because after 45 years
(32:00):
of being head over heels in love with one another, she
was inside him. She was a part of him. And
so he was taking her with him into any other
relationship he had. And that's the spirit with which
he began the relationship with his partner.
And has his wife and your mom ever come
(32:23):
through you and said she's happy, that she's part of that? I am
absolutely certain of it. When my dad. My dad died
a year and about 15 months ago, he was in
London at his partner's place. And about 10 days before he
died, I went downstairs to make coffee, and he was in the next room,
and I could hear him talking to someone. And I said, papa, who are you
(32:44):
talking to? And he said, mama's here. Mama's here.
That's a common thing when people are close to passing, that they can
see somebody that they love from the other side. But it was
so clear to her and to me as
well, that she was the one who kind of popped that idea into
his head in the first place, that I'm not jealous because, like, I'm over
(33:07):
here. I want you to be happy. How about the survivor, though?
How about, you know, the one that he remarried and they painted
together and held hands together. And how does she feel now? Does
she feel she's lost him forever because he's going to go back to
his original wife? Or does it. I mean, because I'm always interested in the people
left behind as well. Again, I think that our
(33:29):
sense of connection and love is so Much
more expansive than we imagine it to be when we're here in
our fleshly bodies and we can only see things in kind
of narrow ways. And how do people that love
you and know you, do they relate to you differently?
Now that's almost like you can read my mind or
(33:52):
you're in a different plane than I am, or do they just appreciate
you for you? People just, just treat me
as me. And then if they have a question they will
sometimes ask me, they will say, hey, what do you think about this? How
easy is it to turn off that tap? Because I have to believe that. But
the stronger you get in the field, the more people up there are going,
(34:15):
this is a great gateway. This is somebody that has to have ethics, she has
a sense of humanity. Like, you know, there has to be quite a
backlog up there of people going, my turn. The best way to put the
answer is that I outsource the gateway.
I use the term spirit, but you can say God or
Allah or Adonai or creator, source,
(34:37):
whatever you want. I do believe there is a larger
force that is a force for good. And I
am doing this work in the service of spirit. There's a website,
but if somebody can't afford to pay, but I'm the right person to hear
them, they can reach out and message me. There
have been a number of people who've come to me through like really
(35:00):
interesting circuitous ways, but the people
in spirit have been really insistent that, that they
need me to connect with that person. And that's
happened. You know, Rim, I could talk to you forever, but
I always end my shows with sort of my observations. And
the first one is you truly are about good over evil.
(35:22):
Even when you're in politics and or writing in academia, it's all
about how can we create a world where nobody
loses and everybody wins. And then when you realize that when
you speak from evidence, people lean in and want to learn. And
that seems to have carried you across evidence based
academia right through parliament, when even the opposition
(35:44):
would lean in, as opposed to just dismiss you as some sort of left wing
person. Even today you give people two or three things
up front that relax them and realize that they're going to have a conversation
that's going to matter. I guess the final one lesson is
we really are here to represent good. The fact
that there is a force of good in this world, I think it's in everybody's
(36:06):
interest that we listen harder for it because it's easy to
believe it's disappeared because there's so much negativity coming at us today. There's so
much impossibility, so much sky is fine. But I think if we
just step aside once in a while and sit in that stoop like you did
with that person for an hour and a half and saved his life,
if we just sat and listened to the good more, I think we'd be
(36:29):
for our time on this planet, we would do a much better service to it.
Thank you. Thank you. That is. I'm near tears. That's really
beautiful. And I could not agree more. I think
if we just all were able to be still and quiet and
feel inside for that good, all of us are capable of it,
and we're capable of. Of connecting to it.
(36:53):
Once again, a special thanks to RBC for supporting Chatter that matters.
It's Tony Chapman. Thanks for listening and let's chat soon.
If you followed this show for some time, you know that Steve
Paikin has been a guest. I actually interviewed him live.
He's just a remarkable individual. He's become a close friend. And
on his new podcast, which I love, he had this guest on
Rima Burns McGown. The connective tissue
for me is genuinely, how do I make the world
(00:27):
a better place? Who was as expected because his
roster often includes politics, was an MPP in Ontario. Being
Canadian is, in fact being open
to integration of people who come from somewhere else.
But she switched courses midstream to become a
medium, someone that connects the people on the planet,
(00:50):
the people that have left them. I connect. There are a series of
steps that I go through to say, okay, spirit, I'm ready to work.
I knew I had to have her on the show. I just finished interviewing. We
spent an hour together. I could have spent the rest of my life talking to
her. She's so much beauty and good that works through
her. I think if we just all were able to be still and
(01:12):
quiet and feel inside for that good it is
there. All of us are capable of it, and we're capable
of connecting to it. And there is a greater
good. I am absolutely convinced of it. Last week,
if you listened to the show, it was on Oscar Arias, Nobel Peace Prize
winner and his life's quest and why I called the show Give Peace a
(01:34):
Chance. Well, I'm calling this show Give Good a Chance.
I hope you listen to all of it, suspend your disbelief
and just think about what she has to say,
who she is and why she's here. The quest to understand
what makes harmonious societies work and
(01:54):
how do you actually create inclusion became
very central. She's here to talk about identity,
belonging, and following a calling that might
defy convention, might have many of you
immediately dismiss. But I can promise you that
her quest resonates with purpose.
(02:21):
Hi, it's Tony Chapman. Thank you for listening to Chatter that Matters, presented by
rbc. If you can please subscribe to the podcast and
ratings and reviews, well, they're always welcome and they're always appreciated.
Rima, welcome to Chatter that Matters. Thank you, Tony. Thank you for
having me. I believe this is without scientific
(02:43):
research, but just by doing so many of these episodes that so
much of who we are today began with who we were as
a little person in our family's homes. You probably don't have a
lot of memories of your family leaving South Africa, but I'm sure that many
stories have been shared. So give us some context of what life was
Growing up with a family that probably felt they were going to spend a life
(03:05):
in a certain country and then ends up across the world to Canada.
I was only four when we left. There are some very, very
nascent memories from the before time. A lot of
it got filled in afterwards. I do remember the
journey and the fear that my parents had, but there was
never a doubt that they were leaving because
(03:28):
apartheid was wrong. And my dad was
so disgusted, felt after the Sharpville
massacre that he had to get involved in the struggle. But it was a
time when people who did were being shut out of work
or they were jailed or murdered. And my mother said, you know,
you have two small children now, so you have to really think
(03:50):
about them. And my dad said, well, in that case we can't stay.
And Canada was a country that seemed to offer
freedom and promise and the opposite of what South
Africa was all about about it offered inclusion as opposed to
exclusion. And so it was very much with that dream in
mind that my parents left South Africa with me
(04:13):
and my 18 month old brother and never
having seen snow, managed to arrive in Montreal on the
20th of January. That dream of creating
a good life in a country that could make room for
everybody was at the heart of their
journey and very much became, to
(04:35):
your point, at the heart of mine. In an article, I think
it was called Transitions, you talk about mixed race ancestry, you talk
about Jewish and Cape colored, you talked about this layered identity.
And at the same time you talk about how inclusive Montreal was. And I'm
sure compared to South Africa it was night and day. But did you feel that
your family truly belonged? That we were all in this together, that
(04:57):
there was no sense of hierarchy or class system or
racism or bias. So in South Africa, my family had been
considered white. Three of my four grandparents were Jewish.
They had come from refugee families escaping pogroms in
various parts of Europe. My father's mother
was in fact Afrikaner and Cape colored,
(05:19):
a fact that she had to keep quiet under apartheid or her
marriage to my grandfather would have been illegal. However,
when we moved to Canada, I
experienced an enormous amount of both
antisemitism and anti black racism while I was
growing up. Because as light as my skin is, it
(05:42):
was significantly darker than that of my Scots Irish
classmates and teachers. So I experienced
all of that. The assumption was that I was mixed. And you know,
it was still very much a time when the one drop rule
seemed to matter and the sense that there was some
black in me seemed to taint me. And I
(06:05):
experienced an enormous amount of that it was hard to talk about with
my parents because they had this idea that they'd come to such a perfect
place. And I was told that I didn't belong and that I'd never amount to
anything. And therefore, the quest to understand
what makes harmonious societies work and
how do you actually create inclusion became
(06:28):
very central. You know, your academic studies, your published
works, were really about a world where that
utopia didn't exist. There wasn't that sense of inclusion in
society. How did you connect the dots and say, even what's going on
in this world, even what's happening in Montreal, even when I'm hiding from my
parents, there is still hope for cultures that can
(06:50):
live and work and prosper together, that we're all one human race.
I did my PhD in international politics,
and my thesis, which was published by the University of Toronto Press,
was the integration of Somalis and
the Somali community as Muslims. It was
a comparative study between London, England and
(07:13):
Toronto. What was really powerful about that work
was that I think it showed that when you allow people
to be themselves and you allow them to feel
at home fully, they will feel
very invested in the country that they have
moved to and they will make it home
(07:36):
and in a really beautiful way. And that it is so
much more powerful than alienating them and telling them
that you will never belong here. What are a couple of things
we could do as a society? Because I see us more divided than we've
ever been. Let's counter that. Let's talk about a couple of things that we could
be thinking, doing as a country to live the lessons you
(07:58):
identified in your PhD and subsequent work. It only takes
actually looking at the facts of what has happened in Canada,
as compared with many other immigrant receiving countries
where we did such a much better job of
defining Canada to its core as a country
(08:18):
that is really good at integrating people
from all over the world. That being Canadian is
in fact being open to
integration of people who come from somewhere else at a very
deep level that goes beyond the multicultural
notions of food and dance and superficial things like that,
(08:41):
but really, really deep understanding that
to totally take people in, to give them a seat at the
table, makes us stronger in every possible
way. It makes us more socially cohesive. It makes us
a more harmonious society, certainly makes a richer
society culturally, and it makes us a stronger society
(09:03):
economically. You took this very successful academic
career. You describe yourself in an interview as an introvert. The last
place I should be is in politics. But you decide to run Beaches
East York, which has happened to be Where I live as the mpp. Why
politics? It was really students of mine who, and I use
this word in the fondest possible way, bullied me,
(09:24):
cajoled me, begged me, entreated me,
and actually got me elected. Former students of
mine had become very good organizers, and they're the ones who effectively
made it happen. And when I
initially agreed, I was terrified. The reason
my students wanted me to try was because
(09:46):
they said, you have such a good way of
articulating why Canada is stronger when it works for
everybody, and why society is stronger when nobody's losing
and everybody is winning. And there were many things, to be
honest, that I loved about my. And they
included the community work, which I really loved.
(10:08):
But I also loved my work in the legislature. When I
used to stand up and speak to a bill, and I used to bring
in experiences from my research or my academic life
or my work with people in community,
I would notice that the government ministers, because I was, of course, in the opposition,
the government ministers would put their phones down and listen to me.
(10:30):
And then at the end of it, they would all say, we always learn something.
Remember, you're building currency in politics. Advocacy people, as you
said, even the opposition enjoy you there.
And yet you choose not to seek reelection. Not everybody
was in it. And I should say we're recording this on the day
that Ken Dryden's funeral is occurring.
(10:53):
And Ken Dryden is a person who did
everything that he did, including going into politics, for all the right
reasons. He wanted to make the world a better place. And I think that if
everybody did, then politics really would be a place
where you could accomplish those goals. But right now,
it's a very bitter, nasty, super
(11:15):
partisan kind of place. The partisan politics
and the nastiness really, really got to me. And after four years,
I just didn't want to do it anymore. You make one of the most
interesting career changes, and that's when you
decide that you're going to move from being a political force to an
intuitive medium. The connective tissue for me
(11:37):
is genuinely, how do I make the world a better place? The
Hebrew phrase is tikkun olam. How do I mend the world? How do
I work to do that? And that is something that I
have tried to do in absolutely every
phase of my. Of my life. I've always
been intuitive. That intuition has always been there.
(12:00):
When I was a little kid, it started to rear its head in
ways that were almost too much, and then it kind of goes
away, but then it pokes itself up from time to time. And
I noticed it when I was doing research. I was doing a research
project at some point where I was interviewing a lot of people
who'd come to Canada from conflict afflicted
(12:23):
places. And I did 220 interviews with people, one
on one. I suddenly realized that I knew what they were going to tell me.
Not in general terms, but quite specifically, I knew what they were going to tell
me, which made me a really good interviewer because I knew
how to craft the next question so that it felt like
they were safe. When I got into politics, of all
(12:44):
places, my intuition seemed to get stronger. It
kept me safe and it enabled me to help other people.
I remember one case where I was canvassing not for myself,
but for another person. You know when you're can, you're supposed to be at a
door for 20 seconds max or 30aminute, and then you're supposed to
leave. And there was just something about the fellow I was
(13:07):
talking to. We were standing outside his little stoop and I
said, how long have you been here and why did you come? And he said,
oh, you don't want to know. And I said, no, I really do. And those
words flew out of my mouth. And part of my brain is thinking, you do.
You're not supposed to ask that. You do. I sat down on his stoop
and listened to him for an hour and a half. And at the end of
(13:28):
it I said, you need to speak to somebody. Here's the name of a
professional. And then I went on my way. And
two years later, during COVID I was crossing the street in
a completely different part of the riding. And he came up to
me and he said, oh my gosh, it's you, Rima. I
have to let you know, you saved my life. Wow. I
(13:51):
called the person you said, I listened to her. I wasn't planning to stay here,
I was planning to exit the world. And because of you,
I'm still here. So towards the end of my time in
politics, I decided to actually go off and
figure out what was going on. How did I know these things?
How was I able to know these things? What was I picking up
(14:13):
on? What was happening? What senses was I using?
And because I come at this from such an
evidence based perspective, I,
and I think this is partly due to Covid was able to
find people online to take
classes from, very grounded people.
(14:36):
But if you do this work properly,
you're doing it. Evidentially, what I rapidly
discovered, there are in fact a lot of people with
big brains and PhDs who start
with a Very realist paradigm. And
with looking for evidence and have come to the
(14:58):
conclusion that if we're going to be honest,
materialism is a paradigm just like anything else. Right. And so
when there's evidence of things happening that don't fit with that, then
you use scientific methodology and you go and study it.
And so there's a lot of evidence for what you might
call paranormal stuff. There's a lot to
(15:21):
back up the work that I find myself doing now.
So I'm curious what you do, because you're dealing with people's lives. You're dealing
with people's hopes and dreams. You know, this is a path that you're taking people
on. I think there are really strong ethics
that have to surround this work. And if somebody isn't doing it
ethically, then there's a big problem. And I think you need to
(15:44):
stay away from folks who are not being ethical about it.
So let's start with the idea that we have more
senses than the traditional five. And I think that
all of us have had some kind of experience. All of us,
by dint of being human, have some form of
intuitive ability. I think another way that it
(16:06):
appears for a lot of people is when we've been looking for places
to rent or buy and we've walked into
an apartment or a house and we've just gone, oh, no, no, no, no,
no, no, no. It just doesn't. It might look okay. It just doesn't feel
good. Or we'll walk into a room and
people will be. There won't be anything obvious on their faces, but you
(16:29):
know, they've just had a fight. You can feel it. We are using
the senses that I'm talking about, so we'll get a gut sense about
something. Or sometimes we'll have a
premonition. The phone will ring and we'll suddenly know who it is.
Or we'll have a dream in which we have a dream that somebody. Something
happens. And then it turns out a precognitive dream. It turns out to be
(16:51):
real. So there are all these other senses and ways that we're picking up
information. When I am doing a
reading for somebody, I will meditate. I'll get
a picture in my mind's eye, not with my physical eyes. And
then I'll get a feeling of who this person is
as I'm talking to the person. The sense of
(17:14):
who the person is, the essence of who they are. I'm able to describe enough
of them that the person can recognize if I'm connected to the
right person. And the more that we talk, the
stronger that connection will come. The things that
I'm given as evidence are things that
I will often say, you just. You can't make this stuff up. You just
(17:36):
can't. It's too specific, and it's not
something that you can Google. And it's something that's
very much about the relationship of the person who's coming
in, the person in spirit, and the person that I'm talking
to. And then once they're connected and
you are able to actually have a meaningful
(17:58):
conversation, if you will, that's where healing can
happen. How do you compartmentalize it? If you've had these
experiences with people and then you try to go back
to a normal day, or is there such a thing as a normal day
for you? Because people realize that you're a potential
gateway and therefore they're knocking on your door? First of all, I should say
(18:20):
that after having done this for a few years, readings get organized
from up there. It's our people up there. The people here are
the ones who have this. You know what? I feel like I should try this.
And maybe she's a good medium and maybe I can trust her. So they're the
ones who book an appointment or reach out and say, can we talk?
But it's the person up there who's like, I have a thing to say.
(18:42):
And this is the medium who can hear me. Like, this is the medium who
can interpret for me. Because not everybody can read for everybody
else, just as not everybody can be a therapist for everybody. But at the
same time, I also have control over when
I connect and how I connect. It is very,
very. Back to ethics. It's very unethical
(19:04):
for me to walk up to someone in a grocery
store or on the street and say, hey,
someone is here who wants to say something to you.
That could be just devastating for them, or they may not be
prepared to hear it, or they may be afraid like you would. That's just
rude. But, Rima, I want challenge you on that for a sec, because you said
(19:26):
the people up there are the ones that coming to me. If
someone up there is coming to you in that grocery store, how is
it unethical for you to approach somebody and say that?
There's two things. The first is that I don't walk around in the
grocery store. Connected. I disconnect.
Okay. The other thing, though, is that I have a friend who
(19:48):
at some point reached out to me and she said, I never,
ever, ever want to be connected to my mom who has
Passed on. I never do. Is there anything that would
compel me to? And I said, absolutely not. You always have the choice to
say no. If her mother really wanted to talk to
her and walked up to, you know, tapped some medium on the shoulder
(20:11):
in a grocery store where she was and said, can you please tell her, blah,
blah, blah, and the person did, that would not be something
that my friend would welcome. Okay. What I do
find is often, for instance, I have had
times where someone has come to see me
not telling me who they want to connect with. Like, they've made the
(20:33):
appointment, but they haven't told me who in spirit they've
wanted. And I've said, okay, so the person
who's coming forward is your mom or your dad or your grandmother
or your brother or whomever. And the first thing out of their mouths is, I
need to apologize to you and I want to say
sorry. They're leading with that.
(20:55):
Often the person here will say, huh, that's
interesting. A year ago, I wouldn't have been ready to hear that, but now I
am. So there's a way that you can get that message across
to someone, but accosting them in the grocery store? Not a great idea.
Before we get back to this amazing store story, and there's so much more
(21:17):
to come, I want to take a moment to talk to you about
rbc. And by the way, I'm not compelled to do so.
This isn't part of their sponsorship. They're here for the same reason
I'm here. We want to share stories of positivity and possibility
and proving that even in times like this, we can overcome
circumstances, chase dreams. What I want to share with you
(21:40):
is a new campaign that they've created called you'd Deserve, starring
Will Arnett. And why this ad struck such an emotional
chord with me is, yes, we live in this very convenient world,
and our phone's this vending machine, and the world's within arm's reach of
desire. But there are times when we need to sit
face to face with somebody that cares. There's times when we need
(22:03):
advice, we need help. We need a place to share an idea
and to make our dreams come true. And this is what this ad
says to me, that the DNA of RBC is people.
People that are there to help you get to where you need, want, and
deserve to go. So here's this wonderful new campaign called you
(22:23):
Deserve. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. What
makes a bank more than a bank? It's more than products,
apps, ATMs, it's being there when, you know,
with real people and real conversations. Let's face it,
life gets real. RBC is the bank that we Canadians
turn to for advice, because at the end of the day, that's what you deserve,
(22:46):
a track record, not some trend. Your idea of banking that's
personal happens here. RBC ideas happen here.
We need everybody to not just crawl, but to toddle
and then to walk and then to run and then to sprint, because we need
everybody sprinting, teaching people, bringing everybody
(23:09):
along, because we're going to need every voice. My guest today is Reema
Burns McGown, academically trained, evidence
based, devoted part of her career to serving the public.
And now as a medium, what's the
most powerful thing that's happened when
you're this conduit or medium between somebody here
(23:32):
and somebody is no longer here? I'm not even sure you can say no longer
here, but some here in a different manner. I think when you do this work
for any length of time, you come to recognize
we are energy beings having a physical
existence, not the other way around.
We're always here in one form or another.
(23:54):
And I can give you so, so, so many
powerful examples. There was a
young man who came to see me about a month ago, and I said, is
there somebody particular that you want to connect with? And he said, yes, but I
don't want to tell you who because I don't want it to come from me.
And I'm like, absolutely fair. I said, well, I can feel a few
(24:14):
people, and the first and strongest person feels like a
maternal figure, mother or grandmother. And I gave him very
specific examples of what she was
saying she looked like and was wearing. And he said, oh, my goodness, yes,
that's my grandmother, and she used to wear that. And I said, she
wants to say that she's really sorry
(24:36):
for having given you a really hard time for not having gone
to church enough. And the other thing that she was doing, which was
really beautiful, and this was like, the evidential thing is like, I kept saying, there's
so much emotion for you, so much love. And he said
the very last thing that he saw her
doing was this when she was in hospice and couldn't talk
(24:59):
anymore. But the main thing she wanted to get across
was that the rules of the church that she had been
given to understand them, that she thought was so important
lest you end up going to the bad place, were
nonsense. She said when she got across to the other
side, all she encountered was love and
(25:20):
acceptance, and there was no sense of okay, you followed
enough rules, and therefore, that's just not what happens.
It's just all love. So we are talking and somebody else comes
in. And then I said, oh, my goodness, did you
lose a young person recently? And he just
was like, yes. And I said, okay, there's somebody here.
(25:43):
He's wrapped in like, white swaddling cloths, like he's being
healed. And he wants to say he's really
sorry for the pain that he caused you and his family.
And he is somebody who had taken his own life, had
chosen to leave. And he said, I need
you to know that when I crossed over, all I met was love.
(26:06):
And it mattered because this was a very strong Catholic
family. And the grandmothers having come through here
first to say those set of rules that you
don't get to be embraced into love if you've taken
your own life. They're nonsense. You'll be healed.
And it was just so
(26:29):
incredibly beautiful. Do you believe that you meet up with the people
in your past life when you go to this place, which is all love? I
mean, do you reconnect with family and friends?
100%. And the thing that I've also come to really have
a sense of is that our ancestors, our loved ones
who cross over never leave us. They're constantly there,
(26:52):
helping us, supporting us. At moments of
emotional poignancy, that connection is always there.
You know, it's interesting. My wife talks about her three angels, which are her two
dogs in her past life and her husband, who she
lost. And one day I'm driving. We just started seeing
each other probably a couple months in, and these three birds land
(27:14):
on my windshield wiper and stop and look at me, and they
stare. And they stare. They stare. They look at each other and fly away. And
I called my wife and said, the most crazy thing just happened. I'm driving home
and we just literally started to see each other. She goes, oh, those are my
three angels. They're here to check you out. What's your sense
of death? Has this changed your fear of death? I am not afraid
(27:34):
of it at all anymore. And you know that thing that happens when you wake
up at three in the morning and you. You start doing that little
existential hamster wheeling thing? I don't do that
anymore, ever. It's gone. Because I feel like I have such
a much stronger sense of connection
to the bigger picture, for want of a better word.
(27:56):
I think when we become disconnected from what is going on,
big picture, that's what that middle of the night sense of like,
ha is all about. And how do you feel about
human beings now that you've had a chance to talk about us
in a different state, where it's all about love and
kindness and forgiveness and I'm
(28:18):
sorry I gave you all that pain. How come we become such
different people when we're inside these human beings that we're
greed and power? And let's go back to the beginning of the show and what
got you out of politics and the nastiness and the divide takes over.
There seems to be a fair amount of evidence that we don't
do this only once. That we cycle in and out in
(28:42):
different bodies and different genders and different relationships
with each other. That we do it with
some other energy beings who are there in multiple
incarnations, if you will. It's like we're soul groups
and soul families. And we go in and out, and some of us
are in spirit, while others of us are having a physical
(29:04):
experience. And we sort of help each other. Because the point
of all of this is to grow your soul. It's to be
better. It's to learn to be less
greedy, less mean, less
nasty to each other. To just learn how to be better.
But the argument then would be, the longer we advance as a human race,
(29:26):
collectively, we should all be getting better. Because we're all
getting better at improving our souls.
But I would argue that this time in history, I don't see a
lot of improvement in the human race. I mean, Let Them Eat Cake and
Rome is Burning has come back into a whole new
manifestation now. I think about that a lot as well. I don't think
(29:48):
this is a linear thing. I don't think progress is linear.
The idea that if you don't learn from history, you're condemned to repeat it is
absolutely true. It's not a question of a collective,
like the whole human race learning something. It's
almost like we have to learn it as
(30:08):
individual souls. There's still a lot about
how the soul works that I don't begin to understand. Another
question I have for you. And, I mean, I could talk to you for a
week. Do you fall in love up there? Do you
have relationships up there? Or is that what makes you want to go back
to Earth? Because you don't have the same sense of
(30:29):
adventure with another person? I don't know. But I think
that love means something different when we're
not trapped in a physical body. And so we don't have the
same boundaries or jealousies or sense of
like, I can only love one person, or
they're gonna be jealous. When my mom
(30:52):
died, it was in the early 2000s, and my
dad was not a person who. He was deeply loyal to my mom.
He adored my mom. She adored him. They had a wonderful
marriage, but he was only in his early late 60s, so
he wasn't okay being alone. And he re met
this woman who was the widow of a childhood friend of his,
(31:15):
and they struck up a connection. He'd been an architect, she'd
been a teacher. They were both artists. He
ended up in New Zealand at my cousin's house, borrowing a
car and driving around New Zealand wondering whether
he could have a relationship with somebody else,
anybody else, and not be disloyal
(31:37):
to my mom and my dad. I love him to bits, and I just adore
him, but he was not a particularly. He wasn't always
a person who was full of insights about himself. But as he was sitting
on that beach, he suddenly had the understanding
that there was absolutely no way he could be disloyal
to my mom because after 45 years
(32:00):
of being head over heels in love with one another, she
was inside him. She was a part of him. And
so he was taking her with him into any other
relationship he had. And that's the spirit with which
he began the relationship with his partner.
And has his wife and your mom ever come
(32:23):
through you and said she's happy, that she's part of that? I am
absolutely certain of it. When my dad. My dad died
a year and about 15 months ago, he was in
London at his partner's place. And about 10 days before he
died, I went downstairs to make coffee, and he was in the next room,
and I could hear him talking to someone. And I said, papa, who are you
(32:44):
talking to? And he said, mama's here. Mama's here.
That's a common thing when people are close to passing, that they can
see somebody that they love from the other side. But it was
so clear to her and to me as
well, that she was the one who kind of popped that idea into
his head in the first place, that I'm not jealous because, like, I'm over
(33:07):
here. I want you to be happy. How about the survivor, though?
How about, you know, the one that he remarried and they painted
together and held hands together. And how does she feel now? Does
she feel she's lost him forever because he's going to go back to
his original wife? Or does it. I mean, because I'm always interested in the people
left behind as well. Again, I think that our
(33:29):
sense of connection and love is so Much
more expansive than we imagine it to be when we're here in
our fleshly bodies and we can only see things in kind
of narrow ways. And how do people that love
you and know you, do they relate to you differently?
Now that's almost like you can read my mind or
(33:52):
you're in a different plane than I am, or do they just appreciate
you for you? People just, just treat me
as me. And then if they have a question they will
sometimes ask me, they will say, hey, what do you think about this? How
easy is it to turn off that tap? Because I have to believe that. But
the stronger you get in the field, the more people up there are going,
(34:15):
this is a great gateway. This is somebody that has to have ethics, she has
a sense of humanity. Like, you know, there has to be quite a
backlog up there of people going, my turn. The best way to put the
answer is that I outsource the gateway.
I use the term spirit, but you can say God or
Allah or Adonai or creator, source,
(34:37):
whatever you want. I do believe there is a larger
force that is a force for good. And I
am doing this work in the service of spirit. There's a website,
but if somebody can't afford to pay, but I'm the right person to hear
them, they can reach out and message me. There
have been a number of people who've come to me through like really
(35:00):
interesting circuitous ways, but the people
in spirit have been really insistent that, that they
need me to connect with that person. And that's
happened. You know, Rim, I could talk to you forever, but
I always end my shows with sort of my observations. And
the first one is you truly are about good over evil.
(35:22):
Even when you're in politics and or writing in academia, it's all
about how can we create a world where nobody
loses and everybody wins. And then when you realize that when
you speak from evidence, people lean in and want to learn. And
that seems to have carried you across evidence based
academia right through parliament, when even the opposition
(35:44):
would lean in, as opposed to just dismiss you as some sort of left wing
person. Even today you give people two or three things
up front that relax them and realize that they're going to have a conversation
that's going to matter. I guess the final one lesson is
we really are here to represent good. The fact
that there is a force of good in this world, I think it's in everybody's
(36:06):
interest that we listen harder for it because it's easy to
believe it's disappeared because there's so much negativity coming at us today. There's so
much impossibility, so much sky is fine. But I think if we
just step aside once in a while and sit in that stoop like you did
with that person for an hour and a half and saved his life,
if we just sat and listened to the good more, I think we'd be
(36:29):
for our time on this planet, we would do a much better service to it.
Thank you. Thank you. That is. I'm near tears. That's really
beautiful. And I could not agree more. I think
if we just all were able to be still and quiet and
feel inside for that good, all of us are capable of it,
and we're capable of. Of connecting to it.
(36:53):
Once again, a special thanks to RBC for supporting Chatter that matters.
It's Tony Chapman. Thanks for listening and let's chat soon.
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