Connecting with the other side

No sooner does she start talking about specifics than Kashmira Elavia strays into a related subject, and before long, the conversation reaches an entirely different place. Perhaps this is fitting considering the journeys the healer, guide, automatic writer, crystal therapy practitioner (and much more) has been on.

"People have to understand that we are only passing through (when we die). We get channelled into our next path of life," she says. "But you don't have to 'die' to know this. I live and know all this. I go to places, I meet people and find out all this."

The 'places' and 'people' that Elavia refers to don't manifest in the physiological dimension that you and I perceive. In other words, these places and people don't exist in our world. But for the 58-year-old, they do.

While that might seem incredible, such is the world of psychics that language falls short of being a reliable medium, and experiences, however varied, become inadequate benchmarks of perception. Unlike temperamental psychics one reads about, Elavia is patient and amenable to reveal what she knows of herself: that her father was an evolved soul who taught her palm and face reading, to not be afraid of ghosts and spirits and instead ask if she could help them; that by age 12, she was reading books about the afterlife and the spiritual world; that she has always been 'karmically conscious'; that she communicates with her father, and has been doing so since his death when she was 17; that she invariably knows more than what someone chooses to share with her; that she possess the "power to shift things without touching them"; that she 'soul travels' daily and that she has received (and still receives) guidance from the likes of Shirdi Saibaba, Parmananda Yoganhansa, Shiva as well as from her forefathers and 'soul connections'.

"Everyone has guides, most just don't know (that they do)," says Elavia. "They are your friends and family and connections from past lives. Think of them as people hiding behind a curtain, waiting to manifest themselves. And they are there to simply guide you."

Among the practices she has learnt from her guides are automatic writing — writing words without consciously doing so — which she learnt nearly 25 years ago.

"My hand would get heavy, my leg would turn stiff, I'd be aware and my eyes would be open but I'd know that it's not me," she says of her early learning days. "It was not a possession, but there was a connection. I'd know that the brain had become a divine brain and that it was making space for the other. I could sense my hand being taken away by someone else. The handwriting would change — becoming big or crooked or small. And I've always known that I've had this energy even before (I learnt automatic writing)."

Apart from being a popular automatic writer, Elavia also practises crystal therapy, colour therapy and meditative healing. "My spiritual aim is to knock of all abnormalities and make each one's spiritual self supersede," says Elavia, who, as a child, wished to grow up to be a doctor to heal people.

Ask if she has converted cynics, and pat comes the response: "People ask me for proof very often, but after doing this for more than 26 years, trust me that I know more than proof. But I understand where these questions come from, and I don't mind it... It's my duty to open them to something they don't know about."

And almost as if to qualify her words, she places a palm-sized, heavy crystal on the tabletop, her index finger pressing down on its pointy edge and puts questions to the rock after explaining that a rotation in a certain direction indicates affirmative, and in the opposite direction indicates negative: "Will Marisha see the other side?" The crystal turns and rotates. "Will my book be published this year, before November?" The crystal rotates slightly. "See, it all comes (naturally)," she says. "I just know that they won't let me go wrong. Even if something has to go wrong, I get guidance beforehand."