This month our feature is Corbie Mitleid. Corbie’s vast array of expertise ranges from Tarot, Mediumship, and guidance to Healing and Counseling those in need. She is also one of Bellesprit’s Diamond Psychics and Healers.
By Belle Salisbury, Psychic Medium
Belle: I am so honored to be talking to you again Corbie and to learn what you are up to now because you are always so busy.
Corbie: It’s a pleasure, Belle. Yes, I do tend to live life on jet powered roller skates, so you grab me when you can.
Belle: I can see that! We have a history together working with different psychic fairs; goodness, how many years has it been?
Corbie: At least a decade.
Belle: I am so happy that our connection has remained intact, that we continue to connect and work with each other. I have noticed that you are now actively involved in teaching. What has inspired you to bring about some of the courses that you offer?
Corbie: Well, it’s a natural progression of living the examined life. I was a theater major, but realized what I really loved was donning interesting costumes and spouting interesting languages, and I could do that through the SCA [Society for Creative Anachronism] and Renaissance fairs; I didn’t have to act. I love psychic readings, I love empowering people, and one-on-one meetings are still a great deal of fun, but….once an actress, always an actress. I thoroughly love an audience.
I’ve always done lectures. Those lectures, in a lot of ways, have morphed into classes. Some of the lectures I have done were really “chewy enough,” I guess you’d say, to make into a three-hour experience. The classes I am teaching now are part of a standard empowerment roster, but seen through the lens of my own life. As a lot of your readers may know, my path has not been a tranquil one. I’ve had several career changes before doing the psychic work full time. I’ve done the cancer dance three times. I’ve been married more than once. I have lost all three of my parents; my two biologicals and a step mother I adored. So, the way I have gotten through my life is always to say, ’All right, here I am; how can what has happened empower me, what can I learn and how can I pass it on?’ Because, frankly, everyone has to pass on some kind of learning before they get out of here. That’s part of the final exam.
Belle: What I enjoy about you is that you are so grounded and down to earth, and you bring humor into the mix.
Corbie: I do say, ‘I am the most practical psychic you’re going to find. There is no fluffy bunny, unicorn poo or Madam Hoohah stuff at my table.’ People giggle, but they get it.
There are some folks who do need to have an intuitive wrapped in mysticism, that’s not me. And I say constantly, ‘you can do what I do, without a doubt, but that’s going to take a bit of work and development.’
Belle: Absolutely. Now looking at your web site, which is at www.firethroughspirit.com, you offer a custom weekend to feed your soul. What is involved in that weekend?
Corbie: You know, there are an awful lot of people who would love to work with me, but they don’t live either near me or where I normally travel. I could do webinars, but I truly, honestly prefer working directly with people in the room. Because at my events, a tribe is formed. When I say tribe, let’s take one of my most popular courses, Create Your Sentence of Passion. Your Sentence of Passion is not who you are or what you do, or even how you do it. It is your vapor trail. When you go skidding into heaven on bald tires and fumes in the tank and God hands you a beer and says, ‘So?’ You get to say, ‘This! I did this! Wasn’t it cool?’ And all of us have that Sentence of Passion, but we don’t know how to get to it. When someone says to me, ‘Please tell me what my purpose is’ I just grin and say ‘nope, not my job to tell you’ because you need to find that out for yourself and you will only find your purpose in how your life has been drawn.
So, with the Sentence of Passion weekend, you will be given homework to prepare before the course. It is two pages of all kinds of questions that, at first, look disjointed. Then you come in with these questions and answers on paper, and let’s say we have ten people in the class. You are partnered up with somebody and you switch papers because a stranger, who doesn’t have all your detailed back story, is going to be able to look at this list and say, ‘Your pattern shows a love of animals,’ or justice, or whatever it is. And once everybody understands their own underlying patterns, then we start working on their Sentence of Passion. By the end of that three hour event, people who may not have known each other when they came into the class have now formed a tribe. They hear each other’s stories, they hear each other’s passions, they cheer each other on, and they help each other say, ‘This is my rallying cry.’ At the end of that class, everyone knows what they need to do and they have partners to do it.
Belle: How amazing! That would be so much fun! When are you coming to North Carolina? That would be a fun class to take.
Corbie: That’s what the Feed Your Soul Weekend is all about. When someone sponsors me in their area, generally it is a minimum of 10 people and a maximum of 20 because I do want to work with folks. The Feed Your Soul Weekend, as structured, is for one fee and that covers two workshops and a half hour reading with me. There are several other workshops you can choose from besides the Sentence of Passion we’ve talked about. I don’t mind driving to your location. If you see a workshop I offer that you have been dying to take, get a bunch of your friends together, commit to the weekend and I will come and teach.
Belle: That is awesome! Have workshop, will travel.
Corbie: That’s right. The workshops I teach are not like ones where you need to have some background. They are designed so that background knowledge isn’t necessary, but they are still good for people who have been doing this work for many years because your reference is yourself.
Belle: In looking at some of the various workshops you offer, you’ve got Brainstorming Your New Age Business. That sounds like it would be incredibly helpful for someone to discover what they want their business to be about.
Corbie: You know, Belle, there are some people in our business that are in it strictly for money. Then there are those that love what they do, but have no business sense, so they are always living hand to mouth and don’t really give a material value to what they do. Because my background has encompassed a lot of business skills — marketing, editing, video production, recruiting, being a right hand to major business players — I know how to make my business work. I also happen to be pretty darn good at things like coming up with brand names, marketing strategies. Often, somebody will come to me and say, ‘I have this idea for a business’ and they won’t know how to purchase a URL or how to market their idea or anything like that. That’s where I run through it with them. It is a session intended strictly for their business. It’s not like a classroom situation where you sit and take notes on generalities and then having to make what you hear fit what you do. This will already fit what you do because it’s all about you.
Belle: What a great opportunity for anyone who is hoping to build their business. Now, tell me about your Life As Kintsukuroi workshop.
Corbie: Kintsukuroi is the Japanese method of repairing with gold or silver lacquer. The Japanese have some gorgeous philosophies and one of them is that if you break a piece of pottery and you repair it carefully, lovingly with gold or silver lacquer to hold it together, the piece is actually more beautiful for having been broken. It teaches us to accept what we have been through, cherish what we have been through, and own how strong it has made us, instead of making it our pity party/victim story that we trot out at a moment’s notice.
Here’s a perfect example. I have dealt with cancer three times and how I talk about it is the changer. I don’t say I fought cancer because what you fight, fights back. I do not say I am a survivor because the image of surviving makes you think of someone barely hanging on by their teeth and toenails. THAT AIN’T ME! I have danced with cancer, the idea being that I found out how graceful I could be under pressure. I avoided having my toes stepped on and I got off the dance floor in one piece. It doesn’t change the fact that cancer and I have had an experience together, but it changes how I view it and how it affects me in the future. That is what Life as Kintsukuroi does. When you can see that even things like miscarriages, abuse, accidents have made you bigger, stronger and better then you are, as Robert Schwartz says, a courageous soul. Then, for the rest of your life, instead of saying ‘I can’t because such and such happened to me,’ you begin to say ‘such and such happened to me and this is what I got from it, so now I’m going to go on and do whatever it is I want to do.’
Belle: So, it teaches us to see the beauty in our life challenges and creation.
Corbie: And usefulness. I am not someone who says, ‘Yes, isn’t it delicious I’ve had cancer?’ Hell no! But, I do like who I am better, having gone through it. That’s the difference.
Belle: That would be an inspiring course for everyone to take because we all have had our share of problems. This course would teach us to see our life challenges a lot differently.
Corbie: But not all my courses are about Serious Stuff. There are the fun ones. My very favorite fun course is Deck- a- Dance. Everybody knows about Tarot, but there are so many books and courses and thought patterns behind it that it can be very intimidating. These days, there are so many Oracle decks that give you the possibility of making your own rules, which I love. Again, it goes back to the idea of ‘you can do what I do.’ This course is specifically not for Tarot decks, but instead for everything else out there. You give yourself permission to know and work with your own intuition with these tools. So, everyone brings in one deck from a large list I provide. I do that to make sure they are not bringing in any Tarot-based decks. During the course, you learn how to read your decks and you learn how to read other people’s decks. You learn how to intuit what kind of a spread would work and how to read more than one deck at a time, which is one of the things that I will often do.
If someone has a question, for instance, about a relationship, I will use my standard Tarot deck to give a general overview. But then I have a deck by John Gray, a Karma and relationship deck that I’ll use underneath to show the Karma within the relationship from a spiritual perspective. It is not ‘Leave him honey, he’s is a scumbag,’ or ‘Yes, you are going to have 42 babies and live in Scarsdale.’ It’s more balanced and detailed than that. My people know I hate answering yes or no questions. That takes away their own free will. I would much rather show them how to look at all of the ramifications in a situation and then make an informed decision. Deck-a-Dance will teach people how to do that at any point. It doesn’t mean they won’t enjoy having readings because all of us need an objective viewpoint, but they will learn to trust their own ‘knowing.’ That’s something I wish more people did.
Belle: So basically, they find a deck they are most comfortable with and then learn how to do their own spread, using not just one deck, but several.
Corbie: That’s right. It’s important that they choose the deck. Can you be given decks? Sure you can, but this is going to be a partner. You need to fall in love with it.
Belle: Let’s talk about another lecture you offer, Happiness is a Choice. Many people would choose to argue that statement, so let’s hear your take on that.
Corbie: That is a lecture rather than a workshop. The reason why is because it is based on the work of Barry and Samahria Kaufman of the Option Institute and I am not a Certified Option Mentor. All the Option teaching happens at their campus in western Massachusetts. But, at the same time, they are the people that helped me walk through the breast cancer, the divorces, the deaths, and come out clear on the other side. So their philosophy is one I try to use with my own clients. Very often, people get in their own way, but it is because that is what they think is going to bring them happiness. So, for example, we learn how to be authentic, not needing to lie to anybody; ‘Well, if I tell them what I am really like, they won’t like me.’ My thought is, well, you know what? They still won’t like you because they won’t know who you really are. So be authentic.
How to be non-judgmental is another. An example I use for that is something that Barry, or Bears, as we call him, calls being the happy Martian detective. Here’s an example: if water was coming from your eyes, I might look at you and ask you why you were crying, and I might be wrong. A Martian would look at you and say, ‘Why is there water coming from your eyes?’ because the Martian has no reference points. Therefore, he doesn’t judge it, but merely asks. He is much more likely to get the correct answer because your contact lenses might be bothering you, or you might have allergies, or there might be an emotional basis. By only asking, ‘why are you crying?’ I have eliminated 2/3 of that, so I may have missed the boat. In this lecture, I use my own life as an example of how, even in these very difficult situations, I chose to be happy. The clear example with me is when I was told that I had to have a double mastectomy. No choice. ‘We’ll see you in three weeks,’ they said, as I was dismissed from the office. I had to find reasons to be OK with this or I was going to fall apart. And, the three rapid examples I give are, One: OK, if you don’t have them, you can’t get cancer there. That’s a good thing. Two: they are not going to be ‘smashed in the refrigerator door at the doctor’s’ twice a year anymore. Every one of your female readers know exactly what I am talking about with that! And Three: as far as the implants go, well fine, I’ll be perky till I’m 93. Now, a lot of people will hear that and think, ‘she’s nuts.’ To which I respond, ‘Well, what good would bemoaning it do?’ That allowed me to focus on healing and moving my life forward. You can’t change the past; you can only live in the present moment. That’s what makes the difference!
Belle: That makes so much sense. So many people need to hear this lecture. They need to hear this. I have met a lot of people who, as you say, bemoan their circumstances. They do it as if it is a habit. I often suggest to them that they shift their focus onto something that is good in their life, rather than that which is wrong.
Corbie: Part of it, Belle, is that we live in a world which rewards victims.
Belle: You’re right!
Corbie: Look at the reality shows. Who gets the biggest press? The whiners and the ones you love to hate! You look at the old Extreme Home Makeover programs. Who got the houses? The most hard luck stories they could find. If you live a normal life, if you are at all happy, you aren’t going to get anything special from anybody. You don’t matter. So, we are encouraged to highlight the negatives in our lives because then maybe someone will pay attention to us and maybe we will get something nice out of it, instead of being ignored.
So, when you know that nothing is wrong with you and nothing ever was, that you can be happy with your life and it’s just as empowering as the messages we are getting from the idiot box, you change your life. I have the career I love because I owned every problem, every challenge, every stupid thing I did and I turned it into something useful, both for myself and for those I teach.
Belle: Now, Corbie, you are also featured in Robert Schwartz’s books Your Soul’s Plan and Your Soul’s Gift, and, I understand, there is a third book coming out by Robert. You also developed a workshop around that called The Weaving of Your Lives using pre-birth planning, Karma, and compassion to create your best self now. Tell us about this.
Corbie: Well, none of us who started working with Robert ten years ago had any idea what profound work we’d end up doing together. Since then, as I’ve said, Robert has put out two books and has started to work on the third; I will be involved in that one as well. The two intuitives that are the cornerstones of all three books are myself and my colleague and close friend, Staci Wells, who is also a Bellesprit Diamond. I have taught twice now with Robert at the Kripalu Yoga Center in Massachusetts.
In this event, I share my story and then I explain the idea of pre-birth planning, how you can use it, and how you can turn your life around. There is a meditation that I do, a guided visualization, where you can meet your Higher Self. Your Higher Self is the totality of your soul. It’s like meeting your own soul and looking at what you have developed to bring this incarnation into being. It releases people from a lot of self-judgment, helping them understand why difficult things happen. It’s a bookend with Life as Kintsukuroi. Pre-birth planning is, ‘if this happened, this is why you decided it would be useful.’ Life as Kintsukuroi is, ‘well, now that it happened, this is how you can reframe it so you can move ahead with it.’
Belle: That workshop sounds perfect! I like that one! So, the key then is to use meditation to connect with the Higher Self, to understand what your pre-birth planning was about, and what you are here to do with it.
Corbie: We take you up to the halls where your Akashic records are and you pull your book. You take one experience in your life that was planned and you learn why it was planned and how you did it. And so, to put it into a better context, it is a very profound experience for a lot of people….the idea that it wasn’t all just random. It’s relieving for them. ‘It wasn’t that I was bad, it wasn’t that I was stupid, it’s just that this is what it was.’ And when people know that they can make sense out of things, it’s easier on them. People hate random.
Belle: I so have to get a group together and get you down here to North Carolina. My mind is going, I want that one and I want this one and I need that one. [Laughter]
Corbie: I would be happy to come down and do it. I’m much more mobile with these workshops than I am schlepping all my gear down to do a show.
Belle: So, it doesn’t matter where a person is, say within the United States, you can get there as long as they have your minimum number of people to attend.
Corbie: Yes, that is why it is a commitment because in taking care of myself, I can’t travel any distance without the minimum number of people in attendance in order for me to teach. It doesn’t benefit me if you say you’re going to have 20 people, and when I arrive, you only have 3. If you have the minimum number of attendees, I’m there, happily.
Belle: Corbie, what message would you like to leave for our Bellesprit readers?
Corbie: The winter has brutalized all of us. It’s been, to quote a line from Shakespeare’s Richard the Third, “the winter of our discontent,” Oh, baby! But, spring is coming and no matter how deep the snow, how cold the season, how frozen the ground, those seeds know their purpose; and that is to grow, and to sprout, and to reach the sun. We’re those seeds. Right now, the way the world is going it feels like a heck of a spiritual winter but we have that ability inside to grow and to push aside the cold, and the snow, and the frozen ground and bloom where we are planted.
Belle: How can people connect with you? We talked about your website, what other ways they can connect with you.
Corbie: You can find me all over the place. There is my fan page on Facebook, Fire Through Spirit. I am on Twitter @CorbieMitleid. You can find me on the Bellesprit website as a Diamond Psychic and Healer. If you want a reading with me, the minimum readings are ½ hour. If you want a quick 10 to 15 minutes with me, you can go to ESPsychics.com. I’m part of that group and you can also find me there.
Belle: And you also have a radio show.
Corbie: I do. It’s called Fire Through Spirit and it’s on EmpowerRadio.com on Thursday nights at 8 PM ET.
Belle: Corbie, thank you so much for taking the time off to chat with me. I know you are such a busy person.
Corbie: Belle, it’s always a pleasure Thank you. I love talking to you.
Corbie Mitleid has always been a person I greatly admire for her ethics and standards, both professionally and personally. Corbie personifies the title of Beautiful Spirit as she willingly provides knowledge for those who seek to heal and grow along their life path helping us to develop into the souls we came here to be.
About the Author:
Belle Salisbury is the owner and Editor of Bellesprit. She has been a Spiritual Counselor for 41 years utilizing Clairvoyance, Clairsentience, and Clairaudience in her sessions bringing you guidance in your daily life. As a medium, she is able to see and communicate with your Spirit Guides or departed loved ones bringing you communications of guidance, healing, validation, and closure. For more information or to book a session, visit her website at www.bellesalisbury.com.
