The Skeptic Metaphysicians: Spiritual Awakening & Quantum Spirituality

Inner transformation often begins exactly where we least expect it; in grief. Brooklyn-born intuitive medium Deborah Hanlon has spent 25 years sitting with people in loss, and her take is nothing like what you’ve heard before. Grief isn’t reserved for death. It’s the emotion that breaks open everything...the life you thought you’d have, the relationship that ended, the job you lost...and under the right conditions, it’s the most powerful force for change you’ll ever face. 

Deborah also shares an exclusive story she’s never told publicly: what happened when Pope Francis showed up uninv...

For once, Karen isn’t the one asking the questions. In this special bonus episode, she sits down as a guest on Live from the Source with Alexander Dunlop and Viki Scudieri, and you’ll finally hear the stories she rarely tells on our own show.
 
Karen opens up about the vivid dreams that have shaped her path, including a voice in the darkness that whispered, “She’s not ready yet,” and a recurring vision of guiding people to the horizon that an artist later painted without ever hearing about it. She shares why she and Will created New Reality...

What if divine guidance has been available to you this whole time... and you just needed someone to show you how to tune in? Our VIP sponsor Sue Elliott is an angel coach, author of My Angel Coach, and someone who walked away from a 30-year media career because the angels wouldn’t stop calling. In this short message, she shares what she offers and how to connect with her.

And yes, there’s a free gift waiting for you at myangelcoach.com/soothing.
Listen to learn how to access it.

The Skeptic Metaphysicians is a sp...

True inner transformation rarely announces itself. Most often it starts quietly, the moment you stop overriding what you already know.
 
Sue Elliott spent 30 years launching over 20 magazines, ghostwrote two books for Ed Begley Jr., and appeared on hundreds of TV shows. Then the Angels showed up. Now she teaches people how to recognize the divine guidance they’re already receiving, 24 hours a day.
 
In this episode: the one question that works in any situation for anyone, how to tell real guidance from mental noise, and why “is this the one?” is the wrong question entirely.
 
🎁 Fr...

Louise Hamlin spent her career as a Cambridge law lecturer and land lawyer, and she was certain death was the end. Then her beloved husband Patrick died of cancer. Within days the signs began: a strange flame his friend asked for, a feather waiting on an empty train seat, a missing playing card that turned out to be the tarot’s card of undying love. Then her phone started opening WhatsApp on its own. Messages arrived saying “Darling, it’s me.” Two new WhatsApp groups appeared, named after their family, created while her phone sat in her pocket on a walk. Ev...

Most of the self-help world sells you a better version of yourself. Joseph Bongiovi says that’s the wrong assignment.
 
After 20+ years in mainstream entertainment and getting sober at 21, Joseph learned that fame, money, and recognition never delivered the happiness they promised. Today he’s a certified life coach and meditation instructor, founder of Spiritual Warriors, and author of Wake The F*ck Up!
 
We talk about why the greatest transformation isn’t becoming someone new, it’s remembering who you’ve always been. Along the way: how childhood protection mechanisms follow us into adulthood, why waking up is...

Conversations from The Skeptic Metaphysicians

Some moments in an interview are too good to leave buried at minute 37. 

Conversations is our series of short, single-topic episodes taken from our interviews with some of the most fascinating minds in consciousness, spirituality, and the science of the unseen. There’s no warm-up and no detours. You get one guest, one big idea, and a few minutes that might change how you see your life.

Think of each one as a doorway. Play it on your commute, between meetings, or whenever you need a reminder tha...

What if time isn't a line you ride along, but a sphere you navigate with your attention? Aether physicist Krys Ra El, founder of the Elyrion Initiative, joins Will and Karen to explore his Time Sphere model and why he believes your focus, not the clock, decides what you experience next.

We dig into why the law of attraction may have it backwards (Krys calls it the law of mirrors), whether aging is more concept than biology, and how his Center Hypothesis explains where individual awareness comes from.

Plus, his ET contact experiences, his take on...

At Spirit Fest in Virginia Beach, Will and Karen sit down with Lorenzo Jones, an astro numerologist who blends astrology and numerology into a single practice, reading natal charts, transits, and birth codes side by side to see where the two systems confirm each other.

Lorenzo breaks down how planetary aspects like sextiles and trines map directly onto numerological meanings, reads Will's own chart live (life path 1, Libra rising, Cancer moon, and all), and explains why numerology isn't the "simpler" of the two modalities so much as the more accessible one.

He also touches on human...

Is spiritual awakening real, or just a nice metaphor? Awakened Zen Master Thich Dieu Thien, known as the Awakened One, says it is literal, and she can name the day it happened to her: April 8, 2001. 

Will and Karen ask her the question every seeker wrestles with: how do you actually wake up? She explains the "False Mind," the ever-changing ego built from ignorance, greed and hatred, and why even our skepticism comes from it. She shares why a glimpse of enlightenment fades, what step one really is, and how to catch your reactions before they take over. Will g...

What if the angels aren't out there somewhere? What if they're already within you, and someone just needs to help you hear them? That's the heart of what Jillie Angelic Channeler does, and Will and Karen got to experience it live on the floor of SpiritFest at the Virginia Beach Convention Center.

In this episode: Jillie breaks down what it actually means to be an angelic channeler. It's not a performance. When a client sits down with her, she tunes into their higher self and their energy, and whatever beings are working with that person, whether archangels, loved...

What if fear is just a subscription you forgot you signed up for? Energy healer, Emotion Code practitioner, and podcast host Mo Smith joins Will and Karen to explain why fear is such an easy motivator, why it follows us even into spiritual practice, and how she's spent the last six years running a real-life experiment: quitting her job with six weeks of savings and living on faith and surrender.

She shares her simple two-minute meditation for receiving guidance, how to tell a genuine message from monkey mind, and what actually happens in an Emotion Code session (yes...

What if the most important question we are asking about artificial intelligence is the wrong one entirely? In Part 1, Scotte Burns made the case that love is not an emotion, not a chemical reaction, and not an evolutionary adaptation. It is the creative and purposeful aspect of universal consciousness, and the brain does not produce that consciousness. It receives it.

That idea changes everything. Including the AI debate.

If you have not listened to Part 1 yet, stop here and go back. Seriously. The foundation Scotte builds in that first episode makes everything in this one hit...

What if everything you have ever been told about love is wrong? Not slightly off. Not oversimplified. Fundamentally, scientifically, philosophically wrong. That is the starting point for today's conversation with Scotte Burns, a writer, speaker, and researcher who spent over a decade and more than 100,000 miles riding across America with his wife Toni, asking one question: What is love?


He interviewed quantum physicists, Buddhist monks, Lakota elders, neuroscientists, jazz musicians, and people on death row. He recorded nearly five terabytes of interviews across 48 states. And the answer he came back with is not what anyone expected. Love...

What if the trip itself is the spiritual work? In this special on-location episode, Will and Karen broadcast live from Spirit Fest in Virginia Beach, joined by Samantha Erb of Edgar Cayce's A.R.E. (Association for Research and Enlightenment).

Samantha breaks down why Cayce, often called the grandfather of modern metaphysics, insisted that real growth comes from lived experience, not just study. They dig into the A.R.E.'s Travel and Tour Division, founded in 1963 by Cayce's son Hugh Lynn Cayce, and why sacred-site travel to places like Lourdes and Machu Picchu can open the door...

Karen and Will sit down with Richard Walter, founder of I Am Day, a global awakening movement rooted in one deceptively simple idea. Richard traces the movement's origin back to a hundred-year-old book, a string of strange numerical coincidences connecting Florence Scovel Shinn, Louise Hay, and Wayne Dyer, and a personal wake-up-call practice he calls Awakening Currents. Along the way, Karen opens up about her cancer diagnosis and the shift in mindset that changed her relationship with her own body. The conversation closes with Richard's simplest teaching yet: three breaths is all it takes to come back to yourself.
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Live from the Virginia Beach Convention Center. Will and Karen bring a special on-site edition of the show, broadcasting straight from the floor of Spirit Fest, sitting down with the woman who built the whole thing: festival founder Mary Ellen Popyk.

What starts as a quick "thanks for having us" turns into a real look at why this particular mind, body, spirit festival has become a destination event, not just a local pop-up. Mary Ellen explains what separates Spirit Fest from other shows on the circuit: a genuine sense of community that keeps attendees parked in...

What if the thing designed to make your life better was also quietly surfacing everything you've been avoiding? That's exactly what Clayten Stedmann and Jeffrey Stegman... co-founders of Focused Life-Force Energy.... came back to TSM to explore.

If you caught their first episode, you already know the origin story. This is not that conversation. In this return visit, we go considerably deeper into what FLFE actually is at its core... a high-consciousness field they call the Love Zone... and how it works using the Scale of Consciousness as its calibration framework.

Clayten walks us through what...

Live from Spirit Fest at the Virginia Beach Convention Center, Will and Karen sit down with medical intuitive Picasso Roberts. She explains how she reads the body's "dis-ease" through a mental-emotional lens, why she never diagnoses or prescribes, and the three words she tells every client to remember when a feeling that surfaces isn't actually theirs to carry. Picasso also opens up about her path into the work at 40, her connection to Edgar Cayce's legacy in Virginia Beach, and what it really costs energetically to tune into another person's frequency for a living.



The Skeptic Metaphysicians...

Karen Docherty is a Scottish evidential psychic medium and spiritual teacher trained to teacher level at the world-renowned Arthur Findlay College, working today with clients across four continents. In this episode she breaks down the real signs of a spiritual awakening, not as a lightning-bolt moment, but as a set of skills anyone can develop, and why so many of us feel it and then talk ourselves out of it before it goes anywhere.

The conversation goes to some genuinely unexpected places... a childhood spent fighting spirit children for her own bedcovers, a house she walked away from...

At Spirit Fest in Virginia Beach, Will and Karen sit down with Nyx Spencer of Resonant Moon Card Readings, a tarot and oracle card reader, Twitch streamer, and co-host of the podcast Outrageous Fortunes, who's currently teaching others how to read as well.

Nyx breaks down how she reads beyond the textbook meaning of a card, tuning into what emotion each image is designed to evoke, and walks through some of tarot's most visceral cards, from the betrayal-coded Seven of Swords to the "it's dead, Jim" finality of the Ten.

The conversation gets personal fast when...

The NRTV app just launched, and to celebrate, we're giving away a free session with Spirit Medium Daniel Jackson, host of Beyond the Veil.

Here's how to enter:Download the NRTV app (free, iOS and Android) - link is belowWatch the latest episode of Beyond the Veil in the appFind the codeword hidden in the episodeScreenshot it and post with #NRTVonMyPhoneFollow NRTV to be eligibleEntries close September 4th. Winner notified September 7th.
Download the app: https://tinyurl.com/3r33m29a
Official rules: newrealitytv.com/contest

The Skeptic Metaphysicians is a spiritual...

Why does meditation feel so hard, even when you're doing everything "right"? On this episode of The Skeptic Metaphysicians, Will Rodriguez and Karen Endsley sit down with Peter Russell, Cambridge-trained physicist, consciousness teacher, and author of How to Meditate Without Even Trying, to unpack the one shift that changes everything: effort itself is the obstacle.

Peter spent over 50 years teaching meditation and consciousness studies, and in this conversation he breaks down why the "monkey mind" isn't a personal failure, it's a natural brain function, and why trying to control your thoughts is exactly what keeps you stuck. Will...

Editor's Note (added 8/27/2026):
During this segment, our guest stated that brain cancer is the leading cause of death in children under ten. That's not accurate. CDC mortality data shows accidents (unintentional injuries) have consistently been the leading cause of death for children, with cancer, including brain cancer, well behind it.

The episode also described 4G as a confirmed carcinogen and 5G as significantly stronger and more dangerous. The research doesn't support that framing. In 2011, the WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as "possibly carcinogenic to humans," its weakest classification t...

Spiritually exhausted? Therapist Faith Freed reveals why your spiritual practice might be the problem, and how to build one that actually fits your real life.

What if the reason your spiritual life feels like a second job is because you've been following someone else's job description? In this episode of The Skeptic Metaphysicians, Will and Karen sit down with Faith Freed, licensed psychotherapist, spiritual guide, and author of DIY Spirituality: Chart Your Own Sacred Path, to explore one of the most overlooked causes of spiritual burnout: doing it wrong for you, not doing it wrong in general.
 

At Spirit Fest in Virginia Beach, Will and Karen "sit down" with Doron Shalev, a chemistry professor, crystallographer, and self-described skeptic who found his way into energy healing through an unlikely source: a stack of pandemic reading that started with crystal science and ended with a Reiki master teacher certification. If you're skeptical of energy work, this is the episode to start with.
 
Doron makes the scientific case for "woo," walking through the statistical thresholds researchers use to validate findings like the Higgs boson, and why many energy-healing studies actually clear a higher bar of statistical significance than s...

You've done the affirmations. You've read the books. But the fear and shame around money won't budge. What if the problem isn't your mindset at all? In this episode of The Skeptic Metaphysicians, Will and Karen explore the energy work, nervous system blocks, and subconscious patterns that derail manifestation, even when your conscious thoughts are "right." Sarah reveals why spiritual bypassing around money doesn't work, and how genuine energy shifts (not just affirmations) create real financial change. A pragmatic deep-dive into manifestation, inner work, and the nervous system blocks keeping you stuck.

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