Summary: Interview with UFO and alien contact experience researcher examines the power of personal experience. Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Mary Rodwell, author of, Awakening. During the interview Rodwell talks about the power of personal experience: Mary Rodwell: The truth is that all we’ve ever got within ourselves is our own resonance to truth, our own BS meter, if you like. Ultimately that is what we’re being asked to trust. We’ve got nothing else. We’re told huge amounts of information. Some of it is disinformation; some of it’s lies. What is it in us that resonates to truth? Ultimately that’s the only thing we’ve got because actually nobody has the full mandate on truth. We’ve all got bits of it and we are fed all sorts of mixes of truth. So the only thing we’ve got in the end is ourselves as that instrument of choosing what our truth is. My role is to facilitate a place where they can find their truth in their experience. Nobody has a right to tell them what to believe around that other than what they choose to believe. (continued below) Mary's ACERN Website Play It Listen Now: Download MP3 (43 min.) Read It: Today we welcome Mary Rodwell to Skeptiko. Mary’s a professional counselor and hypnotherapist, as well as being one of Australia’s best known and most highly regarded UFO researchers. Mary is the founder of the Australian Close Encounter Resource Network (ACERN) where she helps those dealing with the aftermath of alien contact experience. Mary, welcome to Skeptiko. Thanks so much for joining me. Mary Rodwell: It’s a pleasure, Alex. Alex Tsakiris: It’s a big pleasure for me. As we were just chatting about a minute ago, I’ve seen many of your excellent interviews. One thing I have to commend you on is that you’re really very open and generous with your time. You give many interviews to many people. I can see that you’re very committed to spreading this information and you do it in such a great way. I really want to commend you on that. Mary Rodwell: Thank you, Alex. I think that for me it’s about the fact that people are so discriminated against in terms of their own personal experiences to the point of almost anyone that’s out of the box is considered abnormal in some way. For me, it’s the discrimination against personal experience which I think is the hardest thing most of us have to deal with because of the judgment that goes with that. Alex Tsakiris: I think that’s a great way of saying it. As we were just chatting about a minute ago, on this show we’ve looked at near-death experience quite a bit. There is a similar kind of stigma there although that’s much relieved now with the popular media catching onto that. The experience is no longer stigmatized in the same way. But certainly when you talk about people who had such an experience 20 or 30 years ago they say, “I told no one. I couldn’t tell anyone.” That certainly is a situation that you’re familiar with when we talk about close encounter or alien contact experiences. Before I get too far along, for folks who are less familiar with your work can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started doing this work? Mary Rodwell: My background is nursing. For a number of years I practiced my profession there but I went into professional counseling about 25 to 30 years ago. I’ve done the whole gamut, from relationship counseling to grief and bereavement, through a whole range of what we call the more expected normal human experiences. It was about 17 or 18 years ago that I was in private practice and a gentleman came to me and said, “I heard you’re open-minded. For this there are no support groups. For this people just think you’re a loony. But I’m having experiences, my family is, my children. I feel like I’m being taken somewhere. I wake up with marks on my body, shaved areas. The relatives won’t even come to the house because they think it’s demons.
