Pamela Sommer-Dickson: “Discover the strength within you—You can!”

There is something ethereal, gentle about her. Despite her 58 years, Pamela Sommer-Dickson looks remarkably fresh and youthful. There aren’t many people who have done more good for their fellow man than she has, having spent more than thirty years healing people—even the desperately ill. Yet she is extremely unpretentious and modest about herself: just a normal person, albeit with an extraordinary gift, is what she aspires to be. Even if you can heal, she says, you are not automatically a saint—you are also often treated rather harshly by life. That means spending every moment learning, just like everyone else. “Some people treat life as an enemy when it is actually trying to teach them something. You shouldn’t,” she smiles softly.

Even as a child she knew she was different somehow; relatives reacted aggressively towards her because they felt caught out and exposed—she was able to see auras, as well as when someone was lying. Today she can simply shut down her “sight”, which she does for two reasons: “Firstly to spare my nerves—who would want to see into all the thoughts and feelings of everyone around you all the time! And secondly because it would be snooping—like breaking into someone’s house and rifling through his drawers.”

The youngest child of a Dutch-Indonesian doctor’s family, Sommer-Dickson grew up in The Hague, Wassenaar and Scheveningen where she was just a stone’s throw from the water. The little girl liked to sit and look at “the moving beings” that “clean the water and help the fishes and sea mammals.”

Her childhood, says Pamela, “had elements of both the difficult and the beautiful. I’m the youngest of four children and there was always something going on. My mother always said I was difficult, but I was just very different from my siblings. Very shy and sensitive, I withdrew and hid because I ‘saw and sensed things’ that nobody understood.”

Besides auras, she would also sometimes see people who were dead. Not astral shells that had remained behind (please see Facts are Facts no. 4), but shining beings who would briefly come to her from their new world of existence. There was nothing ugly or terrifying about it: “I was very protected by the spiritual world. Nothing has ever come to me that frightened me. But of course I was confronted by all this much later. Some of those that came to me had dark beings around them, but even that never scared me.”

Nordic-blond like her eldest brother, little Pamela and he took after their mother, while the two middle siblings looked more Indonesian. She was almost too sensitive for this world. Sensory overload was too much for her: fireworks or fairs made her anxious—too many impressions, too much noise! When her parents sent her to bed she would obediently go straight to her darkened room without complaint, because that was where the other world was waiting for her: “I saw really quite a lot of things at that time, and went on journeys. I can still remember the feeling and noise of travelling through the universe. There was a lot of speed, vitality and light there. A little man would often come to visit and chat to me. That was great; I was in a world that felt familiar.”

Pamela was also able to sense immediately if an animal was sick, so other children would bring their sick pets to her. She didn’t really do much, but the animals always got better afterwards. Yet Pamela didn’t believe that she had healing powers. “As a child, I would often eat on the beach looking out at the horizon and pray: ‘Teach me love and humility in this life! And if I am allowed to heal—perhaps in a later life, in a thousand years or so—please let me!’ I knew healers existed, but I have never seen myself as one.”

Eventually, being different became a burden for her. “So at the age of about twelve or thirteen, I said to myself: okay, go away, I don’t want to have any business with you anymore!” She smiles. “Instead I had boyfriends and parties and played sport,” like any other youngster. And the spiritual world proved obedient. “They have always very much respected my will. So I suppressed everything and focused completely on my studies and on having as crazy a teenage life as possible—well, as far as was possible with such an authoritarian father.”

The doctor’s daughter decided she still wanted to help sick people, but in the conventional way. So after leaving school she began her medical studies, went to Switzerland for a year to learn the language, and met her future husband there, an English journalist. “And you know how it goes: we got married and I left university.”

When her second child was about 6 months old, the couple moved from England to Switzerland. And then something inexplicable happened: “All of a sudden I was out cold for three days—no one knew what was wrong with me. And then after three days I was suddenly back again, right as rain. But I had no idea that I had been ‘gone’ for that long!”

Were you on a journey? What happened?

During those three days, I experienced it all again very intensely. And when I woke up, I was able to see auras again very clearly. I knew that this experience was asking something of me, and I felt an indescribable strength inside me, although I didn’t know where it came from. That was 35 years ago… Back then there were no courses or books on spirituality like there are today; you just didn’t talk about those things. I felt completely alone. And then I asked: What should I do? Give me a sign! Well then, after a few weeks this woman rang at the door... and it all started from there.

What did she want?

She had a six-week-old baby that hadn’t been able to keep down its milk since birth, and the doctors had already warned her that it would probably die. One night this woman dreamed of me: the dream showed her my name and where I lived. It must have been so momentous that she decided to look me up in the phone book—of course, Dickson is an unusual name in Switzerland so she found me quite quickly.

One day she just turned up at my door. She said: ‘I dreamed about you, you can help me!’ I gasped, ‘What?!’ (Laughs). I was completely thrown off guard. To start with, I made her a cup of tea and had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do next. So I simply chatted with her a bit and held the baby while she told me all about the child’s illness. Then she suddenly said to me: ‘There is so much light around you; what have you done to your hands?’—‘I haven’t done anything!’ I said. ‘You have, you have!’ she said, ‘You made these gestures.’ I was completely unaware of having done that. To this day I don’t know what I did. Anyway, we talked for another half an hour or so, and then she left. Three days later she called me: from the time we met, the baby had been able to keep down its milk. The doctors had examined her a week later and were amazed at how well the child was doing. And today she’s a grown woman.”

And did you know at that point, that’s my destiny?

I thought, now perhaps that’s a sign. In any case, I was very cautious and very awed. And you know how it goes—this woman told the story to a few people.”

Eventually a doctor sent her a patient who was suffering from terminal cancer. “The patient said on the phone: ‘You’re my only hope!’” Pamela Sommer-Dickson spent an almost sleepless night under the weight of this expectation, during which she was visited by a radiant being of light. It seemed more masculine than feminine, yet in the spiritual world it is sometimes difficult to tell because beings of higher vibrations become more and more androgynous. This shining being shared a lesson with her that would be important for the rest of her life. “Don’t take yourself so seriously,” it said. “Just be there for them, and do the best you can—leave the rest to us.” “From then on I never encouraged anyone to come to me. If it’s meant to be, then people will be lead to me.”

Yet, she says, it is never easy when someone does not experience a healing, because you’d like to free every single person from his or her suffering. “But I know that everyone has their own path to follow and that the disease can offer you the chance to learn certain things. I also try to convey to people the idea that there’s more to ‘life’ than just clutching onto the earthly things down here.”

In her seminars she also emphasizes the things that should mark the attitude of anyone wanting to be healed:

“Three gifts are given to any person who serves as a healing channel. These are, firstly, unconditional love. Secondly, the power of thought and thirdly, free will.”

In terms of unconditional love, the person looking for healing should first accept themselves and love who they are. This is the main problem of the people that come to her: “People think they have accomplished something in their life; they look good and make an impression on others, but this external ideal they want to fit is actually very distorted. There is a lot of self-doubt there, which was probably already sown in childhood. People feel they have to be liked by everyone and they get lost in this struggle instead of searching inside themselves for their true being, and then doing something with that.

“This means,” Sommer stresses, “that the power is within us now! We often get bogged down by the past from our experiences of failure and guilt (partly real, partly imagined) and by the future, which scares us. So we need to be in the NOW and in harmony with everything that is. This inner attitude comprises true love, which is unconditional and non-possessive.”

Free will enables a person to decide how they want to deal with a situation in terms of both thought and behaviour. Do they want to cling to it or let it go? Be unyielding, or forgive? Sommer-Dickson: “It is imperative to rid yourself of the victim mentality and ask: How can I deal with this situation? We are our own worst enemy in that by fighting against our feelings of guilt and fear, we only nourish them instead. When we fight against something, we feed energy into it, yet if we accept it as a lesson, it will help us find the way.

It is therefore essential “to live in the moment—then your strength can flow. Everything is in flux; everything can change—people too!”

The second thing that people looking for healing struggle with is the idea of letting go.

What do people have to let go of?

The material world. Pain. Resentment. Forgiveness is a big issue. Forgiving yourself also has to do with love: if you forgive yourself, you can also forgive others—then you feel more liberated and can liberate someone else in turn. This also works on people who may intentionally not choose the ‘good’. It can weaken their negative potential, even when this happens totally unconsciously.