She Saw My Face: Catrina Bond on Spirit, Healing and Learning to Be Human

There was a moment in my conversation with Catrina Bond when things became unexpectedly personal.

I had been telling her about experiences I sometimes have as I am falling asleep. It begins with what I can only describe as a thud — not a sound I hear through my ears, but something I feel through my whole body. Then comes this expanding vibration.

When it happens, I have the sense that I am about to go somewhere.

I have had experiences that I interpret as leaving my physical body. I don't claim to have all the answers about what they are. I can't do it at will, and sometimes I return remembering where I have been; other times it feels as though the shutters have simply come back down.

Then Catrina told me something.

She described waking one morning in that strange in-between state, not fully asleep but not completely awake either.

“I remember seeing a silhouette of a young man. It was almost like I had to follow this.”

So she followed him.

“Just as I got close, the head turned to look back at me, and it was Anthony's face that I saw.”

Apparently I then turned around and “off he scuttled”, which is probably one of the less glamorous descriptions of astral travel I have ever heard.

Catrina got up, put the kettle on and tried to digest what had happened. Something told her she needed to telephone me. When we eventually spoke, I told her about my own experiences of what I call out-of-body or astral travel. 

What was it?

I don't know.

Was Catrina genuinely seeing some non-physical version of me? Was it a dream, a waking image, or something produced by the mind in that space between sleeping and waking?

I can't prove any of it.

But I found it fascinating, particularly because that uncertainty — experience first, interpretation second — runs through so much of Catrina's story.

“The door was always open”

Catrina is from Doncaster in South Yorkshire and describes herself as a medium, trance healer, Reiki practitioner and spiritual teacher.

But she doesn't talk about spirituality as something she discovered after reading a book or attending a course. In her version of events, it was simply there from the beginning.

Some of her earliest memories go back to before her fifth birthday, when her family was living abroad.

There had been a series of fires around the blocks of apartments where they lived. Catrina remembers having an image of a man's face before one particular evacuation. Later, as everybody stood outside waiting for the fire brigade, she says she recognised that same face among the people watching.

Her father had gone back into the building to rescue the family's budgie and cat, so the child Catrina was understandably frightened. But mixed in with that very ordinary fear was this much stranger thought: I've seen this man before.

The following day, she says she felt drawn to a bush near where they lived and found boxes of tablets there, which she told her parents about. Catrina connected them with what had happened, although the transcript doesn't establish independently whether they were related. 

At another point when she was around six, Catrina and another little girl had sneaked into a swimming pool. She says she suddenly saw the children's grandfather approaching as clearly as if he were physically there.

Except he wasn't.

Then the door opened and in walked the grandfather she believed she had already seen — understandably furious to find two young children swimming without an adult.

For Catrina, experiences like these were not something she had a vocabulary for. She was a little girl trying to make sense of what she believed she had seen. 

And there was another childhood experience that stayed with her for decades.

Catrina remembers getting out of bed one night to take her sleepwalking sister back to her room. She says a young female figure in a nightdress appeared to float through the room and disappear through the wall.

Importantly for Catrina, she says her mother saw it too.

Years later, during her first full week at a spiritual college in Essex, she walked into the library and saw a picture on the wall of a young woman floating in a nightdress and holding flowers.

Catrina connected the image immediately with what she remembered seeing as a child.

There were other details too. Shortly before attending the college, she'd drawn a face during an exercise at a local church. She later believed the face matched the woman in the picture. She also remembered seeing a five-petalled lily during meditation; in the picture, she could see five petals on the flower being held.

My response in the interview wasn't particularly sophisticated.

“Mind blown. Guys, mind blown.”

Sometimes that's genuinely where I'm at. 

Learning from experience rather than books

One part of Catrina's story I found particularly interesting is the way she says she has learned.

Catrina is severely dyslexic and told me that she doesn't really read books. She has never had one continuous spiritual mentor either. Instead, she says she has relied on experience.

“I've relied on that experience for the trust, for the understanding and for the proof.”

That word — trust — kept appearing throughout our conversation.

Catrina told me that when she was around eleven she would regularly visit older people living nearby. She would do their shopping and errands, and one lady would apparently be waiting for her with a cup, saucer and biscuit.

At the time, she didn't have language such as energy healing or mediumship. She simply knew that she felt different around them.

She compared herself to a straw: physically solid on the outside, hollow until something flowed through it.

She believed the people she visited sometimes appeared brighter or happier afterwards — “the sparkle in the eye or the skip to the door” — and as an eleven-year-old, that was enough for her. She felt she was making a difference.

Again, that is Catrina's interpretation of those experiences rather than something I can independently establish. But the important thing for understanding her story is that she didn't begin with a spiritual theory and then try to fit her life around it.

She believes the experiences came first.

“I don't tune in. They tune me.”

As we moved into how Catrina works now, I asked about what she calls her spiritual “team”.

Her explanation made me smile because I immediately needed to turn it into something I could visualise.

She compared it to a radio with different frequencies.

“So you can tune in to any member of your team?” I asked.

“I don't tune in. They tune me.”

That completely changed my imaginary radio.

Apparently, I don't turn the dial. I switch on the receiver and pull up the aerial.

“Right, we'll plug it in,” I said. “I might have been on batteries, you never know.”

This is why I enjoy having conversations rather than conducting formal interviews. Sometimes I need to play with an idea before I can understand what somebody is trying to tell me.

For Catrina, the underlying concept is that she becomes receptive rather than reaching out and grabbing for information. She repeatedly came back to discipline as an important part of that.

If she is tired, emotionally unsettled or doesn't feel right herself, she says she wouldn't deliberately sit down to give healing.

She also has a firm boundary when it comes to what she believes she senses about other people:

“It's none of my business. If you ask me the question and you make it my business, then I will share.”

I liked that.

Whatever somebody believes about psychic ability, there is an ethical point in there that is much more down to earth: believing you know something about another person doesn't automatically give you the right to interfere in their life.

What does “home” mean?

Eventually our imaginary radio took us somewhere much bigger.

I asked Catrina what she means by “home”.

Her answer was “the source”.

She described it using another wonderfully practical image: an electrical generator. Energy comes from it, is distributed outwards and, when the physical body has finished, she believes that energy returns to its source.

Then I immediately complicated matters.

I could see the generator in my head.

It was red, for some reason.

So naturally I wanted to know: who built the generator?

At this point even I admitted we'd gone beyond the capacity of my brain.

Catrina's language for God isn't necessarily an external figure. She talks about life force, breath and a collective energy.

These are beliefs. I don't present them as scientific explanations of consciousness or death. But I am interested in how people who have spent decades immersed in spiritual practice make sense of being alive.

And one phrase Catrina used early in our conversation kept coming back.

She said she had needed to learn humanity.

As a highly sensitive child, she felt that she saw everybody as pure and had to learn the layers that came with being human — personalities, behaviour, hurt, dishonesty and everything else we accumulate along the way.

For her, being here is almost like being dropped into a vehicle and having to work out how to drive it.

That became one of the strongest threads of the whole conversation.

Then she told me she had seen me

It was from that discussion about energy and consciousness that I shared my own experiences of travelling outside the body.

I explained that sometimes, just before sleep, I feel that vibration building. Once I recognise it, there are occasions when I feel myself leave my physical body.

I know how that sounds.

I am not asking anyone else to accept my interpretation of it. There are recognised sleep-related experiences, altered states and other possible ways of understanding what people report around the boundary between sleeping and waking.

I can only tell you what it feels like to me.

That's when Catrina revealed that she had experienced the silhouette that turned around with my face.

The coincidence was enough to stop me.

From there we ended up talking about ghosts, spirit and what Catrina calls “imprints”.

Her distinction is that an imprint doesn't interact. In her interpretation, it is more like a recording — something seen or sensed but not consciously communicating.

Spirit communication, to her, involves interaction.

Again, I don't know if that distinction describes something objective about the world. But it gave me another way of thinking about the experiences people report.

And then, naturally, I asked if she could sense anything in the room.

“This room's full.”

“You joking?”

“No.”

That is more or less how serious spiritual enquiry occasionally works on my podcast.

Healing, trance and knowing your limits

Healing runs throughout Catrina's story.

She works with Reiki and trance healing, among other approaches. I had assumed trance healing meant something similar to trance mediumship — somebody entering an altered state and almost becoming somebody else.

Catrina described it differently.

For her, it is about becoming increasingly passive and allowing what she believes to be a healing intelligence or spiritual influence to work through her. She compared ordinary healing and trance healing with seeing a GP and then being referred to a specialist — not as a medical equivalence, but as her way of explaining different levels of focus or attunement.

Some of the experiences she shared involved serious illness, including cancer, brain tumours and a very poorly premature baby.

Those stories need care.

Catrina interprets some unexpected medical developments through the spiritual healing she says she was giving at the time. The transcript does not provide medical records or enough independent evidence for me to say that spiritual intervention caused those outcomes, and conventional medical care was clearly part of several of these stories.

What I can say is that Catrina believes those experiences were significant, and they helped form her understanding of healing.

For me, one of the more revealing parts of this discussion wasn't a claim about what healing could achieve. It was what Catrina said about responsibility.

It took her seventeen years, she told me, before she felt ready to stand on a platform and work with evidential mediumship.

Why so long?

Because when she was young, her mother visited a medium and something said to her caused lasting hurt.

Catrina didn't want to become the person who did that to somebody else.

“For me it was about getting my understanding right, being able to use the right information to deliver the right source.”

She wasn't suggesting people never get things wrong. Her point was that words matter.

For someone sitting opposite a medium while grieving, frightened or vulnerable, a careless sentence can land very differently from the way it was intended.

That part felt very grounded to me.

“You're a healing medium”

There was one other slightly uncomfortable part of the conversation — uncomfortable for me, anyway.

Catrina turned some of this back onto me.

I've always had difficulty with the word medium when talking about myself. Healing is different; I am comfortable with my Reiki work. But standing up and telling someone I have information from a person who has died?

My immediate response is doubt.

Is it imagination? Am I reading somebody's energy? Is it intuition? Is it something else entirely?

As I said to Catrina, Mr Ego will quite happily come charging in and eradicate every possibility.

Towards the end, she told me she didn't doubt my connection with spirit and that, for her, mediumship simply means being a bridge.

“You are a healing medium,” she said.

I still don't know where I sit with that.

And I think that's all right.

I'd rather remain curious than force myself into a label because somebody else thinks it fits.

Catrina herself took seventeen years before she trusted what she was doing enough to work publicly. There was something reassuring about that. Not everything needs to be rushed into certainty.

At one point I told her I felt as though I wasn't even on the threshold. I keep peering over it, stepping back, then creeping slightly nearer again.

That probably still describes me quite well. 

Learning to be human

Near the end, I took Catrina back to the little girl who had been seeing and feeling things she couldn't explain.

After all these years, did she think there had been a purpose behind it?

“Yes.”

For Catrina, that purpose was to understand her “vehicle” — the physical human being she is living through.

“It was for me to learn the human experience.”

She believes her calling is much simpler than proving every mystery of the universe:

“If I make one difference every day of my life, I'm doing my job.”

And then came the question I ask every guest.

If you could leave one message with the world, from everything you've experienced spiritually, what would that message be?

Catrina didn't need a long answer.

“Live your best life, be true to yourself. And don't wait till you're dead to live.”

I laughed because it was so Catrina — spiritual, certainly, but also very firmly about getting on with the business of being alive.

And I think she deserves the final word. 

Watch the full conversation

This article is based on my full conversation with Catrina Bond on the Anthony Larkin Podcast, where we explore her childhood experiences, mediumship, trance healing, consciousness, out-of-body experiences and her own understanding of what it means to be spirit living a human life.