“I must have been a little monster!” Katherine Bell says with a laugh as she describes some of her earliest experiences as a seer.
“You must treat your baby brother nicer,” the entity she calls a guardian kept telling her. “He would tell me how to live my life, and to be good to my parents. I must have been a real brat!”
Katherine had these unusual experiences from the time she was born, and it took a while for her to understand that they didn’t happen to everyone. About two years following the birth of her little brother, a sister was born, and Katherine got the same messages about how to value her new sibling.
An older sister had already started school, and young Katherine wanted nothing more than to also attend school. So her guardian showed her the school, perceptually walking her to the corner, then to the school, where she “met” the kindergarten teacher, who later actually became her teacher in the physical realm.
Katherine was born in Denver, and her parents divorced when she was seven. Unable to care for his four children full time, her father placed them in an orphanage, where they lived for five years, joining their father at home on weekends.
When people express sympathy for this early experience, she says, “You don’t need to, because it was a very good place to live. I learned how to play piano there, and to sing. We had positive instruction, not negative.”
After high school graduation, she moved to California, where she would remain for 54 years. She had four children, who are all now adults with their own children and grandchildren.
Katherine says guardians have spoken to her throughout her life. There have been different guardians in her consciousness, and sometimes even groups of them. For her, it’s always been about how better to know God.
On New Year’s Day of 1980, she sat down and asked the guardians what was going to happen in the next decade: Would we have peace? Would prosperity return? Now that Vietnam was behind us, would the ’80s be better? The master guardian told her, “Your father will die in 1983.”
Unwilling to hear that, she cut off communication, and said, “I don’t want to ever talk to you guys again. I don’t want to hear things like that. I’m going to meditate and be with God, but I’m never talking to you again.”
Encouraged by her husband to share this frightening prediction with her family, Katherine remained in denial and said, “It’s not true, and I’m not going to tell them something like that.” So she didn’t.
In 1983, when her younger sister moved to California , Katherine again resisted her husband’s urging to share the prophecy with her siblings. Even though their father’s health was declining, she remained in denial. She finally told her sister, but pledged her to secrecy, because she still considered it false information.
After wondering why her father didn’t call on Thanksgiving, she received the call the next day from her stepmother: “Your dad just died.” Shock took over on many levels.
“My denial was so strong I had to fly back to Denver to see his body before I would believe it. Denial can do incredible things to us,” she says.
“When I got back home, I got down on my knees and said, ‘God, how do you want me to serve you? You gave me a message that I could have done something with, but I didn’t.’” Katherine acknowledges that to this day she has an older sister who is still angry because she didn’t tell them, nor did she return home to be with her dad.
Later in a meditation, another being came, calling himself Mohad, and emitting very high frequency energy. He said, “I can speak through you.” Always the skeptic, Katherine thought “This is nuts!” When her sister agreed to sit with her and share the experience, they began to perceive incredible information that they’d never heard from any mystic, seer, or prophet. They realized the English language lacked the ability to show the capacity of the wisdom they were being given. Eventually, Mohad told her, “The consciousness of humanity is not quite ready for this. We will return and give it to you at a later time.”
Another entity came and announced himself as Malachi. As he began to share information, Katherine recognized the energy of Mohad, and finally Malachi told her that the Mohad energy had downgraded so it could match her frequency and communicate better with her. “He began to bring wisdom forward,” she says, “and I’ve worked with him now since 1983.”
Some of Malachi’s information held very practical advantages. He predicted a company’s first-time-ever layoffs and a decline in the company’s stock price. He predicted the 1987 stock market crash. Katherine says, “He works both in a practical reality of our human form, and the positive reality of us advancing our spiritual awareness so we can truly recognize, ‘You are that God. You are God in matter, and you are experiencing it, expressing the duality, and polarity processes.’ He keeps teaching that and teaching it to all who will listen.”
Divorced from her first husband, she went to work at raising her four children, and found it necessary to work in the corporate world and higher education. She worked as a receptionist, executive secretary, administrative assistant, and contracts coordinator, including a stint with Dr. Irwin Jacobs, who eventually developed tech giant Qualcomm.
Katherine always wanted to move forward in life. She studied psychology at National University in San Diego, but found a roadblock when she realized the laws at that time precluded her from suggesting meditation for her clients. “I really wanted to bring that philosophy to counseling,” she says, “but at that time you could not.”
Her professor encouraged her to research the legal situation, and she found in the regulations a key phrase: “… according to your church.” Consulting with the professor produced the understanding that she could study religion instead of psychology and have much more freedom to encourage clients with methods more consistent with her own beliefs.
This understanding propelled her in the direction of religious studies. She took classes at Kairos, a religious institution providing studies in symbolism, psychism, and spiritual psychology. One of her meditation students there showed her an ad for a program that offered bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in spiritual philosophy—the University of Metaphysics (now University of Sedona). She met the program’s minister/director in Los Angeles and could immediately feel his positive energy. “I’d always heard the term ‘the thousand-petal lotus,’” she says, “and this man’s crown chakra was glowing like that.” She signed up for the doctoral program.
That was followed by a Ph.D. in transpersonal psychology from Westbrook University, a Ph.D. in metaphysical sciences, a Ph.D. in holistic astrology, and a Ph.D. in mysticism. She also joined the Builders of the Adytum, a Mystery school with its greater focus on Qabalah. She continues to advance in studies in sound healing with Reiki, tuning forks and singing bowls. Divine Inspiration led her to the development of Timeless Cryptograms of Healing®, a sound healing process using cryptograms and tuning forks. She provides classes for individuals to become certified in Cryptogram Healing as well as working the Divine to be Cryptogram writers.
Katherine conducts workshops, classes, and counseling in these fields. During one of her workshops a donor offered her seed money to begin a school. As usual, meditation was her first response, and the positive answer came. She recruited a vice president and a secretary/treasurer and the organization was begun.
Within the group was a woman with CPA credentials, who handled the review of paperwork to get them established as a non-profit organization, with authority to grant bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees. That launched a great amount of activity creating courses for these degree programs.
Thus “SPICA – Way of Light” was born in 2007. The namesake of the organization is the star Spica in the constellation Virgo, considered the 15th most brilliant star in our sky. Spica’s (and Virgo’s) symbolic representation is the Divine Feminine, or the Goddess. Christians would say it’s Mary, the Holy Mother. In the star pattern she is standing with something in her hand—some say it’s corn, some say wheat—and it’s the symbol of providing humanity everything we need. The bright star’s position in the constellation corresponds with this symbolic gift.
The name is also an acronym: Spirit Presence In Consciousness Always. SPICA – Way of Light is a religious organization with a focus on spiritual education. The University of Divinity offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees in spiritual philosophy and a Doctor of Divinity degree. Headquarters of the organization are in Thousand Oaks, California. She stays busy at the helm of the SPICA – Way of Light organization, but sometimes finds time to read, bicycle, and otherwise enjoy nature.
For 35 years Katherine has counseled, taught, and written about sacred mysteries. Her books include: Soul Magic: Understanding Your Journey; The Faces of WomanSpirit: A Celtic Oracle of Avalon (including a color book of the same name); Be the Living Tree: From Roots to Fruit You are Divine; The 72 Names of God: Healing Codes for Sacred Living; and she is presently working on The Tribe of the Soul: The Clan of Whispering Grandmothers.
When Al Torres, her husband of 31 years, died of cancer, she thought she’d never remarry. She hadn’t even a thought or desire. Yet, she met Wayne Bell, now her husband of five years, and they share a home in Colorado.
One of Katherine’s favorite quotes about herself is from a newspaper story about her: “Katherine is a person you’d meet in a grocery store and think of her only as a grandmother.” And grandmother she is, twenty times now, along with twelve great-grandchildren. “I’m a simple woman,” she says, “who’s been given a great blessing to do this work.”
Concerning her life’s work, she says, “I have days when I absolutely know it, and maybe those days will go on for me. And then, like everybody else, some days I fall down and say ‘I missed the boat somewhere.’ The truth is coming out more and more, and spiritual and religious people understand the foundational language, ‘We are the Divine’; but now we have to live it. We have to live it.”