Who is Joanne Knapp Helfrich?

I was born in upstate New York in 1957. My dad, John, was the personnel manager at the Jell-O plant in LeRoy, and my mother, Jeanette, was a homemaker. They, along with my sister Jeanne, had moved there from Evansville, Indiana. There are loads of Helfrichs in Evansville, and years later, after I moved to Philadelphia and married Paul, my aunt would joke, “You had to move all the way to Philadelphia to marry a Helfrich?”

We were happy in New York, all told. My dad enjoyed his work, and in his free time directed musical revues for the local Rotary Club. These were very professionally produced, and my dad, who had been a musician and end-man in minstrel revues, was good at finding and encouraging talent in the townspeople. My mom did creative things, too, like sewing and crocheting, and instilled in me a sense of the extraordinary in ordinary things. She had a shrine to the Blessed Mother in her garden, and a picture of the Little Infant Jesus in the kitchen. She says my first word was “Jesus” and that I called everything Jesus, including the neighbor’s dog. She is religious, and Catholic, but often rebels against the church and its practices.

Humor and music were, and still are, important parts of our lives. On Sundays my dad played show tunes on our record player, and my mom took us to church. My dad exposed me to Gypsy Rose Lee and my mom to Joan of Arc, and these became my earliest role models. As a child, I was sick a lot with asthma and allergies, and spent a lot of time at home, and am still very much a homebody.

When General Foods purchased Jell-O, they shut down the plant and put half the town out of work. In January 1964, they moved us to Dover, Delaware. My family never really adapted to corporate life, and my dad drank to deal with his unhappiness. I attended Catholic school, and while there was a lot of dogma and dysfunction, I believe that being in an environment where you are not only allowed but expected to discuss spiritual matters is extremely important, and that in the long run my Catholic upbringing did me a valuable service, in this respect.

Outside of school, I took art and dance classes, and developed my interest in theater. I got a part in a local drama production when I was twelve, and spent summers doing musical comedy revues in a teen troupe. I think theater, music, comedy, and art in many ways became my Church, as it had for my father.

After graduating from high school, I entered the University of Delaware as a theater major, but was disappointed to find no musical or comedy theater. I was, however, happy to discover sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. But without any sense of direction, or any way discover it, I quit after a year and moved back home. Although I wasn’t really emotionally ready to be on my own, I felt the need to try my wings and moved out, at eighteen.

One of the reasons I feel profoundly committed to helping people connect with their intentionality, purpose, and passions in life is that I would have greatly benefited from that when I was young. I had interests that had no place for expression and no clear sense of my path in life. As a result, I experienced some difficult, confusing times, essentially keeping a roof over my head, taking waitress jobs, and then a job with the State, which is the ultimate thing when you grow up in a small town. When the job ended, faced with the prospects of being a chicken plucker at the new Perdue factory, I told myself, “I have to get out of this town.”

I moved to Philadelphia in 1979, and worked in a home for boys as a child care worker and art instructor, then as a secretary (we were called that back then) at an art college, on a motion picture, and as the assistant to a hotel marketing director. In 1984, I caught up with a previous boss who took me on a tour of his alma mater, Temple University School of Communications and Theatre, and told me, “You’re too smart to not get smarter.” Finally someone helped me connect with my inner longing, and gave me a sense of direction and possibility! I fell in love with the course catalog, enrolled full-time, and got jobs as a cocktail waitress and singing telegram performer. Finally, I started to get my bliss back.

In the meantime, my parents finally had it with corporate life. My dad took an early retirement, and they moved back to Evansville. He died in 1985 after a long illness, and my sister Jeanne and I went out to say our goodbyes and help mom with the funeral arrangements. We made sure the funeral director knew to put the minstrel costume in the casket and not on dad. Three priests would be conducting the ceremony, and performing would be the choir that dad and his best friend, Joe, had formed to do charity shows. Dad and Joe had done vaudeville bits together for decades, but would never agree who the straight man was and so they were always trying to top each other. During my dad’s funeral, Joe got up to read from the bible, had a heart attack, keeled backwards, and died right there on the altar. We imagined our dad saying, “Well, Joe, you had to upstage me at my own goddamned funeral!”

The event would hold even more significance for me, as on the way to Evansville, I stopped at a Philadelphia Airport gift shop looking for a book that would help me through my dad’s passing. I bought Seth Speaks by Jane Roberts. This would be more influential in my life than I could have imagined at the time.

In 1987, I attended a party and met a cute guy named Paul Helfrich. Several weeks later, I needed music for a video class, and my friend suggested Paul, who was a doctoral Music Composition student. The Music Building was right across the street from the Communications Building, so I went to the chairman of the Composition Department and asked him for references. Paul had asked him not to send any more students looking for free work, but the chairman suggested I talk to him anyway. Another person telling me to talk to Paul! I did, and he was very nice about it. I gave him a five-note theme that I’d “heard” in a yoga meditation, and he composed an incredibly beautiful piece that was exactly what I’d been looking for. When I edited the video, it was as if someone was guiding my hands. On our third date, Paul confessed his deep interest in the work of Jane Roberts and Seth, which had been a source of conflict in his previous marriage. So he was greatly relieved when I said, “I read Seth Speaks and thought it was great.”

Our first year together was tough. We had little money and lived in a ghetto. I had health problems. With degrees in music and communications, we were relatively unemployable. Miraculously, with the recommendation of the same music department chair (God bless you Maurice Wright!), Paul got a job with the Franklin Institute Science Museum as lead developer for the “What Makes Music?” exhibit, which fueled his passion for art, science, and the marriage of both. After a few years in the video industry, I got a job in an aerospace company as a writer and graphic artist. We moved to the suburbs and married in 1989. In 1990, when I was trying to get pregnant, my fertility specialist told me, in one breath, “You won’t get pregnant, and you may have ovarian cancer.” I was scheduled to have a hysterectomy that October.

With the prospect of a terminal dis-ease, not having children, and sensing that the imagery around my health issues had to do with creative “progeny,” I sought to determine what that would be. I came across The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels, and immediately sensed a connection to the life and times of the historical Christ, and the role of women in that society and ours. I began writing a historical novel from the perspective of a female biblical character, and the title was The Power of the Rose.

A few weeks before my surgery, a woman pathologist stepped in and suggested to the surgeons that, before performing the hysterectomy, they biopsy me while on the operating table, cut open like a sandwich. When I awoke after the surgery, I was told that there was no cancer, and that I still had all my parts. I refer to this event as my “misdirectomy.” I have no doubt that there would have been other outcomes if the event hadn’t driven me to find a new direction in my life – writing books, plays and musicals – which has brought me so much joy.

Meanwhile, Paul and I were not enjoying the suburban lifestyle that everyone else seemed to. We attended the 1996 New Haven Seth Network Int’l. Conference, and felt we’d found our tribe. We wrote down the things that were truly important to us, and posted them on our living room wall: Art, Music, the Seth material, and Nature. Paul quit his science museum job and started experimenting with CafeMuse, a web site and curricula that integrated science and art.

At the 1997 Elmira Seth Conference, we quite literally stumbled upon Mary Ennis and friends doing Elias sessions in Room 106. Then, during a visit with them in California, we bought a house up the street from where the Elias sessions were taking place, and loaded up a truck and moved to Be… autiful Castaic in northern Los Angeles County. We began collaborating on Elias materials, and playing a lot of Balderdash. Vicki Pendley, who was central to the Elias phenomenon, helped us with many things, including the ability to recognize the Rose energy and my connection to it, which was explained in our first private Elias session on October 1, 1997.

Paul and I also became students of Ken Wilber and Don Beck, whose work has become a critical part of legitimizing the channeling phenomenon, which evolved as a natural part of our explorations. In 1999, we created NewWorldView with our Seth friends, launched the NewWorldView website, and held two conferences and an author tour. Vicki died in 2001, and we launched the Elias Forum web site. NewWorldView continued to grow with online contributors including Serge Grandbois, who channels Kris. In 2004, we promoted them through our phone session gatherings called Dinner & A Dead Guy.

Even after being so involved in supporting channeling and channelers, no one was more surprised than us when I began to channel the essence of Rose in April 2007. Discovering this gift, and my “way of spirit,” has been an extraordinary privilege and life-changing event in every way. It changes the past, too, and helps make sense of things. I now see my life as a sort of poetic, Divine conspiracy that includes, for example, understanding why we choose the families we do.

Like my mother, I revel in celebrating the sacred in the secular. As an infant, perhaps I called everything Jesus because there’s truth in that: everyone is their own savior when they heed the call of their intentionality. In some ways like my father, my bliss is helping each of us to connect with our way of spirit, encouraging our talents so we can each open fully to the magical lives that we are meant to live. My sister continues to be a most wonderful, contrary individual in my life, something that I’ve learned is divinely important. And my early role models, Gypsy Rose Lee and Joan of Arc, seem even more appropriate now that I engage my own inner voices and perform in ways far outside the norm. For now, I will keep my clothes on, but with Rose, we never know what to expect!