“The peace and joy that now encompasses your soul is the same that we wish you to share, here, with us. Your understanding is so much more, now...” — excerpted, with permission, from Susan Chamberlain’s 9/11 tribute to her beloved sister, Michele Lanza.   Read more about our students and graduates.

Graduate Profiles

Healing from 9/11:
The Ultimate House Call is Heaven
Susan G. Chamberlain, D.N., 1997, and Ph.D., 2000

AIHT graduate Susan Chamberlain of New York recalls September 11, 2001 as a soul-transforming day: for her sister who died in Twin Towers #2, for their family, and for herself. “In one moment in time, my sister was here with us in body, mind and spirit. Michele’s last earthly activity was to help calm her terrified co–workers in a stairwell. She called and left us a message at home and then within the next moments, Michele apparently stepped over into the heavenly realm.”

Susan witnessed the heinous attacks of 9/11 from a distance, from her car. Working as a traveling phlebotomist, her job is to collect blood samples from homebound patients and take them to a Staten Island hospital. But by noon that day, the hospital security guard who usually ”nodded her by” had been replaced by a SWAT team, and her intuition felt increasingly uneasy about Michele.

Susan is a metaphysician as well as a medical technologist. She travels the “super highway” of daily prayer, meditation and breath work. She devoutly prays the Rosary as well as the Divine Mercy Chaplets. And often at the end of her daily rounds, she meets to minister and pray with individuals who reach out to her, seeking to share a divine connection. All of this is Susan’s faith in action.

“By the time I filled out a Missing Person’s Report and posted flyers on prayer walls that Thursday, I could clearly envision Michele as an angel. As I saw her literally lifted up and carried by other angels, my own heavy heart lifted and began to heal.”

Susan attributes part of her growing enlightenment to the life–changing, healing wisdom of medical intuitive Caroline Myss, and to her own perpetual study of A Course in Miracles—both of which were part of Susan Chamberlain’s AIHT curricula. To aid her family’s mourning process, Susan consciously offers them a peaceful demeanor as well as an uplifting witness.

“Jesus taught by example. When I demonstrate ‘the peace that passes understanding,’ my family can either hear it as a foreign language or I can become their translator, their bridge to honoring Michele’s sacred contract.”

Susan is referring to Caroline Myss’ newest book, Sacred Contracts, whose premise is that each of us is born specifically to carry out certain tasks, meet certain people, and endure pain along with joy. We either learn key lessons within this lifetime, or we continue reliving painful lessons until they finally do succeed in helping us to grow and go higher.

Ironically, the posting of Michele’s missing person flyers would lead to a filmmaker’s documentary on children who became orphans on 9/11. Its title, Telling Nicholas, refers to Michele Lanza’s seven–year–old son, Nicholas. The show premiered on HBO.

Even before 9/11 but also throughout this year, Susan’s own kinship with Caroline Myss continues evolving, as a journey of personal healing and enrichment.

But doesn’t she ever mourn her sister’s sudden departure from Earth School?

“We don’t have to live without our loved ones, if we acknowledge that their energetic spirit can always shine within us, each and every day. Anytime I reach out to connect with Michele, she reaches right back and comforts me. I envision her teaching Orientation groups in heaven. She is teaching large classes of new angels about the earth experience.

“God’s plan is a perfect plan”, Susan asserts. “Therefore life does not happen to us, it happens for us.”