This is a question that I get asked very often and I’m happy to share my story with you.
“Thank you for taking care of one of my children.”
These words ran through my mind, body and soul for two days after I gave Stephanie a five-dollar bill from my wallet; a similar five-dollar bill that I had been giving her every Friday for over one year. My five-dollars will buy Stephanie a hot cup of coffee and a pack of cigarettes that quiets her nerves (she must smoke at least three packs a day.)
Stephanie is a women disconnected from life; a schizophrenic personality who lives on the streets of southern Long Island, roaming from shopping center to shopping center begging for handouts, warming herself in all night diners and occasionally returning to a home that she does occupy with her mother. Stephanie’s mother lives on the edge of senility, a woman worn out by the tired road of old age.
My modest helping hand was a small gesture of compassion for a woman whose life has taken many wrong turns, through the corridors of psychiatric hospitals and jail cells.
However, on this one particular Friday, some 16 years ago, I handed Stephanie the same five dollars as I always did, and then I heard the voice. Not a voice …the voice!
I was driving my car on my way home and I heard it as clear as daylight. It rang in my head over and over again. The voice seemed to come from within me and yet from the outside at the same time. The same firm sentence repeated itself over and over again.
“Thank you for taking care of one of my children.”
As you can imagine I was scared, curious and definitely confused. I thought this “voice “ was my imagination, a side effect of too many movies or the tall tales that fiction writers record on audiotapes that I listen to on long drives in my car.
The “voice” seemed to quiet down after a few hours only to give rise again. Except as I became more settled with the experience, I began to pay closer attention to the message behind the voice not just what the voice was saying.
Amazingly, I knew what was being said. Somehow I was being thanked for seeing the beauty in Stephanie, that she was just as worthy of love and compassion as anyone despite her behavior and appearance. My heart was open to her and I had not judged her, nor shunned her, and somehow my behavior had resonated in a world that reached beyond the boundaries of my mind…but stretched into my soul. Somehow I was hearing the “voice” of the divine, the voice of spirit. A voice that was thanking me and at the same time preparing me for a mission that would define my life forever…
This extraordinary experience seemed to last for more than two days. Two days in which I was very aware of the “voice” all the time.
And then suddenly, like a great marlin hooked on a line, it seemed to disappear below the surface, running firmly and yet out of sight. The voice was changing my very core. It was creating within me a new perception, a new reality from which I have never looked back.
My sense of the world and beyond was changing and it changed in a way that I now knew, without question, that there was so much more to the spiritual universe than I imagined.
My journey into the world of spirit and psychic energy had begun and I had no choice but to go with it. I had changed in a way I could not explain in words… and then the communication began.
Initially, it was only the voice but as time went on I simply knew that more was coming. It was almost a sense of self –fulfilling prophecy. I thought that because I believed, it was happening. Almost a form of self deceit and yet despite my own doubts, my own sense of silliness, I could not help but feel that I was on this remarkable new journey.
Several weeks had passed and I had started to settle down with this new found experience, this sense of wisdom. I began to receive more. It came in the form of broken day dreams, images, and feelings that would leap into my conscious mind whenever I found myself near someone who had experienced a personal sense of grief or loss. Before long I began the slow steady investigation into the field of mediumship, which apparently was happening to me.
Within six months of the voices first visit, I began to develop a sense of presence; a sense of awareness that was coming from a place that I was unfamiliar with. My seemingly empty-minded daydreams had actually been visits; breakthrough pieces of a psychic language that were becoming more and more clear each day.
And the reason why I knew that it was becoming clearer was from my encounters with guests and friends of friends, of whom I had no knowledge, and yet I seemed capable of retrieving very specific pieces of information regarding deceased members of their families, validations and confirmations.
Little did I know that these “cool” psychic tidbits were actually a serious effort from the other side reaching across the veil trying to gain my attention so that I could relate this information to others; to bring hope and healing, and not to do a psychic trick. How embarrassed I was to think that I was becoming some Whoopi Goldberg “Ghost” type psychic! But soon, very soon, everything changed when the tidbits turned into heart breaking and heart healing readings that really had an affect on the sitters. It had grown way past entertainment and was getting real, real fast!
Within a very short time, perhaps a few months, I began to do readings out of my home, seeing a few people, a few families, a few couples here and there. It was in these first few years that words such as psychic symbolism, validations, affirmations, and messages took on a new meaning. They became a working part not only of my vocabulary, but expressed a glimpse into a new world that I was becoming an active member of. I had become a professional medium, a psychic.
And what was really amazing to me was that I could open to these unique gifts whenever I wished to, unlike in the past, where the messages seemed to be so random. Now they would present themselves to me almost at request. I was stunned.
The responsibility of this gift is tremendous!!! So many people place their hopes and wishes, their pain and sorrow on your doorstep. Reaching across, eye to eye, anxiously hoping to hear something, anything that will reinforce their faith and belief that all the stories we’ve heard as children are true. That we move on to another place when we die. Whether it be called Heaven, the other side, the veil, matters not. Just to know that love does not end or die is the great message and to bring this message demands great responsibility!
I have never seen my gift as a burden. I find it greatly humbling. Somehow being selected by “spirit” to act as a representative for them is amazing. To be so trusted with such delicate, beautiful messages is quite special, wonderful.
I never really worried about dying and since my gift has really broken through, my seeing death as the end is gone. My world seems slower, less quick. However, my personal time has been greatly reduced. Good readings take time, preparation. Questions and answers, tearful goodbyes, it all takes time.