This is an excerpt from my book "Messages from the Stars: How the 20th Century's Greatest Artists and Visionaries Lived Their Art, and What They Have to Teach Us from Beyond the Veil." Learn more and get the book here.
As a psychic medium, I am able to connect with beings in the Spirit world and relay their words and wisdom. As a trance channel, I can merge with the energies of these spirits, capturing their essence to project their voices and mannerisms, radiating their unique energetic imprint, and becoming the living embodiment of their human expression. In other words, I allow them to use my body and speak through my voice. I act as a literal portal to the Great Beyond and open the door that separates the two worlds, facilitating a dialogue between the living and the dead.
But although it comes effortlessly to me now, I wasn’t born with the ability to trance channel; I was born simply with the ability to feel. This is how it all began.
A HEALER IS BORN
I did not come into this world knowing that I was psychic or a medium, but it has always been there: that mystical, unexplainable force that added such profound yet confusing depth and feeling to my everyday experience that no one around me seemed to even notice, let alone validate or support. So while this innate connection to the unseen world has given me unique insights into the human condition and the nature of life itself, this ability to sense too much, know too much, and feel too much has more often than not been an excruciating cross to bear.
In hindsight, it’s almost laughable that I had no idea I was psychic. Sure, as a kid I would see shadowy figures prowling the halls at night, I could always sense when a place was haunted, and I could feel when someone or something was there that shouldn’t be. But because the bulk of my intuitive experiences came through emotions and sensations rather than visions and ghostly visitations, I didn’t equate my abilities with the supernatural; I just thought I was mentally ill.
When you go through the world as an open vessel, taking in all the sensations of the seen and unseen world around you, it doesn’t take long for you to become overwhelmed. And because of my natural abilities as a healer, feeling the pain of the world — from both the living and the dead — became my default setting. I suffered my first major depressive episode at age 9, and it was far from the last.
Throughout my teenage years and into my 20’s I cycled up and down, the highs getting higher and the lows getting lower until eventually I suffered a nervous breakdown at age 21. At 22 I was given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, put on a mind-numbing cocktail of psychiatric medications, and told that the best I could hope for was basically to not go completely insane. That is, they said, if I laid low, managed my symptoms, avoided my triggers, and didn’t get too caught up in the world around me. Then everything would be fine. Probably.
But how do you avoid triggers when they’re not coming from your actions or the circumstances of your life, but from the entire nonphysical world around you?
And so after years of treatment that did nothing to alleviate my depression and only made me terrified to engage in life again for fear I’d suffer another breakdown, something snapped inside. Nothing the doctors said or did thus far had made anything better, so why was I surrendering my entire life to their advice? I gave the psychiatric world the proverbial middle finger and vowed to make peace with my emotions once and for all.
I can’t just be a freak of nature, I thought. Something deep inside me believed that there must be a reason for all of this. I can’t just be broken and unfixable and that’s the end of it; there must be more to me — and more to life — than this.
Little did I know how much more I would discover.
Making peace with and leaning into my emotions eventually led me to the earth-shaking truth that I am not in fact mentally ill, I am spiritually gifted. I have the ability to feel the pain of those around me because I have the ability to heal it. I have the ability to feel all that is unseen, be it energy, memory, emotion, and yes, even the spirits of the dead. What’s more, I have the ability to tune into them, merging my energies with theirs to become a conduit for their words, insight, passion, and power, weaving messages of hope and healing for those on both sides of the veil.
And so, through several years of deep healing work and learning to manage my mental health as well as my empathic overwhelm (and most importantly, learning to turn my intuitive feeling senses on and off at will), I was able to fully develop my abilities as a psychic medium, a healer, and a trance channeler. I opened up a private practice for clients around the world, and for the first time in my life, everything was exactly how I wanted it to be. At long last I understood why I am the way I am, and I found purpose and profound value in all I had experienced and fought to overcome. Everything was perfect.
Until it wasn’t.
Despite a thriving business that deeply impacted countless souls on both sides of the veil — work that allowed me to not only embrace my abilities but also live life as a healthy wife and mother to three young children, something doctors once told me I’d never be able to do — after a few years of this work, something didn’t feel right. I leaned in, trying to determine just what about my life was “off.” The feeling got so uncomfortable I decided to leave my psychic work behind, reasoning that I’d overcome what I set out to overcome, so maybe it was time to try something new. Maybe I needed a restart. Maybe that path had run its course and it was time to grow up and get a real job.
Well, as you can imagine, that didn’t work out very well. I may have been done with Spirit, but Spirit wasn’t done with me.
It wasn’t long before I found myself getting fired from my corporate work completely out of the blue, not once but twice. The shock, anger, humiliation, and fear of it all brought me into a deep state of surrender to the divine. Clearly I wasn’t entirely in charge of my life path; clearly there was something else I was meant to do, something that wasn’t letting me off easy. It was time to let Spirit take the lead as it had once before. It was time to do the work I came to this Earth to do.
That’s when David Bowie came blazing into my life and changed my world forever.
This is an excerpt from my book "Messages from the Stars: How the 20th Century's Greatest Artists and Visionaries Lived Their Art, and What They Have to Teach Us from Beyond the Veil." Learn more and get the book here.
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