Do Dead People Walk Their Dogs? (6 page)

We really don’t
need any smudging or perfumes or candles or anything. The best way I have found to do this is to focus on the light of God inside myself and ask the spirit of perfect love—which is God, after all—to wash my body and home, inside and out. Just ask God. Call it a prayer, if you will. I call it spiritual hygiene. It’s not for special occasions or circumstances; I do it regularly, like brushing my teeth or showering. Spiritual hygiene—I don’t know if I invented that, but I like that expression.

Can they? Maybe.
Maybe they could get away with it at first. But actually, I doubt it. I’m very firm in this: Whether or not they
can
, a psychic
should not
play the ponies. I don’t feel that my ability is a gift that is given with “no strings attached.” I think it comes with responsibilities. There’s the saying, “To one whom much is given, much is expected,” and to me this means I need to be the one to police my own behavior and try to do what is correct with the ability I’ve been given. I always know when it’s appropriate to ask for something and when it’s not. The truth is that the Other Side always knows when I need something. This is really true of everyone, but I think my unique experience has made me a lot more aware of this than most. When I really need something, I know the Other Side will help me to get it. By “need” I mean that my getting it—whatever it is—will be attached to some higher good. Is my winning a million-dollar lottery attached to some higher good? Not really. It’s just money. But there’s a huge difference between my wanting a certain horse to come in first at the Meadowlands because I’ve got a bet riding on it, and, on the other hand, my wanting my book to be successful because the messages in it are important for people to hear.

God knows all
things so I, personally, wouldn’t try any sneaky stuff and think I was getting away with it. This material plane is such a place of trials and challenges. It’s not perfection like the Other Side, and it contains every sort of temptation. We’re all here to learn and I, for one, cannot pretend to know the nature of someone else’s lessons. Sometimes I don’t even know my own until a long time afterward. So I don’t want to be holier-than-thou with this question. It’s not my position either to condone or to judge what someone else does. I can tell you this, though: If someone made a move on John I would definitely have something to say about it—she’d get a whole lot more than she bargained for! Outside my own relationship, in cases where I maybe hear something through the grapevine, I make an effort not to judge. In a situation that I’m not directly involved in, I try very hard not to have an opinion. That’s God’s business.

Oh, definitely, they’ll
know the truth. They’ll know everything. And once they are on the Other Side, that knowledge won’t hurt them. Forgiveness is big business over there. However, that does not at all mean that this betrayal was meaningless. And it doesn’t mean that those involved will be getting off scot-free. No such luck. Actions like this don’t just affect the two involved in it and their significant others—they affect many people connected to the two in a variety of ways and karmically can take a long time to balance out.

Speaking strictly from
my own experience, when I first went public, I used to lay out Tarot cards just to take the attention away from myself. They were literally a decoy. I was afraid that without the cards people would judge me or think I was strange because I was hearing or seeing something that they couldn’t hear or see. I was afraid they wouldn’t believe me. Reading cards seemed like something more tangible. A big problem, though, was that I didn’t really know how to read cards. I’d never learned what the different symbols meant. It could be embarrassing because every now and then I’d get a client who knew a lot more about them than I did. She’d go, “But doesn’t that card mean the house of love?” and I would have no clue what she was talking about, so it could get me in hot water. It seems funny now that I’d put myself in that position and actually thought it was better than just telling the truth. But eventually it got to the point where I wouldn’t even remember to look at the cards, so my cover was pretty well blown. The interesting thing was that the cards were, for me, a step. I don’t like to say “a crutch”; actually, they were more of a tool to get me from one place to the next. They helped me build confidence because even though they weren’t the source of the messages I was giving, they allowed me to do my thing as a new professional and get confirmation from my clients that the messages were real. Once I didn’t need them anymore, or saw they were just getting in the way, I took the deck off my table. It’s funny because there were some return clients who actually were disappointed when I stopped using the cards. They really liked the cards and could not be convinced that to me they were meaningless. That said, there are some people who seem to be really talented in interpreting the various symbols in the cards themselves or the way they end up being laid out, depending on the shuffle. I think that is a true talent. But I also feel that people who are very good at that must also have good old ordinary psychic ability without the cards. I personally can’t see how cards themselves could have any real power.

I can’t pretend
to have experienced too many other psychics lately, but I visited quite a few in my twenties when I was trying to come to terms with my own abilities. In many cases there seemed to be more rigmarole than necessary. I tend to connect with a spirit and get their point fairly rapidly, even when it’s more of a puzzle I’m putting together. Also, if a client wants to reach a particular person, I
nearly
always can reach them. I realize that I might come across as flippant to some, but I deliver. Everyone’s personality is different. It’s no different for us—mediums are people, too. I like to say that the way I work is like a short-order cook. Just tell me what you want and I put it in the window. Some of the others are like bad foreplay—you could do without it, it doesn’t amount to anything, it’s just annoying. You want to say, “Just get to the point.”

It’s really so
simple. I’ve said before, we are on the brink of a time when more and more people will be tuning in to this and other abilities that today seem extraordinary. Just look at our popular culture—the ideas are out there now, all around us, and reality always follows the ideas. Everything is mental before it becomes material. Children will develop these abilities much more rapidly than adults since kids don’t have any other job than just to learn their world. What we call the psychic—seeing, hearing, and communicating with spirits who have crossed to the Other Side—is already a real part of a child’s world. When that reality is affirmed by the parents instead of being ridiculed or denied, the child won’t lose that. It’s really the parents who have the most to learn, but as I said, if you look around you see that every day now, we’re learning more about these realities.

One thing I do that helps to center me and keep me in open contact with God and the Other Side is to practice meditation. Finding some time in your day to quiet yourself, breathe deeply, and open yourself to that connection can be really helpful. In a focused way, express the desire to be in contact with your guides. Maybe visualize yourself opening a window to let in the Other Side.

Basically, we need to practice awareness. We need to tune in to the instincts God gave us, listen for the little voice that runs alongside our own in our head, pay attention to the different feelings we get in our body that inform us of other levels of truth going on around us all the time. Even though there can be a playful nature to our psychic abilities they aren’t primarily for our amusement. The main reason we have this is for our protection and our soul growth: in other words, to learn our lessons. A classic example would be if you are in a shop and your own mind is telling you something like, “The manager just walked into the backroom. I could put those earrings in my pocket, pay for my chewing gum, and walk out—nobody the wiser, and I’ve got a cute new pair of earrings.” Then that other voice that is there to protect and teach you says, “Don’t do it, honey. You don’t need ’em that bad. Even if you don’t get caught, they’ll always remind you of a moment when you were dishonest and you will never enjoy them.”

Even if you don’t think you are especially psychic, virtually every single person can think of at least a few times when they had a strong feeling that they needed to avoid a certain person or stay away from a particular place or situation. This feeling was nothing more or less than their sixth sense, what some call ESP (extra-sensory perception), which essentially is a form of being psychic, but instead of cautioning us about our own behavior, it’s warning us about someone else’s behavior. I can think of several occasions where I used this very ordinary kind of ESP in my own life.

For example, sometime before I went public I was working at a famous sporting goods store. There was a guy, Willy, who worked in the service department. I always got a vibe from him that he was a little odd. I knew there was something wrong with him, but didn’t know exactly what. It bothered me, but there was nothing I could do about it since he always just seemed to be doing his job. One day I was driving and I saw Willy with a little boy; they were both wearing baseball uniforms. Suddenly I “knew” that Willy was a child molester. Now I was really upset, wondering what I could do. I knew it, but there was no way for me to prove it. But then I heard in my head the Other Side saying to me, “A conclusion is coming.” I realized I had to just let things play out without my intervention and just trust that the right thing was going to happen. It was only a short time after that that the boy’s parents found letters written to their son. They were actually from Willy, but they were written like they were from someone else. The boy had been very, very upset by the things that Willy was doing with him and had tried to break away from him. He was refusing to see Willy and Willy was trying to get him back under his sway. The letters were along the lines of “If you don’t go with Willy, I’m going to kill your parents.” Crazy, horrible stuff. When the parents found the letters, they easily put two and two together and went to the police. Willy was picked up and pleaded no contest and went straight to jail. Granted, in this case, I had the added assurance of hearing from spirits that “a conclusion was coming,” but my original impulse—straight from the gut, garden-variety sixth sense—was that there was something not good about this person. He was poop on a plate, and now he’s where he belongs—poop behind bars!

I do think
this is generally true. Lots of kids have bits of memories of who they were before in other lives, for instance, and they’re very tuned in to spirit. They know a lot more than they are given credit for about who means well and who doesn’t—generally speaking they have good ESP because they were only a short while ago on the Other Side and have not had enough time here to be tarnished. They still have their good listening ears on.

When I was just a very young girl, one night my parents were to go to a wedding. Our regular babysitter was not available and there was a young local man who offered to babysit us. I knew there was something “off” about this young man, and I told my father I didn’t want him to be our babysitter. My father knew enough to trust that I had good reasons and declined the young man’s offer. Later we did find out some pretty unsavory things about this young man.

When I was around eleven, my father owned three or four cleaning stores, where I’d go to visit him at different times. At one of them he had a nineteen-year-old girl, Nancy, who I really liked and loved to just hang out with. There was a guy named Ted who lived on the second floor of the building and I’d often see him when I was hanging with Nancy. One day I went to see Nancy and she wasn’t at the store. But Ted was there and he invited me to come upstairs to wait for Nancy at his place. I got an uneasy vibe—my ESP kicking in—and I said no, thanks. Ted tried to persuade me, saying he had things upstairs he wanted to show me, but I still said no. A short time later, my father showed up and said that Nancy wasn’t coming in that day, and he took me away with him. Some time after that, I’d been in that store a few times and noticed that I never saw Ted anymore. I asked my father, “Where’s Ted?” My earlier vibe not to go alone with him to his apartment had been correct. There was something terribly wrong with Ted. He was tormented. My father told me he’d been found in his apartment, dead. He’d hung himself.

The children of these new generations are waking up to the universe. They’re using their love and kindness, and to a greater degree than generations before they are remembering where they came from. Children have always had the ability to see the Dead, but now as their parents are beginning to be more open about it, they ask more questions. They sense more acceptance of their curiosity on the subject, and they approach it as they would any other normal part of their world and their experience. Kids generally have a more highly developed sixth sense than adults. Isn’t that strange? Actually, all of kids’ senses are more sharply tuned than ours are, but we don’t think of it that way because what we older people have that they lack is the means to communicate what we see, hear, feel, etc. So basically as we get older, our communication skills improve while everything else declines. What a system! But back to what I was saying, take the example of a child being involved in an accident where both his parents are killed. Only a five-year-old boy survives the crash. A crowd gathers around the wreck. Out of all the people present, that child will always gravitate to the individual who will keep him safe. It’s built in. Even in a situation where some bad person wants the child to go with them, the child
knows
this person is not right. But generally, kids are taught by their parents that adults are authority figures, so they don’t feel right saying no. They’ll go against their own ESP unless parents teach their children to listen to those feelings and obey them.