The messages were very simple, but the mayor said to me, “Concetta, you have no idea what you just did. You have no idea how much he needed to hear this and what you said and how much sense it made.” I told him it’s always the individual on the other side that I count on to bring the message, because I myself don’t know what I’m talking about!
They both said, “I’m sure it wasn’t a coincidence we ran into you on the street today.” It was clear that the messages I was able to share brought healing, which I feel is a profound honor and gift—an example of my own divine purpose.
I had a client in my office who also brought this home to me. After her reading, she said, “What makes your work so beautiful, Concetta, is that every one of us has a fear of dying, and what awaits all of us. And you do help take that fear away.”
I said, “Honey, I may not be perfect or have all the answers, but there’s one thing I can tell you: In all my life hearing dead folks, and in my entire career doing readings for people, I’ve never heard anyone complain about the other side. All they ever talk about is what a miracle it is. I’m just like anyone else, and I too have just a smidgen of fear, like any human would have, of the unknown. But I do know that God is good, and so his realm has to be good. And that gives me a lot of comfort.”
Not everyone will have an easy time becoming who and what they are meant to be. Sometimes it takes many years even to discover what we are intended for. And it can take a lot of hard work and real courage—whether it’s because others feel threatened by your uniqueness, or whether you just feel unsupported in your dreams. My brother Harold was always a fan of Jimi Hendrix, and when I hear Jimi’s music, I always think of him. There are a couple of lines in Jimi’s song “If Six Was Nine” that I bet he really related to—when Jimi sings, “I’ve got my own world to live through…and I ain’t gonna copy you…I’m gonna wave my freak flag high!” he’s saying everyone has to be who they are, what they are, not what somebody else would prefer they be.
As challenging as that may be here (and I know it can be very hard), you have to understand that there are those on the other side who are really your guardian angels—we all have them, not just a select lucky few. And those spirits will be very much looking out for you and supporting you in any way they possibly can.
A while back, a young man came to me. He was very good-looking, gorgeous and blonde. He was German, and he told me he still had family back in Germany. His family here was very much against gay people, and he himself was gay. I can tell you that there was nothing in his demeanor that would have suggested to me this truth, certainly nothing of any stereotype some people have about how a gay person looks, sounds, or behaves. But it was a big fear of his that his family would discover his secret and he’d be ostracized. In the reading, his grandfather came through to tell him that there was more love for him within the family than he knew. His grandfather told him that he loved him—always had and always would—and that he would show him signs that he did. He also told this young man that he should be who he was and not to be afraid to live his life honestly.
Some time after his reading, a family member who was still in Germany passed away. I assume it was when the family was going through this person’s things that they’d found a photograph, one they sent to him. It was a photo of his grandfather holding him when he was a baby. And great love was obvious in the grandfather’s eyes. He took that as a major sign—he’d never even known the photo existed.
When you hold back from being your authentic self, you are not being true to your soul’s path. Nobody can be their best self if they are trying to conform to be like everybody else. We each have our own divine purpose here. It’s our purpose, not somebody else’s.
I have a friend who lives in New York City. One of her favorite things is people-watching. She’s said that, if you live in New York long enough, you start to think that nothing can surprise you—until it does. Every time you think you’ve seen the craziest thing you could ever see, somebody tops it. (I’m not talking about “crazy dangerous” or “crazy hurtful.” I mean like some sort of costume, invention, display, or performance.) Where she lives, it’s common to see people sharing their gifts, whether it’s an opera singer or guitarist or drummer on a subway platform, or someone dancing with a life-size puppet in Times Square. I remember one time she told me about being in Central Park and seeing a guy wearing a swallowtail tuxedo jacket riding one of those old-fashioned bicycles with the great big wheel in the front (I don’t know how they even get up on one of those things). And as she watched him, just loving the novelty of seeing such a thing, she saw behind him there were a dozen more people riding these bikes through the park in a wave! Think what that does to an ordinary day to see something so fun and unexpected. You can’t help but smile. You might look at this as “crazy,” but I say, “Let your freak flag fly!” Life would be so dull without different people doing different things, things we might never have thought of. My friend is a businessperson and tends to dress in a fairly mainstream way, but because she gets such a kick out of seeing all the weird and wonderful folks around her, every now and then she’ll dress up in something just a little bit different, to “give back” some enjoyment to other people-watchers for all the fun she’s had watching.
We are all one, but we are each unique. We each have a special reason for being here—each of us has our own reality show, and we need to own our starring role in it. The other side wants us to respect and appreciate each other, help and support each other whenever we can, and allow each other to be who they are meant to be here on Planet Earth.
In case this has all sounded a little too serious, it’s perfectly okay to have a little fun. I’m thinking back to this past Halloween—John and I were invited to a party with a bunch of friends, and he didn’t have a costume. I had mine all ready, and I said, “John, what are you going to do?”
He said, “I don’t know. I was thinking of going as a cowboy.”
I said, “A cowboy?” With a cowboy costume you have to have things like a cowboy hat, a gun, a holster. That was out of the question—we didn’t have any of those things. So I said, “Why don’t you go as something completely opposite of what you are?”
He said, “What’s that?” I said, “A woman.”
Well, to be honest, I was saying it for fun, but he cracked up and said, “What would I wear?” So I started pulling together some of my clothes—he’s thin and has a great body, so he was able to fit into my things. As I was getting him a dress, a shawl, a bracelet, and a ring, he said he wanted to do the shoes too. I had a pair of bright red ones he managed to squeeze into. Then he said he wanted a matching pocketbook.
I had just bought a really pretty red pocketbook and I said, “Oh no you don’t, you are not wearing my brand new pocketbook!” We were just cracking up the whole time we were putting this together. But then, when I was putting lipstick on John, it went from “funny” to…I don’t know. I was used to my husband being the suave, dapper “Johnny Fontaine.” John has always been an impeccable dresser, and I’ve always been a sucker for that Italian stallion who dresses well. So to see him driving to this party wearing red lipstick, a dress, a shawl, earrings, and necklace to match—I just couldn’t stop laughing. But at one point I said to him, “Are you comfortable with this?”
He said, “I don’t care!” He was just having fun. My husband is so comfortable in his own skin that I have to say that’s one of the things that turns me on about him. The party was great, and John’s outfit was a big hit. The next day, we were going to the mall, and he got all dressed up in full Guido, like he was going to a mob meeting. The “other” John was back in the closet.
This is your reality show. Your reality. Your show. Every day, you need to put aside any negative judgments of others, as well as others’ judgments about you. Look to the positive—what are you really here for? Who do you want to be? What have you come to contribute or accomplish? Who are the
right role models for you? We need to ask the other side to help clear the path for the special work we are here to do; we need to pray, saying, “I am calm, important, loved, healthy, happy, and most importantly, grounded in God.” Then let your freak flag fly and get on with what you have come here to do!
Chapter 6
One Pill Makes You Larger…and One Pill Makes You Small
I remember a show I was doing in Totowa, New Jersey. A woman’s deceased brother came through, appearing to me in a haze of smoke. Often I will smell cigarette smoke or pipe tobacco—the perception will be pretty specific. I said to the woman, “There’s all this smoke around him—and it’s not all cigarette smoke.”
She laughed out loud and then said, “Well, he did go to Woodstock!”
You can’t turn on the TV now without seeing a story about drugs. This is something that until recent generations had never been much of a “thing” for most people, throughout many reincarnations. Yes, we’ve long had people who have struggled with alcoholism and have heard stories of “opium dens” from the time of the British East India Company. I don’t recall myself having a past life that involved anything like that. But, more recently, drugs have touched or taken over so many lives. Besides all the medications available now, whether over-the-counter or prescribed, there are the less legal kinds—some taken because of an addiction and some for “entertainment.” This isn’t a subject I might raise here, except that more and more I’m seeing folks who have lost a loved one to an overdose. Needless to say, this causes tremendous pain, so it’s obviously one of our lessons here on the earth plane. There’s been a lot of movement toward legalizing marijuana for its therapeutic uses, and I recently read how even certain other drugs that had been outlawed, when they were misused for partying, are now being studied to see if they can help people with addictions and anxiety. I’ll leave that to the scientists to figure out, but I will tell my own story as a cautionary tale!
One of the things that I know as a medium is that people who have heightened sensitivities (either with intuition or the ability to see spirits of the deceased) should NOT do drugs. I, unfortunately, had to learn this lesson the hard way, because when peer pressure kicked in during high school, I found myself dabbling in some things I probably shouldn’t have.
When I was sixteen, my best friend Mushy and I decided to go against our better judgment and take LSD. The place: a double feature at the movies. Other classmates had occasionally smoked pot, but every time it was passed to me, I would fake it and never inhale. I just had a feeling it wouldn’t agree with me. Why I thought jumping from doing nothing to trying “purple haze” was a good idea, I’ll never know, but I digress.
The first movie they were playing was called Charly, which was about a mentally challenged guy who takes a drug that makes him go from being not too sharp, to someone who is super smart. But the drug doesn’t last, so at the end of the movie, he goes back to being mentally challenged.
Holy moly!
The second movie was called They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? with Jane Fonda, about a couple struggling though a dance marathon. Couples basically keep going until they can’t move anymore and just drop from exhaustion, trying to win a money prize. The premise of that movie is that they shoot the horses when they no longer have value. Also, Jane Fonda’s character wanted the guy in the movie (Michael Sarrazin) to shoot her.
Both of these movies were not only depressing, but confusing as hell when you’re under the influence of LSD.
It took a little while for the drug to hit me, but when it hit—holy crap, did it hit. Colors were brighter. The walls were moving. My hearing got so sensitive I thought I could actually hear people in the lobby from my seat in the theater. I was begging Mushy to hold my hand because I couldn’t handle it. I definitely didn’t see how anyone could do this for fun! Even the sounds of the man chewing popcorn behind me were making me nuts. Each bite sounded like a bomb going off, and I swear I could hear his tongue hit the roof of his mouth.
Then I started hearing people talking to me, only I didn’t know if that was my mind or the dead folks.
Is that a spirit or am I tripping?!
I couldn’t make out who was real and who wasn’t. As I looked over my shoulder to the left of the loud popcorn dude, there were people sitting there laughing at me and talking to me…only they were freaking dead!!
“Mushy, do you see those dead people?” I whispered.
“Concetta, you’re freaking me out!” she said.
There was a break between the movies so people could stretch their legs or go to the bathroom. I dragged Mushy out to the lobby with me to escape the terrifying sounds of that man’s exploding popcorn kernels and the yapping dead guys. To get there, we had to go up this spiral staircase. With each step, I thought I was going to lose my balance, fall down, and crack my head open. Each step I took felt like an earthquake was hitting New Jersey.
Boom! Boom!
We finally made it to the top of the stairs and got to the bathroom. As we walked in, I was just glued to the wall, hoping it would make me feel grounded or something, because I was feeling so out of my mind. Everything looked like it was in Technicolor, but on steroids, so the reds were really red, and the blues were this incredible blue hue I’d never seen before. I was scanning the room and I saw this woman putting on lipstick, and her lips looked like they were stretching out like chewing gum. I was watching her so intently with my eyes bugging out, I’m surprised she didn’t call the cops—I must have looked so insane. Then I heard whispers…and I knew it was the dead trying to get my attention: “Sorry, folks, this medium is currently out of order!”
When Mushy came out of the stall, I pointed to the woman’s lips and said, “Do you see that, Mushy?” because her lips looked like they were being stretched to Texas. But Mushy was having a perfectly fine trip and kept trying to get me under control. She wasn’t seeing stretched-out lips. She wanted to get back to the movie. Now, I’ll talk to spirits all day long (unless I’m on LSD, that is!), but watching someone’s lips melt, now that stuff is scary!
We left the bathroom, headed down the spiral staircase of doom, and made it back into the theater just in time for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Again, I was begging Mushy to hold my hand because, at this point, I’m thinking the chair is trying to swallow me.
You’ll be fine, Concetta. Try to relax.
My father was picking us up after the movie, and I was terrified he might figure out that we had taken something and were tripping. When we walked out of the theater to cross the street, I felt like Wendy in Peter Pan, walking the plank—that walk seemed to take forever. Looking at all the other people leaving the theater, I was convinced they were talking about me. That’s another thing that happens to sensitive people under the influence…we think everyone is talking about us and become extremely paranoid.
When I got home and went to my room, I heard my parents whispering in the living room. I thought I heard my mother saying to my father, “I think Connie is high on LSD!”
And what I thought I heard my father say in return was, “Yeah, I could tell!”
The next thing I knew, I was storming into the living room yelling, “I’m not taking drugs! I am not on LSD!” And my mother’s head slowly did this 180-degree turn like an owl, where her body didn’t budge.
She looked at me and said in a calm tone, “We weren’t talking about you, Con.”
“Oh, okay,” I said, and I made my way down to my brother Harold’s room. He was sleeping, but I woke him up.
“Harold,” I whispered. “I’m on LSD. What do I do?”
He smiled and said, “Hey, cool, enjoy it!”
I wasn’t enjoying anything. The LSD didn’t wear off until lunch the next day. I could barely make it through math class because I could see my teacher surrounded by all the spirits of her deceased family! Being in this post-LSD fog meant I couldn’t control my
abilities. I was sensitive to begin with, but the chemicals of the drug took me to a place I never wanted to return to. I knew, from that moment on, I could never do drugs again—one more lesson learned on the earth plane!
For me to be in any kind of jeopardized consciousness, whether it’s with alcohol or drugs, is not a good thing. I may joke about having cocktails, but the truth is that I don’t drink; I don’t like anything that hinders my conscious mind. Mushy could quickly bounce back and recover because she doesn’t have the spiritual connection that I have. But for anyone with a heightened sense of intuition, taking something that alters your senses—either drugs or alcohol, or even anesthesia—can really screw with your abilities. If I’m telling the whole truth, then I have to say that trip with Mushy wasn’t the last time that I tried drugs. Teenagers are more stupid than other people. There were times when I wanted to be “cool” or be in with the “in crowd,” so I made some other mistakes, but none as severe as the one I made when I took that acid trip, thank God. Of course, after our wild night, Mushy used to tease me. She’d say, “Don’t let Connie in a room where they even smoked pot ten days ago, ’cause she’ll get high just inhaling the residue.”
I Kissed a Ghost (and I Liked It) Page 7
