There are some sensitive people who actually try to dull their abilities by partying. They hope this will turn it off, even just for a moment. I understand this inclination, because if you haven’t learned how to control the on/off switch, it can be quite stressful to be so sensitive or have the dead intruding on you day and night. I see this a lot in my industry. But the danger is that this can actually open you up to dark energies.
During one of my live events, I remember a woman who wanted to connect to her son. As soon as she said his name, he came right through, standing by his mother.
“I see him,” I said. “He’s wearing a leather jacket.”
“Yes, he always wore a leather jacket,” she said with a cracked half-smile. This woman was still grieving and clutched a tissue to wipe her eyes. Then the son showed me how he died. He apparently took too many pills of some kind and accidentally killed himself. He was addicted to the pills and thought he was just going to get high, but unfortunately he ended his life.
“He’s taking responsibility for his actions,” I said. “He knows he made a terrible mistake. But he just couldn’t kick it. He had a lot of bad people around him and he just couldn’t get it together.”
The woman let out a heavy sob.
Apparently the young man had a lot of anxiety, and he took an anti-anxiety drug to calm his nerves. Eventually he got addicted, and his addiction moved to opioids. This is a slippery slope that I see all the time. People are anxious, or they may have physical pain, and they’re getting hooked on pills, and now we have an opioid epidemic on our hands.
“He doesn’t want you to blame yourself,” I said. “He really wants you to know that you did the best you could. You were a fantastic mom.”
“We tried to get him into rehab,” the woman said. “He never stayed. We tried tough love, and then tried letting him live with us. But after a while, we couldn’t live with him anymore, because we were always fighting.”
Often, addicts will have spirits (who were looking for a place to camp out) attached to their energy fields.. These souls aren’t in the light, and they want to stay that way. Their dark energies can cause people who live in the house to have arguments. These spirits like to have company, so they try to bring you down to their energetic level.
Her son showed me how he flicks the light switches on and off in the house to let her know he is around.
“He messes with the lights,” I said. “He wants you to know that when you see the lights flicker, it is him.”
The mother laughed.
“Yeah, that happens a lot,” she said.
“But just know he has a clear mind now,” I said. “He sees how much this has hurt you and he is so sorry. He wants you to know that he is happy and can help from the other side with his brother and sister. He wants you to be there for them.”
This woman was so stuck in her grief, I got the feeling from her son that she was not really present for her other kids.
“ ‘Shower them with love the way you did with me,’ ” I said. “ ‘And don’t start up with the pills.’ He is adamant about that. He says, ‘Don’t do what I did because you are sad!’ That is what he wants to tell you.”
The woman nodded.
“And he says not to let his brother hang out in bars. He doesn’t want him making the same mistakes that he made,” I said. I got the sense that his younger brother was partying hard to cope with his grief, and that this could lead him down the wrong path.
“Okay,” she said. “I will pass along the message.”
“He’s not high anymore,” I said. “Not on drugs, anyway…but on love. So remember to love and that he loves you so much.”
The woman wept into her hands as her son stepped back into the light.
On another occasion, I had a young woman come to my office and tell me that a friend had died. She asked if I could hear anything from them that I could tell her. As I connected to that friend, I understood that the individual had crossed from a drug overdose. There was a tremendous amount of energy around this spirit as they communicated to this girl through me. Through the reading, he kept saying how proud he was of her and profusely saying to tell her that it was not her fault.
The thing that made her happiest was that he told her that he was in the light of God, how happy he was, and that he was drug-free. After the reading, she disclosed to me that they had both been drug users. When two drug addicts hang out together, it may not be because they like each other, but that they share a behavior, and they get their needs met by seeing the same behavior in the other person.
She recognized there would be no good ending if she kept up that behavior and had managed to get clean before he died. She stopped hanging out with him and didn’t go to the places she knew he would go. When she told me this, I knew of course that this was in her best interest, but she felt terrible because he had gone on to overdose. He ended up where she might have herself, but she felt guilt for having disconnected from him, like she had abandoned him. I was glad that, hearing from him, she was able to have peace of mind, knowing that he was now alive in the light of God in a drug-free place, just like she was on this side.
In this country today, addiction is no joke. We have a terrible problem with it, and, in my line of work, it’s coming up more and more that this is the way someone crossed. I did a show in Chicago where I was doing a reading for a woman and I said to her, “Your mother is telling me about your new baby, but she’s saying something about how you had a hard time conceiving this child. She said you have babies on the other side that are with her in the light.” The woman was grateful to hear this and was now crying. I told her, “There’s something that I don’t understand. There is someone standing with your mother who is trying to make it clear to me that she is definitely of a different race, and she’s saying, ‘Send my love to the baby.’ ” I didn’t know why I was seeing this and why this particular thing was being stressed, that this individual was of a different race.
The woman then told me that she had been involved with social services that look after children, and that there was a mixed-race child, a little girl, whose mother had a lot of issues. The woman would always be called upon to look after the child when her mother abandoned her (which she did repeatedly). The mother was a drug addict and not reliable, but, whenever they’d go before the judge, the mother would clean up her act and the child would be put back with her. It was driving this woman crazy, because the little girl was kept in the middle of this terrible ongoing drama. Sadly, the little girl’s mother passed away from a drug overdose. Afterward, this woman fought for custody of the little girl and won. Since then, the little girl has become her adopted daughter. The mother who passed away was standing next to the woman’s mother, saying, “Thank you, and please tell my daughter I love her and I’m sorry.”
If someone was a big drinker or did drugs and they died and haven’t chosen to go into the light, they will hang around susceptible souls who are on earth and stay close to them. It’s like getting a contact high. Many of these souls caused a lot of pain when they were alive, and they realize this when they cross over, so they’re afraid of the light. When they get to the other side they think, “Now what’s God going to do to me?” So they stay earthbound, looking for a body to occupy. They think, “I’m going to go hang out at the bars, and I’m going to antagonize these other people who are sitting here, and I’m going to feed off their energy and try to get buzzed from being around them.”
You know that expression, “You weren’t acting like yourself?” Sometimes it’s true, because you have a lost soul hanging onto your energy. Souls can literally latch onto you if you compromise yourself by drinking or partying too much. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be able to enjoy yourself or have a few drinks now and then. But if you overdo it one night (or several nights in a row), when you wake up bleary-eyed, look in the mirror and say this:
I command that an
y energy that has attached itself to me that is not for my highest good be gone, and go back to the light for healing. In the name of God, hear my prayer.
And then that dark energy has to leave. They can’t stay if you kick them out.
In addition to the prayers, it’s helpful to clear your space by burning sage. While sage used to be hard to find, now you can buy it at most grocery stores. It either comes in a bunch or loose-leaf, like a tea. When you light it, say a prayer and visualize the white light coming into each room. Open windows to let in fresh air, and be sure to walk through each room, hitting every corner. (Even the closets. I’m not kidding!) I do it after I have clients in my home, or perhaps after Thanksgiving dinner if someone had too much wine while watching football. It’s a great way to reboot your space and keep negative energies at bay.
You can also say a prayer:
I bring in the white light to clear this space of any negative energy that is not for my highest good. Thank you in full faith.
The power of prayer is very real. I know this now, from all the work I’ve done with the dead. They do hear your prayers, and if they can’t make it to your rescue, they will find some sort of angelic being who can.
Chapter 7
This Wouldn’t Be Happening if You Couldn’t Handle It
How often have we heard it said that God never gives us more than we can handle? Even though I have been very blessed in my life, I can say that this certainly doesn’t always seem to be true. I see what many people go through in the course of a life and am constantly amazed at how strong a person can be. Experiencing grief is no sign of weakness. Our grief is as deep as our love, and it’s pretty rare that we are granted love with no amount of grief to go along with it.
I say it all the time: the other side is complete peace, even bliss. There is no pain or sorrow. All is forgiven, all is love. This side is the tough place. This is where we are challenged to grow spiritually and come to understand and embrace our true godly nature.
As I talked about at more length in my last book, Inside the Other Side, before coming here, we basically signed a spiritual agreement for the life we were about to live. Or, to keep with the reality-show metaphor, we answered the producer’s casting call and were a good fit for the role. Challenging lives help us grow spiritually: single parenting or parenting a special-needs kid, illness or incapacity, addiction, abuse, not having enough, trying to do something difficult, trying again and again, living with disappointment, wanting something we can’t have this time, and loss—all these things, though they can be incredibly difficult and even painful, polish our soul’s diamond.
I’m on the same path you are on. We start out knowing almost nothing, and little by little our eyes are opened. We all are one, yet until we have some painful experiences, we can’t fully know another’s pain. The tough times and losses we endure are lessons in empathy. The challenge is to let those experiences expand our hearts, rather than make them shrink with bitterness. (I admit there are some very loving souls who seem to be born with natural empathy, but I can tell you with certainty that these are old souls who’ve definitely had a good share of painful experiences in past lifetimes.)
When my brother Harold passed, he was the first person in my immediate family to go. I didn’t lose my father until ten years later, and my mother passed another eight years after my father. But with Harold leaving, it was like I experienced for the first time what others in my neighborhood were feeling, the ones who’d been coming to me to ask for some word from their loved ones who had crossed. Before that, I could never quite grasp why people would be so desperate to know that their loved one who had passed was okay. I just had never experienced that kind of loss. Losing my brother was a major lesson in empathy.
When we are struggling here, the thing that we all lose sight of is that we chose to come back to the earth plane, and that we chose to undergo certain challenges. We do not know every single thing that will happen to us in the life we’re about to live before we sign our new spiritual contract, because here on the earth plane we have free will and can alter our course at any time. But we definitely are given some sense of the level of difficulty and have agreed to it. Karma is always involved. At some point before we can “graduate” spiritually, we need to balance negative karma that we’ve created for ourselves with our past actions and behavior. While we might have the choice to skip something hard in one new lifetime here, at some point we’ll have to address it and set things right. We might even, before coming here, agree to take on something extremely difficult just because we understand how much growth it will create for us.
Many people I talk with in my work tell me terrible stories, stories that are just so sad, or simply bewildering and hurtful. They want to know why. Why would God bring this person into my life and then take them away? Why do I have this illness or disability? Why was I born into a family that I just don’t mesh with and can’t seem to get along with, no matter how hard I try? Why do I always seem to attract the person who treats me badly? Or, one of the saddest of all, how could my child die before me?
I have wondered about these same questions myself: God, what were you thinking??? The truth is, I do not know. But I do know that there is a reason. And I do know that karma is not punishment. When we are here, we cannot fathom why terrible things would happen to us or to others we care about. But I do know that each of us, when we get to the other side again, is fully aware of the reasons for everything that happens in our life here. We need to trust that. We were not sent here to suffer randomly. We came here to learn and grow. The expression “growing pains” didn’t come out of nowhere.
One thing that I’m very concerned about right now is the opioid addiction problem we’re having in our country. I talked about it in the last chapter, but I have never seen anything comparable to it in my life and career. I admit it really scares me, even though I know there is a reason for it.
Just this past week, a close friend of mine told me about the death of a young girl, twenty-one years old, who was best friends with her daughter. She had been involved with drugs before, but her family was feeling very hopeful, as she had been clean for the past four or five months. Then her parents found her unconscious. My friend showed me her photo, and you wouldn’t believe how beautiful she was, like an angel. Gorgeous green eyes, lovely personality, she said. Just an amazing, lovely, poor thing. Apparently she’d relapsed on her sobriety and sadly had gotten hold of a bad batch of fentanyl. Now her family is experiencing such horror and devastation. My girlfriend, who is an angel on earth, is taking care of all the funeral arrangements because the mother is an emotional wreck and cannot manage. Already the mother is struggling with questions like, “Where is she?” and “What more could I have done?”
When the girl was taken unconscious from the home, she was brain-dead, but she was kept alive at the hospital for a time because she had signed up to be an organ donor. Strangely, about a week before she died, she had said, “If anything happens to me, please make sure that they follow through with my organ donations.” What twenty-one-year-old says that? I know the kid had a premonition. The mother sat vigil with her daughter on life support, hoping that by some miracle her daughter would come back to life—that’s the state of mind she was in. Of course that didn’t happen, but, after the organs had been donated to others whose lives could be saved and life support was turned off, the mother told my friend that, once they were back in their home, all the lights went off and then back on, then off, then back on, several times. The mother was so stricken, thinking it could be a sign from her daughter. They live in a condominium complex, and she went to her neighbors to ask if their lights had gone off, thinking maybe there was a power surge or something. But her neighbors all told her their lights had not gone off. I believe that the daughter was letting her mother know that she was home with God on the other side and that all was well with her.
These really are such scary times. This poo
r girl was the fourth kid in her town around this same age who died of this kind of overdose. It is tragic for every person whose life is touched by this terrible, heartbreaking scourge, but I know that the reason this is happening is karmic at its roots. It’s not just individual people who have karma. As groups, even nations, we have karma, too. This issue is happening massively, all around us, so it has to do with all of us in some way. We have some re-balancing to do to solve this problem, that is for sure. We all need to be strong, and we need to be there for each other.
On both sides of the veil (especially this one), we need to get over playing the game of shame and blame. Over there, it doesn’t last long, once we get past our life review. When reviewing all our past actions, we may experience a sense of shame or disappointment in ourselves, and that fresh awareness will inspire us to try to make better choices in our next lifetime. Also, even while still on that side, a spirit may want to take any opportunity to apologize when they know they have done wrong, or try to give extra assistance to someone here they feel a debt toward.
I do believe that shame has a purpose on this side of the veil. It can remind us that we have higher standards for ourselves and make us recognize that we did not live up to them. Shame is a reminder to try to do better. Just bear in mind that a little bit of it goes a long way. We don’t need to take it to the furthest lengths. If we let down a friend or really hurt someone, either physically or by spreading gossip or something similar, then we should feel some guilt and shame and make sure we step up our game. We need to apologize, and we may have some repair work to do in a relationship. But in all honesty, I can feel guilty if I even take too many Splendas at the Dunkin’, so sometimes I have to remind myself to reel it in.
I Kissed a Ghost (and I Liked It) Page 8
