Category: General

To Believe, or Not to Believe …

A while back, Reader, I posted an entry here about my longtime friend Louie. I’ve known Louie since we were both “kids” in New York City … He’d come from France to study music at Juilliard, while I’d just returned from college down South, and was working at an Off-Broadway theater where we had a mutual friend who introduced us. And we’ve stayed close over the years.

Louie had at the time of my previous post lost his beloved mother and, several years later, his brother Liam as well. Liam’s death was sudden and unexpected—he had drowned while at their sister’s house near Crozon, in Brittany, on France’s northwest coast. While Louie was undergoing his own grieving process, he was also very concerned about his sister, Gabrielle. She’d been extremely close to both her mother and brother, had done caregiving for both, and was deeply stricken. In particular, she was plagued by the fact that Liam, who had suffered a mental breakdown a few years before, had died while visiting her house. She could no longer look at her beloved beach and ocean there, she’d told Louie, without thinking of Liam’s death.

Louie had reached out to me from his own home in Candes-St.-Martin, in central France. He was not himself. His voice had an atypical flatness, an air of desolation. At one point, he expressed the wish that he had a belief in the spiritual realms, as he knew I did. On hearing that, I had talked with him about some impressive work going on in the field of mediumship studies—rigorous, highly professional scientific studies. I told him there was a book I could recommend about it, by one of the founders. (If you’re curious, Reader, see my post “Mediumship: Follow the Science at the Windbridge Research Center.”) I thought it might bring him some comfort, and possibly his sister too.

Louie had listened and thanked me. But I knew it had not opened up his mind to the possibility that such phenomena could be real, and I doubted he would check out the work I had mentioned, at least not anytime soon.

Fast forward to earlier this year, when I was deeply saddened to hear of the sudden and unexpected death now of Louie’s sister, too! She’d been found on her couch; Louie said he believed she’d died of a broken heart. While I hadn’t known Liam, I had gotten to know Gabrielle a little over the years, and we’d bonded over being caregivers for members of our family. I expressed my condolences and sadness to Louie, who told me he couldn’t imagine his life without her.

I was surprised when Louie reached out to me again before too long to tell me that one of his sisters-in-law—Liam’s ex-wife—had hired a medium, and that his deceased brother had, she said, “come through.”  Shazam! I thought. I couldn’t wait to hear what had occurred.

“She told me that Liam said some things about my sister and what happened when she died,” he said. Liam had reportedly told the medium that he went to his sister when she was dying, and that she “couldn’t see the light,” and was afraid. Apparently, he had helped her to “cross over.”

“And he said some things about me … about my relationship with him. That he loved me and respected me, even though we sometimes fought …”

“Did you fight?” I asked.

“Well, yes,” he admitted. He paused, hesitating. “She also told me that Liam was saying he was concerned about my health!”

Louie’s former sister-in-law had shared that his deceased brother, according to the medium, had used the word celiac, a word the medium didn’t even know. The medium said that Liam was explaining that it was related to the intestines. His ex-sister-in-law, who knew what celiac disease was—“an intolerance for gluten,” as she put it—advised Louie to seek medical help.

“I don’t really know what to think about it all,” he said. He was definitely skeptical and a bit disturbed by what had been said. And he seemed to be looking for my opinion about it.

“It’s impossible for me to say if this medium is actually connecting to your brother,” I said. “But you know that I’m a believer in the ability itself … My feeling is, if a reading doesn’t help you, if it isn’t comforting, or uplifting, if it doesn’t resonate with you as true, just let it go. Don’t let it affect you!” He seemed very relieved to hear that.

Even good mediums, I told him, sometimes got things wrong, because they were interpreting what they got, and also because they perceived things through their own filters … And all of this was also being filtered through Louie’s ex-sister-in-law. Again, he seemed relieved to hear it.

It was funny, I thought. Here I was, thinking that mediumship could comfort Louis. In fact, it had done the opposite. I did hope that he would take his brother’s advice and see a doctor, though.

Not too long after that I heard from Louie again, via text. “Hello, my dear,” he wrote. “Well, it turns out that I have celiac disease. It is freaky. I knew I had intestinal problems for a long time as I go the bathroom too often, and often have pain on my right side. But my former sister-in-law was not aware of this. Ah, the mystery of the afterlife …”

Double shazam! I was impressed.

As for Louie, though … had it convinced him that the medium had actually been in contact with Liam? It didn’t sound like it. And it didn’t really surprise me. To me, this medium picking up a disease that Louie didn’t yet know he had was pretty good evidence that something more than guesswork was going on. Then again, I’d had so many experiences with valid evidence coming in from mediums that I no longer questioned the phenomenon. To Louie, it was all brand new. And, apparently, “freaky.” I couldn’t blame him.

Time passed, and Louie began posting photos on social media of his gluten-free baked goods (he was an excellent cook!). He said he felt much better, and I was happy to hear it.

But the photos he posted as he went about cleaning out his sister’s house, grappling with what to keep and what to let go, broke my heart. One of her antique bed, which had been handed down through their family, and in particular one of a little red ceramic mug she had made as a girl, brought tears to my eyes.

I wondered what impact, if any, the reading would have on Louie as he moved on with his life? Had it made him curious to have a session with the medium himself? You know me, Reader. I had to ask.

“I still really don’t know what to think of it all,” he said, when I phoned him.       

“So, how do you explain the fact that he was accurate about your having celiac?” I asked. I’d come upon situations like this before, many times, with skeptical friends, and I genuinely was curious to understand. Did he just see it as a huge coincidence?

“I don’t know. Maybe she could have, you know, gotten that psychically somehow. It just … doesn’t really convince me that she was in touch with Liam.”

Well, I could understand that. But to me, the medium not having been in touch with Louie himself made it, well, perhaps not impossible but unlikely that she would have picked it up from him.

As we chatted a bit more, I asked Louie how he was holding up. “I don’t ever feel like Gabrielle is around me,” he said. “I go to her house, and I can feel her there, even when it’s empty, though. It doesn’t feel like just an empty house, even without all her things in it. It still feels like her house.”

Louie mentioned that someone had spoken to him about the idea that Gabrielle had “left” because her work here was done. That perhaps, with her mother and brother gone, both of whom she had taken care of, her “job” on Earth might be complete.

I was surprised to hear him say it, and not dismissively. “Yes,” I said. “There is that idea of ‘soul contracts.’ That you contract to play out certain roles, and perform certain functions, before you come into each life,” I said. I’d read some fascinating books on that subject. Perhaps, one day I’d share them with him, if he seemed so inclined.

Most of us had a “tipping point,” I felt, an experience, or experiences, we could no longer brush off, that awakened our curiosity, or even directly changed our beliefs, opening us to new ways of seeing and being. But we were all on our own paths, and perhaps not everyone would ever hit that point—at least, not in this lifetime. And whereas I could be a bit zealous, I knew, about sharing my own adventures in the metaphysical world, that, I had come to understand, was perfectly OK. And sometimes I needed to remind myself of that.

We were here to be different, and unique. To learn from one another through all our differing experiences. In fact, as souls, I’d come to understand, we had a choice about what we wanted to experience here. It was not my job to attempt to convince anyone of anything, no matter how excited I might be about what I had experienced myself … Sharing was one thing. And yes, I did believe that was something—with my books and Salons—that I was here to do. With those who felt called to it. With those who asked.

I would do what I could to be supportive and compassionate, here and now, on our very human level, to my friend in his grief and loss. And if he ever wanted to know more, to arrange for a reading himself and reach out to his sister, his brother, and maybe his mother, too, just to experience what might happen for himself, he knew that all he had to do was ask.

A Psychoanalyst Risks Opening Her Mind

Not too long ago, Reader, I rode the Southern Crescent train down the coast to Virginia to visit my friend Griffin. Some of you may recall him from my book Adventures of a Soul, the rational-thinking skeptic whose first “highly specific and astoundingly accurate” reading with my marvelous psychic Patricia Masters resonated with him so powerfully that he did an about-face and launched into a deep dive into the metaphysical, becoming a mentor of sorts to me. Griffin lives in a smallish but lively college town, and whenever I visit him, I thoroughly enjoy wandering its brick-paved streets, popping into coffee shops and antiques stores, and driving through the rolling green hills (I’ve always had a thing for cows) and scenic mountain passes at its outskirts.

Anne in Farmland

Cows Grazing

But the best part is inevitably at the end of the day, when, after a simple homecooked meal, Griffin and I settle into a pair of old oak rocking chairs in his living room, his highly vocal cat, Roswell, on my lap, and watch documentaries and interview shows about things metaphysical together. It’s difficult to find friends like Griffin who have taken the time—many decades, in his case—to seriously study the topics and ideas that most pique my “wonder-lust,” topics and ideas that most of the world tends to ignore, or even mock. Topics and ideas that I often refrain from discussing for fear of being considered naive or crazy, or accused of summoning demons or doing the devil’s work . . . by those who have never bothered to take even a cursory look into these subjects themselves. As I continue my explorations into things nonphysical and as yet unexplained, I value Griffin’s companionship and camaraderie, his boundless curiosity that matches my own, and the opportunity that he provides to seriously discuss even the most way-out-there-seeming subjects, more and more.

I hadn’t brought a book to read with me on this trip. And reading an actual, nondigital book before bed has been a habit I’ve cultivated since childhood, to the point that it’s often hard for me to fall asleep without one. So on the first day of my stay, we swung by the nicely kept local library to see what their small (make that “very small”) section of offerings on the topic of spirituality and/or the paranormal might contain. “Hey,” Griffin said, as he pulled a book off a shelf and handed it to me. “Here’s one I read a while back. I think I told you about it. You really should read it. It’s kinda right in your wheelhouse, and it’s a very good book.”

I looked at the cover: Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Power of the Human Mind by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, PhD. Then I turned to the back cover blurb.

“Elizabeth Mayer’s familiar world of science and rational thinking was turned upside down the day a stranger pinpointed the exact location of her daughter’s stolen harp in California—without ever leaving his Arkansas home. Deeply shaken, yet driven to understand what had happened, she began the fourteen-year journey of discovery that she recounts in the mind-blowing, brilliantly readable book.”

Ah, Griffin knew me well, and he’d never yet steered me wrong. I checked out the book—literally—and stowed it in my backpack for later perusal.

Anne with Extraordinary Knowng

Once I began Extraordinary Knowing that night, in my makeshift quarters at Griffin’s, where Roswell often lounged on my tummy as I lay on my air mattress reading, I could not put it down. Mayer, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, among other places, and a skeptic about things paranormal, was astonished when an Arkansas “dowser” recommended by a friend located the stolen harp . . .  to the precise house in Oakland, the city in which Mayer and her daughter lived. For those new to the term, “dowsing” basically means using a divining rod, or forked stick, to locate something—though there are different ways to do it, including “map dowsing,” which the dowser in question did. Mayer used the dowser’s information to recover the harp within days. Arriving home and turning into her driveway with the recovered harp in the back of her station wagon, she writes, she had the thought, “This changes everything!”

What follows in the book is Mayer’s journey of how that incident, which, she confesses, shook her to the core as it flew in the face of everything she believed in—and didn’t believe in—started her on a quest to explore, to quote the book’s subtitle, “the inexplicable powers of the human mind.” She began to look for scientific evidence of dowsing, which opened up the door onto research into “all manner of other, possibly related anomalous phenomena” by very credible and highly credited scientists. “Of course,” she writes, “I also discovered that the world of anomalous mind-matter research is filled with shoddy research, flaky research, and research based on questions that are neither particularly interesting nor rooted in a solid grasp of science, scientific method, or scientific thinking. Yet as I delved more deeply, what most impressed me was the significant bank of well-conducted, scientifically impeccable research that imposes enormous questions on anyone interested in making sense of the world from a Western scientific point of view. I began to wonder, why had so much of this excellent research been overlooked, its conclusions dismissed?”

How Mayer discovers and comes to terms—given her training and background in psychology—with the idea that reality is not as she has been taught to believe makes for a fantastically absorbing tale. “[The experience with the harp] changed how I work as a clinician and psychoanalyst. It changed the nature of the research I pursued. It changed my sense of what’s ordinary and what’s extraordinary. Most of all, it changed my relatively established, relatively secure sense of how the world adds up.”

I read more of the book each night I stayed with Griffin, and we discussed what I was reading over our morning coffee. Mayer’s explorations included Sigmund Freud’s writings on telepathy (who knew?); experiments by the CIA on remote viewing (if you’re not aware of these, Reader, prepare your eyebrows to be raised); the founding of a parapsychology lab at Duke University that later became, independent of Duke, the Rhine Research Center; studies on the power of prayer; and more. “How is this book not more well known?” I asked. Griffin informed me that he’d looked up Mayer online and found that she’d passed away shortly after its publication. Huh, I thought. A real pity. Though I was sure Mayer was continuing her explorations now, perhaps into higher dimensions from other realms.

Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, PhD
Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, PhD

One of my favorite aspects of the book was that, early on in her explorations, as Mayer began to share her experience with her peers in the psychology and medical world and others, colleagues and even strangers who approached her at meetings began confiding in her their own anomalous experiences and those of their patients: miraculous healings from fatal cancers; sensing the exact moment of a patient’s death and later finding it to be true; the presence of a white light, seen by a surgeon, that signaled to him that he could  operate and the patient would survive . . . These individuals, she recounts, were extremely eager to share their stories, yet in many cases confessed they had never revealed them to anyone. Given their professional careers and reputations, they had never felt safe in divulging them.

I was not a professional in the world of psychology or medicine, but I understood how they felt.

Soon Mayer established, along with renowned psychologist and author Carol Gilligan, PhD, a professional discussion group at a meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association to talk about, to quote the group’s title, “Intuition, Unconscious Communication, and ‘Thought Transference.’” They asked applicants interested in participating in the group to write a letter sharing an account of an anomalous experience, clinical or personal. They were flooded with them. One therapist shared the story of her very young patient who, on the anniversary of the therapist’s brother’s death by drowning, turned to her out of the blue while playing to say, “Your brother is dying! You have to save him!” Another reported that numerous times, his patients had told him dreams that replicated uncannily recent specific events in his own life. And on and on. Nearly all of the practitioners reported how relieved they were to have their experiences considered with thoughtfulness and respect by fellow professionals after keeping them so long “sequestered out of shame and anxiety.”

In the years since the book was published, in 2007, a lot has changed: There are so many venues and platforms through which things “anomalous” are being seriously and thoughtfully considered, and often with great eagerness and enthusiasm. One need only do a search on YouTube, Reader, to find a nearly endless array of podcasts and video interview shows delving into such things as telepathy, channeling, near death experiences, remote viewing, and medical intuition. For many of us who are tuned in to such topics, it’s a time of unparalleled excitement. After all, as Mayer puts it at the book’s end, “To pursue the questions behind extraordinary knowing is to pursue a complete and free articulation of what it is to be human.”

My Own New Normal

A Look Back Since Publishing Adventures of a Soul

I can’t believe that it’s been more than a year and a half now—a year this past August, to be precise—since I published Adventures of a Soul: Psychics, Mediums, the Mystical, and Me. I’ve learned so much about the world of self-publishing and book promotion, and yet there is so much still to learn! A heartfelt thank-you to EVERYONE who has purchased and read my book, and doubly so to those who have posted a review on Amazon or elsewhere. It’s GREATLY appreciated. The Reader reviews I’ve received have been touching and heart-warming. Honestly, I’ve been surprised many times at precisely WHO has enjoyed my book the most and/or expressed to me that they’d been profoundly changed by reading it. Friends who admitted they had barely even thought about metaphysics or the invisible realms, but had a mind open enough to read Adventures of a Soul when they heard about it, have asked me for recommendations for their first psychic or medium reading; for classes and workshops; and for more books in this genre to read. Now, that, Dear Reader, REALLY warms my heart! After all, that was the reason I wrote this book in the first place: to encourage others to expand their horizons—both inward and outward—by embarking on a personal metaphysical exploration of their own.   

Even more surprising to me, Reader, has been another phenomenon that’s occurred since my book’s launch. Friends who read Adventures of a Soul with whom I’d not had contact for a long time—sometimes several decades—confessed to me that they’d had “paranormal” experiences, and even discovered “paranormal” gifts and abilities of their own. Some have come into them in recent years; others had them back when we were classmates or neighbors or work colleagues, but had never shared this aspect of their lives with me, as they had no idea I was interested in such things. (And, honestly, who can blame them? Up until fairly recently, most people haven’t generally talked about these topics in “mixed company,” for fear of being branded deluded dreamers, wackos, or mentally ill.

Reader, the stories they’ve shared with me have been fascinating! One told me of seeing an apparition, dressed in clothing from another era, that vanished before his eyes; another, of hearing a “little voice” throughout her life that told her things, including a long-buried family secret that proved to be true. One described having an ability to intuitively sense serious medical issues in the patients she was treating as a physician’s assistant, at times second-guessing her superiors, and being right! A former coworker told me she has become able to contact the dead, along with a number of spirit guides; and a former schoolmate of experiencing an “awakening” that left her able to communicate with guides, angels, and other higher-dimensional beings. One friend told me of seeing, as a teenager, up close and unmistakably, a UFO craft (or, in current parlance, a UAP); the husband of another shared his experience of seeing two actual ETs—the ones with little bodies, big heads, and huge eyes, in this case—in his bedroom! (Yes, he was freaked out; no, he’d not ingested any controlled substance; and no, they did not harm him.)

And this is not to mention any of the new friends I’ve made, while pursuing my explorations, who are gifted intuitives, mediums, past-life readers, and energy healers . . . I’ve even gotten to know several who can talk to the animals (move over, Dr. Dolittle) and see fairies (yes, Reader, I now believe in fairies, though they’re not, as I understand it, quite the way our pop culture has portrayed them: think less Tinkerbell, more energetic-beings-existing-in-a-higher-dimension-who-often-appear-as-light! (Then again, “Tink” did often appear as a bit of light, so perhaps author J. M. Barrie was on to something . . . )

Actually, Reader, all of this should hardly have surprised me. It’s part and parcel of what I’ve been learning about for a good number of years now in my studies and explorations regarding the idea of a “Shift” on planet Earth—a global shift in consciousness—that’s been long awaited, and is now taking place. (Come on, you knew something weird was happening, didn’t you?) This Shift, apparently predicted by many of the planet’s indigenous cultures and ancient civilizations as something that would occur if we got to this point in history without wiping ourselves out, involves, among other things, vast numbers of people “waking up” to the fact that we are far more than just our bodies, and stepping into a far stronger connection with their Higher Self . . . including claiming such innate human abilities as intuition, mediumship, telepathy, remote viewing, channeling, energetic healing, knowledge of their past lives, and more.

But it’s one thing to read about it and hear about it for decades from so many metaphysical teachers and sources as something “coming”—it’s another thing to hear that it’s here, now, and to actually witness these things occurring among your otherwise “normal” acquaintances and friends. If it sounds a little X-Men-ish to you . . . well, you’re not alone. And from what I’ve come to believe, Reader, we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. I’ll be writing more about the Shift and in particular the information that’s been “brought in” about it via channelers—individuals who serve as “vessels” for higher-dimensional beings or collectives who are able to communicate through them—for many years now. (There are a few channelers out there who’ve been doing it for thirty or forty years. One has even been invited to speak numerous times at the UN! Who knew?)

So, yes, Virginia . . . and anybody else who’s seriously asking . . . paranormal HAS become the new normal, as I hope I’ve begun to show in my previous blog posts, and looks to be becoming more so every day! Stay tuned . . .

Past-Life Regression Pioneer Dr. Brian L. Weiss

When spending time with my mother in the Staten Island house I grew up in, which I frequently do, I take my daily walks at lovely Sailor Snug Harbor, formerly a home for retired mariners and now a cultural and arts center with gorgeous landscaped grounds. Most days, as I walk, I listen to podcasts or videos on my phone—generally woo-woo-related content that’s research for upcoming books (yes, Reader, there are two more in the works . . . so far). One day, I was listening to some material that had to do with “old souls,” a phrase used to refer to souls who’ve had many incarnations—hundreds, perhaps even thousands of them. Apparently, those of us who are drawn to this material, I had come to understand, are likely to be old souls too. And on a gut level, I felt that to be true. As I cut across a parking lot on my way to visit the loo, a license plate on a parked car caught my eye. “HERE B4,” it read. Yep, I thought, me too.

Have you, too, had the feeling you’ve been here before, and maybe more than once? As I write in my book Adventures of a Soul, it could be meeting someone for the first time and having a profound sense that you’ve known them before; it could be an inordinate fondness for—or even an obsession with—something not of your era or culture; or visiting a place for a first time and feeling, I know this place, often with deep emotion involved. (I had this feeling myself upon visiting several cloisters and convents, before I’d ever been told that I’d had many past lives in religious orders—which I was, a number of times.) It could be a phobia, for no apparent reason, or a prodigious inborn talent for, and knowledge of, something like music or math. For those who are curious about the topic, I direct you not only to the astonishing work of Dr. Jim Tucker at my alma mater, UVa, regarding children’s past-life memories—featured in several of my previous blog posts—but now, too, to that of Dr. Brian L. Weiss.

Brian L. Weiss was one of the earliest mainstream authors (and a best-selling one at that) in the field of reincarnation. A psychotherapist with an MD and an Ivy-League background, he used hypnotic regression as a tool with his patients, taking them back to their childhoods to find the roots of issues manifesting in their present-day lives. A skeptic about reincarnation at the time, he was astonished when, while regressing one of his patients, whom he refers to as Catherine, she appeared to recall past-life traumas that seemed to be the cause of the severe emotional problems plaguing her in the present. And while Catherine, quite remarkably, began to rapidly recover once those memories were explored and processed, it wasn’t until she began to bring in, or “channel,” messages from spirit “Masters” that were extremely personal to Dr. Weiss and his family, with information no one outside the family knew—in particular, messages about his deceased son—that he became convinced that what was going on was “real.”

Weiss wrote about the experience in his first book, Many Lives, Many Masters.  He went on to write several more books as he continued to work with his patients’ past-life memories, finding them a powerful means of healing, including Same Soul, Many Bodies (about, believe it or not, “progression therapy,” that is, peering into the future—or a future—through hypnosis! I haven’t read it yet, but having just learned about this phenomenon, now I must!), and the hugely synchronistic, fated past-live love story Only Love Is Real (a personal favorite, Reader, as I’m not only a hopeless romantic, but have experienced a fated past-life love story of my own, as told in my book Adventures of a Soul).

Why does all this matter? Well, to me, the idea of past lives is a fascinating topic in and of itself. But then, I always want to learn as much as I can about who I am, where I come from, and where I may be going. Not everyone, I’ve found, does! (Reader, it boggles my mind, but it’s the case.) If we can heal our present-day maladies by processing wounds and traumas from other lives in our past, in my opinion, that’s a valuable thing to know.

And then there’s this: I’m working on a few more books, one of which deals with a subject that I touch upon only briefly in Adventures—the idea that we are currently in the midst of a seismic shift in consciousness on the planet, one that has been predicted by a number of ancient cultures around the world, and talked about by countless channelers and intuitives in the “New Age” movement over the past several decades or more. One aspect of what they see happening to us humans as we evolve as a species is that we will be connecting far more seamlessly with what some call our “higher selves”—the divine part of ourselves to which we are always connected, but with which most (though not all) of us here on the planet don’t currently consciously interact. As we do, it’s said, one thing that we can look forward to is the ability to remember all of our past lives. Yes, Reader, you read that right! And not only remember them, but be able to access, for each and every life, all of the knowledge, experience, and talents that we possessed. Think about what that would mean . . . especially for old souls!

Do I believe it? Yes. Why? I’ll tackle that subject, as I said, in a future book! For now . . . check out Weiss’s books, and the videos on his YouTube channel, and you, too, may find yourself as intrigued as I am by the clues, and sometimes keys, to a present life of happiness that our past lives may hold.