9- Photo-realism

9- Photo-realism

Despite the mystical experiences connected to my spiritual journey, I had never researched or entertained any kind of paranormal explorations.  Not that I avoided them…they just weren’t on my radar.  Despite my own mystical experiences, I was a clinician who primarily believed in addressing the here and now with the here and now. But an antique photo in a tiny shop would expand that understanding, proving that the ‘here and now’ also holds the ‘there and then’.  

Each time I put the antique photograph down and walked away to explore other things in the tiny shop, I felt myself unexplainably drawn back to the woman in the portrait.  In those days there was something about old things that called me.  Along with my sister and girlfriends I often perused dusty old shops and antique malls, and this day was no different.  These places resonated with a kind of timelessness that we each found captivating.  Our homes were furnished and adorned with treasures from such places.  For me it was not so much a shopping adventure as an appreciation for the craftsmanship and beauty that I feel has all but disappeared in our modern, make-shift world of the instant and disposable.  But my attraction to this particular photograph had nothing to do with any of that.

For some time I had been collecting antique cabinet card portraits of women for a Women’s Issues class that I was scheduled to teach.  I had planned to use such images to connect the students of today to the energy of women in earlier times.  However, I never expected to connect so deeply to an image myself.  Having more photos than I needed, despite the attraction, I put the photo down and left the store with my sister and girlfriend.  Halfway down the sidewalk I was compelled to return to the shop and the photograph.  As I picked it up and looked into the depth of the eyes staring back at me, I was completely captivated and clueless as to why.  But to free myself from the pull, I marched straight to the counter, purchased the seven dollar obsession and tucked it into my purse.  That was that…or so I thought.

All day long I felt the urge to take the photo from my purse and look into her eyes.  Time and again I found myself staring into them as if they held some great mystery.  I even asked those with me if they got any vibe off the picture and they both denied any kind of draw what-so-ever.  My sister further commented that she didn’t even find the woman particularly attractive.  This threw me because I found her to be quite captivating.  It wasn’t that she was a beauty, but there was an undeniable strength and presence about her that I found compelling. 

That evening I sat with the photo and wrote whatever came to mind as I imagined the life of the mysterious woman from the turn of the century.  Alone on my sun porch, I fashioned a character study of sorts that was impossible to verify, but verification wasn’t what I was looking for.  I simply wanted to understand what was calling me to this image so I wrote whatever filled my thoughts.  The things that came spoke to a strength of character and her determination to be heard and unrestricted in an age where women had very little freedom and even less voice.  The message was one of self-knowledge with regard to her personality; a quiet type of inner-strength that was unmistakable in her presence.  Not foreboding or arrogant in any way,  I felt she held a kind of self-awareness that was purposeful and directed, without ego yet very centered.  

A few days later I had the image copied and enlarged so I could frame and display it prominently in my home.  I knew this was very unusual behavior but I just went with it.  I intuitively felt the need to ‘be with her’; to have her share my space.  Fortunately I lived with people who didn’t question my quirky ideas or spontaneous notions.

It was the early nineties and we had a nice apartment just outside of Dallas, Texas.  I say this to emphasize that there wasn’t anything in our area of the bible belt that openly addressed the paranormal.  Quite honestly, despite the mystical experiences connected to my spiritual journey, I had never researched or entertained any kind of paranormal explorations.  Not that I avoided them…they just weren’t on my radar.  Despite my own mystical experiences, I was a clinician who primarily believed in addressing the here and now with the here and now.   But the woman in the photo, unbeknownst to me, had come to show me that the here and now held more than I realized.  Being all that existed, the ‘here and now’ holds everything!

A few days after finding the portrait and writing down my thoughts, I randomly turned the TV channel following a local home-school program my son had just finished watching.  An interview type talk-show I had never heard of caught my attention.  This episode featured a detective who used the services of a psychic to assist in finding missing persons.  The detective, a credible sounding, middle-aged man, introduced the psychic and sang her praises with regard to her assistance in his cases.  Curious, I watched the interview through to the end.  When an invitation to call the number on the screen reached out to anyone with a story they would like to share about the paranormal, I found myself jotting the number down. 

Not only did I know nothing about the paranormal world at this time in my life, I had certainly never entertained the idea of calling a television show, much less a psychic!  But there I was, only minutes after the show aired, dialing the number. Hoping to get information for contacting the psychic, my mind was questioning my actions even as I watched them unfold.  I had no idea why I was calling to connect with a woman on a TV show in California simply because I was obsessed with a photograph I’d found in an antique shop in Texas, but there I was.  Imagine my surprise at being told that the psychic actually lived only three hours from my home!  For Texans, that’s a day trip! Without missing a beat, I called, she answered, and the synchronistic breadcrumbs continued to fall into perfect alignment.  As it turned out she was in my area twice a month seeing clients.  Needless to say, I scheduled an appointment.

On the phone I was careful not to give anything away.  I told her that I had seen her on the TV show, and being a counselor, I wondered if she had ever assisted in that field in some way.  She said she had and we agreed to discuss the possibilities when she was in town. Two weeks later I waited outside the office she used when she was in town.  The photo tucked inside my purse, I thought about how I was going to approach the subject.  When it was my turn to see her I found the woman to be just as she was on TV.  Warm, friendly and very approachable.  After introductions and pleasantries the two of us went into the room she used as an office.  We sat across from one another at an empty table, but for a small cassette recorder next to her.   I reached into my purse, took the photograph out and said “I was wondering…”.  Before I could finish my sentence the woman reached to take the photograph from my hand, and upon touching it she gasped slightly, drew it to her and hit the record button and said, “This was you in a past life.”  I sat speechless and suspicious until she began independently stating much of what I had written after finding the photo….and then some.  I’d probably taken it all with a grain of salt had her reading not been so close to the things that I had intuitively written.  However,  I had never even remotely considered a past life connection.  In those days I didn’t even think in such terms.  Since then however, I have had three other very gifted psychics confirm the connection and I have no doubt they were honestly telling me what they saw. 

While it is fun to imagine that I actually connected with a photograph from one of my own past (parallel) lives, that has never been what most astounded me.  Connecting with that photograph in such a profound way marked a trajectory that opened me up to a much larger picture of life.  After that experience and hearing about the possible connection, my studies turned to exploring life as an ongoing continuum rather than a single appearance.  Weather she is indeed one of my own past/parallel lives, I don’t know.  However, those who knew me during that time can certainly attest to how strongly her energy influenced my life, and the doors that opened up for me following our uncommon introduction.  I eventually began to explore past life regression.  I assisted a friend in unraveling and validating her young son’s comments about the lives they shared prior to this one.  And my world view expanded far beyond the limits of my five senses.  

I came to understand that we simultaneously project our eternal essence into many incarnations at once in various dimensions.  These fluctuate along bands of frequency and actually influence one another across what we experience as time and space.  I’ve learned that shifts in awareness which I experience in this life literally impact other lives that the larger self is projecting which I’m not even consciously aware of and vice-versa.  I have also been shown that our life is not one of continuity.  We are not limited to a chronological continuum of experience, but do indeed seamlessly pop in and out of experiences according to our perception and focus.  I have felt sudden shifts and become aware of literally shifting from one timeline to another without needing to experience the gradual steps I could have used to get there.  This awareness continues to expand in me as does my understanding of it.  It is these kind of lessons I enjoy exploring and dissecting.  The world I experience today is far from what meets the eye and this has made life quite an adventure.  One that was prompted by a photograph experienced along two timelines which crossed in the eternal now.

The enlarged framed photograph is still in my home and long ago I painted a portrait of the two of us.  Together we are more than I was alone and I feel a kinship to the energy that reached out to me in such a profound way.  Understanding that we all exist beyond the limitations of time and space is what matters most.  When we live from that awareness we open ourselves to infinite possibilities in the seemingly here and now.  The captivating woman in the photograph ushered that awareness in for me. I am both grateful I followed the intuitive nudges that led me to her and forever changed because of it.  

12- Staying Connected

12- Staying Connected

Unexpectedly widowed at fifty-six, a series of beautifully guided, synchronistic events, had me living at my daughter’s home just prior to, and following, my sweet husband’s untimely passing.  A few weeks before his transition, knowing it was close, Phil and I made an agreement to stay connected.  Our beliefs supported this idea though neither of us knew just how we would pull this off.  Therefore we decided he would be the one to let me know just how that was going to happen once he ‘settled in’ beyond the physical.  

Several weeks after Phil’s passing I was writing one of my evening letters to him in my journal.  This was a practice I had started after his transition to ease my grief and move into a new way of being with him.  It really seemed to help me find ‘us time’ to share my day with him.  But it wasn’t a two-way street and I really wanted that.  Since we had agreed before his passing to keep in touch,  it dawned on me to give him a symbol to use to let me know he was around.  Dragonflies had always been a personal totem for me and was even the logo I used for business in the form of my initials.  This seemed the perfect symbol.  As I wrote the letter telling him to send me dragonflies if he was around, I also wrote how difficult this might be since I was most always inside.  Not long after I put my letter away the phone rang.  Lo and behold, my three year old grandson was put on the phone to tell me about his new temporary “dwagon-fwy”  tattoo.  I laughed and cried and excitedly shared the news with everyone.  Phil was in touch!

Lighter and happier, the next day I shared the news with a girlfriend as I accompanied her to an appointment.  As we sat together across from the man she was seeing, he began questioning me rather than my friend.  I explained that I was just accompanying her, but still he asked me a bit about myself and my work.  As I explained my work, a look of excitement came over his face and he reached beneath the table he was sitting behind, pulled out a rather large book and said,  “Oh, you have to read this!”  A huge dragonfly illustration adorned the cover of the book he held up, and my friend and I could hardly contain our amazement.  The book, as it turned out, addressed many of the esoteric based questions I had been asking my late husband about in the letters I wrote each evening.  This was not only his way of answering the questions, but of saying hello once again.  I know this, because as I went to purchase the book that evening, the edition now available had a new cover….without the dragonfly!  Had I not gone with my girlfriend, I’d have never seen that edition let alone been directed to it for some of the answers I sought.  I have since learned how our loved ones can inspire our thoughts in order to align us with such synchronistic events.  This is exactly what Phil had done!  And he wasn’t through yet.

All of a sudden I began hearing from my family about their own unusual dragonfly experiences.  My mother, who had become widowed only a day before me, had a dragonfly visit her patio daily that she had never encountered before. This went on for a good week or more.  My sweet niece, for the first time she could recall, not only had a dragonfly appear at her home, but it perched itself on her shoulder, which she couldn’t wait to tell me about.  Dragonflies randomly appeared to my daughter and my grandson’s mother around this time as well.  But no dragonfly dance was as profound as the one I experienced a year following Phil’s passing.

Prior to his transition, Phil had never expressed one bit of concern about my life without him.  When I would say how much I was going to miss him, he would simply reply “You’ll be fine.”   For twenty-two years we had done absolutely everything together and loved the introverted cocoon we had built around our life.  Imagining life without him was impossible.  But now, as I look back, I wonder if he intuitively knew something I didn’t.

About a year after Phil’s passing, I went to dinner with a man I had met through yet another series of profound synchronistic events.  Such alignments had become almost a way of life and I needed only to follow the clues scattered like breadcrumbs before me.  Seated at a window overlooking a lake, my mind turned to Phil.  He had loved the water and whenever I am near it he always comes to mind.   I suppose it’s natural, after a long marriage, to wonder if your late spouse approves of your life moving along with someone new.  Having had no doubt, that Phil had a hand in arranging our meeting, as I sat there I wondered what he thought.  At that very moment a huge swarm of tiny dragonflies arose from the lake right in front of the window where we sat.  Hundreds of tiny dragonflies circled and danced outside the window the whole time we were there.  For me it was Phil not only acknowledging his approval, but taking credit for the matchmaking itself, saying….  “See, I told you you’d be fine.”  

Dragonflies were not the only way Phil communicated.  One day, not long after the phone call from my grandson about his timely tattoo, I was in my bedroom at my daughters house tidying up.  I was talking out-loud to Phil as I always did, telling him we needed a better system.  Dragonflies were great for saying hello but I needed something more.  As I continued to talk to Phil about ways we could connect, I reached for the remote and turned on the TV.  Again, perfect timing!   Just as I turned on the TV a woman on the screen was demonstrating how one could use a pendulum to connect with their deceased loved one.  The series, which I had watched countless times, had never even remotely shown anything metaphysical….let alone a clip about connecting with a deceased loved one.  Phil had done it again, and so I reached for a chain that held beautiful handmade glass bead Phil had once bought me.

In the years since his passing I have learned how easy it is for our transitioned loved ones to inspire us with guiding thoughts toward things they want us to know or experience.  The pendulum proved to be a great tool for ongoing communication and greatly reconnected me to Phil on an emotional level in that first year following his transition.  I rarely use it to connect with him today as we are quite literally on a different wavelength and communicate differently.  However, I do use it, and have taught others to use a pendulum, to regain a physical connection to those who have transitioned.  I can’t tell you how many times I have held it and simply asked Phil to use it to ‘hold my hand’.  For us that means the pendulum will spin in a circle with quite an energetic pull as I hold it.  This worked like magic to lift my spirits in the first year following his passing, because the physical absence was so profound.  

Since Phil’s transition I have encountered three separate mediums who have connected with Phil and given me confirmation of messages I intuitively received from him, without me sharing the tiniest bit of such information with them, including his existence!  This initially helped me to trust what I was picking up.  The two mediums I spoke with after I met my new partner even stressed that Phil was taking full credit for having put us together.  I had also intuited this because of the synchronistic alignments that happened to arrange our meeting.  This made me smile and appreciate how he was even taking care of me from the non-physical.  Mediums are great for tapping the lower planes if you can find one with a good track record.  There are lots of charlatans however using something called ‘cold reading’ to appear to have a connection, so, if you are inclined to use one, do your homework.  But, trust me, there is nothing like having your own ongoing connection. Six years into his transition I experience Phil very differently these days.  A couple of years ago my new life partner became my husband, and while he fully embraces the connection I have to Phil, it has become much more subtle. It is my sincere feeling that this subtlety is how Phil honors the life I live today.