Waking UP

I was raised in traditional Midwestern suburban community during the sixties and seventies. My father worked as engineer and entrepreneur and my mother earned a doctorate in sociology and taught at a university medical school. My parents believed in all things tangible and encouraged us to do the same. Though my specific ability to directly communicate with the spirit of loved ones revealed itself in my adult years, I was keenly aware of experiencing the depth of spiritual reality in early life.

As I child I was able to see into multiple dimensions and observe the energy surrounding people. More significantly was the ability to feel the emotions of others with an understanding about their circumstances. Often when I touched another, I would see images and gain insights about the individual. I was able to see the origins of pain or concerns. This experience elicited profound compassion within me toward most people.

At times I had dreams or visions about future happenings, knowing that the details provided were not to be interpreted as destiny. Somehow I knew that each vision about the future was not a fact of fate. Clairvoyance provided information to assist the individual concerned, into making a higher choice.

Like many of you, no one in my family spoke of psychic phenomena. Intuition was trivialized and even mocked. Psychics were depicted as "airy fairy" flakes. Because I had other qualities that made me feel separate and alone in life; I did not want to stand out in the crowd by announcing that I had psychic experiences. So I kept my abilities private.

When I was a teen, a helping spirit prevented me from dying in a car crash. The afternoon of that event, I felt an intuitive nudge not to drive. There was no rational reason to avoid driving, but the tug at my gut was persistent. I tried hard to ignore the sensation. Later that evening, five girls, including me got into a car. I climbed into the center of a front-bench seat and just before we left the parking lot, a loud male voice shouted “Get out of this car now!” The voice was unrelenting and I turned to see if a male had joined our group. No such luck! The male voice continued shouting at me and I was not moving. Suddenly I felt as though I was being pulled out of the car. I finally surrendered to the urging, removed myself from the vehicle and my friends spun off without me. An hour later, I learned they had been involved in a fatal car crash. That evening my life was spared through a direct encounter with spirit, but who would believe me? I told no one.

As a young adult I had similar encounters with spirit. I prayed silently and would receive compelling guidance in response. When I honored the guidance my life improved. During this time, I had consistently compelling dreams about multiple dimensions, soul groups and spiritual helpers. Through these dreams I also received guidance for my life. One repetitive dream included a Native American male telling me that I was a shaman who needed to awaken.

But by my late twenties I had reached a pivotal encounter with pain. Throughout my childhood, teens and even early adulthood, I had experienced sexual, physical and emotional trauma. As a teen I started using alcohol to numb the pain. One night of silent desperation, I lay my head down in prayer begging God to free me from my suffering. Within moments, a golden vortex of light imbued with angels appeared with in my apartment. No, I was not hallucinating! These angelic beings radiated pure love that enveloped my heart. Their compassionate aid told me how to heal from my suffering. I was given specific instructions about my current status, how to deal with it and if I was willing to let them help me, how I would transcend the situation into a whole new life path.

I began actively listening to the divine assistance being offered me. As I enacted each step, my life continued to improve. But I had to do the work. They did not wave a magical wand to fix me. Instead, they encouraged me to take responsibility for my life and my healing. They guided me with specific steps that helped me face my suffering directly and led me to supportive people, places and experiences that helped me to grow. I listened to my intuitive guidance and embraced healing.

Soon it became a daily ritual for me to enthusiastically ask, listen and enact divine guidance. I observed how my thinking mind would often resist and even counter the spiritual assistance being suggested. It seemed my mind and emotions preferred the familiar, even when it meant suffering. When I succumbed to the resistance; life grew challenging. In contrast, as I allowed the guidance to come through me into action; my life was noticeably enhanced.

One afternoon an angel appeared to me and it was then that my intuitive abilities expanded into receiving direct messages from the world of loved ones in spirit. This astonished me! I had never contemplated or been drawn to such work. My divine helpers showed me how to receive and understand the spiritual realm with increasing accuracy and facility. Eventually they showed me how to provide ethical and meaningful readings for others.

Being a psychic medium was not in my plan for life. By then, I had left my profession as a marketing executive to raise my daughter and was returning to graduate school to follow my passion for healing and growth by becoming a psychologist. As soon as I was admitted to graduate school, spirit began urging me to open my mind, to see that I could serve healing through a completely different approach than I had ever considered. Not only did this stretch me into a whole new professional direction, it pushed me out of the closet as an intuitive being.

I began offering readings from my home, but through word of mouth, my practice expanded so rapidly, I had to move into an office. I was uncomfortable calling my self a medium, because it seemed so new to me and because I didn't know "everything" about spirit. My self-perceptions were consistently challenged by the divine. And while my professional life was expanding exponentially, my personal life fell into turmoil. Family members passed into spirit and my personal relationships began to unravel. Then my spiritual helpers offered the familiar message: “Wake up Shaman” they would say, “Wake up!”

I did not know the meaning of this guidance. I thought serving, as a medium was a stretch but now I was being called a shaman by the spirit world. My mind conjured all kinds of images about Native American Holy Men and Medicine Women and I wondered how I fit into this idea of a shaman. And then I was offering a reading for a young man who had encountered a severe trauma about six months prior. His parents brought him to me, after seeking myriad traditional healing approaches for their son that had brought no noticeable assistance to him. They showed up in my office desperate and seeking guidance on how to help him. I promised nothing but to see what might be revealed through intuitive means. During that session, I was shown by my guides that this man had experienced a dramatic soul loss through a meditative initiation led by a guru. A significant aspect of his soul had left his body through this process and I could see the dimension where his soul was residing. And it was during that reading that my guides revealed that he needed a soul retrieval. I had completed graduate school and an internship in clinical psychology and had studied with some of the most gifted holistic and intuitive healers in the world: but I had never heard of “soul loss” or a “soul retrieval”. My guides told me “this is what you were born to do”; revealing I had done so in many past lifetimes. But to be honest, in this lifetime I was baffled! I shared my findings with my client and his parents, explaining I had no prior knowledge of such a thing but I was willing to research. Immediately following the reading, I conducted a web search on “soul retrieval” and discovered it was a shamanic practice. I was then guided to refer my client and his family to the trained shamanic practitioner for a soul retrieval.

The web search led me to Sandra Ingerman - a gifted soul retriever and shamanic teacher but this was not the draw - my soul recognized her with a pure sense of elation. I enrolled in her next workshop and flew to Santa Fe to study. While there, my guides began teaching me about soul retrieval. I meditated and learned from them in the early morning only to discover that what they had shown to me was being taught in Sandra’s class that very day. As I opened to this aspect of intuitive healing and practicing, my heart and soul felt increasingly more peaceful. I became like a sponge, soaking up my guides teachings enhanced by Sandra's wisdom and experience.

Today I continue to learn from both spirit and teachers in the physical realm. And I always share what I learn. As an intuitive medium and shamanic healer, I am able to do many kinds of work - but I am not equipped to provide a reading or healing for everyone. My intuitive guidance will tell me when to serve in that role and when to refer a client to a better match or different service for healing.By shifting my identification from the material world to that of a soul centered life, I have been healing, expanding and living a consistently enriching life experience. I now see the eternal nature of spirit and how it is evolving through human consciousness. I am humbled and awed by what I have encountered and learned thus far.

I am no special person, per se. I am a regular individual, just like you. We are all uniquely gifted. Trauma pushed me open my eyes, but I had to open them. I had to learn how to see, feel and understand what life was showing me. I was encouraged to release my identification with my physical reality and realize that I am a soul. By doing that, I heal, deepen and expand. Living in touch with my soul and the world of spirit is a daily practice.

A reading, a soul retrieval or energy healing are not fixes. When divinely sourced, each service can provide a gateway to you. By stepping through that gateway, you can discover the eternal nature of you as spirit and activate your innate power and purpose. Spirit guides do not make your life work for you. That is the unique responsibility of each one of us. But by opening to the eternal reality of you as a soul and the divine assistance available to support you, you are then empowered to embrace your inimitable gifts and contribute to the beauty of life.

By opening to the divine assistance made available through my intuition, I was able to heal and expand into a path of service that is far grander than I had ever imagined. I am eternally grateful for the gifts from the divine and it is my profound honor to share these services and teach others how to awaken to the innate language of soul. The journey of life is infinitely rich, empowering and exquisite when we shift from living through the paradigms of our mind into the immutable truth of our soul.