Do Dead People Watch You Shower? (20 page)

I think we
call things miracles because we are unable to acknowledge that our normal everyday life is the miracle and miracles are really the norm. Our physical world and the spiritual world are completely intertwined. It’s only the fact that most people will draw some nonexistent separation between the two that we start whistling the theme from
The Twilight Zone
when something like a miracle happens. Why is this so hard for us to accept?

Yes, but we
have to do our part, too. We have to remember to pay attention to the small things. It’s not always a balloon falling from the sky with the message written on it. Another time, a woman had come to see me. She wanted to hear from her mother. She told me that she’d been hoping that her mother would send her a sign of some kind and even though she did hear from her mother in the reading there just wasn’t enough to satisfy her—she just didn’t feel that she could validate, and she was really disappointed. I felt bad, but I also thought there’d been a good bit of information and that her expectations were pretty high. She really wanted something to knock her out. Like, she wanted the house to fall down on top of her and to find the red shoes sticking out underneath or something. So all I could do was tell her what I believe—that she needed to be more open to the little things. When we are contacted by the dead, it’s not like Hollywood. It’s very simple stuff.

Later that weekend, she went to a wedding. It was an Italian wedding, the usual—very overdone with all the usual Italian stuff and
then
some. She’s sitting there talking with someone about how much she misses her mother. Just then the bride takes the mike and says that she’s asked the band to play a special song for the groom. The band starts to play “Danny Boy” and this woman bursts into tears. That was her very
Irish
mother’s favorite song—being played at this very
Italian
wedding, just as she’s talking about her mother. She called me to tell me that she finally got it. It’s in the small stuff.

Sure it does—I’ve
seen this many times. And it can be decided either before our loved one crosses or after; it can work both ways.

At one of my big shows, I was doing a reading for a young girl and she wanted to hear from her brother. He came through and had a number of messages for her. I can’t recall what they were, but as I was finishing, I heard the word
duck
. I said, “He’s saying
duck
. Do you have any idea what he’s talking about?” She burst into tears! She said, “That was the word he and I decided would be our signal that it was really him talking to me.”

Another time, a man whose wife had crossed came for a reading. He was in the habit of communicating with her, talking with her from time to time throughout his day, but he wasn’t sure if she really heard him. So he made an appointment with me, and sure enough his wife—her name was Linda—came through and said a good number of things that he was able to validate. So when he left, he was feeling pretty good about the reading and was convinced that he wasn’t wasting his time to still be talking to her even if he didn’t hear any answer back. As he was leaving, suddenly I got another image and I said to him, “Why is she showing me this?” and I put the palms of my hands together, like you do when you’re praying. Well, he got so excited—he opened the front of his jacket and took from the inside pocket a pencil with a pair of praying hands on top. He said he’d bought a coffee that morning and on the counter at the checkout was a cup of these pencils—one of those “impulse buy” type things set up near the cashier—and he bought one and said to his wife, “Linda, if you are really there, tell me something about this.” He’d already been a satisfied customer, just from the things his wife said in the reading, but that was, for him, the icing on the cake.

There are lots
of small things that the dead will do to make their presence known. One of the most common is that they will move things. You could have a perfectly organized bureau top and find it in complete disarray, or maybe just some key element out of whack, like a photograph tipped over or coins arranged in a line or anything crazy like that.

One of my clients was missing her sister very much. She used to talk to her portrait in the living room. She’d just gaze at her sister’s picture and have a conversation with her and beg her to show some sign that she was still around. But she never got anything out of the portrait. One day, after another session of gazing at and talking to this picture, she left her living room frustrated, only to hear a loud crash coming from the room behind her. She ran back in to discover a small resin plaque had fallen onto the hardwood floor. The plaque read, “Sisters are forever.” Another of my clients was sure that her husband was nearby because she kept finding dimes all over the place that she knew “shouldn’t have been where they were,” and she felt that he’d been leaving them for her to find. Maybe there’s a photo or painting on your wall that no matter how many times you straighten it, it will always be crooked. This is very common—moving some object into our view or tilting or upsetting something, or, sometimes, if they have a twisted sense of humor, hiding things we need, though I don’t think they do that with things that are really important to us—they just like to see us go a little crazy sometimes for fun.

Nearly always it
will be small things. You might catch a whiff of a particular perfume your mother always wore or your dad’s aftershave. Sometimes it will be sounds—I had one client who told me that the whole family thought they were hearing her mother’s footsteps in the house. Her mother used a walker so the sound was very distinctive. Sure enough, when I did her reading, her mother confirmed that she’d been practically tap-dancing to let her family know she was still around!

There are also certain animals, often turtles or frogs for some reason, that may appear in your path in some unusual way. Perhaps a bird or a butterfly.

I’ve heard a
lot of confusion about this. If your mother always loved to see the first robin of spring, and you associate robins with your mother, then your mother crosses over and you begin to see robins everywhere, or maybe just one robin that tends to stick pretty close to where you are, that robin is
not
your mother. However, it is very likely that your mother is sending robins to you because she knows that when you see a robin you’ll think of her.

A story comes to mind of a woman who came to me for a reading. She told me that before he died, her husband said that he’d show her a butterfly so that she would know he was still around her. So she kept looking and looking for this butterfly and was very disappointed that she never saw one. Then one evening she was out with a couple of friends for dinner. Before they ordered they were chatting about her husband, whom they all missed. Finally they opened their menus to order and there was a big butterfly—the emblem of the restaurant—printed on the menu. To her credit, the significance wasn’t lost on her! So it’s important also to remember that you never know how the contact will come—even if you think you know what you are looking for. Don’t be disappointed if the butterfly doesn’t literally land on your nose.

That’s an easy
one. Just say, “I love you, too!” In fact, it doesn’t matter one iota whether you say it out loud or whisper it or just think it. They are telepathic, they know our thoughts. Say it any way you want. You can write, you can sing it. They hear you, no matter what.

What I believe,
because of what I’ve been told and shown, is that we do return, over and over, in different bodies, for the purpose of learning different things. We come here in groups—there are people we have known before. Soul groups are quite large, not just a single family or even an extended family. We recognize feelings we have toward people when we first meet them here, whether good or bad, because of the lives we’ve shared with that person before.

It’s so much more than just a “soul group,” it’s more like an energy field. When we die, we all go back to the Other Side. Those we’ve loved and those we’ve lost are all there waiting for us. Anyone who was important to you in your life will be there. They won’t leave until you get there. For instance, if a child’s parent dies when the child is just born or very young, that parent will not reincarnate before that child crosses over. They will wait for them, literally a lifetime. Over there time has no meaning, in any case. That child
will
know his or her parent over there before they all go back again.

To be reincarnated there is an agreement and a plan made with God and the soul’s spirit Masters. The dead choose where and when they want to come back. It’s always for the purpose of both learning something and helping others, teaching something as well as learning something.

I don’t believe
that any new souls are being created at this point. I think we are just a bunch of old souls that keep coming back here and then going back home. I feel that those souls we refer to as “old souls” are simply more experienced, maybe have pushed themselves more during their however-many life cycles in a body. Souls retain their personalities, so if you think about it, it makes sense. If you happen to be a slacker soul, you probably aren’t going to get as much out of whatever time you put in on the planet because you just aren’t exerting yourself. This is not to compare someone who maybe doesn’t run around doing a lot of stuff but who is deeply philosophical and meditative to a slacker. It’s not the same thing. You can be gathering experience and understanding, you can be growing, without appearing outwardly active if you are focused and studying in some way. By slacker I really mean someone who is satisfied sitting around watching TV, wanting things spoon-fed to him instead of trying to figure things out for himself and getting out and helping others and so forth. You can see how the soul who is grappling with understanding might be an “old soul” while the one who just comes back over and over without breaking a sweat would still be, in spiritual terms, a baby. It could also be that the “baby” soul, while it may have been created at the same time as an “old” soul, possibly didn’t choose to come back to earth as often. There may have been longer periods when it was on the Other Side playing checkers or whatever.

No, I don’t
believe it is. A child is just a soul returning here for a new mission in life, a new job in life, a new experience in life. We’ve all been here before. We may come back as male or female, we may be any race or color, we may be born in one part of the world or another. But it’s just another trip. I’ve heard many stories about people who visit a country on their vacation, they don’t know why they have such an interest in seeing that place, and when they get there it’s all familiar to them. There are also cases of very young children who can speak fluently in a language that is foreign to them and no one in their family speaks that language. Somehow, in both cases, there has been some previous past life memory retained when that soul has come back to this side of the veil and been born again. I don’t know why this happens sometimes. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s not a perfect system. God is perfect, but anything to do with us humans is bound to have a few flaws in it.

Each of these
scenarios is different, even though in each case it is ultimately a matter of the soul going back to the Other Side instead of being born into a body and living a life here. There still are lessons for the soul, as well as for the mother and for any number of people in the mother’s life, anyone with an association to that baby who never arrives.

The first thing to remember is that the soul has made an agreement to come here and understands the circumstances of their coming, completely understands that they will not be here long, or won’t even be born at all in the conventional sense. It’s mapped out and chosen.

The second thing to remember is that there is always karma, a lesson and a balance involved. This is between the individual souls involved and God. At different times in history and places in the world it may have been accepted to tie the ankles of a handicapped newborn together and leave it in the wilderness thinking that this child would never have a “good” life because it was not in a perfect body, or that if an amniocentesis showed that a child was handicapped in some way the pregnancy should be terminated, or that if a baby was a girl it should be aborted or allowed to be born and then given away. All of these situations and decisions have to do with karma—choices and lessons—and while we may have an opinion, and can even vote to legislate our opinion if we live in a democracy, in spiritual terms we are not the judges. Only God can judge.

All that said, my understanding is that when a soul comes forward in anticipation of birth, it actually travels back and forth between the growing embryo and the Other Side. It does not take up residence in the mother and stay there throughout the pregnancy; rather, it adheres to the embryo at the last stage, during the last two months before birth.

Then, when it goes home, it goes back through the tunnel. From what I have been told, I believe there are three tunnels. There is a yellow one, which is for the vast majority of crossings, those of us who have lived relatively normal lives and have a normal amount of what we would think of as “sins.” There is a black tunnel for the souls of those who would be considered “evil,” those who have taken a human life. (There is no punishment we can mete out here that can compare to what happens on the Other Side to such an individual. However deserved their punishment, it is tragic.) And there is a blue tunnel that is reserved for those souls who cross as babies or the unborn. I do not really know why there is this specific tunnel for those who spend the shortest time here, but that is what has been shown to me.