I’m a Reluctant Psychic

When I was three years old, I told my mother I had spoken to my grandfather before I was born. When I was five, I experienced my first premonition of a death. When I was ten years old, I saw the ghosts of my grandparents in my room. Through my teens, I would get anxious and feel when someone in my family was hurt or in trouble. As a young adult, people who I just met would tell me really personal information about themselves, even if I didn't ask them. In my career, I seemed to miraculously be at the places and times people emotionally needed me most. And with every incident that happened to me, I usually had two reactions. This is really cool, and this creeps me out beyond belief. I never wanted to be in touch with paranormal things. Even the word "paranormal" seems to sound like "not normal" to me. So I denied it all, tried to make it go away, and wrapped myself in a lot of skepticism, cynicism and doubt. Doing so took a toll on my health, my happiness and my relationships. If you are reading this, I am gathering that you might relate.
This book was created for all those people out there who, like myself, are reluctant to identify as Psychics, Indigo Children, Mediums, Intuitives or Earth Angels. It is also for those people who don't call themselves by any of those names, but have experienced spiritual things in their lives they can't explain. It is for all of us skeptics out there that heard something about Fairies and Merpeople and rolled our eyes and said “Oh God. Merpeople? Really?” But deep down inside, it makes sense to us, because we really ARE Fairies or Merpeople or Angels or Indigo Children, etc. We may not want to admit it, or see the benefit in bringing it into our lives, but it's still there. This book is for all of you that ask “How do I accept this type of spirituality into my life when it pretty much goes against what I’ve been taught?” Well read on.

In the beginning, there was light.

I can remember as far back as my being four years old and I felt like I shined with a really big light. I could basically flirt with anyone, I was super charming, and people couldn’t keep themselves from pinching my chubby cheeks and commenting on my bright blue eyes being so shiny. I have pictures of me in my tiny sailor suit outfit, sparkling for the camera, and I swear you could see my glow in the photo. I already knew at that time I felt different from my family and things happened to me intuitively that I couldn’t explain. Such as why I felt like I shined with such a positive light, and yet not great things happened to me. Or the time I saw my grandparent’s ghosts standing in my bedroom. I searched for reasons and I dealt with it as best I could with the information I had at the time. Information that came from movies and television programs in which most psychics were portrayed as eccentric crazy people, and ghosts seemed to always be scary and evil. I didn’t have the wealth of easily available information we have now. As a child, I was fascinated with anything I saw that dealt with magic or people with special powers. I remember seeing sci-fi movies or fantasy TV shows and I would feel a longing to connect with the people in the story. There just seemed to be something innately familiar about them. I almost felt like I had lived those stories before and somehow I had lost the ability to make magic happen. My moods would suddenly shift without provocation when I was with certain people or places and I couldn’t figure out why. I found this quite unsettling. To complicate things even more, I would sometimes get the feeling that the moods weren’t mine, but someone else’s. In more than a few instances, I would be happily working away on something and then a sudden feeling of dread would overcome me, like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. It didn’t make any sense, it just happened. I thought I was going crazy and did whatever I could to hide my insanity from the world. I had no idea who to talk to about the things that were happening to me. When children experience unexplainable things in their lives, they look to adults for answers, but don’t always get the responses they hoped for.
When I was in my twenties, my mother and I were cooking dinner together and she related a story about a time she and I were talking about her father. She told me that I had said things about my grandfather that I couldn’t have possibly known as a three year old. My grandfather had passed away nine years before I was born and my mom rarely spoke of him. My mother asked the then-three-year-old me how I knew all these things about her father. Without hesitation I looked at her and said “I talked to him in Heaven.” Although I have no conscious memory of this conversation, it was probably at that specific point that I realized that talking about spirits or psychic stuff upset my mother. As I grew older, it didn’t take long for me to realize that speaking about the spirit world tended to bring up strong reactions from the people in my life.
So how did I start to travel down the long and winding road to acceptance? It started with a conversation I was having with a coworker who I deeply respect and admire. She and I were speaking about religion and spirituality, discussing the various approaches people have and how it is used in their lives. I mentioned I had a life long discomfort with organized religion and ritualization, and stated that I felt that I wasn’t a very spiritual person. My colleague turned to me and said, with incredible sincerity, “Oh no. You are one of the most spiritual people I have ever met.” I was floored. Up until that time, I was pretty much convinced that being spiritual was acting like the people who thump bibles, preached loudly, and spread the word of superiority and discrimination. It was a narrow viewpoint, but one I held at the time, and I wanted to be as far from that as I could get. It was later that I learned that spirituality can have little to do with organized religion. External forces such as rituals and religions can be very helpful in guiding and nurturing spirituality. Rituals can give spirituality a purpose and a function. However, my personal view is that spirituality is something you feel inside yourself and ritual and religion are ways used to express it. To me, spirituality is a belief and a kind of knowing/feeling that there is more to life then just our human bodies in a waking state. There are many names for this belief in the world. Spirit, God, Mohammed, the Universe, ghosts, the Force, and tons of other names humans have given to that feeling that this waking life isn’t all there is to being here. So I was a bit jolted by what my coworker said. As in many other instances before this, I knew deep down I did feel deeply spiritual, I just denied it most of my life. So this relatively innocent conversation with a friend was the first step towards acceptance.
Several years later, a friend of mine mentioned to me that she knew her child was Indigo. So with my skepticism at full force, I asked, “Really? What’s an Indigo Child?” This simple question launched me into the exploration of this world of spirituality, and gave me the desire to find out more about it. So I did some research, and here is what I discovered.