That night, I had a dream in which she brought me a present:
We are standing on my balcony overlooking the ocean and my mother hands me a large, porous loofa sponge. “I want you to make sure you use this,” she says. “It's the highest-quality loofa sponge available anywhere in the world.” I am puzzled by this gesture, but I accept the sponge. My mother beams at me and disappears.
Initially, I wasn't sure what to make of her present. Loofa sponges are used for rubbing off dead skin cells from the body. What was she trying to tell me? Then the answer came. In her own inimitable style, she was stressing how important it was for me to slough off and release the old in order to allow room for something new to replace it. She was making a plea that I not focus on her past pain and suffering, that I stop dwelling on the horror I'd felt watching her die. It was time for me to move on. She was encouraging me to embrace every moment of my life with the same enthusiasm with which she had lived her own.
I can't imagine how I could have survived the three-month period of my mother's dying without my psychic dreams to guide me. I would have been lost without them. In my darkest days, when it seemed impossible to muster the energy to keep moving forward, these dreams lit up my path. I felt protected by them, heartened by their intelligence and compassion.
Such dreams respond to out deepest needs during times of crisis. An alarm is set off, calling on a wisdom within to direct us. The art is to listen, not to discount the information received, to follow its instructions. Through faith, the psychic can intervene. Our inner resources are more bountiful than we envision. Even if we're alone, without the support of friends or family, the integrity of our spirit, the prescience we all possess, will come to our aid. Once we believe this, and recognize our strength, we gain courage to face whatever lies ahead.
To this day, I often feel my mother with me. One night, for instance, she came to my bedside, and while I lay suspended between sleep and wakefulness, I felt her stroke my hair with her hand. Her essence was like a subtle veil, one I could sense but could not reach out and touch. When I opened my eyes, she was gone.
On the Mother's Day following her death, I ran across an old photograph of my mother, taken while she was riding a camel in the Egyptian desert. I stared at her face, missing her very much, when suddenly I saw her wink at me. Startled, I ran into the next room to tell a friend. She laughed and said that earlier that morning she'd been looking at the same photograph and my mother had winked at her, too. This was just like my mother—to catch us by surprise and reassure us both that she was still there.
The great gift that came from my mother's death was that my father and I grew closer. While she was alive, my mother always took center stage and overshadowed our relationship. The love he and I had for each other ran deep, but never had a real chance to flower. It was waiting for the right time to emerge. After my mother died, my father and I began to really communicate for the first time. Now we talk on the phone daily, have dinner at least once a week, and share the stuff of our lives. One aspect of this change is that he fully appreciates the woman I've become, and relies on that. There's both trust and frankness.
Recently my father told me that when my mother was pregnant, he saw an ultrasound of her belly in which he noticed that my head was almost exactly the same shape as his. When I was a child and insecure with my own identity, the fact that we looked so much alike had embarrassed me. My slender face, prominent forehead, olive complexion, and even some of my simple gestures—folding my hands in my lap when concentrating—were an exact image of his own. Now, as my father spoke with such pride about our resemblance, I felt proud, too.
During a meditation about a year ago, I had a vision in which we were walking down a dirt road in the canyons above Malibu and my father suddenly died. Instantly, his body disintegrated into dust but his heart was transformed into an exquisite statue of jade, so green that it could have come from the bottom of the sea. I took it with me on the journey home and treasured it. The new relationship I had begun with my father was that same precious jewel.
On Christmas Day of 1993, my mother had been dead for nearly a year. As on every Christmas before, I performed my ritual of feeding the seagulls loaves of Wonder bread by the ocean in front of my home. On this day, at least thirty of them swarmed around my head, squawking at each other and aggressively snatching chunks of bread from my hand. When the last of the bread was gone, I sat cross-legged in the sand while the birds landed on the ground and stood around me in a concentric circular formation. These throngs of white-breasted seagulls looking attentively into my eyes reminded me of angels, pure, white, and majestic. Then, fluttering their wings in unison, they rose high up into the azure sky until they became tiny black specks on the horizon.
I pictured the faces of the women in my family, some dead, some still here. Just like the gulls, we were all connected by a continuum. I felt particularly close to Melissa, my cousin Sindy's daughter. At age four, she had already demonstrated evidence of prescience. Melissa was more fortunate than I had been. If she needs us, Sindy, her grandmother Phyllis, and I will be there as role models to support and direct her without fear or reservation. When the time comes, perhaps she will do the same for her own daughter. Woman to woman, our psychic tradition will be passed down. I walked back toward the warmth of my house, content in the knowledge that long after I have gone, the legacy will continue.
Teachings
P
REPARING TO
S
EE
In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few.
—S
HUNRYU
S
UZUKI,
R
OSHI
When I was nine, I dreamed that my grandfather, who had recently died, took me to see Jesus. There he was, larger than life, sitting on an enormous white stage in a glistening ballroom, the kind I'd seen on TV when the big bands of the 1940s performed. In my dream, I was so excited I could barely contain myself. My heart beating wildly, I rushed down the aisle and plunged into the warmth of his arms. As my grandfather looked on, Jesus embraced me. I snuggled into his lap, protected and safe, lulled by a chorus of distant angels. At this moment, I felt only love. Wanting for nothing, I remained in this state a long time.
Still enveloped by the sweetness, I awoke. It was nighttime. I couldn't have been up for more than a few minutes when the door of my bedroom swung open and my mother burst in. Sensing that something bad had happened, that I was sick or hurt, she'd come running.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
Sitting up in bed, I could still hear the angels singing. “I just saw Jesus,” I told her. “I was with Grandpop, in my dream.”
“Jesus?” she exclaimed. My mother shook her head and gave me a look I'd seen before, one of bemused tolerance, as if she didn't want to hurt my feelings by disagreeing. “I knew something was going on. I'm just glad to see you're fine.” Smiling as she tucked me in, she gently whispered, “Your grandfather loves you very much. Now go to sleep.”
My mother didn't make any more of my dream that night, but the next day she seemed to cringe when I started talking about how wonderful Jesus was. Exasperated, she sat me down and asked, “Where did you get this from? I've raised you to be a nice Jewish girl. All your friends are Jewish. We never taught you anything about Jesus.” I'd just encountered this incredible being, but now I felt I had done something wrong and was treading in dangerous territory. I didn't understand. Why did my response to Jesus make me any less Jewish? I just saw him as a loving friend and guide.
Not surprisingly, I didn't mention this again to my mother or anyone else. But neither did I speak about the many other dreams throughout my childhood that communicated the same message of love, though with different characters and settings. I sensed that this entire domain was in some way off limits. As for Jesus, he appeared to me from time to time as only one part of this nocturnal continuum. I now consider him my first spiritual teacher and my first exposure to the love I later sought in working with Brugh Joy and others, and then discovered in my own meditations.
My early psychic dreams, I have since realized, were preparing me to see. They were my initial encounter with the fact that the form our faith takes is less important than the love it imparts. Of course I couldn't articulate this as a child, but I did know that the goodness and rightness I felt were indisputable, even if I had to keep these dreams to myself. Years later, after a decade of meditating, searching, and studying with teachers from a variety of backgrounds, I was able to put into words this childhood knowing: The bedrock of spirituality is to learn about love.
When we approach the psychic in this spirit, not as a means to accumulate power but as a vehicle for right action, clarity, and service, our intentions remain pristine. It is possible to be psychic without any spiritual orientation: You could view this ability as the expression of a trainable, human skill. But to do so, you would be assigning it a very limited role. On the most basic level, the psychic is a means of gathering specific information. It also possesses, however, a spiritual impulse that makes it a potent vehicle for healing, a poignant force readily contacted by our belief in the mystical, even if simply defined as love.
While growing up, I knew none of this. Frightened by my psychic experiences, I had no context in which to place them, was afraid of my abilities for many years. Later, as I became an adult, my teachers imparted a message true for any and all wishing to open themselves up to seeing: To proceed, we must feel safe, we must know there is a net beneath us.
Clarifying and strengthening spiritual beliefs, I've found, is a way of providing that net. It may not be your way—and that's fine. But to prepare yourself to see, you'll need a path that is compassionate, and not based on power. My approach is through the spiritual, and I urge you to give this a try. It helps not to think of “spirituality” as some rigid concept with procedures and rules. The form of spirituality is a matter of choice—it can be religious in a traditional sense, or not. After all, through the ages spirit has had numerous faces and names: God, Goddess, Jesus, Buddha, Adonai, Tao, Father Sky, Mother Earth, or love. For some of us, however, it might be nameless, the quiet place inside. Whatever the form, through our connection with this sublime, compassionate presence our awareness begins to expand. We become more open, psychically receptive. Our capacity to see is often born of an inner pilgrimage. The quest for spirit, our focused listening within, fine-tunes our sensitivities, bringing us greater insight.
By nature we are all seers, though our ability may remain latent. Also, the impetus to explore the psychic can vary. For some it may be a choice, a gradual unfolding. For others, like myself, it may be thrust upon you, compelling you to begin. Suddenly you have a dream, a premonition, an overpowering hunch. Maybe you have never thought of yourself as psychic, even doubted the reality of such things. Still, you can't argue with the clarity of your experience. You're at a crossroads, being pulled forward. Do you deny yourself? Go on with life as before? Impossible. Something tells you to stop guarding some rigid idea of who you are. For those so compelled, pursuing the psychic is nor a choice: It is a calling.
For one patient of mine, it came like a bolt out of the blue. Sophie thought she was crazy. She found me by flipping her television channels one Saturday night when I was on a public-access cable show. The topic of the show was psychic dreams, and I was talking about how my mother had visited me soon after she died. It had only been a few months since her death, and I was still reeling from the shock. To speak of my mother on the air, though liberating, also made my loss more real. When Sophie heard me, she was driven to pick up the phone.
A Jewish immigrant in her early seventies, Sophie lived alone in a studio apartment in the Fairfax district, with Social Security benefits her only income. Her son had died of an accidental cocaine overdose one year before. Thus we shared a similar grief. Soon after her son's death, Sophie had fallen into a depression.
When she arrived for her first appointment, she explained why she had come. “I've been afraid to tell anyone,” she said, “but every evening after dinner, my son sits across from me on a stool in the kitchen and keeps me company. He's just as real as you or me. I realize how strange this sounds, but when I heard the story about your mother, I thought you'd understand. My son's presence is comforting, but have I lost my mind?”
Since she was certain that both her daughters would be alarmed if she told them about her son's visitations, I was the only person she'd confided in. Being of a generation that didn't believe in psychiatry, Sophie had taken a big risk. “If I ever had a problem,” she declared, “I'd always work it out on my own.” This was a matter of pride, of not giving in to “weakness.” And yet, she had a great need to make sense of her experience.
Bundled up in an old woolen coat and clutching her purse, Sophie sat poised on the edge of the couch. Though I saw how uneasy she was, I was touched by her determination to get to the truth. Most of all, I felt empathy for her isolation and self-doubt. She was an ordinary person with visions. That impressed me. No New Age convert or student of metaphysics, Sophie didn't think of herself as psychic. Psychology was an alien language. I was the first psychiatrist she had ever seen.
Wanting to make Sophie more comfortable, I sat down beside her and offered her some tea. Gradually, as we talked, she began to open up, and then for over an hour spoke nonstop about herself. I learned she was a conservative Jew who regularly attended a synagogue in her neighborhood. She had received solace from prayer and the traditional Jewish rituals, but she was reluctant to tell her rabbi about the vision, afraid that he wouldn't understand.