Crossing Over Read online

  Busted

  “I GOT AN APPLICATION TO VET SCHOOL,” I told Mark almost exactly ten years later.

  “Shit, you’re serious,” he said.

  “I went on the Internet and did some research.”

  “Explain this to me. You’re doing this because…”

  “So I don’t have to deal with people. I’ll be able to heal, like, dogs and cats. It seems like animals give you unconditional love. Not that I’m Dr. Doolittle here, but I do feel like I understand animals.”

  Mark just sat there, looking at me with a face that said, What’s wrong with this guy? “You know these unconditional beings of fur?” he said finally.

  “Yeah?”

  “They’re attached to people. It will be people who will be bringing them in. It will be people who will be paying the bill. It will be people who will be complaining to you when their dog dies.”

  I hadn’t thought of it that way. Accountants—they can be so damn smart.

  “Shit,” I said. “You’re right.”

  “Look,” Mark said. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You’ve been through this before; you’ll go through it again. God gave you this great ability. How can you think of not using it? What other work could you do that would bring so much peace to people? Look at me. I’m an accountant. How much peace and comfort do you think I bring people? I call people and say, ‘You owed fifty dollars, but I got it down to ten.’”

  I laughed and told Mark, all right, you made your point. But I still felt lousy. I didn’t rip up the application to vet school, not yet.

  I didn’t tell Sandra what I was contemplating. I didn’t want to give her the opportunity to say what I knew she would: that this was what I was supposed to be doing, helping people, et cetera, et cetera. I could take it from Mark. He’s like Cher in Moonstruck. He’s in charge of smacks in the face. Hey—snap out of it! But if I heard it from Sandra, it would bring me to a place I didn’t want to go. Ultimately, she would support whatever I decided. But I hated disappointing her.

  We Libras, we’re terrible with choices. That’s the big joke among the people close to me—don’t give him options. But like my mother, when I finally decide something, I’m done. I won’t talk about it anymore, and I won’t change my mind. But it can take a while to get there, which is not easy for the people around me. First, I will argue both sides, as if I really want both sides. I will argue so passionately why we need to do something on one day and argue just as passionately the next day why that would be the worst possible thing to do. Then I’ll work out a line of probabilities for both options. If we do this, this might happen, then this might happen, then this . . . but if we do this, then this might happen and this might happen, then . . . being a psychic only complicates things. If it needs to be a consensus decision and I’m pulled in one direction by my guides, which happens all the time, I get very frustrated when people don’t listen to me. Another occupational hazard that sometimes makes me feel like I’m alone on the planet.

  Anyway, as you’ve probably surmised, I decided not to become a pet doctor. Which meant I had to confront what the past nine months had been all about. It wasn’t as simple as That’s Life. That’s not how my life works. Things happen for a reason. As I slowly climbed out of my little abyss, I began to realize that it wasn’t unappreciative people who were making me so unhappy. I was basically using them—the very people I had set out to help—as scapegoats for what was really bugging me: I was angry at myself. I had let my guides down. I’d failed to achieve what I was supposed to. I had screwed up.

  By this time in my life, my guides and I had been through a lot together. It’s a unique relationship, to say the least. Everyone has guides to assist them and give them insight, but for most people, the connection is subtle, even imperceptible. I may be more in tune with my guides, but they’re no different from anyone else’s. They aren’t there to make my decisions for me, but to help me find my way to the right ones—even if it sometimes means making things happen so the decision is a little easier. They shine a light, nudge me, and then let me use my free will based on the lessons I’ve learned. It’s a kind of collegial professional relationship. They’re like an oversight committee, a group of five or six, based on the energies I’ve sensed, that seems to guide by consensus. They will pull me in one direction or the other. I never hear a minority opinion.

  I don’t believe that the guides I have now are all the same as ten years ago, or twenty. Like everyone’s guides, there have been some comings and goings, depending on what has been going on in my life and what lessons I need to learn. Some energies are brought in for some specific purpose—just as we seek out a specialist to perform surgery, prepare our taxes, or fix our cars. A psychic I’ve worked with, Mary Jo McCabe of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, says that I have to stop referring to my guides as “The Boys.” She told me that a female energy was coming in. But I’m still calling them The Boys.

  So what was this personal guidance committee making of the direction I was taking back in 1998, when book royalties and infomercials were in the atmosphere? This was the question I had been avoiding. Now it was time to deal with it.

  The business side of the psychic life is tricky stuff. This is spiritual work, yet there’s no denying that if you have an ability or talent, it’s possible to earn a living at it. Some may even make a lot of money at it. Few actually do, but they are the ones who carry the burden of public perception for everyone else. When I made my decision to actually make a career out of this, I had to come to an arrangement with my guides. Call it an understanding: As long as I didn’t make it about money, I would be okay. As long as the work stayed front and center, they would take care of me. People have always said to me, Wow, can they tell you what stocks to buy? How about the winning lottery number? Can they give you some of their famous guidance in Vegas? They could. But they won’t. I learned from the get-go that if I came anywhere near trying to use my ability for that stuff, they’d slap me silly. They’ve told me over and over: If you do anything with your abilities specifically for money, we will bang you so hard your head will spin.

  So here’s my rule: It’s okay to want to earn a living as a medium, even a good living—and okay to succeed. As my colleague Suzane Northrop says, “There’s nothing spiritual about poverty.” What’s not okay is stepping over the fine line between simple human desire and simple human greed. For me, if I cross it, I’m toast. That’s not to say I can’t do things that will bring me financial rewards. I just can’t use money as the measure of my success, as if I’m a contestant on Who Wants to be a Millionaire. I can’t use a calculator as my moral compass. And I can’t abuse my abilities by charging an obscene fee for a private reading just because that’s what the market will bear. And really, it’s not that my field is so special. In any career, if you make it about the work first, the money will take care of itself. You don’t have to be a spiritual person to embrace this ethic. And you don’t have to be a Wall Street shark to lose sight of it. Especially if you also allow yourself to fall prey to some of the other human impulses: competition with peers, resentment at being left behind, the desire for control and power.

  I’m always saying it’s not the spirits who are getting it wrong; it’s more likely that I’m misinterpreting their messages. So now as I decompressed from my recent crash and burn, I began to consider whether I had misinterpreted my guides’ messages all those years. Did I allow myself to become so seduced by the expectation of what they were showing me—really since the day Lydia Clar sat in my bedroom and told me I would be a famous psychic—that I began to think of it as some kind of entitlement?

  I never stopped honoring the work. Bringing knowledge and comfort to a lot of people remained my goal. I also held to the principle that if I could earn my money via books, tapes, or a ticket to a seminar, I wouldn’t even have to think about how much I earned from the one-on-one readings that I felt were important to keep doing, no matter how successful I became. Still, I had to acknowledge that humani
ty might have lost some ground lately to the impulse to cash in. That was never my intention or motivation. But it might have seemed that way to any spirit guides who happened to be looking in. So now The Boys were slapping me silly.

  They were busting me. I’m not supposed to be out front, I finally decided. At least not now. I’m supposed to do the work—do my readings in my office, and my lectures at the Holiday Inns—and continue trying to raise the understanding of spirit communication. But it was time to slow down, breathe deep, and put some spirituality back into this hard-driving, turbo-medium thing I had going. I wasn’t some Type A on Wall Street—whoever talks to the most dead people gets a big annual bonus. (Forgive the metaphors—they give me a million of them.) I had been operating under the assumption that I had to do it all now. Sort of the opposite of when I got dragged into radio kicking and screaming.

  Of course I didn’t have to do it all at once. First, I had a lesson to learn: If I was going to climb onto a big stage, I had to get a peek behind the curtains. I needed to go through the experience of losing perspective and screwing up. And I needed to learn how to recognize and cope with people who might not necessarily put the work first. I’d never be able to control the actions of people I dealt with—and definitely not their motives and attitudes—but I could damn well control my own.

  That said, I wasn’t ready to own this insight. I still needed some time to let it sink into the wound and clean it out. “I think,” I told Sandra, “that my expectations for the book were unrealistic.”

  WE WENT TO THE CARIBBEAN, Sandra and I, with her family and some friends. We rented a rustic cottage on a gorgeous seaside cliff with a pool and a gazebo—and spread out before us, the sea. The water was a dazzling aqua, but rough. Four-foot waves crashed against the sea wall beneath us. There’s an energy to the islands that seems to recharge me every time I go there. There’s a spot we like to go, and I don’t know if it was my home in some past life, but something about the place is magic to me.

  The others couldn’t get down until Sunday, so I went with my friend Steve Guddat a couple of days before everyone else. And almost immediately after I arrived, I knew things were going to be okay. Late in the afternoon that first day, I was lying on a float in the pool. The sun was already starting to set, and I could see the silhouette of the palm trees against the sky. My mind started to drift . . . I wonder about the aura of a tree. What would that look like? I took a deep breath and felt the tension of the previous year leave my body. The disappointments and frustrations; the book signing in ladies’ underwear; the disaster in Dallas, Yosemite Sam, and Elmer; the people who didn’t like their readings; the attacks on Amazon—none of it mattered anymore.

  Floating in the pool, I almost felt as if I had crossed over, in a sense. Spirits are always saying that they’ve left all their problems behind. Their physical pain is gone and all their worldly worries disappear. They don’t care who got the house, they don’t care that you weren’t there when they passed, none of it matters anymore. They’re okay now. And that’s how I felt. The only way I can describe it is that I felt purified. Like I had finally released and surrendered this cloak of negative energy that I alone was holding onto. It just peeled away and fell into the water and dissolved.

  There was something about the moment that was familiar to me. I realized what it was. Years ago, when I was a teenager doing psychic seminars on weekends, I would be in a room with other psychics, a different venue each week, and realized that there was competition among the psychics: Why is she doing twenty readings a day and I’m only doing ten? Why is he getting more clients than I am? It was human nature to feel competitive, and even then I remember being conscious of that trap. Instead, I adopted a Zenlike philosophy: Those who were supposed to see me were going to see me. If on one Sunday I read only three people, then I was supposed to read only those three people. If that other person is supposed to read fifteen people, she will read fifteen people, and it has nothing to do with me. Money? Whatever. Just do the work the best you can.

  Only the scale was different now—the principle was the same. Whomever I was supposed to reach with my books—or seminars and lectures, for that matter—I was supposed to reach. If only 100 people read my book, then those were the ones who were supposed to read it. As soon as I reconnected with that value, I was back on track.

  I have no idea why it happened so suddenly or at that moment. Maybe it was my guides’ way of saying, Okay, you learned your lesson, you can come out of your room now. Go to the Carribean. Get some rest. Then go home and get back to work.

  Reva and the Princess

  SOON AFTER MY MOTHER’S DEATH IN 1989, I had begun a grand quest for The Three Signs. It was exactly the kind of narrow-minded and misguided search that I’m always scolding my audiences and clients about. Never mind that over the next few years I would have two amazing visits from my mother in dreams, or that several times colleagues would pass on messages that I knew were from her. They weren’t the messages I wanted to hear. The white bird at the wake, which wasn’t technically one of them, only fueled my desire for The Big Three. When I tell people to come into a reading without any expectations, I know how wickedly hard it can be. For a long time, I couldn’t do it.

  I started making appointments with other mediums I knew or had heard of. But the first sign came during a reading my cousin Joey had with a medium in my area. Joey wanted to connect with his father, my Uncle Carmine. But during the reading, it was an aunt with a “P” name that came through. Joey, who was close to my mother, was skeptical, and basically challenged the medium to come up with the whole name. “She’s telling me to say . . . Prin . . . Princess?” the medium said, apparently thinking this couldn’t be it. But Joey laughed and said, “Yes! She was Aunt Princess.” She wanted Joey to know that she and his father were together, and fine.

  Joey came over and brought me a present: a tape of the session. I was slightly disappointed that the first message had come through my cousin and not more directly to me, but I wasn’t going to argue. I figured that my mother wanted Joey to know his father was with her, and he was fine. I was sure she would give the other two signs to me—and before too long. I figured that any decent medium would get at least one of the two.

  Being in the business, if only a junior member of the fraternity, I had no trouble finding my way to mediums. Some I knew, such as Shelley Peck; some I didn’t. I must have seen eight or ten in my pursuit of confirmation, visiting some of them two or three times. I went to the same medium Joey had been to. Nothing. Others got good, validating information, but not The Signs. I wanted The Signs.

  A year passed, then two, then three . . . my mother was really starting to annoy and frustrate me. I mean, between private readings by my colleagues and events where I shared a stage with them, she had more than ample opportunity to put me out of my misery. I began working on One Last Time, and assumed I would have the signs by the time it was finished. I really wanted to be able to write in the book that I’d gotten all three. But all I was able to say in the book was: Check your expectations at the door. Because these spirits ain’t giving you what you want to hear. Even I get what they give me—and I have connections. Nine years had now passed. Obviously, my mother had her reasons for making me wait. She taught me a lot about life. And this was a lesson, too. Still, I knew she would come through eventually, when she felt the time was right. I made sure to continue protecting the integrity of our pact. I did not reveal the missing signs in the book. Rick, my collaborator, asked, but I wouldn’t tell him. I didn’t tell Sandra. I didn’t tell anyone.

  IN SEPTEMBER OF 1998, I happened onto a new book by a medium I hadn’t heard of before. It was called Contacting the Spirit World, and it was a guide for people who want to develop their own abilities to connect with that world. This book knocked me out. It was written in a very straightforward, matter-of-fact, useful way. No fluffy psychic babble about love and peace and someone standing behind you playing with your hair. I was so impressed with th
e book that when I finished it, I was probably like everybody else. I wanted a reading with the author.

  Her name was Linda Williamson, and apparently she was from Britain. I read the book on a flight to Puerto Rico, and when I got home and went to a meeting at my publisher’s office, I asked Denise Silvestro, my editor, if she could help me. “Can you find out who this woman is and how I can get to her?” I asked.

  Denise started laughing.

  “I know, it’s funny. I’m a psychic looking for a reading.”

  “No, it’s not that,” she said. “Did you happen to notice who published her book?” She got up and went to her shelf. She picked out a copy of Contacting the Spirit World. “I published this book.”

  “Get out.”

  “It was published in England. I read it and liked it. I bought the U.S. rights.”

  Denise got me Linda Williamson’s phone number, and I couldn’t wait to call her. It was ten at night—in New York. That would be—well, very late in England. “Hello?” I heard in a very sleepy English accent. Uh-oh. She politely let me know what time it was in her part of the world. But she didn’t seem to mind that much. She was excited that one of her fellow mediums was calling from America to say how much he liked her book. She, of course, was no more aware of me than I was of her.

  “Would you be ever so kind and ring me up in the morning?” she requested.

  “Well, I was just wondering if you might give me a phone reading sometime.”

  “I don’t really do that. But if you’re ever in England, I’d love to see you.”

  “Well, if you’re a medium and you’ve done it a number of years, I’m sure you can do it over the phone. I do it on the radio all the time. It’s the same thing.” I’m usually not this pushy—I of all people should know what it’s like to be on the receiving end—but I just had to have a reading with this woman. I was not getting off the phone without an appointment.