MY PATH INTO PSYCHIC AWARENESS AND HEALING

My Path Into Psychic Awareness And Healing

I want you to understand the context of my first "cosmic consciousness" event before I describe it., so I will give you a bit of an intro into the time period  Before we get to the kicker, I'll go over the spiritual "training" I received during elementary and high school, then I'll conclude with the event that put me permanently on this path.

 In 1967, when I was 22, I was married and going to college. Jim and I had rented a home next door to a childhood friend of mine in Fresno, the city where my brother and mother still resided. My father had passed away during the 1966 flu epidemic. I didn't spend any time with my brother (we had polar opposite values and beliefs) and not much time with my mother, who, God love her, was addicted to alcohol, and refused to consider treatment.

I got a call from my brother out of the blue, he informed me his estranged wife was coming to Fresno from LA to attend their divorce court hearing, and he needed to find her a place to stay. .I begrudgingly agreed to let her stay overnight. I almost said no. Thank God I didn't! I was feeling judgmental, superior, and anxious underneath all that bluster. The visit turned out to be uneventful and went well. That should have been a tip off right there that something unusual was 'in the air.' As she left, she had some brochures in her hand.

“I’ll just leave these here for you," she said. "I’m through reading them. Don’t tell your brother though, because being a fundamentalist Christian, he thinks this kind of spiritual information is heretical.”

“Well, if that’s what he thinks, I’m interested.” Back then, I was just beginning to have a life that wasn’t dominated by my big brother’s controlling personality!

She left for Los Angeles, I threw the brochures down on the coffee table, grateful they were not Jehovah Witness tropes, and busied myself studying for an exam in my World Religions class; part of my college’s sociology unit. I was on the hunt for a spiritual path, and all options were on the table. 

 Considering my early childhood experiences, it's no surprise I was spiritually rudderless. My parents had never been churchgoers, but there was a small Methodist church two blocks from our new house. I was 4, my brother 6 when we moved there in 1949. Each Sunday as we walked out the door to walk to church, my dad would raise his Bloody Mary glass and shout “Say hi to God for me,” while Mom quietly sipped her drink. I never considered it at the time, but something tells me he encouraged our attendance to have mom all to himself for two hours every week. Mind you, this was in the days before television, so I guess they had nothing to deter them after we left for church. 

My ‘saving grace’ in that church was the pastor’s focus on love, kindness, service, and miracles, with no mention of hell, and an image of Jesus that was politely iconoclastic, fresh and mystical. Jesus was a Jew, raised in his church's doctrine, then later had a personal experience that put him at odds with his religion and with the Romans who had taken over their cities. My child's mind tried to get the gist of his story. He walked the hills, taught, and healed, vibrating with a revolutionary power that demonstrated his personal connection with God. He loved kids and eschewed hypocrisy and bullying. He was a superhero sans violence. When the younger kids got peeled off of the main congregation to attend Sunday School for an hour, they showed us pictures of Jesus with some kind of light energy coming out of his head and hands, he used it to heal people. I wondered if he could heal my parents; even at that age I knew they had a problem with alcohol, but was too shy to mention it.  

So, Sunday morning at church got me prepared to return home to drunk parents and the Sunday afternoon fights, while I hid in my room and wished my big brother was like Jesus instead of a wounded narcissistic bully like Dad. Decades later, when my brother and I were in our 40’s we both read Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tides and felt someone had told our story. With some exceptions, because in Tides, the sister is mentally ill, while in our family it was my brother, who lifted weights throughout puberty and suffered without treatment from a narcissistic personality disorder and anxiety disorder until he was diagnosed at age 70. 

Nine years of church convinced me that many churchgoers were focused more on blind acceptance of their minister’s views and afraid to step out of line lest they be judged by fellow churchgoers. At the lecherous age of 14, I kissed my boyfriend once during a Methodist church youth group hayride and was notified the next day by the leader that I was banned from the group. My first thought? Jesus wouldn’t get his robe in a wad because of a kiss and try to make an innocent virgin feel like a slut, so I agreed with the church lady that I did not belong there, and gave up on church.

Fast-forward to my college class in World Religions. I had begun to think churches attracted people who were anxious and looking for a structured environment, a set of strict rules within which they could feel safe and enjoy feeling superior to other people who didn’t fit in. I had avoided church for years, and the World Religions class was step one in my quest for a more enlightened spiritual path.

The more I studied, the more I noticed the similarities in the enlightenment experiences of Jesus, Buddha, Muhammed and others: a spiritual seeker would have a profound and direct mystical experience that changed his or her ideas about life. These people would cite visions of multiple dimensions and contact with non-physical beings, they would experience a state of oneness with all existence,  and taught that while joined in this field of oneness, one’s convictions could be manifested; thus, it was possible to manifest change in physical matter, and 'reboot' the soul body to treat physical or mental illness. Sounded extremely adventurous and expansive to me! These skills could make a big difference in human life. However, once these teachings were institutionalized, they were limited by political forces. Dogma overtook mysticism. Their cultures were patriarchal, and women were not allowed to be in leadership/policy-making roles until the 1800's when church practices were entrenched. Women were not welcomed as change-agents in any established churches, and eventually when they began to become popular as 'new thought' spiritual leaders, their focus, like Mary Baker Eddy, was to teach followers about metaphysical practices that are ubiquitous today. 

So, when my ex sister-in-law had handed me the brochures and a small booklet, I had seen it as one more church-related multilevel marketing technique. Don’t need THAT, thank you very much.

But at 5 a.m. the next morning, I started to study for my exam sitting in my favorite living room chair. I procrastinated; decided to read the brochures and the booklet, intending to scoff at the recruiting tools and then get on with my schoolwork. It was from a nondenominational church, but––the message was very different.

Their message: forget the dogma and meditate (directions for meditating therein). Apparently, there was only one way to communicate with our intelligent, loving creator, and that was to clear your mind and pay attention: let it communicate itself through a feeling, perhaps a vision. Once I succeeded, I would know we were one being. Co-creators. Something in the booklet described how life would change when I woke up and realized I was creating my life, I was fully responsible for how it worked, and fully capable of experiencing the proof of this dynamic every day. I would find out that it was no cure-all for impulsive mistakes one makes out of passion, loneliness, PMS and young adult drinking fests, but that would come. Progress often contains detours.

Reading the brochures, I recognized these concepts were similar to random discussions I’d had with my dad over the years. He had given me a heads-up about these dynamics. He had dabbled in some of this before I was born. He had been a fan of Norman Vincent Peale, Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science, and various other teachers who insisted we create our own reality. In other words, the ‘Law of Attraction’ concept that boomed in the 1990’s with the movie The Secret. “You can be anything you want to be!” he would say, “I went from being a dirt-poor kid with a drunk for a dad who could never get ahead, and now look, I’m the top executive of a McClatchy newspaper!”

And indeed he was. Unfortunately, he was also an alcoholic, but newspaper cultures in the 1950’s were full of whiskey-drinking cigarette-puffing men, with wives who knew they screwed around, and secretaries who covered up their indiscretions and made sure they stayed organized. He was fascinated with psychics as well and had good intuitive powers when he wasn’t drunk or hung over. We used to try to locate misplaced items using our inner guidance, and thought we were pretty good. Thanks, Dad.

Now, back to the morning after my ex-sister-in-law left the brochures. My first meditation. It could have been my first day attending college; I was that excited. To think this was how you did it, wow! Okay, here I come, I said to my higher power. Overall, the entire experience probably lasted an hour. But it changed my life forever. Once I calmed into the meditation, eyes closed the whole time, I sensed someone was in the room with me, except not to my left or right or over on the couch, but everywhere around me. It was a soft, gentle, expansive, intelligent energy. I didn’t want to react strongly and break the connection, but I recall saying in my mind Hello, I’m happy you are here, feels wonderful. I got informed, somehow without any words, that this was just the beginning of something bigger. You know, kind of a loving ‘fasten your seatbelt’ communication.

Slowly, I felt the energy build. In me, in my self-aware space, and around me at the same time. Building more intensely, more densely, stronger and stronger. This could kill me, I thought, this is ultimate power we’re talking about here, the kind that could explode my atoms and molecules to smithereens (wherever that dimension is).

 I was feeling the ultimate level of respect for this power. I felt that even my molecules and atoms were scared. Then I thought wait a minute, this is God we’re talking about here, this is the holy power. God is love, right? Then why am I fearing for my life? I need to trust the love aspect and not hold back. Exactly. So, I let go of my resistance, my fear, and surrendered to whatever maximum intended dosage my higher power wanted to share, which turned out to be way more than I could imagine.

I lost track of everything except that mighty power and my oneness with it. I got the sense that what I was learning was oneness; I was one with the One. And the power was all I could or would need, ever. The power was also the message, making it completely, irrevocably, unforgettably clear, that this was us, and there would be no leaving this partnership of one ever again. I wouldn’t forget it had happened, and I wouldn’t talk about it except to people who understood. (Now I’m okay with people not understanding).

My husband Jim wasn’t too impressed with my entrée into mysticism. ‘Do your thing,’ was all he said, meaning ‘just keep it to yourself.’  We moved to San Luis Obispo in 1970 and continued with college. I found a group of spiritually like-minded people and went on more of a mystical quest; practiced brainwave control until my psychic skills increased. I was doing ‘readings’ for people and each time I did, my clients and I would seem to simultaneously explode with surprise and tears when I came up with details that revealed their most secret or chronically unresolved problems. The readings would start when I got visions (like dream imagery) and described them. None of this seemed to spark any understanding from my husband. He started avoiding me, then it became a permanent shift in our relationship.

In 1971 I went through a major crisis with my mom, whose decades of heavy alcoholism had taken its toll. I’d gotten a call from my uncle who had stopped to visit her and found her in a psychotic state. I responded immediately. I drove from my home in Pismo Beach to her house and during the three-hour drive I repeated “Thank you for healing my mom” without stopping! I found her home by herself, a note from my uncle said he had to go. Guess his sister’s condition was far too scary for him. 

Mom was covered with bruises and scrapes, hallucinating that the ceiling and other horizontal surfaces were covered with running water, told me she was working for a home for blind people, run by a ‘very nice couple’ and she really liked it. She appeared to be in advanced DT’s, so I took her to the hospital. Then I drove to her home from the hospital and went to bed, expressing the same gratitude for her healing until I fell asleep.

At some point I came out of my body and saw a ‘light being’. Shaped like a human but without any features, just flickering bits of light. Then I felt a shift of energy and discovered we were by Mom’s bed at the hospital. Another light being was there, and both of them communicated their plan telepathically. I agreed. They were very close, holding my left hand and I was on the edge of Mom’s bed, holding my right hand on Mom. You may have figured out that in this ‘close to earth’ dimension some tactile sense occurred, but it was more energy to energy than flesh to flesh. They channeled energy through me, into her, as if I were there to ‘ramp down’ and personalize the energy so she wouldn’t get too scared.

If I hadn’t already had my preview of that power in my very first meditation I wouldn’t have been able to hang in with it…it was that scary and intense at the midpoint. She knew we were there, and I had to keep her calm during the healing, telling her repeatedly “Everything’s going to be all right.” Finally, the process was completed, she was calm.

In a flash I woke up back in bed at Mom’s house. It was morning. I recalled the healing journey to her hospital room, and excited to see her healed, got dressed and drove to the hospital as soon as I could. When I walked in, she sat up in bed looking like she’d had a week at a spa, talking like a college professor, and clearly HEALED. She greeted me with exclamations of “Everything’s going to be all right now, everything’s going to be all right!”

After several days she was discharged; I moved her to San Luis Obispo, to a residential care home while she recovered enough to manage a home of her own. The owner said Mom outworked her taking care of people and was more than ready to make it on her own! She joined a local women’s’ recovery group. From the day of her healing she said she never craved alcohol and never drank again. She spent the next, and final 20 years of her life working with Alcoholics Anonymous and served on the board of directors of a women’s halfway house in San Luis Obispo. She always said she got sober the easy way and felt badly for the people in AA who returned to their habit.

Oh, and my husband Jim? From 1969 forward, he thought my experiences were too out of the mainstream for his comfort. I went to a spiritual development conference for a week, and when I got back, we split. I think both of us were relieved. There was no way to reconcile our beliefs. In 1972 I read Robert Monroe’s groundbreaking story: Journeys out of the Body. I did psychic readings, taught classes, studied a succession of psychic development techniques, hypnosis and meditation (not much difference brain-wave wise). 

My life was opening up with one new discovery after the other; a classic spiritual path I now had the freedom to pursue unselfconsciously. A new co-worker at my graveyard shift hospital job asked for a reading at 1 a.m. We had made our rounds, it was quiet, so I agreed. We sat at the nurse’s station. I asked for something of hers to hold, to help me focus, she handed me her glasses. I closed my eyes and waited. A dreamlike image appeared.

“I see you and your husband getting married in a big church, somewhere in the mid-west. You are up at the front, both his and your parents are there on either side of you in a semi-circle facing the minister. He’s reading scripture to you.” Then my vision, like a camera panning out, took in the whole church. To my shock, the church is empty. I describe it, “You two, plus your parents and the minister are the only ones in the church. The whole ceremony is private and brief.” The event seemed so unlikely I hesitated to describe it, but the next image wouldn’t come until I did. Her face conveyed her surprise, “That’s how it was! Exactly! Go on!” Again, a strange ‘video’ ran in my mind, “I see a big car pulling a trailer, the two of you are traveling west, crossing the desert, somewhere near the Nevada salt flats.” I’d never been to Nevada and had no idea I-80 was the route I’d seen, but the smile she gave me confirmed she recognized it. “That’s how we came to California, drove right through there.” (I wonder now if they were Mormons, possibly visited Salt Lake City, but at the time it never occurred to me). Next I saw them in California, in a valley town, in a small grocery store. Everyone goes to the store, I thought, this doesn’t seem unique to her, but if I don’t say it…

She burst out laughing when I explained my reservation to this vision. “Maryl! We owned a mom and pop grocery in the central valley, in Visalia for 19 years!”

So, I was three for three, each vision had been for validation that I was ‘tuned in’ to her frequency and not reading someone else. I closed my eyes, clutching her glasses to help me focus. And here it came, the clincher, the problem, the secret she had held dear for years.

“I’m seeing you in bed with your husband, asleep. You are rising out of your body, on your way somewhere. A hospital. Someone is dying, you go into her room and get very close to her, talking to her, reassuring her everything’s all right. She passes, you reach over and help her move away from her body, she is comforted by your presence and agrees to let you take her to her loved ones who passed before her.”

I heard a sound from my coworker, opened my eyes, and saw her crying hard, so I stopped the reading and asked why she was crying. I assumed it had been the death of her mother or another loved one but waited for her to speak.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” she cried, her shoulders moved with each sob.

I attempted to comfort her. “Sometimes we find ourselves attending the passing of a loved one; it can be their way of letting us know they love us and they’re saying goodbye, it’s a pretty common experience people have when relatives pass.”

She wiped her eyes with a tissue, I gave her glasses back to her, but she just held them; tears continued. “You are so kind, Maryl, I know what you mean, but that’s not the problem. You see, that woman was someone I don’t know. It’s something I find myself doing frequently. I know where to go, somehow, who to help, and I go because I’m being called somehow, by a knowing.” She looked straight at me. “Maryl, it’s so familiar, like a real job.”

“Wow! That’s wonderful! Something to celebrate, such a gift to be able to help people who need it,” I said. She cried again.

“I believe that too, but our religion is against anything like that. My husband is very strict about our religion. When I told him someone else told me they were doing it, of course I didn’t want him to know it was me, he scowled and said––That’s evil. That person’s goin’ straight to hell and they should!”

She wiped her eyes again and said “It’s like living in a straight jacket. I’ve never told anyone before now. He’d drag me to the elders if he knew.”

At that point, I got it. I knew for sure that she was trying to get up the courage to leave him and find a less fearful spiritual community. When I shared that with her, she nodded, “I had no idea how, but I asked God this morning to give me a sign; to show I was making the right decision.”

We both knew why she had needed the reading. Now she was free to move on and live a life that fit her level of spiritual development. After all, I knew how that had been for me, staying stuck in a relationship that would not support my own spiritual path.

Speaking of support, I met my husband Larry in 1975, and from that day forward I have had his support for my somewhat unique learning curve.

Mom passed in 1986 from throat and esophageal cancer. I wanted to help her again, but she refused. She was ready to pass and did not want healing. So instead, I took a leave from my doctoral program, my internship, and my home, and lived with Mom the last six months of her life. This stressful experience gifted me with an unexpected turn of events that ultimately showed me what a miracle forgiveness could be in its most divinely orchestrated and comprehensive sense. Here is the story.

My brother never visited during our mother’s illness, although he was only a 3-hour drive away. My sister lived in Texas, came out once to visit and discovered my brother had talked Mom into letting him manage her trust fund. It was a fund my grandfather had set up with ample monthly allowance for her until she passed, and the remainder was to be split between the three of us when she died. My sister found out all the money was gone. He had invested it and lost it in a stock market reversal. As executor of her trust, he had broken one of the legal requirements stated in the court order for the trust fund: no executor is allowed to make speculative investments.

Four years and one court appearance later, my sister won her lawsuit against my brother and he was ordered to pay her the portion of her inheritance she would have received. I had avoided the four years of legal fighting and bitterness; no amount of money was worth that re-emersion into our family pain. I stayed home in the Bay Area. I was busy with a private counseling practice and a Ph.D. program, and Larry and I had adopted our daughter Lara in 1987.

By 1990, I was recovering from Mom’s death and moving forward. I decided I needed to forgive my brother. We hadn’t spoken to each other since Mom’s funeral. But I couldn’t forgive him. I didn’t trust him, I hated his bullying behavior. He was a religious fanatic, an evangelical Christian, always telling everyone they were going to burn in hell if they didn’t get right with Jesus. I was already all right with Jesus and what my brother’s church was doing with the New Testament made my skin crawl. He railed against the LGBT community, feminism, and anyone who wasn’t “white.”

Fortunately, all the AA methodology I had learned from my mom and an internship gave me a clue. I ran with it. “Dear God, I am powerless to forgive my bullying brother. But I know you can do it, you can do anything. I trust you and turn it over to you. I’m grateful for your power in this.” When I prayed, I would remind myself of that mighty energy I’d encountered before.

When I prayed for forgiveness, I was specific. I wanted it to change both of us at the same time. The adage ‘forgiveness is for you to let go, you can’t change the other person” made no sense to me. Why would I not want him to heal? If we were both stuck in the fallout from our family drama, it seemed to have come from the same root, so to speak.

Like two people in a hot tub, my brother and I would be contained in God’s power and God would make all the pain go away. Years of being abused by my brother every single day; hit, punched, kicked, shamed, humiliated, rejected. My parents had even sent him to the John Brown Military Academy for the 6^th grade; he had been getting more out of control, competing with my dad for the Biggest Bully award.

Like Donald Trump’s dad, our dad solved that challenge by paying the military school to teach him who was boss. (Trump’s parents left him at his military school for five years). Sadly, a year living with a bunch of sex-obsessed teen bullies was not therapeutic for my brother. I can only imagine the damage it did to Trump over five years (actually, some of it is obvious). I believe my brother was abused in many more ways than one. So, going into this forgiveness request, I had a lot of baggage, including guilt for the year I lived in relative safety at home.

My husband Larry supported my plan to forgive my brother. He never thought my spiritual evolution was threatening in any way, and always encouraged me. Every night for weeks I read the prayer at bedtime just as I had written it, then meditated on it, just focusing on that mighty power overriding our affliction: bitterness, disgust, and resentment.

Weeks after I began this process, I woke up just at dawn from a vivid dream in which Larry, Lara and I had spent the night as guests at my brother’s home in Clovis, California. He and his wife had 7 children. In the dream, we woke up in the guest bedroom with his kids saying good morning, then got up for breakfast with everyone, and my brother was genuinely loving and pleased we were there. I told the dream to Larry and said, “I think that’s God telling me the deed is done!”

“How will you know?” Larry said.

“We will know, it will be beyond coincidence.”

 Larry brought my morning coffee in to our room, and the phone rang. “Who would call this early?” Larry said. But I knew. I answered it.

“Hello.”

“Hello…” he began.

“Wow, I haven’t heard your voice in four years!”

“Well, let me tell you why I called,” he said. Earlier this morning I was giving my daughter her bottle, she was looking up at me, I was looking in her eyes. All of a sudden, I remembered holding you when you were a baby, when Mom let me feed you your bottle. I remembered how I felt back then, how much I loved you, and well, it just overwhelmed me. That I had completely forgotten how much I loved you, so I had to call and tell you…and, I apologize for all of it, all that I ever did to hurt you, all the mean things I did and said while we were growing up. And losing all your inheritance money. I thought I was being smart to invest it, so all three of us would get a larger inheritance, but I screwed up. Sis, I love you, I really do, like I did when we were really little.”

“Wow,” I told him, “this is amazing! I know correlation doesn’t establish causation, but in this case, I’m going to call it divine intervention!”

“What do you mean?”

So, I proceeded to tell him about my forgiveness prayer. He already knew about Mom’s healing experience back in the 60’s, so he wasn’t doubting my credibility in this matter.

“You’ve been praying for this for weeks? Then this morning you had the dream to tell you it was done, and I had my experience feeding the baby. It really happened!” We had a great talk and set up plans for a visit. Since that 1990 call, our relationship has been completely without strife. When I moved from the Bay Area to the foothills east of Clovis in 2001, we connected even more. 

Sadly, in 2007 or so, he lost his $15,000 a month income because of a business reversal, fell into a severe depression, and his wife filed for divorce. I helped him get back on his feet and into an apartment. He recovered. He is 74 and works out at the gym five days a week, eats well, and attends a church he loves. His business recovered as well. The healing of our relationship means a lot to both of us. We had forty years of pain and strife between us. Since our higher power created a more comprehensive healing than we could imagine, we have had thirty years of the relationship we always wanted. We seem to avoid topics of disagreement without effort. So, it’s been wonderful developing these spiritual skill sets as I grow, and here is my hope: If my conservative brother can vouch for the validity of my spiritual development, maybe the not-as-conservative world can relate to Addie’s evolution in Blood Dilemma!

In the past four years, especially, I’ve enjoyed more freedom to write, to deepen my meditation practice, to understand that as we navigate brainwave frequencies, we expand our awareness of the one life we all share. It is all a matter of consciousness. The ‘living’ and the ‘dead’ are all alive, unique, conscious beings at various stages of development. Our global communication about the science of multidimensional life is bringing the phenomenon into mainstream acceptance.

I’ve listed some powerful authors and their books in the next section to provide guidance for your journey; check out those you aren’t familiar with. Explore them and see what gems you can bring back for us to share.