​I recently had a new client reach out to me asking me to help find a missing pet whom the client suspected was deceased. Unfortunately, the information I channeled also said the pet was deceased. I was given information as to where the pet’s body might be found, and I shared that information with the new client. (The client has also given permission for me to share this story in a post.)

One of my oldest friends and I are both true crime fans; we’re both psychology-oriented people, and that aspect is definitely what fascinates me about true crime. I like trying to understand what was going on in the mind and spirit of the perpetrator. When I told my friend that I had received my first request to help find a body, albeit a pet, she asked me if that was something I would be interested in doing as part of my intuitive work. I had to think about it for a while.

My metaphysical gifts have been given to me specifically to help people with healing and growth. If a client asks me for information that falls outside of those fields, I often won’t get an answer. One client asked me about selling their car, and the answer from the client’s spirit guides was, “It doesn’t matter.” In terms of healing and growth, this was not relevant to the client.

However, there is a great deal of healing that can be obtained for loved ones who don’t know what happened to someone who disappeared from their lives. Even if the answer is finding a body rather than locating the person still alive, having answers as to what happened provides a great deal of closure and allows grief process move forward.

Thus, after thinking about it, I told my friend that yes, I would be willing to help others who are searching for missing loved ones. I have no interest in working with police departments or other official entities, but in terms of helping individuals heal after a loss, that is something I am more than happy to do and is part of what I consider my primary mission.

I always ask the spirit guides I work with if I can help a client before booking an appointment with them; I don’t want to waste their time and money if I can’t help them. Thus, I’ll always ask if I can help someone looking for a missing loved one to make sure that information will come through and that it’s in their best interest to receive the information.
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©2022 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

​(This is another really long post. Apologies in advance!)

On September 25th, I attended “An Evening with Spirit” hosted by James Van Praagh. I had read his most recent book, Adventures of the Soul, earlier this year, so I was intrigued by the idea of hearing Van Praagh speak when my mentor alerted me to this event. The event was held at Unity Church of the Hills in northwest Austin, just 10 minutes from my home.

As I have had issues around disability accommodation in recent months (in particular trying to see another psychic medium), I was concerned about being able to access this event without challenges. In particular, there were no paper tickets issued for the event. Instead, one had to show one’s driver’s license to gain admission. I feared that this would mean a huge line at the door to get in, and right now, I am not physically capable of standing for any extended amount of time. Thus, I contacted the ticketing company through their website the week before the event. I received no response. A few days before the event, I tried contacting the organizing company through their website. When I didn’t get a quick response, I tried calling the church. A volunteer named Joan answered the phone, and she responded with compassion and friendliness. I felt completely welcomed by her. She didn’t know the answers to my question and the paid staff was in a meeting, but she called me back within an hour with answers. She told me that there were benches in the lobby and that there would be church volunteers in the lobby who could assist me if I needed help with the line. I would be able to hand one of them my driver’s license and they could get me checked in. I felt so relieved by this information. 

When I did eventually get a response from the organizing company, and it was far from adequate. The email I sent read, “I sent a message last week through your website but never heard back from anyone. I require disability assistance for the event and need to talk to someone who can assist me.” The woman who responded said, “The church is fully handicapped accessible, but we are not equipped to provide personal assistance.  What kind of assistance were you looking for?” That response is a “no” in advance of knowing what I need which legally is the wrong answer under the ADA. Public events like this are required to provide reasonable accommodations. I was not asking for personal assistance, but the woman responding made assumptions before finding out the situation. My response to her was, “‘Fully handicapped accessible’ is relative; it actually doesn't encompass several of my disabilities. What that means in most cases the building is wheelchair accessible. I am mobility impaired but not in a wheelchair and need different accommodations.” Mercifully I had already talked to the church who had given me a compassionate response unlike the event organizers who said no in advance of finding out what I needed. This is the kind of thing that is VERY frustrating for someone who is disabled and has found the strength to ask for the help that they need to attend an event.

The evening of the event, I arrived at the church at 6:57 for a 7:30 pm event, and when I drove up to the parking lot and a volunteer attendant, I held up my disabled permit. The volunteer had me stop and roll down my window. He informed me that all the disabled parking was already taken, and I felt my heart sink and my stomach clench in a panic. However, he quickly remedied the issue: The parking attendant “created” a disabled spot for me by having me pull on the grass next to his own truck not far from the door to the church. Had we been in Central Austin, I would have been concerned about getting towed for such a maneuver, but I decided to trust this man. On my way out, I noticed that he had done the same for several other disabled attendees who arrived later than me. Clearly the church was aware of the problem of having more disabled attendees than spots and had worked through this issue before. I was grateful.

Walking into the lobby of the church, there were six volunteers standing at podiums, each with a portion of the alphabet. That meant that there was absolutely no wait, and I did not have to stand for any length of time. I went straight up to the “G” person, was checked in, and got my wristband to enter the auditorium. It was that simple. Once again, I was so grateful. While I wanted to browse the offerings in the lobby including an amazing looking gift shop, I knew I had to sit down and save my energy just to get through the night. I pulled out a book and read for a great deal during the wait for the event to start. The people in front of me were pretty heavily saturated with fabric softener, and the woman had on some perfume as well, but I was doing ok. Another woman was wandering around looking for a seat, and I invited her to sit next to me as I could tell she wasn’t loaded with fragrance. While my skin felt mildly irritated from the fabric softener in the air around me by the time I left, overall my body did well handling all of the chemicals it faced that evening. I was so pleased with how my body did under circumstances that would have left me in horrid pain for days afterward.

James Van Praagh was a far more entertaining speaker than I had expected. The person who introduced Van Praagh noted he has been doing this for thirty years, and when Van Praagh took the microphone, he noted, “Thirty years. Wow I am old. And I’m still short.” He called himself a comedium (a comedian plus a medium). Van Praagh said that he works in the Light, but he also has to keep it light, and his humor throughout the evening did help prevent the event from becoming overwhelmingly deep and depressing. He also noted that life on the road is just him and the dead people, so he has to do something to amuse himself. He made puns on sicko, psycho, and psychic as well. I agree with him that spending so much time in contact with the spirit world definitely gives one a different perspective, and it has changed my sense of humor as well. I find many things funny that I never would have laughed at before.

While most of the evening was talking with souls on the other side, Van Praagh also presented some philosophical and spiritual ideas. He said that the two biggest illusions most of us have is a sense of separation and death. We are all one: We are drops in the same ocean. In addition, death is not an end. It’s just a change. The spirits are still alive. They refer to us as “the living dead” because so many of us don’t actually live our lives but instead act out of fear. In addition, Van Praagh stressed that thoughts are real things. We create our own heaven or hell based on thoughts and vibrations. Most importantly, Van Praagh brought a message of love, stressing how important it is that we love and be guided by love.

By this point in the evening, my heart chakra was hurting terribly. I couldn’t figure out why. I was in a good mood and was feeling so blessed that I had actually made it into the event without any major problems. However, when Van Praagh mentioned empaths, I wanted to do a facepalm. Der! It wasn’t my heart hurting. It was everyone else around me who was wanting so desperately to hear from their loved ones. I was picking up on that and feeling heartache. I worked to boost my shield a bit and offered thanks that I was not in a place of personal pain and grief as so many clearly were.

When Van Praagh asked how many people had been to a reading with a psychic medium before, I wasn’t sure what to do. I ended up raising my hand. I’ve never been to a reading with another psychic medium, but I talk to the dead on a regular basis myself and I receive messages for other people. That counts, right? A large number of people there were first timers, and it was obvious from the energy in the air that many were very excited to be there.

Van Praagh took questions from the audience before he began receiving messages from the spirit world. Someone asked if they could set up signs with a loved one before that person died so that they could know that the other person was around. Van Praagh said that it was absolutely possible, but it was easier in some ways to do it after the loved one died. In that case, one would simply ask the loved one to send butterflies or raccoons or whatever to show that the loved one was around them.

Someone then proceeded to ask a question about reincarnation which led to Van Praagh wandering a bit in his answer. However, it was the most interesting thing for me all evening. Van Praagh very much believes in reincarnation. He believes we are souls having human experiences. This is only one world, one communication. In comparison to the rest of the Universe, the Earth is only a grain of sand on the beach. Van Praagh also believes that only 20% of the soul is in the body, and 80% is outside. He thinks this is how one can experience several lifetimes simultaneously. He believes that we are experiencing far more than what is going on in our bodies right now and we just aren’t aware.

Before Van Praagh began receiving messages from the other side, he emphasized that what he does is a three way conversation between the other side, him, and the audience. It is communicating in different language that is thought based, and it is very different than spoken language. He was the translator for all of us. I realized why he gave such a strong preface once the readings were under way because Van Praagh often makes comments to the spirits saying things like “slow down” or “I don’t know.” He definitely serves as a channel, often speaking in the first person as if he were the spirit who is coming through. I found it fascinating to watch him work.

Also before beginning receiving messages for loved ones in the audience, Van Praagh lead the group in a mediation which was a great way to calm the energy of the room a bit. However, this was the one and only time during the evening where I strongly disagreed with what Van Praagh did and said, but that is influenced by my personal experiences. I can understand that others who have walked a different path don’t see the world in the way that I do, and Van Praagh’s experiences may be very different than mine. The meditation was based on the idea that the heart is the center of the soul, and idea I had no problem with. However, in the middle of the meditative exercise, Van Praagh encouraged people to let spirits around them merge with their bodies so that they could feel their deceased ones’ love for them in a deep and personal way. As someone who had many unhappy and unhealthy souls attached to me which we had to clear in my journey to health, this made me cringe. I don’t invite others to randomly share my body space if I don’t know whom I am working with, and most people in the audience had no idea whom or what they were inviting in (though they certainly wanted to feel the love of family and friends). Unless the setting were one where I knew that everyone was properly grounded and shielded, I would not lead an exercise like that because of the negative consequences it could have for less than spiritually prepared individuals.

From there, Van Praagh began receiving messages. In between messages, he would often take a metaphysical break, talking a bit about important topics related to what he had just related from the other side. Some of his wisdom included:

• Memories create our experiences.
• Prayer is unconditional love. It doesn’t matter what words come out.
• LIfe is a series of choices: We can act out of love or fear. When we work from a place of judgment, that is a place of fear, and that creates a false ego.
• After we die, love and thoughts live on. After death, we all have a life review when we discuss what we did and didn’t do with others who were part of our lives. We judge ourselves in the life review.
• We are works in progress.
• We should give unconditionally even if we know we’ll never get it back.
• We shouldn’t waste time. We should make the most of it.
• Van Praagh feels the movie Ghost is very true about presence of the dead. Also based on that movie, Van Praagh wants us not to think of our loved ones how they died. If we think about their deaths, we make them die every day. Instead, think of how they lived.

I didn’t take a lot of notes on the messages he brought through, in part because I was so captivated and in part because they felt very private even in a room of 500 people. One of the most poignant was a widow whose late husband came through. Their love for each other was palpable even across the divide. When the husband told her that he cuddles her in bed every night, the whole room let out a sigh because it was such an emotional sentiment. In another message, Van Praagh was bringing through someone who had committed suicide with a gun. When he said that, eight people stood up, to which Van Praagh made a comment along the lines of, “Oy. Texas and its guns” which caused the entire audience to laugh. When Van Praagh added that this person had a collection of guns, only two people sat down. Clearly Texans do love their guns. The other memorable message for me was a twenty-something son coming through for his mother (and his father who was not there). The young man was an empath who didn’t know how to deal with the energy he was feeling in this life which lead to him eventually overdosing. On the other side, he was helping animals who had crossed over alone, another comment that deeply moved the audience on an emotional level. Van Praagh asked the mother to remember this side of her son, the young compassionate man who rescued animals, not the man who died an unfortunate early death.

For me, the biggest takeaway from the evening was to be reminded how I am so blessed with my metaphysical gifts to be able to connect with the dead. It has given me a sense of power over death that many others don’t have. Watching people who don’t have such strong gifts connect with Van Praagh’s help was deeply moving, and it made me realize how much I undervalue on a personal level what I can do. I also realized during the evening that I really didn’t have anyone I *needed* to come through. For a moment I thought my paternal grandfather might be coming through because Van Praagh was in my area talking about one of the health issues that my grandfather had and that he was a veteran of WWII, but as he progressed, it was clear that it wasn’t for me. That was fine by me. I am comfortable with where my loved ones are. I’m fairly certain that my daughter has reincarnated, so I didn’t expect or need to hear from her either. Anyone else I might want to hear from, I have. As a result, seeing others connect with ones they needed to get closure with was a far more powerful gift than receiving a message for me.

I am grateful that I was able to make this event. I appreciated having such a great experience with Unity Church of the Hills which has made me quite willing to go back to other events there. I was thrilled to watch Van Praagh in action. I didn’t attend the rest of the events that weekend, but I am sure they brought a great deal of healing, hope, and education to those who did.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

This is a topic I’ve written about before, and it’s a topic I’m sure I’ll write about again. However, it’s incredibly important, and it’s something I see abused regularly in the metaphysical community.

Common sense and metaphysical ethics dictate that those with metaphysical gifts should not check out other people on a metaphysical level without their permission. On one level, as an empath, I can’t help but feel people’s emotions, especially when they are poorly shielded and highly emotional. If they’re having a bad day, I will likely know. That is what they are broadcasting, and I don’t have to do anything to ascertain that information just like I don’t have to do anything but look at them to tell they are wearing an orange shirt and blue jeans.

However, on a total different level, many metaphysical practitioners and healers are able to talk to higher powers to find out more personal details about another being. If I wanted, I could ask higher powers why the person above is having a bad day. If someone on the other side is willing to talk, I might discover that he has been fired or the woman he has had an affair with is leaving him or his best friend just died. Regardless of what the reasons are, I would have just crossed over into unethical behavior. All of that is none of my business. I am doing nothing less than prying into a situation where I have no reason to be. If that man had asked me to contact higher powers on his behalf to understand where his depression was coming from, then it is ok for me to do so.

I recently had another metaphysician take it upon himself to check out my metaphysical state and then send me an email with details about what he had discovered was “wrong” with me. He did not have my permission to do so. I am well aware of the issues he discovered; they are something I’ve been working on for months with other healers to change. The result of him doing this and telling me, though, was that I felt like I had been violated. I let that practitioner know that he was acting unprofessionally and unethically (and this was not the first time I've had to tell this practitioner similar things). What he did is no different than a stranger leering in someone’s windows: Just because he’s capable of pressing his nose up to the glass to see what’s going on inside someone’s house, it doesn’t make it the right thing to do. The next step from there is to just go inside someone’s house and check things out because they left their doors unlocked so they must not have wanted people to stay out. Yet all of us know that there is a societal expectation that we don’t walk into other people’s houses without their permission even if the door is unlocked. It’s rude, and it’s an invasion of privacy. Even if the door is open, unless there's a trail of blood that you can see or someone screaming for help, rules dictate that you don't just walk in. The same is true of checking out someone’s metaphysical body (which is their spirit’s house for the time being) without explicit permission. Even if you have the best of intentions, it's still wrong.

The lesson here is really simple: Don’t check out people’s metaphysical state without their permission. Period. Full stop. I wish more people involved with metaphysics would learn to follow this basic rule of courtesy and ethics.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

I do not serve the world by false humility. I serve the world most by humbly accepting that God uses me, because God uses everyone and everything to serve the process of universal healing. ~Marianne Williamson, Enchanted Love

I very firmly believe that I endured all my health, psychological, emotional and spiritual issues in this life in order to force me to become a better person. What I have been through in the past 41 years has changed me radically, especially in the past 12 when I was forced to start healing old wounds on a much deeper level than before. I am certain that one of the purposes of this life was to heal my soul of much damage it had accumulated across lifetimes.

Yet I also am positive that I went through all of my trials and challenges in order to become a healer so that I could help others heal in ways that aren’t generally possible in our culture. Western medicine flounders around with so many misdiagnoses and with drugs that mask symptoms rather than curing problems. That’s not to say that it doesn’t do some good, too. However, there are many people in this nation who are very well-medicated but still in horrendous pain.

Earlier on the evening when I wrote this post, I questioned whether or not it becomes egocentric to tell others, “I suffered so that you might heal.” In a way, that sounds very Christ-like, and I certainly am not a god. Yet on another level, it is the simple truth. I developed my metaphysical gifts so that I might heal myself and then in turn heal others. I believe that is part of why I was put on this planet in this time in this form. To not use those metaphysical gifts to help others reduce or eliminate suffering would be a waste of my life in my opinion.

However, I’m also very conscious of the dangers of ego combined with healing professions. One of the most perilous things in energy work and healing work is practioners who are coming from a place of ego. When these practitioners forget that they are merely instruments of higher powers and instead believe that they are powerful in their own right, trouble often emerges for both clients and the healers. Spirit does not tolerate that type of ego, and it often induces a scenario that resenbles the famous phrase about pride coming before the fall.

As I enter a new phase of my healing work with others, I am constantly reminding myself that while I am an amazing person, I would not be the gifted healer that I am without the help of those who support me on the other side. My ability to receive healing messages greatly depends on the other side being willing to send them, too! I am grateful to the higher powers who support me day in and day out as we work together to bring about positive change in the world.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

I often talk about my past lives in my blog posts and in real life, but I also say that I am willing to work with whatever spiritual beliefs that my clients may or may not hold. Most people in America don’t believe in past lives; one estimate places the number at around 25% (which I think might actually be a high estimate). In metaphysical communities, though, that belief rate is closer to 99% in favor of past lives. So how do I reconcile the two vastly different perspectives about the afterlife for the 75% of Americans who believe we only live one life?

I tell clients that I believe in past lives, but I understand that they may not. I am fine with that. We all have different belief systems that shape our views of our lives. I speak of my past lives because they have been very influential in my healing process. For me, those lives are as vivid and as real as the one I am living now.

Yet for those who are skeptics or are not believers, I am happy to present past life information as stories that our minds create in order to distance us from our traumas. With that space between us and our intense pain, it can be easier to chip away at the often repressed or inaccessible trauma rather than confronting it head on. Past lives become like metaphors in this situation: they are aids to help us understand something that is hard to grasp otherwise. Through the imagery of past lives, we can work on healing traumas that we otherwise might not be able to heal.

What I have actually found in receiving healing messages for clients, though, is that the clients who don’t believe in past lives don’t usually get information on them. Those who are open to the idea or who are believers are far more likely to receive information on healing from past lives that needs to be done. In this way, the spirit guides who provide the messages help give clients exactly what they need to hear when they need to hear it.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Earlier in my life, I was part of a beagle rescue group in Austin. I loved fostering dogs, and at some time in the future, I hope to be able to return to fostering. Right now, though, it’s not an option for me for many reasons. However, I do what I can to support animal rescue in other ways. I have my Amazon Smile set up to benefit Dogtoberfest Austin (which in turn supports local dog rescue groups). I donate to local shelters when I have extra funds. Most importantly to this post, I will donate my metaphysical services to those doing animal rescue when I have availability in my schedule. At times it can be helpful to have insight into rescue pets especially when it’s hard to figure out their needs since the animals can’t communicate verbally with us.

Recently two women in a group I’m part of rescued a stray cat. The cat was a cutie, one whom I wanted to snuggle up with the moment I saw his picture. One of the women was debating adopting him herself, but she was concerned about how the cat would get along with her cat as well as the potential medical expenses he would have. They knew that the cat had a broken leg which needed to be reset to heal properly. Beyond that, they had little information on the cat’s origins or needs.

The first thing I heard as I tuned in to higher powers was, “There’s more wrong.” I then saw a series of symbols that were confusing and which I had a hard time translating. What I learned after I gave the healing message to the woman who requested it was that these initial symbols likely represented her parents. There were parallels between her parents and this cat that I couldn’t understand at the time. This is something I would not likely have figured out as I didn’t have the details about her parents to make that connection; I also didn’t expect that connection in a message about the cat.

I also felt like one of the symbols was indicating that the cat had a secondary parasitic infection. As I read down a list of common parasitic infections in cats, I was able to pinpoint that the infection was likely some kind of protozoan infection. This is not unusual: we dealt with multiple worms and parasites in our two dogs over the 13 years they lived with us. Both were rescues and came with a few extra critters we hadn’t expected.

As I continued through the message, I kept getting hit by what I would call “cancer vibes.” I don’t like that sensation, and I don’t want to be passing on potentially life-threatening information to clients if I am not absolutely certain of what I’m being told from the other side. I knew for many years before it happened that one of my dogs would die from cancer (and thymus cancer eventually led to his death), so I know what it’s like to live with that kind of information. In this healing message, I was being told that this cat would eventually face cancer. The estimate I got was many years down the road, but as I’ve said before, time estimates are often not accurate when it comes to information from the other side. I wasn’t happy about having to pass this information on to the client, but I was certain I needed to.

The other bit of relevant information that I received was that this stray cat and the potential adopter’s cat would get along well, but I had a huge amount of concern that the stray might pass on something to the adopter’s cat. This is a risk all animal foster parents take, and it’s why most of them keep their own pets fully vaccinated. Rescues often bring disease with them due to the neglect they’ve undergone in their previous living situations. The fact that I was getting this warning wasn’t too unusual in my mind.

I passed on the information to the woman involved in the cat’s rescue. She meditated on it and decided that the best decision for her and her cat was not to adopt the stray. Instead, she surrendered him to the local animal shelter for them to help him. A few days later, she got back to me with information I hadn’t expected: The stray cat had feline leukemia virus, a virus that eventually causes cancer in cats. It also weakens the immune system and leaves cats prone to secondary infections such as parasites. It’s spread by close contact with other cats with the virus; her cat would have been at risk had the stray joined their home.

It’s always amazing for me to get feedback from clients once they’ve understood what the message I received is actually about. In this case, I wish that I had been wrong about what I had seen. However, the good news is that the stray cat was able to get into a sanctuary for cats with major health issues. He will live out his remaining time loved and cared for.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Two weeks ago, I was watching a suggested YouTube video featuring psychic medium John Edward on a recent trip to Australia. As I watched, I thought about how I had wanted to attend a John Edward event in the past, but my health and others had prevented me from going. The first year that I wanted to go, I allowed another intuitive empath to talk me out of going. She had been to see him during one of his previous trips to Austin. She thought she had shielded herself well, but the energy from all of the people who were so desperate to hear from deceased loved ones as well as the energy of the souls was just too much for her, and she ended up spending the night vomiting from all of the metaphysical stress.

The second year that I wanted to go, I allowed another psychic to talk me out of going. He said that he was horribly disappointed and got nothing out of it when he went. Since I trusted him, I decided that it wasn’t worth the expense of going. I regretted that decision.

As I watched this video two weeks ago, I realized that my health was now in a place that I could attend a John Edward event, and this time, I wasn’t going to let anyone talk me out of it because the desire to go was still so strong for me. I went to John Edward’s website and discovered that his next event was actually in Austin on July 9th! I was amazed at the synchronicity of this and decided it was finally meant to be. I purchased a ticket and then contacted the ticket agency to help me with disability accommodation arrangements under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

There, my disappointment began. The first request was met with an absolute “we won’t meet your disabilities” type response; I was offered a refund. I was horrified. The ADA doesn’t allow this kind of blatant discrimination against the disabled, and yet, everywhere I turned this week, I’ve found disability discrimination. I tried again with the ticketing agency who were acting as a middleperson with John Edward’s staff; the second response was better but still was clear that they were not willing to work with me. Feeling emotionally defeated, I contacted my guides and decided to accept the refund. I just didn’t have it in me to fight for the chance to see John Edward.

After the refund processed, I sent the following note through John Edward’s website. I don’t expect to hear back from Edward himself; I expected that an intern or administrative assistant would receive it and send me a form letter telling me that it would be taken into consideration (and then probably discarded without action or change, though they wouldn’t say that to me). To my disappointment, I have not gotten any kind of response, though. I remain disheartened that a psychic medium who focuses on healing clients could possibly allow his organization to discriminate against those who are disabled.

**

To John Edward:

I am aware that at this point, you do not run the day-to-day issues with your business. However, as your business is selling your name and your reputation, I feel you should be aware of my experiences with those you employ or subcontract with.

I was disabled at the age of 28 in 2003; For 12+ years, I’ve dealt with severe health problems which left me homebound for many years. I’ve been able to regain health over the past few years and am now able to function in society with minimal accommodations. I am not able to stand for extended amounts of time: the line at the grocery store is about all I can handle. As I can usually walk short distances without issues, I don’t use a wheelchair. I have a state issued disabled placard for the days when walking is more difficult. I am also very sensitive to fragrances. When I am in public, I have to avoid those wearing perfume, cologne, etc. I also can’t tolerate cigarette smoke residue. This means that if someone has one of these items on them, I have to move away. It’s a relatively minor hassle in the perspective of life.

When I purchased my ticket to your Austin event, I requested disability assistance through Etix. I asked that my message be passed on to the appropriate people on your staff so that I could have direct contact with them. I’ve learned from past experience that trying to arrange disability accommodations through a third party results in a less than entertaining version of the “telephone game.” Etix refused to get me directly connected with a member of your staff who is in charge of handling individuals who need disability accommodation. They insisted on continuing to be the middleperson. The result was confusion and an initial refusal to accommodate my disabilities at all. The second round resulted in a slightly better response but it was still far from satisfactory. At that point, I decided that I wasn’t going to keep fighting with your staff. I just don’t have the emotional energy to engage in this issue this week. I accepted a refund and the fact that I was not going to be welcomed at your event.

From a karmic viewpoint, I am certain that you can understand that not meeting the needs of the disabled is not a great idea. Basic compassion for those who are challenged is often lacking in our society, but it is not something I would expect from your organization.

From a legal standpoint, I am sure as a former hospital administrator you can understand that your staff’s immediate “No, we won’t work with you” response was illegal under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA exists for good reason, though I’ve found that I often have to mention the “L” word of lawyer or lawsuit before most organizations will even consider providing disabilities. I don’t like having to use that word; I’d prefer people functioned from a place of compassion and understanding.

I am requesting that you designate a disability contact on your staff for your events that are on the road. I am asking that any time someone with a disability requests assistance in attending your events that the designated staff person responds directly to the individual with disabilities and does their best to ensure that the person with disabilities has a positive experience in gaining access to your events.

The irony of this all is that I wasn’t coming to your Austin event hoping to receive a reading. I clearly set the intention when I purchased the ticket that I not be read because I know others need to have the experience far more than me. If I want to talk to the other side, I can do that for free from the comfort and convenience of my own home. I am having a hard time articulating why I wanted to attend, but it is somewhere along the lines of wanting to observe your energy while you work as well as the energy around you. My guides assure me that the result of failing to get accommodation to your event is part of a greater life lesson, but at this point I’m not sure what it is yet.

I hope that your brief stay in Austin is a good one and that the event will bring healing to many people.

Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D.
Green Heart Guidance, LLC
Austin, Texas

Last Friday was another powerful day of healing in my world, both personally and globally. The spiritual work I have been doing on myself reached another major turning point as my healers and I released one of the deeper traumas from my childhood. As it released, I saw that the emotions from that incident tied back to traumas in another life hundreds of years ago; the past life experience involved the same soul who also hurt me in this life and many others as well.

After the trauma released from my body, I was told symbolically that this was the last thing that was blocking me from finding unconditional and spiritual love in this lifetime. In the past few years, we’ve pulled out many other energetic blocks related to other people who’ve harmed me and related to beliefs I have previously held. At one point we even had to clear away the soul of a female ancestor who lived in the 19th century in Tennessee. She had been sexually abused by four or five different men in her life, and so she held the false belief that all men are dangerous. She was trying to protect me by keeping men away from me, something I definitely didn’t appreciate even if she was doing it with the best of intentions! My mentor and I helped her crossed over, leaving me happily without my unwanted guardian.

I’ve been working for a long time to reach this point; I was starting to wonder if I would ever reach it. So the news brought me great joy. I left that healing appointment feeling pretty happy and headed to my next appointment. Before it started, I had a few minutes to check to see if my kids had emailed or texted me. They had not, but I noticed an email from a friend who said, “Just saw the SCOTUS decision! :)” I knew that could only be good news, and Googling confirmed that the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of same-sex marriages. Tears began misting in my eyes, but I had to move on to my appointment. Afterward, though, when I got a chance to read some of the articles about the announcement, more tears came streaming down my face.

I don’t have any friends or family members who were waiting to get legally married in Texas. Many couples I know have already gone to Canada or other states to legalize their unions. However, for me, this was a victory that I had been waiting for for a long time. It says a great deal that our society is finally open-minded enough to accept that same-sex marriage will not bring about the end of the world. There’s still a great deal of progress to be made in terms of ending discrimination against those who aren’t cisgendered or heterosexual. However, this is a big and public step forward.

One part of the announcement seriously disturbed me, though. The Supreme Court decision was a 5-4 victory, a very narrow margin. Still, a victory is a victory. What bothered me most was that conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, the only African American on the court at this time, voted against same-sex marriage. Given his conservative voting record, this isn’t a surprise. Yet looking at his personal life, it is. Clarence Thomas married his second wife, Virginia Lamp, in 1987. They are considered an interracial couple as she is of Caucasian descent. Yet it was only twenty years earlier in 1967 that interracial marriage became legal in Thomas’ home state of Georgia thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision of Loving v. Virginia. Less than fifty years later, Thomas is now on the side of the privileged, those who can marry whomever they want, and he voted against letting all citizens have the right to marry their partners. To me, that was a bitter pill to swallow.

While I rejoiced on Friday with many others in the rest of the nation, the fight is far from over in Texas. Certain politicians seem to have a distorted belief that the SCOTUS decision of Obergefell v. Hodges is not the last word. Texas Governor Greg Abbott immediately issued a statement allowing state agencies to refuse to issue same sex marriage licenses on the basis of religious freedom, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has also encouraged county clerks not to issue same-sex licenses. The only county in the Austin area to begin immediately issuing licenses on Friday to same-sex couples was Travis, the liberal bastion of Texas. Other local counties are twiddling their thumbs, blaming a need to update software, and “investigating” what the Supreme Court ruling actually means for their offices. I don’t have great hopes that all county offices in Texas will be offering same-sex couples their now legal right to obtain a marriage license by the end of July. I suspect it is going to take more federal action to make it happen. In my mind, I keep seeing the military involvement  in 1957 that was necessary to enforce the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that desegregated schools.

Despite these new hurdles, I am grateful that both the nation and I have moved forward in a major way when it comes to liberating love. I hope that when the time is right, all of us will be able to find the partners we seek and will be able to decide if and when we choose to get married unhampered by the prejudiced "religious" beliefs of others.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

In the past year, I have noticed this bizarre bit of synchronicity in my life on many occasions: When something in my life, my body, or my spiritual journey is blocked, my master bathroom toilet also clogs.  As amusing as it is, it’s also very frustrating. This weekend’s version of this parallel experience was more aggravating than usual.

I’ve spent the entire weekend (starting on Friday afternoon) feeling really off, emotionally and physically. I couldn’t pinpoint what exactly was wrong, though I know which flower essence I need to help with what I’m working on processing. I’m waiting for it to arrive in the mail mid-week. Until then, all I can really do is work through the other information that my spirit guides give me which was unfortunately not much as we are in a holding pattern until the essence arrives.

My toilet clogged early on Sunday morning. Despite my best efforts, I was not able to unclog it. I tried periodically throughout the day but really got nowhere with it. Then, suddenly in the late afternoon, I heard a gurgling-popping-draining noise from my bathroom. Not more than ten seconds later, I felt a powerful internal movement within my body. I can’t describe exactly what it felt like, but it seemed like a drain opened and everything that had been making me feel like crud was suddenly gone within a few seconds. I walked into the bathroom and discovered that the same draining had occurred with the toilet. The clog was finally gone in both of us.

I was waiting for my sauna to warm up when this happened; that was the only thing that I had done. I hadn’t taken any medications or supplements that could have made me physically feel better, and it’s almost unheard of for something to give me instant relief like that anyway. The synchronistic timing felt fairly wild and too much to be coincidence. I offered up gratitude to whomever got both me and my toilet feeling better, and I headed into the sauna. There, the next unusual experience of the day happened.

When I am receiving messages from the other side, they come in two main forms. In the first, I see symbols and hear words on occasion; I’ll sometimes smell odors or feel sensations as well. It’s not a coherent transmission that I can relate to others without translation. The message is basically in code. When I receive healing messages for clients and for myself, this is the type of message I receive. The second type of message happens when I am used as a channel. This doesn’t happen too often, but when it happens, I am always left in awe. I am nothing more than a scribe at that point, taking dictation for the other side. I usually can barely keep up with the clear and coherent sentences I get from the other side. Unlike many channels, I’m not in a trance when this happens: today I was very aware of the thunderstorm outside and the increasing sweat on my body. I have never served as a channel when someone else is around, so I don’t know if I can interact easily with others when it’s happening or not.

In today’s session, a spirit guide came to me rather unexpectedly. She gave me a name that could be for a woman of any era among thousands of years and from a multitude of cultures (but she’s asked me not to share her name for whatever reasons she has). I don’t think she and I have had any other connections with each other before. When she communicated with me, she spoke quickly and fluently, transmitting dozens of mantras to me for the inspirational memes I put on my website, Facebook, and Pinterest. Looking back at some of them later in the day, I didn’t recognize some of the thoughts I had written, but that’s because I was so busy writing I couldn’t actually take time to process the words in the moment. I’ve been given mantras from the other side before, but never in bulk like this. I had spent several hours earlier in the day working on creating and scheduling the posts for July’s memes, so perhaps that activity had drawn the attention of someone on the other side, and she was just helping me get parts of August, September, and October done as well.

I am also not quite sure why the mantras followed upon the release of whatever was blocking my health, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. I know some of the mantras are meant for me specifically, but some seem as though they are meant for other people whom they will reach through my posting them on my website and other places. Regardless, when the other side gives me a gift like that, I don’t think there’s any appropriate response except to say thank you and then to create the memes they’ve given to me so clearly!

I enjoy when I channel for the other side. It’s draining physically, but it’s also exhilarating. I appreciate the experience every time it happens, and I’m always left in awe. Some day I hope to have a better understanding of why I receive these channeling messages when I do, but for now, I am grateful for the experience.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

I am not a big believer in miracles. Most of the time when people proclaim something to be a miracle, I can see logical reasons for what happened even without any supernatural intervention. I think true miracles are rare. They are the things that defy all understanding without a supernatural influence. When someone is in an accident that leaves the car crumpled like a tin can yet they walk away with nary a scratch, it defies any logical understanding. Those type of miracles do happen on occasion, and when they do, I believe higher powers are involved.

In December 2000, my then-husband and I traveled to Missouri with our new babies. While we were there on Christmas Eve, we visited the park where we had scattered our eldest daughter's ashes in the summer of 1999. My former mother-in-law gave us a clipping from an evergreen tree in their yard to leave at the memorial site. It was from an ordinary evergreen tree (probably a variety of spruce or fir) and ordinary clipping, slightly larger than my hand. When we went to the park, we left that clipping on rocks near the opening of an underground spring. It was a cold but clear winter day at 15 degrees Fahrenheit, and there was about 12 inches of snow on the ground. 

Four months later, we made another visit to Missouri. On April 23rd, we went out to the park to visit the memorial site again. When we arrived, we spent some time around the spring, and then I noticed something amazing. In the creek near the grotto entrance was the exact sprig of evergreen we had left there four months previously. And most amazingly, it was completely green. It was no different than the day we had left it there; it was just located a few feet away from where we left it. All the trees in that local area are deciduous, so it was not a similar looking branch from any of them. It was the same clipping.

Can this be explained logically? Maybe. The weather was cold in December, and the constantly cool fresh stream water probably helped the cutting stay fresh. However, the temperature in Missouri in April is usually in the 40s overnight and 60s during the day, higher than the sub-freezing temperatures we had experienced in December. Furthermore, there had been many rains during those four months, and the rain and the regular current of the stream should have moved the evergreen cutting downstream long before our return. Anyone who has had a real cut Christmas tree can also affirm that even with water, it does have a limited lifespan before needles begin falling and the whole tree turns brown. One wouldn't usually expect an evergreen clipping to stay green for four months even in ideal condition.

For me, though, this is one of those situations where I think the probability of all the perfect conditions lining up are very unlikely without the influence of higher powers. I believe that the green evergreen branch was kept in that condition at that site as a measure of comfort for me, a way of affirming for me that life does not end with death. Even if it was just a series of amazing odds, the power of the experience was incredible for me. 

As a footnote, while I was finishing this blog post, Spotify began playing unprompted in the background on my computer. The synchronistic song selection? "Watching Over Me" from the Canadian Tenors. Its lyrics proclaim:

The pure, the bright, the beautiful that stirred our hearts in you
The whisper of a wordless prayer, the streams of love and truth
A longing after something lost, the spirits yearning cry
Striving after better hopes: These things can never die!
There will always be a shining sun
There will always be the rising of the sea
There will always be an angel watching over me

~Rememebering Rebecca, died and born, June 10, 1999~
 
©2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

During grad school and while my older children were young, I watched very little tv. I had no real need for it in my life. Yet in the days after 9/11, I left the tv on more than I had previously. In that time, I stumbled upon Crossing Over with John Edward, a show in which psychic medium John Edward gave gallery readings for those who were wanting to reach loved ones who had died. I was captivated by the show, but I hid my viewing habits from my then-husband because I knew he would ridicule such things.

Many years later, I better understood my attraction to Crossing Over as my metaphysical gifts came to fruition. As I started to develop my gifts, I wanted desperately to read John Edward’s books, but because of my multiple chemical sensitivities, I could not read the paper versions and there were no digital editions available. I bought the paperback books and put them on my shelf, waiting for the day when I had enough health to read them. Eventually that day came, and over a few weeks, I happily read through most of his Edward’s non-fiction works. They were easy, fun, enjoyable books for me.

As I read through the books, I quickly recognized that Edward’s dysfunctional father was both an alcoholic and a narcissist; as a result, Edward was mostly estranged from his father as an adult. I understood completely from personal experience how and why that narcissism can create a situation in which it’s best for the child to separate from the toxic parent. It’s a very difficult situation for the adult children involved. Our society does not support this kind of “divorce” between a parent and child. Instead, adult children are chided for breaking the Judeo-Christian commandment “honor thy father and mother.” However, in situations where the converse of “honor thy child” is not being respected, a parental-child divorce can be the healthiest thing for all those involved.

My mother undeniably has narcissistic personality disorder, though for the almost 17 years she was in my life, she never received an official diagnosis. It’s rare for narcissists to receive diagnoses because they are often able to present themselves very well to strangers. It is only in living with narcissists or working extensively with them that their true natures are revealed. I have dozens if not hundreds of stories that typify my mother’s narcissism though for the purposes of this blog post, one will suffice.

After my daughter Rebecca died, we received abundant condolence cards for the month afterward. About eight weeks after her death, a card arrived from my mother, whom I had not had any contact with in over seven years at that point. I had not informed her of my pregnancy or my daughter’s death, but we still had common contacts; she likely found out through one of those channels. Unlike most people who sent us bereavement cards, my mother sent me (and not my husband) a card that was about how wonderful daughters are. To someone who doesn’t understand narcissism or my mother, this would seem like a cruel and demented sentiment: I had just lost my only daughter (at that time) to death, yet my mother had sent me a card telling me how wonderful daughters are. However, if you analyze the situation with the knowledge that my mother is a narcissist, the situation makes a great deal more sense: She was only thinking from her point of view. She was trying to express emotion about my loss, but the only way she could do it was by vocalizing her position: She missed her daughter. She couldn’t think through the whole process that I had actually lost my own daughter and that her card was incredibly inconsiderate of that.

For years, many people had told me that I would regret my estrangement from my mother when she died. I would suddenly realize that it was too late for us to work through our differences. There would be no second chance. But as I read chapter 11 of John Edward’s book After Life: Answers from the Other Side, I found a very different perspective. Edward discovered that he was actually able to begin working through his issues with his father after his father’s death once his father was freed from some of his earthly burdens such as alcoholism. While Edward clearly encourages that people should “communicate, appreciate, validate" every day before they lose their loved ones, he does offer hope that reconciliation can happen after death. Working from that place, I finally came to true peace with estrangement from my mother. I realized that even when she dies, I don’t expect to grieve for her. I may once again grieve for the healthy mother whom I never experienced, but I know I will be fine whether she is in this world or the next. I’ve spent many hundred years attached to her soul, and I no longer have any desire to be associated with her. Losing her in no way seems like a loss.

My mother’s parents have both come to visit me from the other side. I never met my grandfather in real life as he died ten years before I was born; my grandmother died when I was 17. Interacting with them after I opened to the metaphysical helped me to understand that while they might have shed burdens such as alcoholism, unless they choose to work on their souls after death, they still carry their soul level issues with them. Neither of my maternal grandparents had done extensive work on themselves, and thus, interacting with them was not inspiring or sentimental. They were very spiritually unhealthy people whom I didn’t want to have around. Quite honestly, if my mother takes the same position of not working on herself after death as her parents have, I definitely don’t want to get back in touch with her then either!

I am grateful for the peace I have reached with being estranged from my toxic mother. I have known from early on that it was for the best, but our society doesn’t always understand that. Instead, mother-daughter relationships are glorified in a way that isn’t always true. While I didn’t receive that love as a daughter, I have been able to experience it as a mother with my living daughter, and for that blessing, I am truly grateful.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance

 (As always, I am not a medical doctor. This information is based on my personal experiences and should not be substituted for medical diagnosis or treatment.  Please speak to your health care providers about your personal situation.)

A few nights ago, a friend messaged me saying she had hives that she couldn't pinpoint the cause of. I have already done a full healing message for this friend, and once I have established a connection with a person’s spirit guides, it’s usually pretty quick and easy for me to answer shorter questions like, “What’s the source of these hives?” The process is more like a conversation with the other side than when I am doing an initial healing message; there’s a lot of back and forth with me asking questions and them providing answers.

As the friend and I messaged while I simultaneously talked to the other side, we were able to pinpoint an emotional stress that was triggering the response; it tied into some deep emotional issues that she now knows she needs to work through. I also was able to give her some book references to help her explore those issues further. Along the way, I began seeing my deceased grandmother’s hive triggers which weren't the same as this friend’s triggers. However, the process of helping my friend helped me gain some additional insight into why my grandmother would sometimes get hives. For my grandmother’s situation, there was always a physical trigger (new dish soap, working in the yard, etc.) but this message also helped me understand some of her emotional issues that may have been part of why the hives manifested.

Synchronicity being what it is, later that evening I was watching Hart of Dixie (season 2, episode 16) on Netflix wherein one of the characters was having hives for a very similar reason! It’s always nice to get wild and random confirmation from the Universe.

As we concluded our messaging, the friend wrote, “I knew you would help. Nothing was making sense so....” That made me laugh because it’s so true. When things don’t make sense, I can often figure out the reason behind what’s going on. That’s one of my superpowers. I’m grateful for that gift because it’s what helped me heal when my health care providers were out of ideas.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

(I received a complimentary copy of this work from Hay House via NetGalley.  The opinions here are my own and are not influenced by anyone.)

I’m a fan of many of the Hay House authors, so seeing that publishing house associated with a new book induces me to try an author I might not have read otherwise.  In most cases, I’m pleased with the selections I read from Hay House.  This was not one of those cases.

In Love Never Dies: How to Reconnect and Make Peace with the Deceased, Jamie Turndorf, Ph.D., explores her newfound connection to the spirit world after the death of her husband, former Jesuit priest Emile Jean Pin.  As a former atheist, this new world of spirituality is an adventure for Turndorf, one she approaches with the blind enthusiasm of a young child after she conquers her initial misgivings.  After her husband’s unexpected death from a reaction to a bee string, Turndorf is surprised to discover her connection to her beloved Jean continues through their deep spiritual love for each other.  She writes that together they have a ministry to help others in processing death and connecting to those in the afterlife so that all involved may continue to grow and heal.

Love Never Dies does have a few good qualities.  It is simply written making it accessible to the popular masses.  The book also has the potential to comfort many in the first and last sections where Turndorf describes her experiences and the experiences of her clients as they reconnect with their deceased love ones.  The book brings up an incredibly large number of questions for a book group to discuss around life, love, healing and death.

From there, however, the book simply falls apart.  It’s repetitive and poorly edited starting with the weak rhyming poetry at the beginning of each chapter.  Turndorf proudly declares that she hadn’t checked out the “competition” before writing her book making it an all original work.  While there are merits to an untainted narrative, those merits are outweighed by the negatives in this book.  Turndorf’s lack of vocabulary to discuss concepts such as synchronicity weakens her arguments and presentation immensely.  The result is a book that feels like an amateur falsely pretending to be a professional.

Turndorf also is blinded by her own narrow experiences regarding the metaphysical world.  She only sees what she wants to see and doesn’t consider that there are possibilities beyond the definitive answers she purports to reach.  For example, Turndorf declares that demons or negative spirit entities might exist though she’s doubtful about it.  She thinks that if negative spiritual beings do exist, Jean protects her from them always.  Any experienced psychic, intuitive or medium who has worked extensively with the metaphysical will cringe at this naïve view:  In his Hay House publication Infinite Quest: Develop Your Psychic Intuition to Take Charge of Your Life, John Edward speaks extensively on the importance of spiritual protection when one is working with the other side.  Turndorf’s inexperience becomes dangerous as she guides readers into murky waters without life jackets.

Furthermore, Turndorf blindly believes that all the departed are willing to work on their faults and help their living loved ones heal.  This, too, is a declaration of an inexperienced practitioner who is, in my words, blinded by the white light.  Other gifted mediums such as me are able to encounter spirits in all their essence, seeing their soul level faults which do not miraculously heal upon entry to the afterlife.  Many souls choose not to work on their own healing in the afterlife, no differently than their course here on earth.  In those cases, Turndorf’s advice risks connecting hurting individuals with souls who will continue to emotionally and spiritual abuse them from the other side.  This is not only ignorant, but it’s dangerous and is the last thing a psychologist should want for clients.

Even on a much simpler and less dangerous level, Turndoff offers bad advice to those wanting to begin meditation as a means to connecting with departed souls.  Setting up beginners with the task of meditating for many hours is going to defeat many people before they even get out of the starting gate.  It’s far better for beginners to slowly introduce themselves to meditation to reduce the risk of perceived failure and to encourage successful future experiences which may eventually be longer.

Turndorf’s faulty logic is so convoluted at times that it is difficult to follow.  Throughout Love Never Dies, she contradicts herself on larger philosophical issues.  Turndorf presents the concept that things that happen more than three times are a scientifically valid result. Unfortunately, she fails to recognize that even if something occurs three times, it’s still possible to misinterpret information about those results.  Throughout the book, I feel she often misinterprets her experiences because of her lack of experience and narrow-minded views.  For example, Turndorf declares many times that we avoid loving fully because losing a loved one is so painful.  However, there are other possibilities for why we might restrain our love that she never even considers.  It’s possible that we don’t love fully because we don’t know how to.  It’s also possible that we don’t love fully because we don’t believe we deserve love.

This narrow perspective continues as Turndorf obsesses over her theories that she is metaphysically gifted because of her premature birth and three month NICU stay away from her mother.  She writes about high fevers and illness predisposing people to being able to being open to spiritual contact, yet she fails to examine the role of her own experiences with Lyme Disease in regards to her metaphysical experiences.  As a practitioner who has had Lyme and who works with many others who have Lyme, I would argue that the vast majority of people who deal with chronic or late disseminated Lyme Disease are those who are metaphysically gifted.  A little research outside of her own bubble would help Turndorf to see these other possibilities. 

As the book progresses, I found Turndorf’s words to her clients and to her readers to be cruel and potentially damaging.  I cringed as Turndorf relates how she said to a newly bereaved parent that “she could view this recent loss as a gift from the spirit.”  While this lesson is true on some levels, the way she phrased this to a parent who has recently lost a baby is heartless at best. 

Furthermore, comparing our pain to others’ is not beneficial.  Telling ourselves “it could be worse” demeans the pain we are experiencing.  Turndorf writes, “When we see someone in pain, we’re being invited to stop feeling sorry for ourselves and give thanks for the problems we have that pale in comparison.  Another person’s difficulty reminds us that we could have it so much worse.”  What she fails to contemplate is that some of her readers (including me in my not so distant past) will fall into that category of having things “so much worse.”  Having been told many times by others that they could look at my life and realize how good they actually have it, I can speak from experience that such an attitude does not help the person undergoing the trials.  The heartless response simply makes their pain increase.

If all of these issues aren’t enough, I found Turndorf’s basic psychological advice to be weak at best.  After 30 years’ experience in practice, she is not a novice.  She earned her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from California Coast University in 1994.  She is a nationally known psychologist using the pseudonym “Dr. Love.”  However, her personal relationship with Jean raised many flags for me as a reader and life coach, beginning with the fact that she was 21 and he was 58 when it began.  Turndorf claims that she and Jean had a perfect spiritual love, yet the aspects of their relationship she shares demonstrate a couple that struggled to love each other in their earthly forms.  She asserts that Jean was “one of the world’s true mystics” but he didn’t know he could be so close to her in spirit form.  This doesn’t build his credibility or hers.  Even Googling her late husband (who died in 2006, after the advent of the internet) does not turn up the abundance of hits one would expect from a man whom she claims was a one of the 50 most holy people to have lived in the eyes of the Dalai Lama.  As she describes their relationship after he “left his body,” Turndorf sees her late husband’s love as fulfilling her and becoming her own love.  Almost all psychologists would argue that seeking to use another’s love as a replacement for self-love is not a healthy approach in the long term.

Finally, in one of the experiences at the end of the book, she details of a client named “Mo.”  Turndorf uses guilt to trick Mo into working with her deceased husband.  This woman clearly has spent a lifetime being manipulated by others who prey on her overactive sense of guilt.  A healthier treatment option might have been to work with Mo to recognize her issues around guilt until she regained the self-esteem necessary to work on herself out of self-love.  The ends did not justify the means in this treatment.

Turndorf seems to think grieving is the only reason people need to connect to Spirit and those on the other side.  As she presents the issues in Love Never Dies, she fails to see how other tragedies can be more devastating and more impactful that grief.  Her narrow-minded and uneducated views result in a book that will help facilitate discussion about important topics but which ultimately may give some very bad advice to vulnerable readers.

(Attached below is a PDF of questions that could be used for book group discussions.  Feel free to alter or edit these questions for your own personal use in a group discussion or journaling.)

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

When I first came out to my friends as metaphysically gifted, it was as an intuitive empath.  So what exactly does that mean?

An intuitive is someone who is guided by higher powers and knows things that s/he could not possibly know otherwise.  Some would use the term psychic instead of intuitive, but I prefer intuitive partially because of some of the negative connotations associated with the term psychic.  I am very much guided by my own intuition as well as the input of higher powers, though one could argue those are the same things.

An empath is someone who can feel others’ emotions in his/her/hir own body.  Arguably, the most famous empath is actually a fictional character, Deanna Troi of Star Trek:  The Next Generation.  Troi used her abilities to sense the emotions in foreign species in order to act as the counselor to the ship’s captain, helping him assess the intentions of those the crew encountered.  Her abilities are presented as fictional and impossible for most humans (as she is half-Betazoid on her mother’s side), but being an empath is a real experience for some humans.

For me, sensing others’ emotions is no different than noticing what color shirt they have on or listening to their tone of voice.  When I walk into a room, it’s part of what I assess unconsciously.  Some argue that this ability develops in individuals as a survival skill, especially in abusive or traumatic situations.  I think that probably combines with a natural disposition toward the ability.  Regardless of how I developed it, it’s something I’ve always done.  I didn’t even realize that it was something that most people didn’t experience until just a few years ago.  When I read Judith Orloff’s Positive Energy at the recommendation of a therapist, I found the book rather boring on one level.  It described how I’ve lived my life all along.  On another level, it was completely enlightening to learn that others didn’t function the way I do and that was causing some of my disconnect from others.  After reading the book, I went to a session of marriage therapy and apologized to my ex for all the times when I thought he was being clueless about things that were so obvious to my perception.

For me, some people are much easier to read than others.  In general, I find men easier to read than women, but even then, there’s quite a bit of variation in how much I sense when I encounter someone.  That amount has to do with my abilities, the metaphysical shields that others have, and others’ relationships to me.  There’s also another wildcard element to it that I don’t fully understand.  It also can sometimes make social interaction with others challenging because I can "see" or feel when a person is lying to me or trying to avoid telling me the truth.

The emotions I feel from others are very visceral and palpable.  It can be as strong as if I were actually experiencing those emotions myself.  When I went to the 5K Austin Gorilla Run a few years ago, I was standing at the beginning of the race and then moved so I could be at the finish line.  The energy was so different at the finish line!  I’ve never been a runner, so I’ve never experienced a runner’s high firsthand, but that feeling coming off the people at the finish line? That was good stuff!  Likewise, the feelings of being around someone who is crazily in love can be very obvious (and happy) to me.

Unfortunately, it’s not just the positive emotions that I experience.  When I am at a zoo or kennel, I can feel the animal’s misery from being held captive.  It makes those really intolerable places for me.  Likewise, when I’m killing off parasites or forcing negative entities to leave, I feel a horrible sensation of panic, and I feel like I want out of my body.  I’ve learned to recognize that it’s not me experiencing that emotion:  It’s the critters in me, and if they’re freaked out about leaving, that’s ok.  They should be.  Their time to go has arrived.  I just have to hold on for a few days and that sensation will pass.

When I first started trying to explain this all to my ex-husband under the supervision of our marriage therapist, he actually was able to give one of the best explanations I’ve heard to date.  He said, “So what you’re telling me is that if you were blindfolded and walked into a room, you could tell me what someone in the room was feeling without reading their body language or facial expressions or vocal tone.”   That’s exactly it.  However, in the real world, I don’t go around blindfolded, so those other elements also do play in quite a bit.  I am not a mind-reader:  Telepathy is not among my gifts, so whatever I am experiencing of other people does not involve what they are actually thinking.  It’s what they are feeling.

An intuitive empath, therefore, is someone who combines the qualities of an intuitive and an empath.  When I am doing metaphysical work as an intuitive, my ability to sense emotions becomes a skill I can use.  In a recent message I received, I could feel the client’s terror about a cooking knife.  I have no idea what that was about, but I knew *I* felt terrified by that knife!  I can also sense the energy of the messengers, too.  Sometimes it’s calm and peaceful; other times it can be incredibly uncomfortable.  In one case, I was speaking with a client’s grandmother.  In our follow up appointment when I politely tried to explain that she felt horribly on edge to me, he replied that she had OCD in life.  That would explain it!  It also helped confirm for him whom I had been communicating with.

As I said, I’ve been this way all of my life, and I can’t imagine being any other way.  I now understand that not everyone is like me, and that’s made it easier to comprehend parts of the world around me.  With that understanding has come more peace about who I am and the way I function.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance, LLC

The unofficial slogan of Missouri, a state where I lived for quite a while when I was growing up, is “The Show Me State.”  I definitely absorbed that idea in my upbringing.  I tend to be a skeptic about things I haven’t experienced.  That doesn’t mean that I don’t deny that those things might exist.  It just means that until I have experienced some things, I’m not willing to take it on the word of others that they do exist. 

Up until I experienced one, I was on the fence about angels.  However, all it took was one experience of an angel in my life for me to cement my view of their reality.  Angels might seem like ghosts or spirits in that they’re not visible to the human eye most of the time.  However, their energy is very different than any spirit that has ever been incarnate.  It’s much more pure.  There’s nothing but goodness to it.

The first time I experienced an angel, I was in one of my healers’ offices, and he was talking to me about something we had been working on.  As he was talking, I became very aware of an angel standing next to his desk.  She was drawing energy off of a huge chunk of rose quartz that he has in his office, and she was using the energy to heal my heart chakra.  It was a powerful experience that lasted for several minutes and that rocked my world.  As he finished talking, my healer looked at me and said, “Does that make sense?”  I replied, “Yes, but there’s someone standing over at the end of your desk.”  He turned, and as he looked at the exact spot where the angel was standing, he visibly shivered from head to toe.  He looked back at me and said, “There’s someone standing over there.”  It was nice to have the confirmation from someone else of what I was experiencing.

The second time I felt an angel was while my massage therapist was working on me.  She was working on a leg, but an angel was working on my head.  I could feel its hands on me, doing what felt a lot like craniosacral work.  This experience wasn’t quite as powerful as my first, but it was still amazing to feel that higher power’s energy working with mine to promote my healing.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

The term “ghost” has all kinds of cultural connotations associated with it.  Many people will think of a translucent white figure that you can see as it makes bumps in the night.  Others might think of Casper or Slimer.  That’s not necessarily the way it plays out in the world of metaphysics, but I’m sure this isn’t the first time Hollywood has taken creative liberties!  Most of the time, I can’t actually see a spirit or energy that is around me.  I can sense their energy sometimes, but more often, I just see the results of their presence. 

One of my friends describes doing metaphysical work as “being shiny.”  That means energy workers attract the magpies of the spirit world as they can tell we can sense them.  While I make sure to shield my house and myself, I still attract energies and souls on occasion.  I’ve had a couple in my house that become electrical menaces.  One was turning on and off my sauna.  Then the spirit switched to turning on and off a light in my bedroom.  In that case, I simply told it, “Cut the crap.  I know you’re here.  I’m not interested in playing games.  This is my home, and you’re not welcome here.  Go in peace.”  And it did.  I guess I wasn’t too much fun to mess with!  

There was another one that was a “kitchen ghost.”  My three kids and I all watched a dish go flying off the kitchen counter.  I told myself that maybe it was just not sitting stably, and I blew the incident off.  Later the same week, an apple started rolling around the table while one of my kids and I were making apple pie.  At that point, I shifted gears and non-verbally went Mama Bear on the energy.  I let it know that it was NOT allowed to mess with my children.  I unexpectedly got back a meek reply of “sorry.”  This was just another bored energy who needed to find something better to do with himself—preferably somewhere that wasn’t my house.

Getting rid of the spirits is really pretty simple in most cases.  You just have to tell them to go.  You need to be firm, strong, and commanding.  You need to take ownership of your space and let them know that you are not open to sharing it.  Then send them on their way, asking them to go in peace.

On the rare occasions that they don’t leave easily, you don’t have to call the Ghostbusters to come in with their photon packs to blast the heck out of everything.  However, seeking outside help can bring peace to your family.  I offer remote home viewing services that can help in this regard; in other cases, you will need to hire a shaman or other energy worker who can get the spirits to leave from your living space. 

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

In a word, yes.

One of the myths about the other side that I had to work through myself is the idea that all of those on the other side are divinely inspired and are in a place of perfect knowledge.  It’s simply not true.  Most of our spirit guides were human once, and many still are working through issues.  Not all guides are at the highest possible level of enlightenment.  One thing we on this side need to do is recognize that not everyone we are speaking with on the other side is perfect. 

A different type of limitation arises when working with spirit guides in relation to our human perception of what they are saying.  The clarity of communication from the other side depends both on the medium’s ability to receive the message and the guides’ ability to send it.  The longer a soul has served as a guide or an intuitive, the clearer the messages tend to be when I receive them.  None of them seem to send a subtitled message, unfortunately.  As a result, there will always miscommunications, not because the message is wrong but because there are difficulties in translation.  I'm a human who isn't perfect either!

I’ve particularly seen difficulties with communication with newer guides.  I suspect my primary spirit guide is a “master guide” and that she works with newer “student guides” to train them in working with intuitives.  Since I am a teacher who has worked with student teachers, it doesn’t surprise me that I would end up with a guide in a similar role on the other side.  However, it means I have a rotating crew of others helping me on the other side.  I frequently am talking to someone I don’t know.  Sometimes they can communicate well, and other times, it’s a disaster.  I recently got a very confusing and disarming message during meditation, one that was almost threatening to me.  I finally cried out to my primary guide to help, and she stepped in and clearly communicated what I was having trouble understanding in its presentation from a less experienced communicator.

One of the other things that I have gotten frustrated with in dealing with the other side is that we have different priorities for my life based on our perspectives.  For my primary spirit guide, my metaphysical work and healing is the absolute priority in life.  She doesn’t have much concern for my personal life.  It’s not that she doesn’t care about me.  It’s just not what she sees as of importance in the long term.  My primary spirit guide and I have also had issues around time as we don’t view things from the same perspective there, either.

I can get frustrated at times when the other side doesn’t volunteer information unless I ask.  It’s no different than human relationships where one individual presumes the other knows something or doesn’t care about something.  It’s just an interpersonal misfire that is easily fixed when I actually ask for a specific detail which they sometimes give and sometimes don’t.  I’ve also found that our guides cannot helping us with bigger issues unless we ask for help.  We have free will, and because they can’t violate that free will, they stay out of our business unless we make it clear that they are welcome to assist.

Working with spirit guides on the other side is a truly amazing experience.  I wouldn’t give up my metaphysical gifts for anything now that I’ve embraced them.  However, it can be an exasperating and frustrating experience at times, just like when working with anyone else.  My co-workers aren’t more perfect than anyone else’s.  They’re just less likely to drain the coffee pot and fail to refill it!

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

As I’ve jokingly told friends, “Some people sleep with men.  I sleep with rocks.”  When my kids help me change the sheets on my bed (since my mobility often limits my ability to do it on my own), my daughter always knows to ask, “How many rocks are there hidden in the sheets?”  The usual answer is that I’m not sure.  It’s always an adventure emptying out the bed to see what I’ve been stashing away in there like a squirrel over the previous week or two.

All jokes aside, one of the primary ways I use crystals is to change my metaphysical energy while I’m sleeping.  I fall asleep with rocks near my feet, near my pillow, in my hands, or alongside my body.  It can be less than pleasant to wake up during the night to a jagged object attacking you, but aside from that minor drawback, crystals can work amazing changes in one’s metaphysical energy during sleep.  If you subscribe to the school of thought that I do, crystals raise one’s vibrations and help change the way one’s body and soul interact with the world.

I’ve had several deep spiritual experiences falling asleep with crystals in my hands, especially during my afternoon naps.  Early in my work with crystals, I had gone to Nature’s Treasures during one of their sales.  I found myself standing in front of one of the clearance tables for a third time, and even my daughter noticed that I couldn’t stay away from the purple fluorite that was there.  It was $3, so I figured, “What the heck” and bought it.   About three weeks later, the fluorite seemed to be calling to me as I was going to bed, so I grabbed it and fell asleep with it in my hand. 

Two hours later, I awoke to a violent jolt as something flew out from my body.  When I looked up, and I saw an entity leaving my body.  It appeared to me like a digitized bat-like creature, but as my mentor has taught me, our minds don’t really know how to process evil when they see it.  So the bat was probably the best approximation of what my mind could do with something it was seeing outside its normal view. 

That happened on a Tuesday afternoon.  On Thursday morning, I went to see one of my healers.  I told him, “I’ve spent the past 36 hours thinking about this, and I don’t think this could have happened, but here’s what I experienced.”  His response?  “That happened.”  And it did.  It was my first experience with seeing something on another level of existence, but not my last.

On a different occasion, I fell asleep with a piece of Atlantisite (pictured above) in my hand.  I was hoping to get some insight on time I spent on Atlantis in past lives.  However, what I ended up seeing was a past life with a friend of mine in Wyoming hundreds of years ago.  I awoke from my nap hearing Native American chanting and drumming in my room.  I couldn’t understand why the neighbor was listening to that music so loudly until I finally figured out that the neighbor wasn’t the source of the music.  I allowed myself to receive information at that point, and I saw the first of three past lives I’ve seen so far that involve this friend.  In this particular message, I also got some information on his current life health issues.  I sent him a text about it, and he wanted more information, so I did another session that day to gain further insight.  In turn, these past life experiences have led to some intense and powerful mutual healing sessions with that friend.

If you are considering working with crystals at any point, I highly recommend sleeping with them in the bed with you.  As I’ve found out time and again, it can create a life-changing experience.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

When the other side contacts me, it’s kind of like hearing thoughts in my own voice in my own head.  The individual energy associated with the messages, though, is very distinct, and it’s how I can get a sketch of the person/being I am communicating with.  When I say that I am talking to a male energy, I don’t actually hear a deep voice most of the time.  I just feel a male energy from the sender of the message.

It has taken some getting used to the concept of having thoughts in my mind that aren’t my own.  When some weird and wild thought comes out of nowhere, I usually realize there’s someone else on the other end of the line who has tapped into my brain.

A while back, I participated in a land journey with a group I was in.  This journey was a spiritual one; we actually never left the room we were in.  We only made the journey in an energetic sense.  In retrospect, this journey was incredibly dangerous, and I strongly believe that inexperienced practitioners of any kind should not have made the journey because the land we traveled to was so energetically toxic.  This was not an adventure for beginners.

In the process of the journey, I encountered a negative energy who tried to enter my body; I chased it away successfully and cut off my participation in the journey at that point.  However, in the time that I was on the land, something put a metaphysical hook into me so that I could continue receiving messages for the owner of the land and so that she could get the information she needed to heal the land.  My mentor and I had to remove that hook because I had not given consent for something to connect to me in that way nor had the owner hired me to be receiving messages for her.

The way that I discovered that the hook was still there was interesting.  I was brushing my teeth in my bathroom and was thinking about the various people that I and others had encountered on the land journey.  I went through the list of people in my head, and then the thought crossed my mind, “Or it could have been the one-armed man.”*  About ten seconds later, I stopped what I was doing and thought to myself, “Wait!  What one-armed man?”  It took me another few seconds, and then I asked, “Is there someone there who wants to talk to me?”  I of course got an emphatic “YES” in response.  So I switched gears and tuned in to get the message to find out what was going on (and I did pass that information on to the land owner). 

Every once in a while, it still throws me off when I get a random thought like that, though I’m now pretty secure and certain when I have things like that cross my mind that I am not going crazy.  I just know that someone else is there who needs or wants my attention.  Once I help them out, they leave me in peace.

*Using people first language, the correct way to phrase this would have been “the man with one arm.”  This is not my choice of words, but the other side is not always in tune with the current language of the day.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

When I first opened myself up to the metaphysical, the other side tended to come to me when I was on the massage table, in my sauna, or in bed about to fall asleep.  The first two were fine.  The latter was not.  When I’m exhausted and ready to fall asleep, the last thing I want to do is channel messages.  I finally had to set up “office hours” for the other side.  They are allowed to come to me when I’m on the massage table, when I’m in the bathroom (where my sauna is), or any time I call on them.  But when I’m falling asleep, I’m generally off-limits.  Every once in a while I get someone on the other side who won’t respect that, but for the most part, they do.

However, for the longest time, I used to joke about who would be getting in bed with me that night or who would be getting into my sauna with me.  It still makes for amusing stories.  I was talking with my mentor one day, and I told her this guy had gotten in my sauna the previous night.  I corrected myself saying, “A dead guy got in my sauna with me.”  My mentor laughed and then said, “Yeah, I got that part.”  I thought about it for a second, and then I said, “You know, it still doesn’t make what I said any more sensible by adding ‘a dead guy got in my sauna with me the other night.’” We both laughed about it because such is the nature of our work.  You just forget at times that not everyone has dead people hopping in the sauna with them on a regular basis.  :)

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

I often mention that I work with my spirit guides, but I haven’t really talked about who and what they are.  Spirit guides are those on the other side who watch over us and guide us through life whether we know they are there or not.  Most of us have a primary spirit guide, someone who is with us all of our life.  My primary spirit guide is an ancient female energy who identifies as a Native American from what is now the southwestern U.S.  We then have other spirit guides who are part of our support team.  They may come and go throughout our lives.  Some may be deceased relatives whom we knew in this life or a previous one, and others have no relation whatsoever.  I have several other spirit guides who are part of my team who check in with me from time to time.

The closest Christian parallel to our primary spirit guides would be our guardian angel, though in my cosmic view, guides and angels are different.  In my understanding, angels are spiritual beings who have never been incarnate; guides are individuals who have been human in the past at some point but have died and live on the other side.  In Christian terms, the other side is heaven.  The rest of one’s spirit guide team could be viewed as the saints whom Catholics often petition for assistance.  They are holy people who can help us from the other side.  Keep in mind that all saints aren’t perfect.  The Catholic Church has canonized some folks who have sketchy pasts!  However, they are individuals who have worked for positive change in our world.  

One of the things that has been part of my spiritual development is discovering who on the other side is there to help me and who has a personal agenda.  It’s a process of discernment.  Sometimes it’s easy to tell that you are dealing with a very holy guide.  My primary guide is one such person.  I received a message for a client whose primary spirit guide was an amazing, serene, powerful soul.  He described himself as the old man on the mountain or as a beautifully wrinkled Native American elder.  It is always an honor to be in the presence of energies like these.  

Other guides are not so blessed and elevated.  I’ve had deceased biological relatives show up to guide me from their place of bias and confusion.  I refused their help.  I had a guide show up whom I eventually figured out was a man I was partnered with in three previous lives.  He was a toxic soul who had plenty of issues and quite a bit of anger at me.  Needless to say, I declined his help as well and was grateful when he realized the situation was hopeless and reincarnated in an attempt to anger me.  (It failed.) 

And then there are the guys who claim they want to help me as guides but who are really just not aware that they are dead.  What they really are after are sexual partners.  Yes, they can be that confused that they don’t understand that a carnal relationship between living and dead people just isn’t going to work out!  These misguided “guides” usually have an energy of a swift-talking guy in a bar.  I very quickly send them on their way, too.  

As you attempt to meet your own spirit guides, be aware that everyone you meet on your journey may not be the holiest of people.  Just because they are souls rather than humans, they haven’t necessarily entered a state of perfection.  Keep a clear sense of judgment about you.  If something feels wrong, it probably is.  When you find your true guides, you will be able to feel their love and help.  They want nothing but the best for you.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

When it comes to messages for others and for me, time is one thing I can't get exact answers for.  From my understanding, the other side doesn't function on our human time, so their estimates of time can be misleading.  “Soon” to them can mean five years because in the grand perspective of the Universe, five years is nothing.  I find that those on the other side who are more recently deceased are more sensitive to issues around human time because it is still somewhat real to them.  I can ask recently departed souls to come back in the morning because I’m needing sleep, and generally speaking, they understand.

However, time is one of the most difficult issues I have with my primary spirit guide.  She is an amazingly beautiful soul who has so much wisdom to offer.  I am fairly certain it’s been at least a millennium since she was last incarnate, and it was probably much longer.  So she doesn’t always grasp time issues.  One Sunday night at 10 p.m., my primary guide decided that I needed clary sage essential oil.  I told her I would get it the next day.  She was not satisfied with that answer.  She wanted me to get it NOW and start working with it.  I had to explain to her that I couldn’t just go outside and pick some clary sage.  It doesn’t work that way anymore.   I needed to go to a store to get it, and the soonest I could go to a store was at 8 a.m. the next morning when Whole Foods opened.  I promised her that I would be there when the doors opened, and I was.  Clary sage did end up being very important in a part of my healing.

In a similar experience with my primary spirit guide, I woke up one night at 2 a.m. to her telling me that I needed lapis lazuli.  I told her fine, and that I would get it in the morning.  I woke up again an hour later.  The sensation was similar to having someone in my face and screaming “LAPIS LAZULI” at me.  Clearly she was not going to be happy with tomorrow morning.  So I got up, turned on the lights, dug out my lapis lazuli from my crystal collection, and fell back asleep for the rest of the night with it in my hand.  Once again, it proved to be a powerful healing tool for me albeit over the course of three weeks—really, it could have waited until the morning! 

Another reason that I feel that time estimates from the other side can be unreliable is that our life paths are malleable.  We are in situations similar to Choose Your Own Adventure books.  Our free will allows us to make decisions that can greatly change the way our lives play out. 

In a situation I encountered about nine months ago, I was told that I was going to meet someone important to my life at an event.  Based on the description, I knew it was one of a few social gatherings I had planned to go to in December.  I consulted with an intuitive tarot reader whom a friend had told me had been incredibly accurate with her time estimates; the tarot reader came up with the same scenario with the same person and in the same time period (without me having given her any clues other than me asking what would happen in the next few weeks in my life).  Alas, the first two social events came and went as I had influenza followed by viral pneumonia and I was way too sick to consider attending.  The final two events also came and went as I was hit by a second strain of influenza.  The window passed for me to meet that person.  I’ve asked if that person will come into my life again at a later date, but have not gotten a clear answer.  So my decisions (to not attend the events because I was sick, though it wasn’t much of a choice!) influenced the path my life took and the accuracy of the time predictions that the other side had provided.

Thus, if you ask me for a time estimate about something in a metaphysical message, I will likely not give you an answer unless your spirit guides insist that I should.  Even then, it will be with a warning that time estimates are very sketchy and should be taken with a grain of sea salt.  To greatly misquote a theory of Einstein’s, time really is relative.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

The short answer to this question:  I don’t know for certain.

The longer answer to this question:  I think that our current human understanding of how energy works on a metaphysical level is very primitive.  I don’t think we are anywhere close to knowing the truth.  There’s an episode of Friends wherein Ross is tortured by Phoebe’s refusal to believe in evolution.  After antagonizing Ross for most of the episode, Phoebe explains her position.  It’s not that she’s a creationist.  It’s that she thinks that evolution isn’t the full story.  She thinks there’s more to it, and that evolution is only the tip of the iceberg.  I think that sums up our understanding of energy at this point, too.  We still have a “flat Earth” type of knowledge about how energy actually works.

Before I opened myself to the metaphysical as an intuitive, I’d actually never been to a psychic, tarot reader or intuitive for a reading.  I had no idea what was possible.  When I first started getting information on others who weren’t near me, I was shocked.  I went to my mentor and asked her why and how this all works.  Her answer:  “Energy is energy.  It is just how it works.”  That sums it up well though it’s not a helpful explanation at understanding the bigger picture of it all. 

The bottom line is that metaphysical energy is not bound by conventions that we are limited by as humans.  Those on the other side can see what’s going on in California and New Jersey at the same time.  They don’t have to physically be in a place to help with metaphysical work.  Thus, when they are assisting me in receiving messages, they can give me information on people who aren’t near me.  All I need is a name, permission to assist, and intention to receive the message.  Then they can get me the information my client needs.

When I was doing training to use my metaphysical gifts, my mentor intentionally set up a “blind” session for me.  Normally I would not do this kind of arrangement because of confidentiality ethics, but I trust my mentor and that she had permission from her friend to do this session.  My mentor “Sarah” told me that her friend “Mary” was having problems sleeping and that doctors couldn’t figure out what was going on.  Sarah was able to pinpoint a problem using her metaphysical gifts, but she hadn’t been able to get a solution.  That was all the information that I was given about the situation.  I didn’t have a last name for Mary or any other history on her.  When I attempted to receive a message for Mary, I got a flood of information.  The amount of information I received let me know that Mary was someone who was open to the metaphysical and able to work on her issues deeply (which turned out to be true:  Mary is another metaphysician).  I came up with a problem than almost no Western doctor would have seen as a cause of sleep deprivation, but it was the same problem that Sarah had gotten as well.  I was also able to get several options to try for relief, and Mary did get some help from one of them.

Since then, I have done long distance messages for people all over the country.  I primarily work without my clients in the same room since I find it easier to make connections to higher powers when I am alone.  I am able to use all of my energy to reach out to the other side rather than having to use part of that energy to work with the client in the same room as me.  I still don’t completely understand the reasons why or how this all works, but I know that it is amazingly true.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

(Forewarning: This is a long post!)

After my daughter Rebecca’s recent birthday and death day, a relatively new friend sent me a message asking, “I believe every person has a reason for being - if you also believe thusly, have you discerned what Rebecca's purpose in her much too short life was?”

First of all, I would like to acknowledge how beautifully this question is phrased.  This friend is a spiritual adviser and has worked with people of many faiths as they are dying.  She recognizes that her beliefs are not the beliefs of everyone, and her question left room for me to disagree with her.  It turns out that I do agree with her:  I believe that every life, no matter how short, impacts the world in some way.

Second, I want to point out that this is not a question that anyone should ask a recently bereaved parent.  It’s been 15 years since my daughter died, and this friend knows that I am willing to talk openly about my daughter’s death.  That greatly changes the situation.  In the situation of a stillbirth or neonatal loss, though, a recently bereaved parent is more likely to be in a stage where they can’t see what purpose their child’s life and death has served. They are surrounded by pain, grief, anger, depression, and many other dark feelings.  They may feel they were cheated out of the future they had envisioned.  To ask them what purpose their child’s life served will feel insulting and possibly amplify their pain.  If they bring up the topic, it’s certainly appropriate to talk to them about it, but until they have healed some of their wounds, they may not be ready to move on to this stage of understanding.

So what purpose did Rebecca’s life serve?  I think that there are many answers to that on many levels. One of the first things that came from Rebecca’s death was that my ex-husband and I established a scholarship in her memory.  We used the memorial donations from friends and family towards this scholarship, plus we put in a large amount of our own money over five years.  The Motorola Foundation matched our donations as well.  This is something we never would have done if it hadn’t been for Rebecca.  Now each year we get the joy of seeing the scholarship reward someone who devotes time and service to the Marching Owl Band (aka the MOB) at Rice University.  The annual report on the scholarship often brings me to tears, but they are good tears!

One of Rebecca’s other gifts was to her siblings who were born after her.  I had planned to breastfeed Rebecca, but I wasn’t very passionate about it.  I knew it was best for the baby, best for mama, cheapest, etc.  However, when I was holding Rebecca’s dead body in my arms, I was hit with the most overwhelming urge to nurse her.  I knew logically that I couldn’t nurse her, but the hormonal urge was amazing.  That response drove my dedication for breastfeeding my subsequent children.  I had a very rough start with nursing my twins due to their slightly early arrival (36 weeks 5 days) and rampant thrush which impacted my supply, but I was determined to breastfeed them.  Eventually we succeeded and nursed until they were almost 18 months old.  If it weren’t for that experience with Rebecca, I probably would have given up as so many overwhelmed and undersupported mothers do.

As part of my breastfeeding devotion, I discretely nursed all my subsequent children in public.  It was something I never questioned that I was going to do with my twins since I knew if I left society while breastfeeding them, I’d pretty much never see other people for many months.  This actually triggered a chain reaction.  My friends, who hadn’t publicly nursed their first children, realized that if I could discretely and comfortably nurse my babies in public, they could do the same with their younger babies.  I am sure these women’s change in their stances on breastfeeding in public helped other women feel more comfortable, too.  I see all of that change as having been instigated by my experience with wanting to nurse Rebecca so desperately.

On a much deeper level, Rebecca’s death taught me a level of compassion and understanding that I would never had known had I not lost her.  While I had lost family members and friends prior to Rebecca’s death, the death of a child is incomparable.  Only a few years after Rebecca’s death, I began speaking publicly to help health care providers, especially those in the natural childbirth community, have better resources for dealing with infant loss.  Through feedback I received from those who heard my presentations, I know I made an impact in the lives of others who subsequently lost babies.  My e-mail address and phone number were circulated for a while in the midwifery community of Austin, so I would periodically get messages or calls from women who had lost a baby and who needed to talk to someone who truly understood.  This in turn has led to the life coaching work I do with bereaved families.

On a metaphysical level, Rebecca’s spirit periodically stayed near me for almost four years after her death.  At the time, I didn’t really believe in such things, but I knew what I was experiencing.  I didn’t discuss it with anyone because I didn't think anyone would believe me.  I unfortunately didn’t know that I could interact with her, but I was aware when she was around me.  She was the first departed soul I know I encountered and experienced.  After her youngest sibling was born, I believe her spirit moved on to whatever her next mission is.

I believe in reincarnation though I respect that others don’t.  I think that my experience with Rebecca in this life ties to my most recent past life in the 1920s-1940s wherein I had both a late miscarriage (four or five months gestation) and an abortion (not my husband’s child).  I have also seen another male life of mine hundreds of years ago wherein I lost a child in battle; that loss greatly shifted my soul’s beliefs and actions in this world.  Somehow I think that my losing Rebecca in this life was to help me process those previous losses in a way I did not or could not in the previous lives.  I can’t be certain of this, but it rings as truth for me.

One other meaning for Rebecca’s short life came up for me in recent months that was deeply profound for me.  In a healing session, I learned that Rebecca’s soul also needed the experience of coming into this world and leaving it so quickly.  She was not happy about her quick departure, but it served some purpose in her soul’s growth.  This isn’t all just about me and my loss of her!  I still haven’t fully understood what that purpose might have been for her soul, but I know that she too gained something from the painful experience.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

When it comes to metaphysical gifts, all of us have different abilities.  It’s no different than any other area, really.  Some of us can shoot layups, some can hit home runs, and some of us struggle not to trip over our own two feet.  Some of us can cook a gourmet meal without a recipe book, and others of us struggle to open a can of soup.  You get the picture.  There are different ranges of gifts and abilities both in terms of quantity, quality, and actual ability.

One of the gifts I have that makes me a bit different than some others who work as psychics, intuitives, or mediums is that when I connect with those who have died and crossed over, I connect with them in their souls’ current realities.  I am able to tap into their souls’ faults, flaws and difficulties.  One of my own relations, deceased for over 20 years, showed up for me and berated me for some of my life choices; she did this under the guise of her idea of love.  To me, she was a soul who was clearly burdened and still very unhappy in her own right.

When I first started discussing this with others with strong metaphysical gifts, I was told by some, “That’s not possible!”  I was ridiculed for my experience, something that caught me off guard and shocked me.  According to the others I was speaking with, when we die, we are stripped of all our problems.  These others believe that after death, we experience some sort of heaven in the proverbial white light.  We no longer have to work on our "human" issues because they are gone.   The individuals who believe this are, in my words, “blinded by the white light.”  They are not able to experience the reality of what some souls go through after death which is more of a self-imposed purgatory.

Utterly puzzled by this response from others to something I knew to be true based on my experiences, I turned to my mentor, a woman with 40+ years of metaphysical experience, whose knowledge and guidance I cherish greatly.  Her first one-word response was profanity, just one of the reasons I appreciate her so greatly.  She agreed with my experience as being true in her experience as well.  She then was able to help me come to terms with why others would want to deny the idea that are souls are not perfect after death:  As humans on the earth plane, they need the comfort that post-death white light is completely cleansing.  She and I both do believe that the white light (which can be a synonym for God’s love if you prefer) is healing, but only as much as one wants it to be.  When one dies, if that person doesn’t feel worthy of staying in the white light and working on healing one’s soul, then it won’t happen.  Those are the souls that are suffering, but it is because they aren’t working on healing, not because the healing is not available.

So why me?  Why can I fully experience these souls in their less than perfect reality on the other side?  Surely some part of it must be where my soul is at in its own evolution.  I am a strong soul, one that some would describe as old.  Based on my past-life regressions, I have seen many past lives where I was a shaman, witch, healer or other individual with metaphysical gifts, and I suspect that is part of it.  My mentor also believes that I may have become more open to the reality of the other side through my experiences with my daughter’s death since I was so tied to her (literally) in the moments she died.  I don’t have a clear answer for this question; I just know that what I experience is my reality.

Others have tried to convince me that perhaps the souls I am encountering are not “crossed over.”  If you aren’t familiar with the term, those who aren’t crossed over are souls who have died but haven’t moved into the white light.  They are what many of us would consider ghosts.  They are stuck in between the earthly plane and the other side and usually need help to get into the white light for whatever reason.  Some of these souls experienced a sudden death and don’t realize they have died.  Others have unfinished business (that may be centuries old) that they can’t understand they have to abandon.  Souls who are in this place can be disoriented, unhappy, aggressive, or in one case I experienced, just plain bored and therefore up to no good.

However, this is not the case for the majority of the unhappy souls I encounter.  They indeed have “crossed over” but have not stayed in union with the white light.  They are lost souls in a spiritual sense, but they are well aware that they are dead and are not in need of crossing over.  Instead, they are in desperate need of believing that they are worthy of healing and that they can and should stay in the white light and work on themselves.  Most of these souls I encounter are trying to “help” relations still living here on Earth, but they are doing it from a place of judgment and misery.  It doesn’t work well.  One client’s grandfather showed up to condemn her sexuality which was not the heterosexuality he wanted for her.  That’s not really any of his business, and from my view, he is the one who needs to go work on his homophobia, sexism, and other dastardly issues.  He felt like the type of soul who didn’t want help; he was sure he was right and was going to force his beliefs on others.  I can completely understand why anyone would want to believe we wouldn’t want to run into that type again once we die!

As I was wrestling through all of these issues, I went to see one of my healers who has been working with his metaphysical gifts for over 30 years.  One of his gifts is the ability to cross over souls who are not going into the white light.  He, too, was initially skeptical of what I was saying to him because it didn’t match his experience.  However, during the session he and I had that day, my unhappy relation mentioned above showed up, and my healer was blown away by the experience of her.  He’d never encountered a soul who was still so burdened by earthly issues.  He was 100% certain that she was crossed over, but clearly she was not spending time in the white light as she needed.  At the end of the session, he just looked at me and said, “I have to revisit and revise everything I believe now.”  It was that strong of an experience, even for someone who has spent decades crossing over souls.  To me, it helped build my faith in him because he was able to open himself to the new experience I brought to the table and grow from it even when it didn’t match his previous experiences.

From my perspective, all of these experiences I have had mean that when we get to the other side, it’s not just a bed of roses. Sure, there are a lot of beautiful roses on the bed, but there’s also the potential for lots of thorns as well.  The example of someone who struggled with alcohol addiction in the earth plane illustrates the situation well.  The person no longer is burdened by that physical alcohol addiction, and freed from his/her/hir human shell, the person no longer fights the actual need to drink.  However, all the soul issues (such as insecurity, lack of love, unhappiness, and low self-esteem) are all still there, waiting for the soul to work on healing them on the other side.  Without the burden of the physical problem, though, perhaps it is easier for us to start working on the deeper issues.  However, it is really important for us to believe that we are able and deserve to be part of the white light on the other side so we can continue to heal and grow.

So consider this a forewarning if you ever decide to have me receive a message for you.  I never go looking for a specific soul to work with you; I just ask for whomever wants to talk to you.  In some cases, this means a less-than-healthy relation may show up.  Some are able to provide great insight despite their own issues.  Others give a strange but still helpful perspective through their distortions and unhappiness.  Often whatever the souls are talking about is truly a major issue in the client’s life, and hearing these souls' perspectives helps clients realize what they need to work on in the earthly plane.  In the case of my negative relation who showed up, it was a wake-up call for me to be completely honest with all those around me about who I am and the fact that I am happy with the choices I have made in my life no matter what anyone else thinks.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance