I was disturbed but not convinced. I had a ready explanation: I had been reading people’s faces and body language. I had looked into their eyes, which is not something people often do. I had said things I observed and intuited but hadn’t brought into consciousness. The workshop focused that consciousness, but not perfectly. I’d also made a kind of fool of myself.
The next day, we sat in circles of six, and a trainer sat with us. First we did physical healing. Our trainer for that was a cherubic-looking woman with long, wavy, blond hair. She often said, with great relish and anticipation, “Love me up.” Lots of hugging was required. As usual, I felt no energy when healing or being healed. The only surprise was that when the healers worked on me they concentrated on my shoulders and neck, areas I needed help with and hadn’t mentioned. But, then, who doesn’t need help with their shoulders and neck?
Later, we practiced giving messages. Elaine called this verbal healing. We didn’t try for spirits, just messages. We were to say whatever images, words, or feelings came to us. The lights were always left on.
The first task was to figure out whom to give a message to. Our teachers said we might see a spirit form around a certain person, as mediums often did, but more likely we would merely feel drawn to that person. We might sense energy around someone, or a color, or simply the inclination to pick a certain person.
When one student had trouble getting a message, our trainer suggested that she give a message about childhood. When my turn came, I tried the same technique. I picked a blonde to my left and asked whether I could come to her. She said yes. Then I sat there mouth-breathing, like an adenoidal dunce. I had nothing to say.
I closed my eyes. At first I saw only blackness. Then the skirt of a dress and the legs of a little girl appeared. One moment nothing, and the next moment they were there. I couldn’t see the child’s shoulders or head.
“I see a dress that has a full skirt and a petticoat under it.” I was laughing skeptically even as I said it. “It’s the old-fashioned kind of slip, a can-can that makes the dress bell out.
“The dress has a sash, a wide sash,” I said. “It ties in the back in a big bow. It’s rose-colored.”
I felt foolish, and a refrain was singing at the back of my brain, You’re making this up. You’re making this up. You’re making this up. It was unnerving me.
“I know that’s ridiculous,” I said. “Who wears a sash?”
The other members of the circle laughed, but I didn’t open my eyes.
Like a diver about to plunge, I pulled a long breath of air into my lungs.
“That’s what I see. The sash is rose-colored. The dress is off-white with flowers on it. Not flowers massed together but spread out on the background of white. And they’re big, but not huge. Red and pink, I think.”
I didn’t think. I knew. I could see it. But what was it?
It’s a desperate attempt to fit in, the voice said at the back of my head. You’ve conjured up something because you don’t want to be embarrassed. Cowardly to the core.
Now my words started to speed up.
“You were a girly sort of little girl.”
I stopped. Part of my mind was groping for how to put this so I wouldn’t insult her. Another part was still trying to shut me up.
You’re extrapolating, the voice of reason said. You’re building on what you’ve seen, you phony. The woman is wearing makeup. Nice clothes, well pressed. Her posture is good. So you’ve turned her into a priss. Admit it.
“Not prissy, exactly, but girly,” I said, “very feminine. You liked to dress up and wear fancy dresses. You thought that was just a wonderful thing to do.”
You’re being ridiculous, the voice said. Imagining things and passing them off as truth, embroidering on what anyone could see and making it into some great revelation. Disgusting. Stop it.
I opened my eyes.
“What kind of sleeves did it have?” she asked.
“What? I don’t know. I didn’t look.”
“Well, look,” she said.
I closed my eyes. The vision was gone.
“Were they short?” she asked.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know,” I said. “They might have been.”
“Little girls did wear sashes fifty-one years ago,” she said. “My mother made that dress.”
The voice said, She’s being nice, you dimwit. Don’t buy it.
“Oh, come on,” I said, sounding a little mad. “You’re kidding me.”
“No,” she said. “I’m not. That was my favorite dress.”
What could I say to that? I laughed.
Next, I picked a woman to my right. Again I closed my eyes and saw nothing. Then, in the lower right corner of the darkness, the figure of a little girl emerged. She had blond hair, cut short like the woman before me. She was a bit chubby. The woman had a stocky build.
That’s so lame, said the voice.
I kept looking at the little girl in my mind. She was leaning against a silver-colored pole.
“It’s a swing set,” I said.
Great, jeered the voice. You see a kid. You see a playground. Such a put-on.
I sighed. Why was I doing this? I didn’t believe in spirit messages or telepathy or whatever this was. Eyelids still shut, I lowered my eyes toward the middle of my body.
Navel gazing? the voice said.
I ignored it. A sense of sadness fell over me. Lonely. She felt so lonely. I didn’t want to say that. So I fumbled.
“I don’t know why. I don’t see anyone else on the playground, but there are children there. Is anyone on the swing set? Why are you alone?” My words were slow this time. My voice sounded so small and mournful. This was bad.
What are you doing? the voice needled me again. You’ve run away with yourself, haven’t you?
I couldn’t stop now. I had to say something upbeat.
“You loved to swing,” I said, trying to put some life in my tone. “You loved the freedom of it.”
It was no good. I felt too sad. “But you’re not swinging now. You’re just standing there. I don’t know why.”
I opened my eyes.
“That was me,” the woman said. In her face was all the sadness I’d been feeling. “I never played with anyone on the playground. I wanted to, but I was afraid. I stood at the edge of the swing set watching the other children to make sure no one fell off.”
Once again I didn’t know what to say. But this time, I didn’t laugh.
My next try was a woman with short curly hair who looked to be in her thirties. Elaine suggested I tell her about her own children. I shut my eyes. Nothing. Then the images came.
“I see three children. Two boys and a girl. The girl is taller, and the boys are about the same age.”
“Tell her something about one of the children,” said our trainer.
“The girl has brown hair that has a little wave in it. She wears it about shoulder-length. She’s a tall, thin child. She’s about eleven, I think.”
You’re describing a young version of the mother, the voice said. Flimsy whimsy.
Was I cheating again? It was impossible not to. The things I observed with my physical eyes melded into the visions supplied by my inner eye. Of course they would.
Suddenly my mouth seemed to take off as it had the day before.
“This little girl is quite willful. She is intent on getting her way. In fact, her brothers sometimes resent her for being bossy.”
Now I was insulting this woman’s child. Where were these cheeky opinions coming from?
I opened my eyes. The curly-haired woman was laughing in a rueful way.
“That’s my daughter. That’s exactly how she is. When her big sister doesn’t do what she wants she chases her around the house.”
“Do you have two younger sons?” I asked.
“No. I have two girls, but the boys might have been other children in my life,” she said. “There are two boy cousins.”
“I was wrong about the boys,” I said
to the trainer.
“No. You’re never wrong. There are two boys. You just don’t know who they are,” she said.
I’d like to accept that, but I don’t. I was speaking to people about things I had no knowledge of. I was giving character assessments that my normal mind would have never ventured. If I was speaking from some kind of divine guidance, then all was well and good and true. But I wasn’t. I was wrong. So now what?
The messages I got from Elaine and fellow class members were surprisingly congruent. They focused on things I’d been pondering, such as what to do next, how to manage so I would have some life while writing a book. Were they guessing? Putting together what I’d told them with impressions and calling it otherworldly?
Probably. I was doing that too. I knew I was, but something more was happening. If my brain was conjuring these images, it was doing so without my complicity. Despite what the voice said, I wasn’t trying to fool people. I was telling them what I saw, felt, and thought. More important, people were claiming the truth I told them.
My classmates went home blissful and full of new power. I fell into a funk so deep that I didn’t get out of bed the first day of my return home. What was this all about? Where did I get that information? If I accepted what my experience was telling me, who would I be? A dippy prophet person wandering around talking about signs and spirit voices.
A few days later my neighbor asked about the weekend. I told her. After hearing my visions of dresses and swing sets, she said, “It sounds like something you’d do at a slumber party.”
Next she said, “I wonder what the probability is of someone being able to describe a dress from someone’s childhood. All little girls have a special dress. And every child spends time on a playground.”
I knew exactly where she was going. I’d been there a dozen times myself. But those images were so clear, and the people’s reactions were so powerful. Like a good seeker of truth, I considered endless paranoid possibilities. Were those women plants? Were they acting? Maybe the whole class was a setup. Maybe everyone there was a plant.
My mother suggested I might have been hypnotized. Maybe so. Maybe we were all hypnotized. When I told Shelley what happened in the class, she began calling me Madame Christine, Sees All, Knows All. When I told my sister, she reassured me.
“Don’t worry. In a couple of days you’ll come up with a way not to believe it.” She was right. I could do that. I would do that.
35
A month later I returned to Lily Dale for the second class. It was October. The leaves had turned to such a brilliant gold that the air seemed to glow.
It was Saturday, and we were doing past-life readings. It was my turn. I don’t believe in past lives, but that was a minor matter to the teachers. Just do it, they said. It doesn’t matter if reincarnation is literally true. Many people in Lily Dale think we have chosen the lives we are now living, but even if reincarnation isn’t a literal fact, the stories and messages we give function as metaphors for psychological truth, Elaine said. Our intent is to give healing messages, and so we do. Our listeners take the meaning they need.
Don’t analyze. Just do. Give what you receive.
We sat in the usual circle of six. The room was brightly lighted.
I gazed into the eyes of a woman named Liz, our trainer. My mind was blank. I tried to slow my breathing. I always panic if I’m not performing well. They were all waiting. Then I had it. Not an image, but a word. I pushed it from my mind. Then it came again. So clear, so strong, that it was as if someone was hissing in my ears.
Witch!
“What do you get?” Liz said. “Just tell me whatever you get.”
The word came whispering again, full of menace. Witch.
I was going to tell this woman, our trainer, that she was a witch? It was insulting. It was ridiculous. It was a cliché.
“Huh. Well…,” I stalled. Everyone was waiting. I shut my eyes.
In the darkness I saw a woman dressed like a peasant. It was two hundred, three hundred, maybe four hundred years ago. How could I know how long ago? I’m not an expert in peasant fashions.
The image appeared in the lower left quadrant of my visual field. She was hustling across a village square.
Good grief, I thought. This is so obvious. You see her in a long dress because Liz is wearing a long dress. How unoriginal. But it was all I had. So I gave it.
“You’re very busy and full of energy and bustling about. People are drawn to you, and you’re a kind of center to the community.”
“What do I do?”
“You mean for a living? I don’t get that,” I said. “You must be some kind of housewife or mother. All I see is that you’re important to the community, and people come to you for help, and you’re able to give it to them.”
“What do I do?” she asked again.
“Do?” I asked. I was not going to say it. “I don’t know. Maybe you’re married. Maybe you’re a housewife. I don’t know.”
“Are you sure?” she said. “Aren’t you getting anything?”
“I don’t get that,” I said. “Sorry.”
She looked amused.
“Okay,” she said lightly. “What does this mean for now?” A rule of the past-life readings in Elaine’s classes was that they must always have a present-day meaning. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be healing.
I paused, opened my mouth, and the fast-talker was back.
“It means that you have that same kind of role in this life. It will be harder to understand how important you are because in this time we value established careers more than we value what is done for the community,” I said. “Your true calling is to work outside formal professions in helping people, in binding them together and helping them.”
Late that night, we were all grouped together for a walk through the Dale, toward the woods and Inspiration Stump. We were going to “play” medium, and we hoped the spirits would oblige by gathering around. At least my classmates were. I didn’t intend to participate. Liz was ahead of me. I caught up with her.
“You know that message today? There was one thing I didn’t say. This is embarrassing, but I kept getting the word witch.”
She didn’t break stride. “I know that. I knew what you were going for. I was a witch. Lots of people have told me that. They burned me at the stake. I’ve gone back and felt the flames and the smoke. It was agonizing,” she said, quite calm and matter-of-fact.
I dropped back. She went on. Just another Lily Dale evening. You’d think I’d be used to it by now.
I didn’t expect that I would ever see spirit loved ones, but when it came time for us to give those kinds of readings, I did see what might have been one. I picked a woman who looked to be in her mid-thirties and said that I saw a figure of an older woman. She was portly, had blue eyes, I thought. I could hardly see her face, but I saw that she had fluffy white hair.
“That would be my mother-in-law,” the woman said.
My eyes were still shut. I saw a table in front of the old woman. I said so.
“That fits,” the woman said.
The table was laid out as if for dinner. The words “you are at the table” came into my mind. Too banal. I was tired of being a channel for cliché.
I opened my eyes, looked at the woman, and shrugged. She seemed about to cry.
“I’m so happy that my mother-in-law showed up. I came here hoping to see her. Thank you.”
Afterward the woman came to me with more explanation.
“My mother-in-law and I were once very close. When her son and I were getting a divorce, I wanted to see her, but her son discouraged me, saying that I wasn’t part of the family anymore and there was no reason for me to see her. Then she died. I never got to tell her how much she meant to me. I was afraid that she didn’t know how much I loved her.”
Now the words I hadn’t said had some meaning.
“Well, she’s here,” I said, my voice taking on that mediumistic authority that I’d heard in others so many tim
es. I might as well do it up right. “She’s here. And she says, ‘You still have a place at the table.’”
I felt a chill go through me as I said the words, and I saw the former daughter-in-law’s eyes fill with tears.
At the break, instead of running for the snack table as I usually did, I confronted Liz.
“What is this?” I asked. “What’s going on here? What are we doing?”
“What do you think we’re doing?” she replied.
“I don’t know. I’m asking.”
“What I think doesn’t matter. What do you think? You have to answer that question for yourself.”
“All right. I’ll guess. I think we’re all connected in some way. People are. I don’t know how, but we are. This class helped us to tap into that connection. That’s what’s going on here.”
“Sounds good to me,” she said, and then she walked away.
So, okay. There is a channel to increased consciousness and knowledge. We can access it. Sometimes. But I was still stuck, as no one else in the class seemed to be, over the fact that what came through the channel was often wrong. My first experience in the October class had reaffirmed both those realities. People know things. Is what they know right? Yes. Is what they know wrong? Yes. Was nobody else bothered by this?
At one point, we were instructed to line up in two circles, one inside the other. When the music began, one circle would move clockwise and the other would move counterclockwise. When the music stopped, so would we. We would look deeply into the eyes of the person before us and give a message.
I didn’t get a thing. Time after time I’d look into someone’s eyes and see nothing. Just two peepers staring back at me. I’d look up, look down, look sideways, shut my eyes, open my eyes, look into their eyes, say my prayer, and nothing. Nobody else seemed to be having the same trouble.
“You think you’re here to do a book, but you’re wrong,” said the first woman. “This is about your heart.” She motioned toward her own chest. “You’re here to have your heart opened.”
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