by Salicrow
In King’s novel The Dead Zone, the main character, Johnny, has a car accident that puts him into a coma. When he awakens, he finds himself bombarded with psychic input. Reading this book brought me a moment of self-awareness. My teachers up to that point had been my grandmother and spirits on the other side of the mirror. Grammy was a hillbilly who used simple words and terminology, and spirits didn’t elaborate on things. To know things about people or situations without being told or shown was simply “knowing.” To see events and moments was “seeing.” Talking to the dead wasn’t mediumship; it was just talking to the dead.
In the book, Johnny’s gifts are thrown at him all at once after the accident. He struggles to find himself and a compass of what is normal. His gift seems more like a curse, and I didn’t want that to be my story. I began to repeat in my mind: I do not want my gift to open like that. I wanted it to open naturally, like a flower blossoming. I poured my intentions into this single thought for months.
The book’s title, The Dead Zone, referred to the fact that there are dreamlike places where reality is not completely formed and the future can be changed. There are also unchangeable areas, and I think they represent karmic lessons, pieces connected to fate—things we must do. When we work with our karmic lessons, we achieve big things on the soul level. If we ignore our karmic lessons, they get harder and harder until we are forced to acknowledge them. Karma can be expiated, but it can’t be changed.
Sometimes I envision or “see” the future like a spiderweb in which the support strands represent our karmic lessons, the threads that are important to our souls. The woven strand, which spirals around the web, is the narrative. It contains many optional components and changeable bits. In this analogy, I see myself as the spider, capable of quickly scampering across the web, responding to the vibrations felt on the threads. As I navigate these vibrations, I’m feeling for the largest obstacles and the best opportunities, and I’m looking for the tools that will most effectively serve the situation.
I’ve received many teachings from works of fiction, but The Dead Zone remains among the most pivotal for me. Not only did it give me an introduction to the language of the metaphysical world; it also opened me to the concept of changing the future.
16
Body Dowsing
My conscious trust of intuition began when I was in middle school, when I started noticing sensations in my body before major events. The events weren’t major on a global scale, but in my life they were. Things that had an effect on me personally created sensations in my body, and this would happen moments, hours, or days before the events occurred.
Most of the time this involved getting sick to my stomach. My intestines would grumble, and I would feel crampy and a bit nauseous. Along with the physical discomfort, I would feel anxious and jittery. After a while I started to notice that the anxious feeling that accompanied the stomachache was similar to the expectation I felt when awaiting something. As these experiences of discomfort and anticipation became more common, I was able to see that they were invariably followed by something significant happening in my personal life.
My mind began to keep track of these episodes, and I started looking for triggers. On one occasion I was riding the school bus home when the familiar symptoms of stomachache and anxiety showed up. I got off the bus at my stop, and as I was walking down my driveway, I noticed that the tension I felt was getting stronger. When I walked in the door, my mother told me my grandmother was in the hospital. I immediately knew that my stomachache and anxiety were related to this information. My confirmation came moments later when the sensations began to subside, showing that my reactions of physical discomfort and emotional tension were connected to my psychic intuition.
Although Grammy’s stay in the hospital was brief, the episode was significant. My parents began to acknowledge that her life force was fading and she could pass at any time.
Shortly after Grammy was released from the hospital, I talked to her about the emotional and physical sensations I was having before I learned of her situation. She told me that when we “know things,” our body often knows them before our mind. Our mind needs to be trained to think differently, whereas our bodies respond like the animals that we are.
I often think of her simple answer when teaching dowsing to students. It’s important to remember that our bodies are the truest tools of divination. L-rods, pendulums, and all the other tools of the trade are simply outward extensions of the energy flows in our bodies. There’s nothing wrong with using these tools, but when we don’t have them at hand, we can develop our bodies to be used as a literal built-in lie-detector divination tool. It is a pleasure and a relief to work with the one thing that I know always truly belongs to me. Having great trust in my animal instincts means spending time deciphering the language my organism speaks in response to psychic input.
Within a short time of this initial recognition, I was able to gauge the severity of an experience by using my psychic radar, sensing how intense my anxiety and stomachache were, how poignant my gut feeling. Following that feeling was always in my best interest.
My “lie detector” is in my solar plexus (the lowest point where the two halves of the rib cage join together on the front of the body). Whenever someone speaks untruthfully to me, I feel that part of my body constricts as if I have a knot at the top of my stomach. This sensation, which is different from my reaction to prophetic stimuli, is a natural form of clairsentience.
Not all people respond at the same location in the body or in the same way. Some people may feel pressure, some may feel heat, some a general discomfort. Although clairsentient sensation can be located in different areas for different people, it does not generally move about. Once we locate the area we respond from, we can always find it. And once we recognize the nature of our response, it stays the same too. This helps us develop seemingly abstruse sensations into real tools.
17
Grammy Brown Is Dead
Toward the end of my childhood, as I read more widely and became acquainted with numerology and dream interpretation, I was eager to share my findings with my grandmother. She listened thoughtfully, stopping me from time to time to interject that these things were all fine and good, but I must remember that my own interpretations and feelings were more valuable than a system categorized in a book. This wasn’t a criticism; she was just reminding me that each of us has our own mind, and the same image can have different meanings to different people. What is divination or astral projection or dowsing for one person may take an entirely different form for another. Our life’s experiences affect us individually, creating a symbolic vocabulary that is ours alone.
Grammy’s lack of metaphysical terminology didn’t hold her back; she simply spoke of things and acted experientially. She used playing cards for divination as effectively as tarot because she had mastered the numerology and patterns behind any deck. Her charms and trinkets may have lacked esoteric sophistication, but they were potently charged with intention.
Most of Grammy’s stories became familiar to me, and I loved hearing them, like watching my favorite movie or re-reading my favorite book. They made me feel connected to my ancestors and to her, and there was always something new to be gleaned from the same folkloric tale. Her presence was a living font of wisdom and affection.
The weaker her physical health got, the more she spoke to me about leadership and kindness. “Wisdom keepers” had a responsibility to their community and to those who didn’t carry the gifts of “seeing” and “knowing.” It was not just the living who needed this attentiveness from us; the dead needed it too. She was preparing me to assume the mantle of community and family leadership.
As I got older, Grammy and I were like opposite sides of a pendulum swing. My body was blossoming, moving from child to adult, and my grandmother’s container was decaying, dying, moving from old to ancient to the end of its time in this dimension. It had become noticeably difficult for her to get around, and she was in constant
pain. Her foot was still infected, and the doctors couldn’t do anything about it. Her balance was unsteady, and she grew tired easily.
Every bad thing that happens to us at the age of twelve is very nearly the end of the world, and we are the only ones to have suffered so wrongly. Existing in the transitional space between child and teenager is an awkward and generally unpleasant experience. I learned many hard lessons that came from my own arrogance and cruelty at the time, my failure to use my charisma generously, but these lessons paled by comparison to the lesson learned through losing my best friend, my mentor, and the center of my universe.
Just after the New Year, Grammy ended up in the hospital. The infection in her toe was still there, her heart had been acting up, and she had come down with pneumonia. The decision was finally made to move her into a nursing home. There was no space available in the assisted-care facility in Whitefield, so she was to be moved to a facility in the town of Colebrook until space opened up in Whitefield. Grammy was angry. She vowed that she would never go to a nursing home, especially not one that would take her almost an hour away from her family.
On January 19, the day before Grammy was to be moved to the nursing home in Colebrook, we got a call from the hospital. I stood holding my breath as my father talked to a nurse on the phone. When he hung up, he told us they didn’t think Grammy would make it through the night. I felt sick and wanted to disappear. I wanted to stop time, hide in the space in between my breaths, and stay there until she was better. But there was no time for that. In a blur of chaos, we were in the car and on our way.
We had to detour on the way to the hospital to pick up my Uncle Ted. When we finally reached the hospital, a nurse came out to meet us. She escorted us to a meeting room near the nurse’s station. I was confused; I couldn’t understand why they were delaying us from seeing her when every minute counted. The room was cold and sterile, white walls with a conference table and a few chairs. I knew something bad had happened because my stomach had been a mess all day, and it hadn’t gotten better when we arrived at the hospital. I didn’t want to think about what that could mean.
Someone came into the room—a nurse, doctor, counselor, I don’t remember. I don’t remember if it was a man or a woman. I only remember what they said: “I’m sorry, but you missed her by twenty minutes.” I didn’t understand what that meant until she explained that Grammy Brown had died twenty minutes before we got there. My world came tumbling down upon me like a ton of bricks. I couldn’t believe it. It had to be a misunderstanding. There was no way she could die without me saying goodbye to her.
I walked into her room on legs that felt like wood, stiff and heavy, difficult to move. My mind was foggy. I couldn’t think. I kept waiting to awake from this nightmare, but the dream didn’t go away, for it was the reality of this world.
As I saw Grammy lying there in the bed, I thought the nurses had been wrong, because I could still feel her there. I felt her energy in the room. I did not recognize that she was now a spirit, and that explained why her presence still filled the room even though her dead body lay before me. My mother made me touch her body so that I could see and feel for myself that she was no longer in it. It was cold and stiff, lacking the presence of a soul, for her soul was now free.
I was mad. I was mad at her for leaving before I got there. I was mad at my uncle for making us pick him up on the way, because if we hadn’t gone to get him we would have been there in time. Twenty minutes was how long we had wasted in getting him. If we had just gone straight to the hospital, none of this would have happened. My thoughts were illogical and broken. I was broken. The person who was the sun of my solar system had left it. How could I possibly ever be okay again?
The wake and funeral went by in a blur. I remember what I wore: black pinstriped pants, a white shirt, and a black ribbon tied around my neck in a bow. I remember the smell of the funeral home: musty like an old lady’s perfume. I remember the ridiculous amount of makeup they put on my grandmother, making her look nothing like herself. Most of all I remember being angry.
I was still angry at my Uncle Ted for making us late. In my twelve-year-old mind, I imagined she would still be alive if not for that twenty minutes. I was angry at all the people—and there were a lot—who kept trying to hug me and tell me they understood how I felt. I wanted to scream at them, You cannot possibly know how I feel.
The whole time I was at the funeral home, through the days of wakes and the funeral, I could feel Grammy with me. This only made me more upset, because I felt like it was all somehow a bad joke or dream. My mother kept making me go up and touch the body, over and over again. It was Grammy’s body, but she wasn’t in it.
It took me years to get over Grammy Brown’s death, and even now, reliving her passing has been a tear-filled journey. The age I was when she passed and the void her death created were pivotal in the formation of who I am today. I know her body had failed her and she needed to go. I also know she needed to leave me so I would learn to find my own strength and become the woman I was meant to be. But if I’d had a magic wand that would have allowed her to live forever, I would have used it then—and if I had that wand today, I might use it now.
Part 3
Fate Intervenes
18
Disordered Thoughts
Grammy’s death was an explosion that went off in the middle of our family. It affected us in different ways and sent most of us barreling outward into space. She was the matriarch extraordinaire, and we had all relied on her to keep us centered and on track. No one had the ability to step up and take her place, for even the grown-ups among us were nothing more than big kids by comparison. In many ways we were like orphans with no mother to guide the way.
My mourning had many phases and contained many emotions. The base of these feelings was deep sadness, but outwardly I was pissed. I was pissed that I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. I was pissed that I couldn’t prevent her death. I was pissed that my dad was a dick when he drank, which he did often. I was pissed at God for the hardships of my life. I felt I had been wronged by the universe. After all, I had been a good girl, an honor-roll student, a well-mannered Girl Scout. I went to Sunday school and strived to be “good.” I was the kid whom adults described as mature. But it didn’t seem to matter at all how I behaved, and that seemed unfair. I thought that if I got the same results from being good as everyone else got from being bad, I might as well be bad. After all, it seemed to be more fun.
These thoughts marked the beginning of my teenage rebellion. Grammy Brown’s death placed me on a self-destructive path. I had once cared about doing the good thing and making her proud; now I didn’t care about anything.
I missed her profoundly, but in my grief, I couldn’t see or hear her the way I could see and hear other spirits. This hurt me more than anything else—the feeling that she had truly abandoned me. I was lost without her, floating around in space like debris. I didn’t know how to find her.
After many years of connecting people with their beloved dead, I came to understand why it was so difficult for me to make contact with Grammy Brown. When people are mourning the loss of a loved one on a very deep level, they often form a protective wall or bubble around themselves. People do this when they badly want to contact the departed person but they fear they will never be able to. This combination of fear and desire causes a hardening of the energy field that surrounds all living things. This hardened aura works as a repellent, keeping the spirit of the loved one at bay.
One interesting part of my work is seeing how easily people can bring down this shield. Simply calling on their dead out loud, repetitively, from the same location, slowly starts to lower the shield. I have witnessed this when doing spirit communication. Recognizing it for what it is, I simply ask the living guest to tell me who they’re looking for. I explain that their asking for the loved one to come forward will help to bring down the bubble keeping them out.
It’s remarkable how powerful our personal belief system
s are in creating our reality. When we hold onto a fear that we may never have contact with our beloved dead, we create an energetic pattern that proves us right, showing that we cannot have the contact we desire. When we shift our view, our thoughts become more fluid and open to possibilities, and we begin to create pathways necessary for achieving our desires.
It is far easier for spirits to see us than it is for us to see them. We are like candles in the darkness to them, our light shining forth, drawing them toward us through the veil. In a sense, a medium is simply someone who gives off a brighter light, like a lighthouse, illuminating the path for others to see. This luminosity or energetic brightness also helps the medium to perceive the world beyond the veil, making it possible for him or her to communicate with the dead. Natural mediums, those born with the gift, have been developing this skill for lifetimes.
At the time of Grammy’s death, I didn’t understand how spirit communication worked; nor did I know anything about auras. If I had possessed this knowledge, I would have known that by releasing my fear I could have maintained contact with her.
For many years I’ve pondered whether I would be the person I am today if I had not been so devastated by Grammy Brown’s death. I don’t think I would be. I needed to learn firsthand what it felt like to lose someone I loved dearly. Grammy’s death and my inability to access her were critical lessons on my path, helping me understand the pain most people feel at the death of a loved one. The emotionally and spiritually trying experiences of my life have been my best teachers, and their lessons have shaped me as a healer, medium, and person. I can find the beloved dead of others in part because I experienced what it was like to lose my own. In order to find Grammy, I had to find not only myself but the universe again. That is what seasoned me as a psychic.