Jump Girl

by Salicrow

  As Lawton had said in my dream, I had a long way to go and needed to find solace and quiet in a very loud world.

  35

  Adam

  Adam is my most trusted spirit companion, my doorman, and my friend. I have worked with him for more than fifteen years, and I can say without a doubt that he is one of the hardest-working, most honest spirits I know. He accompanies me every time I work with other spirits and watches over me when I am energetically vulnerable. I love him!

  I briefly knew Adam in life; he was my youngest sister’s best friend. Despite the fact that I hardly knew him, I thought of him as kindred. This in itself was unusual, as I didn’t hang out with the same crowd as my sister and rarely cared one way or another for her friends. But Adam was different; he was contagiously lovable in an inspired-hippie-boy kind of way.

  He died very young after falling ill while traveling, and he never made it back home to his family and friends. I went to his funeral and found it to be a celebration of life. His family and friends did well by him; their stories and offerings were truly representative of an adventurous lover of life. He lived to the fullest in a short time, something he shared with my friend John.

  When Adam started communicating with me on the Ouija board, it became obvious why I had always loved him, for we discovered we had known each other in many, many lifetimes. We had been married in one life, family in a few, but most often we were dear friends. Some of this information I got from communicating with him on the board, but the information came to me in many forms. I had dreams about the lives the spirits spoke of, catching glimpses of them while bathing in the tub, walking through stores, driving in my car. I was living in the physical world—the waking world, as I generally refer to it—but I was also stepping in and out of my many other incarnations in which I’d known both John and Adam, as well as lifetimes in which I’d known my husband, friends, and other loved ones. My worlds were colliding.

  As my communication with Adam progressed, he started talking about his mother. He kept asking me to make contact with her, to let her know of his continued existence. I felt uncomfortable with this idea and told him so. He persisted and gave me more and more proof that he was who he said he was. For instance, he told me stories of things he’d said and done while hanging out with my sister, sharing conversations and details. He also told me unique things about himself: how he hated tomatoes because he ate so many as a child that he made himself sick, and how he used to play the clarinet. It reached the point where I called my sister, told her some of the stories, and asked her if any of it made sense to her. She was shocked, and she confirmed that the stories were true. I was indeed talking to my sister’s best friend, Adam. I was talking to the dead.

  Confirmation allowed me to step more fully into the experience I was having with spirit. Adam took it upon himself to be my day-to-day guide through the world of spirit. He made it amusing while at the same time giving me strength, as he always seemed to have my back. I now consider Adam to be among my best friends.

  He spent a lot of time on my training, sometimes playing games that were meant to teach me the rules of engagement in the world of spirit. Given that he had just passed from the world of the living, he was adept at the world of computers and electronic games, so his form of teaching was modern and often reminded me of playing a video game.

  One of the games we played, a form of capture and escape, had a Bugs Bunny feeling to it. In my mind’s eye he would turn himself to smoke, and I would in turn become a straw and suck him up. He would then become water with the full force of a fire hose and blast himself out of the straw. If I became a butterfly, he became a net. We played these games in many versions, building my capacity to move freely in the world of spirit.

  Adam was a funny dude. He would show up at inopportune moments and say something hilarious while I was standing by myself in the aisle of the grocery store or when I was waiting quietly in a group. His words or appearance often took me by surprise, and I would burst out laughing only to realize I looked like a crazy lady, talking to herself and laughing like a lunatic for no apparent reason.

  By this point, when working with the Ouija board I found that as the planchette flew across the board, it didn’t move as quickly as my mind. I knew the destination of the pointer before it landed on a letter, and single letters would give me whole words. Within weeks I stopped using the planchette completely and let my eyes work as the cursor. My body swayed slightly when I worked with the board in that way, and communication became much clearer. Spirits still spelled out words for me, deciphering their messages through the reading, but eventually that was no longer necessary. I had refined my ability to communicate with spirit on the Ouija board so that I wasn’t even using my eyes as cursors anymore; I merely looked at the board from time to time for confirmation. I still held it on my lap but let go of the need to have words spelled out.

  The Ouija board shift took place when I was introduced to a spirit named Tamin, a visitor from my past. Tamin was a Scottish Druid who had spent much of his time in isolation, navigating the spirit world and the domain of nature. Adam introduced me to Tamin by saying he was a friend and I would someday work with him in healing. Tamin taught me I could use a crystal as an amplifying tool and would hear him better if I was holding one in my pocket.

  I had a breakthrough with Tamin while driving home one day with a cloudy piece of quartz in my pocket. I was listening to the radio when I heard a male voice say, “Red bird flies east.”

  When I got home I ran to the board, and Tamin was waiting for me. He quickly spelled out the sentence, Red bird flies east. Though Tamin did not become an important part of my journey until much later in my opening, his brief introduction in the early days gave me the confidence I needed to understand that I was hearing spirits and knew what they were saying to me.

  Adam also introduced me to a spirit named Damin, my husband’s spirit guide. By then Noel was quite aware that there something new happening with me and the spirit realm, and he had already been introduced to psychic knowing, energetic healing, and witchcraft by being married to me. He knew I saw spirits and they talked to me in my dreams, but this was an escalation.

  One night I was awakened at 3 a.m. by the spirit of a man who had recently died. He told me he was a truck driver who had lived in Barton, Vermont, a town just twenty minutes from where I lived. He said he’d had a heart attack while driving; he drove his truck into a lake and never made it home. This man, whom I did not know, pleaded with me to call his wife and insisted that she needed to know he was still in the universe somewhere. By then I knew from experience that he might believe his wife wanted to hear about him, but she might not be open to a complete stranger presenting her with such information. Plus, I didn’t want to do it. I was sure that my calling didn’t involve calling strangers to pass messages from the dead.

  I told the truck driver I couldn’t help him and tried to go back to sleep. He woke me twice more that night and again the following evening. I was exhausted and didn’t know what to do about my predicament. As I searched my frazzled mind for a solution, Adam spoke up. You need a doorman, he said, someone to watch out for you, to be your eyes and ears on this side of the veil and keep spirits away when you’re busy or exhausted.

  This made perfect sense. I owned a bar, so I knew what the doorman’s job was. He checked people at the entry, determining whether they were safe to let in; he kept out people who came with negative intentions or who were too emotional to be positive company. He passed messages, when appropriate. He enforced the hours of operation.

  Grammy Brown had come by to visit a few times during my intensive interaction with the spirit world, and I knew that, as much as I loved her, I was far too emotional in her presence. She couldn’t act as my doorman. I thought about John, but our past feelings for each other made the situation confusing and his presence distracting. It also felt inappropriate for a married woman, even a psychic one, to have a former boyfriend as a spirit doorman. Anyo
ne who has lost a loved one, particularly one they were in love with, understands that those feelings do not die with death. Even though John and I had separated years before his passing, constant contact with him was hard for me, and for Noel.

  When Adam volunteered for the position, he told me it had been his plan all along to take this role with me. We had planned our connection with each other; the level of contact we would have while both living and after he preceded me into the world of spirit was intentional. We could have a strong connection without emotional attachment and the complications of relationship.

  Adam stepped into his role with ease. My nights were no longer interrupted by passing visitors, and my communication with spirits was amplified and extended by the confidence that someone had my back.

  36

  Opening to Spirit

  Proving that Adam was real, that I was indeed talking to him in spirit, reinforced that I was also speaking to John. These confirmations paved the way for me to open communication with others as well.

  At this point Rosemary stepped into my life. She was the first spirit to step forward whom I had not known in this lifetime, yet I did know her. She felt familiar from the moment I first sensed her on the board. She was the spirit who had introduced herself to me as Sarah and called me to the board the very first time I used it. She was presenting herself once again, only this time under a different name and with a slight personality change in her energy.

  Spirits can alter their appearance, usually shifting among the ages of their previous life. Some spirits, though—older ones, those who have jobs and work in the spirit world—change their personae between lifetimes. Rosemary was one of those. Her spirit was old.

  Rosemary was also a no-nonsense, firm spirit. She first showed up to tell me she was there because the boys had been letting me push them around. She started talking to me about how important it was that I stop using the board and instead open up and simply listen to the voice of spirit.

  Talking with John and Adam had felt like hanging out with old friends, but talking to Rosemary felt like business. She made me realize that I was being trained, that my teachers had arrived and they were the dead.

  Under Rosemary’s tutelage my study became more serious. I have always been a lover of the mysteries of life, the dark, shadowy bits that hold secrets, even when they scare me. The darkness holds fascination for me. I like to be the light that steps into it and illuminates its wonders. I liken my psyche to that of Indiana Jones, although most of my adventures involve the spirit realm. That said, my journey has had many struggles and obstacles, and despite everything, there were moments when I questioned my sanity. After all, I was still a mom and PTA member.

  Rosemary began calling my other senses into play, asking me to locate her presence in the room and describe what she looked like and what she was doing. The visual sensation was complex, for I could see with both my physical eyes and my hidden third eye, located between the eyebrows. When I see a spirit, I discern a rough outline of them in this dimension. I can gauge their height, build, gender, and general appearance from this side of my vision. I can also see and track their motion if they move across the room. If they embrace a living loved one, I see it with my physical eyes, but as a shadow, a murky shape I can see through. At the same time, though, I get a clear, full-color, detailed image in my mind as transmitted by my third eye. The details often look like a snapshot or even a videotape.

  One day Peter arrived, a spirit that Rosemary had told me would be coming. He was an attractive man in his forties with a close-cut beard and medium brown hair. He had intense eyes and carried himself like someone important. I could see him before he introduced himself through the Ouija board. I had the strong feeling that I had known him during many other lifetimes and that his arrival was important.

  When he spoke to me on the board, he asked if I knew who he was. I replied that I didn’t but that he felt and looked familiar. As we had this exchange, images flashed through my head, and I kept seeing difficult moments in my life when I had experienced intervention by spirit. I began to wonder if he, too, had been around me in those critical times when Sarah/Rosemary had also been watching over me. Had he been protecting me too?

  I could feel the familiar pressure building up in my forehead. My third eye was pulsating. I went to lie down on my bed, feeling as though I could fall asleep. As my physical eyes closed, my third eye opened, and images flashed quickly through my mind. I saw my life in snapshots, jumping back and forth from childhood to the present a flash. I saw an infinity symbol lit up like a neon light. I began to follow its path as if I was locked into a track, making a sideways figure eight over and over again. My mind began to fluctuate between scenes of my life and the infinity symbol. I was moving deeper and further back in time, through landscapes and eras that were distantly familiar. It became clear that I was visiting Egypt, Turkey, England, Israel, Ireland, Scotland, Iceland, and the United States, jumping into lifetimes that were already familiar and ones I had not yet seen.

  When I opened my eyes, I knew what I had experienced was real. I felt in my bones that I had been shown glimpses of multiple lifetimes. I also felt a homesickness for many of them. The lives I had been shown were important to me when I’d lived them. They were not just sweet times of lovemaking and prosperity or idle activity. They were lives in which I’d given service with my gifts, lives in which I was a healer, prophet, shaman, and medium.

  When I returned to the board, Peter again asked me if I knew who he was, and this time I said yes. I recognized him from many of the lives I had seen. I knew we had a shared responsibility to each other and for each other in many of the worlds and landscapes I had seen. I saw that there had been times when one of us had chosen to stand back, to stay in spirit form, while the other went into the world of the living. In this lifetime Peter has chosen to stay back while I attend to things from this side of the veil. He will not be born into life at any point during this incarnation of mine. What’s more, I recognized Peter as Rosemary. Peter, Rosemary, and Sarah were all the same spirit.

  The ability to recognize a spirit’s energy in whatever form it uses it is critical to the work of a medium, especially a medium who works with loved ones and haunted houses. I was being trained to see with my mind’s eye as well as with my physical eyes, to look beyond what first catches consciousness to see what lies hidden just out of sight.

  The world of spirit is another dimension, existing in the same space, yet differently. I sometimes explain it by comparing it to the colored plastic folders you can get to put papers in. Some are pink, some blue, some green, some transparent, and so on. We live in the transparent realm, where everything is lucid and lucent; it is our reality. Other beings, including the spirits of the dead, exist in other realms as in different-colored folders. The dead may inhabit the blue, while nature spirits dwell in the green. All of the realms overlap and interpenetrate each other, but only some beings can see across worlds that exist in different colors. Most are blind to the existence of other worlds, isolated by encryption.

  When we look directly at a spirit, we also look through it. That’s why people often say they saw something out of the corner of their eye that disappeared when they turned to look directly at it. It didn’t disappear; it simply became harder to see. When I teach people to perceive spirits, I tell them to use “wide-angle vision”; to look down their nose and let their vision go out-out-out. It’s the same kind of vision used to see 3-D puzzles that hold a hidden picture within the original. It can only be seen when the right gaze is used. This is also the vision that hunters use when tracking prey.

  With my vision brought into proper focus, I started seeing spirits everywhere. Going out in public became uncomfortable. I found myself seeking the solace of my home and was thankful that my life had become a lot less hectic. I couldn’t imagine working in public with my mind in its current state. I was overwhelmed and became slightly manic; my sleep schedule was erratic.

  Peter took turns
teaching me from his own perspective and from Rosemary’s. The lessons from each persona were different. Rosemary was a stern grandmother, and she showed up when she wanted to break me of a bad habit or make me practice something a hundred times. She came as Peter when the lessons were unusually deep and mysterious, to tell me something important, or to share concrete psychic knowledge. When Peter came through as Peter, it always meant “Big Business,” which is why that became one of my nicknames for him.

  Like me, Peter had been psychic in his lifetimes. He could see the future and had the gift of prophecy. His arrival often accompanied my journey work and could happen at any time, day or night. Sometimes my teachings took place at two in the morning, waking me from my sleep with an intense energy that filled my body. I felt as if the light I was holding in my body was so bright that it must be visible to others. I imagined what my light must look like in the spirit world. Adam’s voice sometimes slipped into my ear, confirming that I looked like a star glowing white.

  I was completely awake and lucid during these journeys. I realized that I was experiencing these situations from the perspective of my higher self. I was moving through experiences that I knew to come from other lifetimes, and I retained the full ability to observe my surroundings. I could pause and take in my environment, looking at details of architecture, clothing, and geography. When interacting in these scenes, I was able to identify individuals, knowing their relationship to me both in that lifetime and in this one, if we had one.

  Peter talked a lot about responsibility from all of his personae. He constantly reminded me that I had planned this lifetime. I had intended this. I had intended to meet Adam briefly in the world so he would be familiar but not well known, charging him with the capacity to be my catalyst and proving our communication was true. Peter explained that my life’s work was to be a bridge between the living and the dead, the worlds of the seen and the unseen.