In these moments, we need to listen to and honor the signs the Other Side is sending us:
A phrase or idea that pops into our head
A gut feeling we can’t shake off
The voice of a loved one who has crossed
The sense that your loved one is present
The signs are there! They will always be there! The Other Side will never stop sending us these incredible signs. They will never stop trying.
So we must stay open to them, and really look and listen for them and allow them to guide us toward our best, happiest, and highest life path. Because time and again I’ve learned that the choices we make, and the energy we embrace, impact not only our own life path but also the collective path of love that we are all on together.
23
BABIES AND BEARS
FEW life decisions are as consequential as the decision to have a child. That’s because children change everything. I should know, I have three of them, and they are the absolute loves of my life, my greatest joys, my most treasured blessings. I cannot possibly begin to imagine my life without Ashley, Hayden, and Juliet—it’s simply unfathomable to me. They are the very best decisions I ever made, along with marrying my wonderful husband, Garrett.
Nevertheless, these decisions can be frightening, confusing, and overwhelming. That is why, when we’re making them, it is so helpful to turn to the Other Side.
And often, without us even needing to ask, the universe and our Team of Light will step in to guide us. That’s why the universe sends us lots of timely and powerful messages about babies. It happens in many of my readings. While people are unsure about a lot of big life decisions, there is a special urgency and gravity that comes with the decision to have a child. Lots of profound emotions enter into play, as well as a potentially frightening sense of finality. After all, we can quit a job, but we can’t quit our kids. In my experience, our teams on the Other Side know just how harrowing this decision can be, and that’s why they send us signs and messages to support us in making this decision.
The stories that follow show just how consequential and life altering these amazing signs can be.
* * *
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When Clayton and Natali Morris met for the first time, millions of people were watching.
Clayton was one of the hosts of a popular morning TV show, and Natali was one of his guests. “She walked onto the set, and she just knocked my socks off,” Clayton remembers. “I was instantly dumbfounded by her, and I think I spoke really quickly through the whole segment.”
“I saved the tape,” says Natali, who was then an editor at a news website and a co-host of an influential technology podcast. “I remember looking at Clayton like, I’m supposed to know you, but I don’t know how. It’s amazing that we have that moment on film.” (I call that feeling soul recognition.)
Just a few years later, another hugely important moment for Clayton and Natali would also happen live on air, in front of millions of people—including me. And this time, it involved the decision to have a child.
Clayton and Natali had not yet talked about getting married when Natali first got pregnant. “It was a surprise for both of us,” she says. “I was thirty-one but I still remember thinking that I was too young for this. I worked a lot, and my career was a big part of my identity. Having a child felt like going through the looking glass.”
They decided to have the baby, and in time their lovely son Miles was born. But Natali’s mixed feelings during the pregnancy filled her with guilt. “Early on, Miles needed some medical treatment, and I wondered if the problem had been caused by trauma in the womb,” she says. “Because we weren’t married, and because I’d been unsure, the pregnancy felt traumatic to me, and that made me feel even more guilt.”
Years later, when Natali and I crossed paths, I did a reading for her in which the Other Side showed me the image of a doctor’s office.
“Why are they telling me all this stuff about a doctor?” I asked her.
Natali then described her ambivalence and the guilt she felt over it.
“That’s why the Other Side pointed it out,” I said, “because the guilt is a toxic thought you need to get rid of. Your son came to heal you, to make you a family, to point you in the right direction. So get rid of the guilt you are carrying. Just let it all go.”
Natali and Clayton got married in city hall in Manhattan three months after Miles was born. “Since I worked the weekend shift, I was home with him a lot in the early months,” Clayton says. “We sort of fell into these roles of mother and father, but we started to realize that we were pretty good at them. We were pretty good parents.”
Eventually, they agreed to have another child, and beautiful Ava came along.
“After that,” Natali says, “the feeling I had was, We’re done.”
But Clayton wasn’t so sure.
“We both agreed to stop at two, and we agreed that we were this great little unit of four people, and that was enough, but then I sort of started pushing for a fifth member,” Clayton says. Natali, too, had been thinking about it, but “my honest feeling was that I really did not want to have another child,” she says. “The pregnancies were tough, and I wanted to go back to work, and so I was really struggling with it. I was very, very conflicted. After a while I had to tell Clayton to stop asking me about it.”
This is kind of where I entered the picture.
* * *
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When Clayton was young and growing up in Spring Township, Pennsylvania, he had an innate curiosity about the secrets of the universe.
“As a kid, I ran around in a Ghostbusters costume trying to find ghosts everywhere,” he says. “Later on, I taped this little show about the paranormal and put the episodes up on YouTube. As I got older, I built up these walls with stress and anxiety about life, and I stopped trying to tap into this space, this curiosity. But I was always open to it.”
Natali, a California native, was raised a Jehovah’s Witness but left the faith when she was twenty. “I hadn’t found any set of beliefs that really worked for me,” she says. It was only after she started reading books about the afterlife and consciousness that she began to form a true worldview. “It was like everything I believed about life up to that point had been completely wrong!” she says. “Those books really informed the way I think about my life.”
Together she and Clayton explored spirituality by reading more books, studying meditation, and just “trying not to limit our ability to connect with the world vibrationally.”
It was that desire for more connections, more openness, that brought Clayton and Natali to my book The Light Between Us. “As soon as we finished the book, we both said, ‘Oh, she should be on the show!’ ” Natali remembers. But before Clayton could suggest it to anyone, his producer sent out an email to all the show’s hosts the very next day: “So who wants to interview this psychic medium Laura Lynne Jackson?” the email read.
“I’ll do it,” Clayton quickly wrote back.
The day of the taping, I arrived at the show’s studio in Rockefeller Center. Just before airtime, I settled onto a sofa across from Clayton on the stage. Natali wanted to be on set for the interview, so she stood behind the cameras, listening intently. Both Clayton and Natali were looking for—hoping for—the very same thing: some kind of sign about having a third child.
When we started taping, Clayton and I talked about the book for a while, but the Other Side had a different game plan. Someone came through very forcefully, and their message was very clear.
“Okay, I’m going to start reading for you,” I told Clayton. “You have two children now, right?”
Clayton said that he did.
“Okay, well, I see a third light waiting for you.”
Behind the cameras, Natali burst into tears.
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��I’d been so scared and so resistant, but as soon as Laura Lynne said those words, it didn’t feel scary anymore,” she says. “I was standing there laughing and crying because I knew that was what she would say.”
But there was more. The being pushing through from the Other Side was Clayton’s grandmother, Alma. She gave me her name to give to Clayton as an affirmation, and she also showed me something about a new pair of boots. It was like she was poking fun at Natali about them.
“Laura asked Clayton if I’d just bought boots, and of course I was wearing a new pair of knee-high black boots I’d just bought,” Natali says. “But I knew Clayton would point out that they were very similar to these other black boots I already had, so I was trying to hide the shopping bag from him. And then Alma came through and talked about them.”
More important, Alma showed me the fear and uncertainty that both Clayton and Natali were feeling.
“She is here and she is saying you’re scared, you think you can’t run your family or your careers with another child, but it’s going to be great, so just do it, just have the third child,” I told them. “If you choose to do it, it will be beautiful. But don’t not do it because of fear.”
Just four weeks later, Natali was pregnant again.
“This time, I made myself enjoy the pregnancy in a way I hadn’t before, because I trusted in what was happening,” she says. “I had faith in our decision. I let go of all the fear and uncertainty. And it was our third child who fully healed me. This persistent little soul came along and healed me.”
Their third child—a glorious little girl—was born. But neither Natali nor Clayton could settle on a name. Clayton’s co-hosts were set to announce the birth live on air, but with just a few minutes to go before the broadcast, the couple still hadn’t picked out a name.
“I was in the lobby of the hospital, about to go up and see Natali, and I just stood there with my cup of Starbucks and took a deep breath and waited for a lightning bolt,” Clayton says. “And then one hit me.”
Upstairs, in her hospital room, Natali also had a name pop in her head. “I was having breakfast and I just came up with it and it felt right,” she says. “And then Clayton burst in and said, ‘I know her name.’ ”
He told her a name. She told him a name. It was the same name.
“So with just a few minutes to go I texted the name to my producer, and then they went on the air and announced the birth,” Clayton says.
That’s how the world was introduced to Eve Morris.
* * *
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Since Eve’s birth, Clayton and Natali have both been even more open to signs from the Other Side. Recently, Clayton was struggling with the decision to stay at his TV job or leave to start his own real estate investment business. “I’ve always felt that my spirit animal is a bear, because I see bears a lot, and every time I see one, something amazing happens,” he says. “You know, I’d see a bear and I’d have a great deal happen within an hour.”
The day he finally decided to leave the show, he called in to work to share his decision with his producers. “And within moments of the call—moments—I was in my car and this enormous black bear just walked right in front of me on the street,” Clayton says. “I just stared and watched him go. It was the universe validating that the choice I had just made was on my highest path.”
Today Clayton and Natali are living truly beautiful and authentic lives together. Now that they have navigated and mastered their own fear and uncertainty, they are both true light workers.
They didn’t need me to tell them a third child was on the way—all they needed was to trust in what they already felt inside. They needed to recognize which choice was the path of fear and which choice was the path of love. In the end, every choice we ever make while here on earth comes down to choosing a path of fear or love. It is our job to recognize the difference—and choose the path of love. That is always our highest path.
“We let go of fear and allowed what was supposed to happen to happen, and when we did it changed everything—our finances, our family dynamic, our future,” says Natali. “It’s about trusting the signs and trusting what the universe is trying to tell you.
“We make things happen when we realize we have the power to make them happen,” she adds. “We can all create magic in this world, we just have to believe that we can.”
24
FLICKERING LIGHTS AND SPARKS
HOW do we know if we’re doing what we’re meant to be doing in this life? How do we find our higher purpose? How do we know if we are on the right path?
Many of us search for the meaning in what we’re doing and wonder if we’re living our very best lives. Danielle Perretty wondered these things, especially when she found herself at a crossroads. “I was in a situation where I began to ask myself, Am I using my skills, my passions, to help people?” she remembers. “I wanted to feel like I was making a difference in the world. I wanted to feel like everything in my life was aligned the right way.”
It’s not that Danielle was in dire straits or had hit rock bottom—in fact, from the outside looking in, her life seemed wonderful. She had a job that she loved, a boyfriend she loved, and her future looked bright. She didn’t feel like there was any glaring need she had to address, or any great opportunity she had missed. For the most part, she felt she was on the right track.
“It wasn’t anything overwhelming or overpowering,” Danielle says. “It was just this sense, this little calling. Like a tiny whisper that was saying, ‘You can do more. You can be more.’ ”
So Danielle listened to the whisper.
And when she did, nothing was ever the same again.
* * *
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Danielle first heard the whisper when she was at a design conference in 2010. At the time, she was working as a marketing director for a respected product design and development firm. She was also living with her boyfriend of ten years, and they were planning to get married and start a family. At the conference, Danielle ran into a friend, Angela, and the two shared a ride home. During the ride, Angela told Danielle about a psychic medium she’d been seeing—me.
Not much later, Danielle reached out to me. She’d never thought about having a reading, but she felt the need to connect—it was the first whisper.
In our first reading, Danielle’s grandmother—Sally, as she was known—came through. Sally had been an important figure during Danielle’s childhood. Her parents divorced when she was five. “I spent a lot of time alone—writing, hiking, listening to music. Nature was my solace.” And she had Sally, whom she calls “a person of great joy and happiness and light. She was more of a mother to me than a grandmother. We’d spend weekends together, and we’d bake things and play games and tell stories and sing songs. She was creative and fashionable, and she had such great energy and enthusiasm for life and for the people she loved.”
Sally crossed when Danielle was sixteen—and now, nearly twenty years later, she was trying to reconnect. Sally pushed through in the reading, not even waiting for me to begin the process of clearing the way for her.
“She is very protective of you,” I told Danielle. “She is watching over you all the time. She says, ‘Do you remember how we used to hang out together on the weekends?’ Well, she says you still do. She is with you every weekend.”
Sally was also very insistent about relaying her message. “She’s a real spitfire,” I told Danielle. “It’s like she’s stomping her feet, saying, ‘Enough already, we want your life to go forward. You need to be more forceful, more verbal, and less patient.’ ”
Danielle understood what Sally was talking about: her boyfriend. Their relationship wasn’t perfect. He was having trouble committing. Every time they talked about getting married, something would come up to delay it. “I was beginning to realize that he wasn’t evolving and growing and on the same path as me,
” Danielle says. “But even so, I loved him. It’s one thing to break up and leave someone when you’re over it and ready to go. It’s a very different thing to break up with someone when you love them but realize you have to move on if you want to grow.”
Danielle struggled with whether to leave her boyfriend until finally, she found the courage to go.
Because of a downturn in the economy, Danielle lost her job. Her bosses were very kind and gave her a generous severance package, but even so, it came as a total shock. “At almost the same time that I left a relationship of ten years, I got laid off from a job I had for more than eight years,” she says. “All of a sudden I was on my own.”
When we had our next reading, her grandmother had a very direct message for her.
“This is not a mistake,” I relayed. “This is not random. The universe took you out of your safe space. The universe did this on purpose. It is leading you to your highest path.”
Hearing those words didn’t ease the pain or take away the fear. Not right away, anyway. But after a while, it began to make sense to Danielle.
“It was the universe giving me a clean break,” she says.
* * *
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Danielle traveled for six months, then came back and started looking for a new position. Very quickly, great offers came in. “I got a few from companies in Boston and others from San Francisco, and they were all amazing offers,” she says. “The kind of jobs you’d be crazy not to take.” She settled on one of the firms, and instructed the recruiter who was working with her to negotiate a higher salary.
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