Signs

by Laura Lynne Jackson

  Then a friend of hers asked her a simple question. “He said, ‘If money wasn’t an issue, what would you want to do with your life?’ No one had ever asked me that before, and it made me think.”

  In fact, Danielle had a secret passion.

  She’d always thought of nature as a safe haven. She’d been a vegetarian since the age of twelve and took care to live in a conscious, healthy way. When she allowed herself to dream, she thought about how to help people strike a perfect balance in their own lives. She dreamed of her own line of fresh juices and of becoming a yoga instructor.

  “When I thought about starting a juice shop and teaching yoga, I just got very excited, but at the same time I told myself, Oh, you’re never going to do that,” she says. “I never once realistically considered doing it. I was single, I couldn’t afford it, I’d have to do it all on my own—I put up all these walls. And that’s where the dream stayed—buried behind walls.”

  Instead, she focused all her energy on the job offer. One evening she was on the phone with her recruiter, who was telling her about the firm’s counteroffer. “It was a lot of money,” Danielle says. “Everything was lining up for me to take the job.”

  But during the phone call, she heard a pop. “I looked over at the outlet and saw smoke and sparks flying out of it,” she says. “Sparking and smoking, like an actual fire. And the weird thing is, nothing was plugged into it.”

  She told the recruiter she’d think about the offer and hurriedly hung up. As soon as she did, the sparking stopped.

  The next day, Danielle pressed the firm for a better offer, and that night the recruiter called back with an even more enticing counteroffer, including a lucrative bonus. And then the socket started smoking and sparking again.

  Similar things had happened before—the lights in her apartment would flicker and dim, lightbulbs would unexpectedly burn out, she’d go to a friend’s house and the lights would start to flicker there.

  “I would also get a lot of ghost phone calls,” she adds. “The phone would ring and no one would be there, and when I’d call the number back it would be disconnected. That happened all the time.”

  From her talks with me, Danielle had become more and more open to signs from the universe—and in particular, to signs involving electricity. The Other Side often communicates through electromagnetic force—the physical interaction between electrically charged particles and magnetic fields. Because of its fluidity, this force is easily manipulated—if not precisely, at least noticeably. In my experience, ghost phone calls, flickering lights, full blackouts, and sparking outlets have all marked interactions between the Other Side and us.

  Danielle came to believe that Sally was using electricity to get her message through, because along with these perfectly timed occurrences came the feeling of a download. “The fact that it happened during the phone calls with the recruiter—that was Sally letting me know she was there and pushing me to get it going, get started on a new adventure,” she says. “It was Sally wanting me to have a more joyous life. She had always watched over me, and she was still watching over me. She wanted me to be happy and fulfilled.”

  Danielle turned down the job.

  Then she began dismantling the walls that she’d erected between her life and her dreams.

  * * *

  —

  Today, just two years after those unusually charged phone calls, Danielle is the owner and manufacturer of a line of juices called Beacon Blend. “A beacon is a guidepost, and that’s what my grandmother was and is for me,” Danielle says. “And that’s what I want my business and my life to be: a beacon of wellness and joy.” The Beacon Blend logo is based on a necklace that Sally used to wear. Danielle has created a product of pure wellness. And that is a really beautiful way for her to honor her grandmother.

  Building her business from scratch—while also teaching yoga classes several times a week—has been difficult and, at times, pretty scary. “I’m strong in marketing and I have a plant-based diet, but I don’t have a business degree,” she says. “I don’t have a business partner. I didn’t really have any money except for my savings. I had to make a leap into the unknown and basically jump off a cliff. And every day, there was a new cliff to jump off.”

  What helps Danielle push through, she says, “are the signs. The signs from my grandmother. I have these rough days when I really want to hear from her, and I’ll ask her for a sign, and she always comes through. The lights will flicker. The phone will ring. She always lets me know she is there with me, watching out for me. She gives me strength.”

  What really helps, too, is that Sally is always on the job.

  “I started to ask her to send me elephants,” Danielle says. “And around the time I started my business, someone randomly gave me a little elephant figurine for good luck.” Being open to these signs—“and learning how to trust in them”—has forever changed Danielle’s life.

  “I feel like I’m able to share a kind of lightness with the world,” she says. “We all have the ability to rebuild our entire lives. Our lives can be something so much bigger and more beautiful than we ever even realize. And it’s all up to us. We need to ask ourselves, How do I really want to build my life?

  “And when we come up with the answer,” Danielle says, “the universe will back us up and root for us to succeed.”

  25

  BOWS AND CLOVERS

  AMY, a young singer and musician from California, woke up one Friday morning feeling sick. She tried to get on with her day, but she just couldn’t shake her nausea and exhaustion. Then she threw up.

  “And, you know, I never throw up,” Amy says. “I think that’s when I knew. That’s when I said, ‘Uh-oh.’ ”

  Amy drove to the pharmacy and bought a pregnancy test. Not much later, she had a result—she was pregnant.

  “I looked at the little stick and I said, ‘This has to be wrong,’ ” she remembers. “So I went to the store and got another test.”

  The result of that test was positive, too.

  So Amy bought a third test.

  And a fourth.

  And a fifth.

  Finally, after six tests came up positive, she stopped going to the pharmacy.

  “I said, ‘Shoot, I’m pregnant,’ ” Amy recalls. “Then I thought, Okay, well, I’m not going to keep this baby.”

  That night, Amy had a terrible nightmare that armed militants came and stole her baby. She spent the next two days curled up on her sofa crying. She avoided contact with just about everyone for the next two weeks. “It was a dark, horrifying time,” she says. “I was terrified. I went back and forth about having the baby and not having the baby. I wanted to keep it, but the idea of keeping it was totally out of the question. I was so lost.”

  Finally, Amy chose what she believed was her only real option.

  She called a clinic and scheduled an abortion.

  * * *

  —

  It wasn’t that Amy didn’t want to have a baby—she did. It’s just that the timing was terrible. Only a year earlier, her father—a powerful TV producer—had gone into the hospital with pneumonia. Twenty days later, he crossed. “I was devastated,” says Amy. “He was healthy and he really took care of himself. It was extremely confusing and unfair and painful.”

  Around that time, Amy was also in the process of ending a two-year relationship. “I didn’t like the way he made me feel,” she says. “He was really bad for me. I hung on because I always thought we might get married and have children. But that was never going to happen.”

  Amy struggled with grief and depression, and she turned to alcohol for solace. “I was in a horrible place,” she says. “It was a really shaky time. In a way I felt like I was a child who couldn’t take care of herself. It was the worst time of my life.”

  A few months later Amy’s aunt gave her a reading with me as a
gift. Amy was driving when I reached her for the reading; she pulled over and we got started. Her father, whom I would later learn was a commanding presence here on earth, was also pretty bossy on the Other Side. He came through right away and gave me a series of affirmations to share with Amy, so she could be sure it was him.

  “I told Laura Lynne about what I was going through, and what a hard time it was for me,” Amy says. “I said that I wanted to get married and have a baby, but that was now feeling like it was never going to happen. That’s when Laura told me my father was laughing. He said, ‘Amy, you’re going to have a baby much sooner than you think.’ I said, ‘Okay, Dad, that’s not funny. Don’t even joke about that.’ ”

  Three months later was the day Amy woke up feeling sick.

  * * *

  —

  “I honestly didn’t see any way I could keep the baby,” she says. “People would tell me, ‘You can do it, babies are beautiful,’ but all I could think was, I can’t do this by myself. It’s too hard. It’s too scary.” Even her brother told her, “You are not keeping this baby.” That, says Amy, “was such a painful moment. I felt so much pressure not to have the baby.”

  Even after she decided to terminate the pregnancy, the terror and the confusion continued. “Something was telling me to have the baby, even though I knew it would be a terrible idea. I was so torn—I felt like I was going crazy, like there was no one in the world who could understand what I was going through.”

  With just a few days to go before her appointment, Amy sent me an urgent email asking for another reading. My schedule was completely full, but I felt the pull to call her. What’s more, I knew the reading was meant to be a gift from her father. It would be complimentary. I set up a time for us to talk. What I didn’t know was that the reading was set to take place one day before Amy’s scheduled appointment at the clinic.

  Amy told me she was pregnant and that she didn’t believe her ex-boyfriend would be there for her in the future. She asked me what she should do. She was desperate for an answer—any answer. I told her what I tell everyone—the choice was hers and hers alone. She had to be the one to decide which life path to follow.

  Then, on my screen, I saw the connection between Amy and her unborn child—between her soul and the child’s soul. I saw that they were linked on a deep level, a soul level. The Other Side was showing me the consequences of Amy’s decision. “Having this baby can be a beautiful path for you, but it’s not the only path,” I told her. “You have to make the choice, but you have to make the choice independent of your boyfriend. The baby is linked to you. If your boyfriend steps up, great, but if he doesn’t, you need to understand this is not about him, it’s about you and the baby. It’s about how your souls are connected.” Amy needed to ask herself what was motivating her choice. If it was fear, it would always lead her down a lower path. But if she followed a path of love, she would find her highest path.

  There was something else I needed to tell Amy—about her father. He was pushing through and letting me know that he’d been sending Amy lots of signs and messages, but she just wasn’t receiving them. She was too caught up in her fear and confusion. He showed me a gift box with a big blue bow on top.

  “Your father is sending you a message,” I told Amy. “This baby can be a gift to you. Search yourself and trust your pull. Don’t let the roar of fear prevent you from hearing whatever that voice inside is telling you to do.”

  Amy admitted she was having trouble receiving signs from her father. Even now, after her father had come through, I couldn’t be sure she’d truly heard what her father was trying to tell her. It was like she needed to get a sign directly from him.

  I told her to keep looking for the signs, that her father would send validation of his message to her directly. I told her to remember that he’d shown me a gift and a bow. I reminded her that she was loved and supported by the universe—that she was not alone. She had a Team of Light from the Other Side around her always.

  Two hours later, Amy drove to her friend Sue’s home. Sue was standing over a table, putting flowers in a vase, preparing it for a friend’s upcoming wedding.

  “I looked at the vase and my mouth dropped open,” Amy says. “There was a big, beautiful bow tied around it. A huge blue bow.”

  Inside her, she heard a quiet little voice get a bit louder.

  Yes, the voice said. Yes.

  Amy immediately got on the phone and called the clinic.

  “I canceled my appointment,” she remembers, “and I told Sue, ‘I am having this baby.’ ”

  * * *

  —

  The signs continued throughout her pregnancy. She would see two children walking toward her with gifts in their hands, each box topped with a bow. Amy began establishing a more concrete language with her father, and asked him for her own sign—the song “Sweet Caroline,” which they used to sing together. The first time she asked for it, it was the first song that randomly played on her iPhone.

  And she asked for clovers. Her father was Irish, and Irish clovers seemed to be everywhere when Amy was growing up. Now she wanted to see them again. He obliged, sending them in advertisements, on billboards, even actual clovers Amy found flat on the ground, with no clover patches in sight.

  “My dad was talking to me,” Amy says. “He’d been talking to me all along. He was telling me I had made a beautiful choice to have this baby.”

  Amy gave birth to a healthy boy she named James. “He had this adorable dimple, and he was this perfect little man, and I loved him right away, except it was a new kind of love, so deep and so profound,” she says. “I nicknamed him my little Buddha, because he’s so happy and smiling all the time.”

  Even so, their first few months together weren’t easy. James, says Amy, is a handful, and she and James’s father are no longer a couple—so she is raising James as a single parent. “There are days when I talk to my father out loud and say, ‘Dad, please help me with all of this, please send me signs so I know you are watching over us and helping protect us,’ ” she says. “There are days when I’m still really scared.”

  On those days, Amy thinks about the connection between her and her son, and also the connection between her son and her father. “The way I see it, James spent time with my father in heaven before he came to me,” she says. “So whenever I get really sad, I think about that. I know this baby has spent time with my father, and that makes me very happy. I feel like my dad is saying, ‘I wasn’t ready to leave you yet, so now I’m sending you this child who is a gift of love in your life.’ ”

  My reading with Amy taught me another incredible lesson about the way the universe works.

  Sometimes our highest path takes us away from someone we romantically love or think we love, simply because they aren’t ready to change paths with us. We need to realize that even if we choose a path that doesn’t include them, that doesn’t mean we no longer love them, or that our time together wasn’t “the right path.” We cross into each other’s path for a reason—to teach each other useful lessons and help each other grow. But sometimes, in order to keep growing, we have to venture onto a new, higher path by ourselves. And that is okay. You can love someone and still not be meant to spend your whole life with them.

  Amy’s relationship with her child, however, is different. They are connected on a deep soul level, and if they didn’t meet in this life, they would have met in another. By choosing to have him now, Amy honored that special connection—independent of her fears about the future. She made a decision based purely on love. And when we make decisions that are love-based and not fear-based, we move on to a higher life path.

  Today, says Amy, “I feel that my father sent James to me, and honestly, in a very real way, he saved my life. I truly feel this baby saved my life.”

  Amy’s child has also rekindled her connection with her father. After losing him so painfully w
hen he crossed, and then struggling to find him when she needed him most, she is now reconnected to him in a way that allows their relationship to continue to grow. “No matter how hard things get, I have some really strong angels, and I have my father,” Amy says. “He was a boss on earth, and he got things done, and he never took no for an answer, and now he’s helping me be the same way in my life.”

  And when things get really challenging?

  “I just talk to my dad and ask for a sign,” says Amy. “And when he sends it to me, it makes me feel like I have an in with God.”

  26

  RAINBOWS

  O​F all the signs sent to us by the Other Side, few are as beautiful and dramatic as a rainbow—a fantastic spectrum of colors stretching across the sky. For most of us, the sight of a rainbow is an exhilarating surprise, a tiny burst of magic in an otherwise ordinary day. Whenever I see a rainbow, I know the Other Side is trying to tell me something—or if not me, someone, somewhere. That’s because the Other Side loves using rainbows to catch our attention.

  Rainbows make great signs because they are relatively rare. So when we see one, we really and truly take notice. And double rainbows are even scarcer; seeing one can feel like spotting a unicorn. What’s more, rainbows are created when sunlight reflects and refracts through droplets of rain in the sky, and the Other Side is very good at manipulating light. Plus, rainbows are light and bright and lift our spirits. Throughout history, many cultures have seen rainbows as powerful and positive messages of love and hope. In Norse mythology, a rainbow is even considered a supernatural bridge between humans on earth and gods on the Other Side.

  In my experience, rainbows are spectacular signs sent to us by our Teams of Light on the Other Side. Rainbows have come up in dozens of my readings and in many stories I’ve heard about signs. One of those stories in particular stands out, and I’d like to share it with you. It’s a story that defies all logic, but nevertheless is true.