Although praying mantises are rather rare, and spotting one is even rarer, something interesting started happening to Paul and his family. It seemed they were being followed. “Whenever my family is together or we’re having a special moment or talking about something important, a praying mantis shows up,” says Paul. “It’s a constant theme in our lives. And whenever we see one, we always say, ‘Oh, hi, Griffin.’ ” At the outdoor reception after his nephew’s wedding, Paul spotted a praying mantis right beside him on the sofa where he and his family were sitting. He saw one on a curtain inside his home on his youngest son’s birthday. He found another on the gate at his hotel on a trip to Italy.
One day, Paul was in his office in Midtown Manhattan, talking to someone on the phone about a difficult decision he had just made, after considerable struggle. He felt he had made the right decision, but he also felt like he could really use some reassurance. Just then, he looked out the window of his office, and there clinging to the outside of the glass, looking straight in at him, was—you guessed it—a praying mantis. Now, this would have been amazing anyway, but what made it even more incredible was that Paul’s office was on the twenty-eighth floor!
“Praying mantises will just show up and hang around like it’s no big deal,” says Paul. “I was sitting on a park bench with a really good friend when one showed up and sat right between us. I held out my hand and it walked into it, and I held it for a long time. My friend said, ‘That is crazy.’ I said, ‘No, it’s not. It’s Griffin.’ ”
What makes me even happier is that Paul is at ease sharing his story, over dinner and a glass of wine—all the while seeing the beauty and meaning in it. Griffin’s sign is being received loud and clear.
* * *
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I really love meeting new people, and when I do, I love to share stories with them. This is true wherever I go, and especially true when a stranger asks me what I do for work. Some people have such incredibly warm and positive energy, and meeting them is a beautiful blessing. This is true of a nurse named Kelly, who works with one of Ashley’s doctors.
When I told her that I am a psychic medium, she shared with me that her mother, with whom she had been extremely close, had crossed when Kelly was just nineteen.
“Gosh, I just wish I could know that she was still around me and still with me,” she said. “I wish she had had the chance to meet my daughter. I miss her so much.”
I told her that her mom was absolutely around her, watching her, and not only knew about her daughter but watched over her, too. I told her that she never needed a psychic medium to have this validated—all she had to do was ask for a sign.
“Make it specific,” I said. “Ask her to send it to you so that you know she is around and watching and knows about everything that has gone on in your life. And after you ask her to send it, trust that you will get it. Say, ‘Universe, I am ready to receive a message from my mother.’ You will see—the sign will come.” I told her that sometimes it might take a little while to receive the sign, so she should be patient, because the Other Side would work hard to make it happen.
That night, in the car on her way home, Kelly let it all out. “I was driving and yelling, ‘Universe, I’m ready!’ ” Kelly later told me. “But then I couldn’t come up with a good sign. Nothing felt right. It actually took me two more weeks to come up with the right sign.”
One day, Kelly recalled a happy memory of her parents taking her trick-or-treating on Halloween when she was three. She even found a photo of it. “My parents were dressed as Raggedy Ann and Andy,” she says, “I decided that that would become my sign. It was appropriate, too, because my mom’s name is Ann and my dad, who also crossed, is named Andy. So I asked my mom to please send me Raggedy Ann. But I didn’t tell anyone what my sign was. I kept it to myself.”
Kelly waited patiently for her sign. Two weeks later, she walked into the lunchroom at her clinic and chatted with a co-worker, Mary Ann.
“Mary Ann mentioned that her next-door neighbor had passed away, and she started telling me about her, and it went on for a while and I was listening but sort of half listening,” Kelly says. “Then she causally mentioned that her neighbor’s name was Ann, and her husband’s name was Andy, and that everyone always called them Raggedy Ann and Andy.”
Kelly froze. “I was in shock. I turned my back a little so she couldn’t see that I was crying. As soon as she left I broke down in tears. I mean, nobody talks about Raggedy Ann and Andy anymore. They’re from another time. But she said their names, and I had absolutely no doubt it was my mother sending me a sign, because it was so direct and clear. It was my mom telling me, ‘I’m here, I’m with you, I’m part of everything you do.’ It was so exhilarating. I felt like I won the lottery.”
* * *
—
One of my favorite things to do is teach workshops and give public talks. Even if I’m addressing a larger group, I feel personally connected to each individual’s energy in that group. It’s truly wonderful when people I’ve crossed paths with feel that connection, too, and reach out to share their stories.
Recently, Ted, a man who attended a large speaking event I did, followed my suggestion to ask his Team of Light for a very specific sign. “I always felt a bit stuck in my career, and I was having some doubt and uncertainty,” Ted wrote me in an email. “So my fiancée and I planned a trip to California to expand our career options. That’s when I remembered your advice and decided to give it a try. I tried to think of something specific, and for no real reason at all, a Yankees baseball player popped into my head. Bernie Williams. He wasn’t even my favorite Yankee, but I’d always been a fan. I asked my guides to send this to me as a sign that the trip was a good idea and that I was headed on the right path.”
One night before he and his fiancée were to leave, Ted looked around his room for paper to make a Valentine’s Day card. He found an old notebook that he hadn’t touched in years. “I went to tear out a page, and as I did, something fell out of it,” says Ted. “It was a baseball card of Sammy Sosa. I thought, well, that’s weird—it’s not Bernie Williams, but maybe that was the best my guides could do.” Ted put down the notebook and started to leave the room when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something else on the floor. “I hadn’t seen it, and I’m not even sure how I missed it, but I picked it up and it was another baseball card,” he says, “and this card was Bernie Williams.”
An old baseball card falling out of a notebook—some will say that’s all it was. But to Ted, it was much more than that. “It was the most amazing sign,” he says, “and it helped me so, so much. It helped me know not only that I was on my highest path by deciding to expand my career options, but that I had a Team of Light rooting me on the whole way!”
* * *
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Sometimes I happen upon stories that share evidence of signs and the secret language in books I am reading. And I don’t mean books written by psychics or mediums—just regular books. One such story turned out to describe one of the most profound and powerful signs I’ve ever heard about.
It involves Dr. Neil Spector, a Duke University oncologist and cancer researcher who shared the story of his sign in his book, Gone in a Heartbeat: A Physician’s Search for True Healing. I bought the book because it was the memoir of a doctor who discovered that he had undiagnosed Lyme disease. The Lyme went untreated for so long that it damaged his heart. I was so moved by his book that I reached out to Dr. Spector and asked him if I could share his story here, and he graciously agreed.
Neil was a perfectly healthy, athletic man in his early thirties. One day, out of the blue, he began having strange cardiac episodes.
“My heart would start racing to two hundred beats a minute for thirty seconds or more,” Neil recalls. “As a physician I knew something was wrong, but we just couldn’t diagnose it. Over the next four years I had thousands of these episodes, and I als
o had extreme fatigue. I went from running ten miles a day, six days a week, to basically not being able to walk ten yards without feeling exhausted.”
He was finally diagnosed with third-degree heart blockage, and had a pacemaker and a defibrillator implanted in his chest. But something didn’t feel right about the diagnosis, and after several years he began having trouble walking up hills. During a routine hospital procedure to check for infection, he felt something was terribly wrong with his heart. As an oncologist, he was no stranger to illness and its effect on the body. “I felt like I was dying,” Neil says. The medical staff was alarmed. They called his wife and told her to get to the hospital as soon as possible.
Something was very wrong. The doctors estimated that Neil had only 10 percent of his normal heart function.
“I really should have died,” he says. “I had a severely damaged heart and barely detectable blood pressure. The odds of survival were very low.”
He made it through the episode, but over the next few days, “I was literally dying,” Neil says. “My organs were shutting down, and my heart was barely pumping. It was like trying to sail a boat on a completely windless day.” A doctor told him that if he didn’t get a heart transplant, he would be dead within three days. “That was actually the most peaceful moment I have ever had in my life,” he says, “because I knew it wasn’t my time to die. If I had been meant to die, I would have died already.”
Incredibly, a heart became available for transplant in thirty-six hours. After twelve hours of surgery, the transplant was deemed a success. The next day, “my young daughter, Celeste, came into my hospital room,” Neil remembers, “and I told her, ‘You know, we can’t just call this Daddy’s new heart. Let’s come up with a name.’ And Celeste said, “I know! Heavenly Precious. It is a precious gift, and it came from heaven. So let’s call it Heavenly Precious.”
And so they did.
According to protocol, the recipient of a donor transplant must wait one year before contacting the donor’s family. After that waiting period passed, Neil sent a letter to the family of the anonymous donor and shared his gratitude. “I’d been counting down the days,” he says. “I felt a tremendous obligation to thank them for their sacrifice, and for literally giving me the gift of life.” He wrote an emotional letter. It took six months for a response to arrive, but finally, there it was—a letter from his heart donor’s family. It came from his donor’s widowed husband—Neil’s heart had belonged to a woman named Vicky.
“It was incredibly moving,” Neil says. “Number one, he said he was thrilled that his wife’s heart could help me to continue my efforts to help other people as a doctor. But then, at the end of the letter, he said he was moved beyond tears and joy when he heard about the name my daughter came up with for his wife’s heart—Heavenly Precious. He was thrilled because, for all of their marriage, he had called his wife by her nickname, which was Precious.”
Precious!
Neil was shocked. He kept reading the letter. “The husband wrote that when he learned the name my daughter gave the heart, he felt it was his wife, communicating through our daughter, to let him know that she was okay, and that his Precious was Heavenly Precious now.”
Think about that. What are the odds? Heavenly Precious. Precious in heaven. Could that just be a coincidence? Or would a man of science see it as a sign from the Other Side?
“I believe deeply in science,” Neil replied. “But I also believe deeply in things we cannot prove.”
In fact, as a physician caring for patients who are nearing death, Neil has a unique perspective on our passage from this life. “I’ve learned so much from my patients and how they embrace their journey,” he says. “I have always believed that the body and soul are different, and I have seen, in my sickest patients, in the moments when their bodies are ravaged, the beauty of their souls burst through. In their eyes, in their energy, in all their kindness and love. I have seen a kind of light emanating from them, and it reinforced my belief that there is something beyond our physical body—that we are not our bodies; we are, instead, our souls.
“What we know about the universe can fit in a thimble. That is how I embrace life, as someone who doesn’t know all the answers,” Neil says.
Separate and apart from our physical bodies, he believes, “We are all energetic beings. There are people here who are sensitive to this energy, and to our collective energy. Maybe we all have that ability, but we get caught up in the physical here and now—you know, our car is making a funny noise, or the mortgage is due, or whatever—and we focus on that and turn away from the energy of others, and from our collective energy.”
If, instead, we stay open to this energy—to the way our lives and our energy interconnect with those of others—we can identify less with our physical bodies and more with our spiritual selves. “I have received so much visual confirmation that we are more than our physical bodies, and knowing that has brought me such peace,” says Neil.
This is how Dr. Spector marries his spirituality and his science: by appreciating that we are all energy, and that our energy is connected to the collective energy of all beings. And within this remarkable flow of energy among us all come miraculous moments of inexplicable and life-affirming connection.
* * *
—
On his final day on earth, the visionary inventor Thomas Edison woke from a coma. He opened his eyes and looked upward, his face reflecting something like awe. Then he spoke for the first time in a long time, and said six words.
“It is very beautiful over there.”
Almost exactly eighty years later, another visionary, Steve Jobs, lay on his deathbed. Just before crossing, he looked lovingly at his sister Patty and at his children and at his life partner, Laurene. Then he looked past them all, to a place only he could see, and he uttered six final words.
“Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.”
At their moments of crossing, when their loved ones on the Other Side rushed to greet their souls, and the embracing light of all creation washed over them, they found the words to convey the sheer wonder of what awaits us, in our true home on the Other Side. In an instant, they experienced how truly interconnected, how truly bound by love and light, we all are. And this revelation was simply dazzling.
Here on earth, it can take a little time to accept the universal truth that we belong to one another and are responsible for one another. But that is why we are here—to learn lessons together. Earth is a school where we are all learning a collective lesson in love.
Through my readings, I have learned that when we cross, this truth becomes instantly apparent to us—just as it did to Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs. The best way I can describe this experience is to call it an instant truth download.
When we cross, we can instantly access every other person’s entire lifetime of experience in a millisecond. Think about that. I mean, it is almost unfathomable to us here on earth—knowing everything there is to know about a person in an instant. But that is what happens on the Other Side, where we no longer have physical bodies and where we communicate in a way that is telepathic, consciousness to consciousness. For when we no longer have our bodies, what separates us from others? What separates our experiences from theirs?
Nothing.
What I’ve seen in my thousands of readings is that this transmission is instant and complete; when we cross we understand perfectly that we’ve always been connected to everyone else, and that we’ve always been part of everyone else’s journey through time.
We realize that, as beings of light and energy, we are all connected to the same massive current of love that powers the universe and infuses everything with meaning.
For now, however, this truth is something each of us must learn at our own pace. And being open to signs from the Other Side brings us immeasurably closer to this beautiful truth.
* * *
—
The moments of connection that happened to the people in this book can happen to you, too—they are likely already happening to you. This is not an exclusive club. The life-altering power of signs from the Other Side is available to us all. It is part of the beautiful package that each of us is born with.
You see, we deliver messages to one another all the time. We are all mediums. Knowingly or unknowingly, there are times when we all serve as messengers for the Other Side—as “angels on earth,” if you will. Not just some of us—all of us. Each of us matters greatly to other people and to the universe—a universe that is always pulling us toward our best and brightest lives.
Why?
Because we are all born worthy.
Each of us is born with the great gift of light—the radiant force of our love and energy and uniqueness. Each of us is born with the ability to shine this light on the world, to help others navigate their own life paths. Each of us is born with our own completely unique set of skills and attributes that contribute to the universal life force. Each of us is born with an innate ability to make a meaningful difference in the world, regardless of who we are or what we do. This is not something we have to petition for, or hope to get. It is our birthright. We all share it. It is what makes us who we are. While we are born with this amazing gift, it is up to us to unwrap it. It is up to us to uncover our light and shine it brightly in the world.
Shine brightly, and shine on.
This is where signs and messages from the Other Side come into play. Opening our hearts and minds to receiving signs helps us unwrap our gift of light, because these signs reveal the truth of the universe—that none of us are alone, that we’re all in this together, that we are interconnected in consequential ways. All of the signs and messages described in this book illustrate this truth.
Signs Page 27