As for my anxious family members? I suspect they’re also sensitive, since I believe my gift is genetic. They’re also very faith-based people, which increases your awareness of Spirit.
I continued to attend Pat’s courses every Wednesday, as Larry watched the kids. I felt calm at her house, since I knew that if anything scary happened, Pat could make me feel better. In class, I began to give people messages from loved ones, and right away, channeling made me feel normal. But I was afraid to try it anywhere else. I still needed Pat as my safety net.
Physically and emotionally, I began to slowly heal. My anxieties became less dramatic. Larry saw a difference in me, and I told him channeling Spirit seemed to be a big part of the answer. He was like, “That’s cool, hon. If you think talking to dead people makes you feel better, keep doing it.” Larry was also raised Catholic, so I’m not sure he believed in Spirit, and was more likely appeasing me, but he was supportive, which is what ultimately mattered.
Six days a week when I wasn’t in class, I had to cope on my own. Since I hadn’t fully accepted my gift yet, I was still prone to the occasional meltdown. I remember when my first cousin Lance got married, we planned to go but at the last minute, I could not get in the car. The kids were dressed, and Larry had mapped out the fastest route. But I didn’t want to drive that far, and my whole family was so upset. I paced for hours. Finally Larry said that if at any point I didn’t want to continue, we could turn around and come home. I reluctantly agreed to go.
Cell phones were still new at the time, and I insisted on taking one in the car in case I needed to call Pat to talk me off a ledge. I remember hearing Faith Hill’s new song “Breathe” and thinking, That’s exactly what I need to do, just breathe. I made Larry play it over and over. I now think it was Spirit telling me to relax already.
When we pulled into the hotel parking lot, my whole family was waiting out front. I remember seeing Gram, who was alive at the time, standing at the window waving at me. I can still see the smile on her face, as if it were yesterday. She died a few years ago, but whenever I get over anxiety-related hurdles—like taking a tour bus across the country or sitting in a tent in my backyard—Spirit makes me remember Gram standing at that window, beaming with pride.
Give Spirit an Inch . . .
To help control the energy around me, Pat taught me that I had to set some boundaries with Spirit that I still use today. I can’t dictate which guides, angels, or dead people talk to me, or what they want to say, but I can control whether I acknowledge them and how I do that. So in the beginning, I said to Spirit, I’m going to set aside a time every day at four o’clock for you to communicate with me. I’m going to light my white candle to protect everything in God’s light. I ask only for the highest good of all concerned. And I only want to channel souls that walk in God’s white light. And you know what? For the most part, Spirit respected that, so I became more comfortable channeling too. We were developing a real give-and-take relationship.
Whatever I sensed while I was meditating, I wrote down on a pad of paper. Pat taught me how to do automatic writings, which is when you basically take dictation from Spirit. Channeling through the pen is an easy way to speak with Spirit, especially when you aren’t fully comfortable with “hearing” messages in your mind and can’t always tell the difference between your thoughts and Spirit’s. You’ll see me do automatic writing during readings on TV with my little notepad, since it helps me focus; when I channel, I’ll scribble down words that Spirit wants me to use to make a point.
Another major thing I asked Spirit to do was stop presenting itself to me as three-dimensional people—an image like you or me. When I first started reading others, I’d be brushing my teeth, look up, and suddenly see a man standing behind me in the mirror. That was so startling! So I told my guides that if I was supposed to embrace this gift, they’d have to find other ways to show me things. From then on, I saw Spirit as figures in shadow instead. I don’t mean negative “shadow people,” or the scary dark masses that whisked away the bad guys’ souls in Ghost. The images I see are like silhouettes, or like a chalk outline at a crime scene but filled in with a cloudy shadow you can see through. Its energy feels very positive. In fact, because I only want to serve the highest good, I don’t see negative Spirit and try to avoid them at all costs. I don’t like Halloween parties or historic haunted houses, and you couldn’t pay me enough to touch a Ouija board. In the same vein, I’m always asking that things be protected in God’s white light, so I never even get negative information during readings. Only good things, that’s all I want.
I began to develop a “vocabulary” with Spirit to understand the signs and sensations they were sending me. I took on more of Pat’s clients and began sharing the unbelievable, moving, and often hilarious stories with Larry. He asked lots of questions, and I could tell he was becoming more invested in what I was doing. Frankly, we were both amazed I could speak to these souls in the first place! In a lot of ways, I was on a clear spiritual path, but we were growing in it together.
Holy Sheet! I Really Am a Medium!
Though I only liked giving readings in class, one day I let it happen in real life. I was in Bed Bath & Beyond, and I remember feeling like I couldn’t take a breath. I’d established with Spirit that this is a sign that someone’s passed from the chest—heart, lungs, breasts, a filling up of fluid, or a drowning even. At one time, I would’ve gone into a tailspin—abandoned my cart in the middle of the aisle, hightailed it out of the store, sped through stop signs crying, and beat myself up for the whole drama once I got home. But that day in BB&B, I told myself I’d be okay. I thought about what my mom used to say: Your safe place is you. And then I heard a man’s voice.
“Tell my wife I like the ones on the left,” he said.
Nobody was there.
Just then, an older woman came up to me with two sets of sheets. She told me she’d just lost her husband after forty years of marriage and was redoing the bedroom. She couldn’t decide which sheets he’d have liked better. I suggested the ones on the left, and it made her so happy.
I didn’t tell the woman that her husband told me what to say. I like my baby steps, if you can’t tell! But at that moment, I knew Spirit would continue to place people in my path who needed to hear messages from their loved ones, like this woman. I also believe my own Spirit guides were giving me my first real test, and I passed! The best bonus of all? My chest felt normal after delivering the message. I channeled, released the energy, and went on with my day.
After taking Pat’s classes for five years, and reading her students, it was time to share my ability with others. I felt confident that what I was doing came from a higher power. There were also signs that made me feel I was being guided by the divine. I was thirty-three years old when I accepted my gift, and Jesus was thirty-three when he died. I live off Jerusalem Avenue. Pat suggested I make business cards and get a separate phone line for my venture. The last four digits of this number were 6444, which I thought was perfect because I was born in the month of June (6), and I believe 444 is a sign of the angels. But the day my phone was set to be turned on, the guy told me he had to change it. I was so bummed, until I realized that the last four digits were the sign of the cross. It’s worth mentioning that one reason it took me so long to accept my gift was that I struggled with why I was chosen to have it in the first place. I kept thinking, Who am I? I’m no one special. Why was I chosen to do this? Why is this my journey? And being raised Catholic, you don’t contact the dead. So I think Spirit was also sending me “religious” signs to assure me that what I was doing was okay and, in many ways, guided.
From the moment I began seeing clients in my home, my family was laid back about it. If people asked my kids what their parents did for a living, they’d say, “Dad owns a business importing Italian foods, and Mom speaks to dead people.” So natural, like I was a teacher or something. Larry also overheard some readings at the house and b
egan coming with me to my small venues. After that, he said it was hard not to believe in what I did. He’d get especially impressed when Spirit had me talk about health or human anatomy, because I didn’t go to college. I also don’t read books, since reading relaxes my brain and clears my mind in a way that lets Spirit communicate with me, and then I can’t focus on my book! So where would I learn this stuff, if it didn’t come from Spirit?
Being a medium also helped validate a lot of “unusual” experiences for my husband. Larry saw his grandmother’s soul when he was ten years old, but was never sure it was real. He shared a room with his brother, and she was standing at the foot of his bed. Larry thought it was his imagination, and actually forgot about it until I accepted my gift. He’s also learned a lot about déjà vu. When Larry was young, he’d be in places he hadn’t been before, though he had clear memories of them and couldn’t explain why. Now, if he feels anything “strange”—like déjà vu, gut instinct, chills, good timing, coincidences, or even a hand on his leg or tug on his shirt, he knows it’s Spirit. In 2001, Larry was diagnosed with a brain tumor and not only did he survive, he overcame most of the nerve damage that it caused. He credits more than his doctors for his recovery.
My favorite change in Larry, though, is that my tough, tattooed, motorcycle man has become more emotionally sensitive to everything for some reason. The Color Purple makes him cry and don’t get him started on how much he loves our family. The guy’s a sap.
The Start of Something Good
Though I’ve finally embraced my gift, I’m far from perfect. I have fewer panic attacks, and I’m much more independent. But I still don’t like elevators or enclosed spaces, and I’m deathly afraid of the dark (no pun intended). I sleep with a nightlight and TV on, and I keep all the doors open except the closet. I also don’t go into a deep sleep at night. I toss, I turn, I hear things, I feel things. And if I dream, I don’t remember it. Larry says when my alarm goes off at six a.m., I get right up—no stretching, no snoozing. It’s as if I’m happy that I don’t have to be in that bed a minute longer. I try to be the best Theresa Caputo I can be, but there are plenty of days I come up short. I’m a medium, not a saint!
As someone who doesn’t exactly hide her big personality, I’ve found it fun and interesting to channel souls that have distinct characters and stories. I love meeting new people, and being a medium can make me feel like the hostess at a really important gathering. Children’s souls, especially, have told me, “My parents have been to mediums, but I like channeling through you because you let my parents see me.” People can feel their loved ones and how they acted or spoke when they were at their best. I’m not saying this is because I’m better than other mediums—no no no no no. I feel that all mediums channel and connect with Spirit differently; one isn’t more skilled or better than another.
I realize that I have a lot to be grateful for. I’m glad that I can share this gift with other people, though my family likes to joke that I don’t give them much of a choice when I stop them in the gym, dentist, or at the mall! I’m glad that Spirit continues to keep me on my toes, and with every single reading, they teach me something new. I also feel thankful that I have such an easygoing personality, or else it might be harder for me to accept my unusual abilities. As a rule, I don’t question or overanalyze anything—I let life be simple. If you handed me a bottle of hair spray and asked how it worked, I’d say, “Listen, I don’t care how. Does it work? Yes? Great.” I don’t need to know how, when, why. It is what it is, and that’s it. I treat Spirit communication the same way.
But, enough about me. Let’s get down to Spirit!
2
Don’t Shoot the Messenger
So how do I communicate with Spirit, including your loved ones? People ask me this all the time, and it can be hard to put into words since channeling is an ability that comes naturally to me. It’s like how my daughter, Victoria, is a competitive gymnast. She can do high-flying dismounts, crazy back handsprings, and flip through the air. Yeah, she practices twenty-five hours a week and does a bunch of exercises to help her improve on her raw talent, but she started with an innate skill that made her un-freaking-believable at swinging and tumbling. And if you ask her how she does it, she’ll say, “I don’t know. I can just do it.” Her gift is part of her. It works the same for me, talking to dead people.
Before I get into specifics about what it’s like for me and my clients when I channel, I’d like to explain how the process works. During a private or group reading, Spirit—mostly your loved ones who have died, but also my guides and other divine souls on the Other Side—makes me sense, see, hear, feel, and know things in ways that most people don’t, so that I can deliver their messages to you. Usually more than one soul channels in a session, and I have no control over who steps forward. I might talk a mile a minute, but the reading isn’t about me. It’s about what Spirit wants you to know. I’m just the physical body that a soul uses to let its voice be heard. I ask only that Spirit communicate with personality, for the highest good of all concerned, and that they tell me the messages that will bring you the most peace at that moment in your life.
My job, then, is to explain what Spirit shows and tells me. Souls do this through my frame of reference, which means that all of the messages I get are filtered through my personal experiences (I always say that when I channel, everyone sounds Italian and Catholic!). If I’ve never heard a term, phrase, name, or come across the kind of situation that Spirit’s describing to me, it may take a minute for me to communicate the message in a way that you can connect with and then interpret. If I’m describing something to my clients that they don’t understand, I ask them to tell me. It doesn’t make me right and them wrong, or them right and me wrong. Spirit is never wrong, first of all, in what they try to communicate to you. What could be incorrect is how I’ve “translated” the signs or feelings they use to get their points across. When a detail seems fuzzy or unclear, I’m the first to say, “I don’t know what this is about, but here’s what they’re showing me!” If we’re still drawing a blank, Spirit has me come at the topic another way. I leave it to you to make sense of the overarching messages, though, because only you know how they fit into your life. I might suggest a few meanings, but I’m never the last word on any of them.
The wild thing is, Spirit always gets its point across. If we don’t understand a message at first, I don’t worry. You may connect the dots later in the session or when you get home. I know Spirit makes me say every word I do for a reason. Here’s a good example. One time a woman came to me whose father died very suddenly. He wanted me to tell her, “Don’t feel that if I were diagnosed any sooner that I’d be alive.” I felt as if he’d passed from a skin disease, but he showed me that he died after hitting his head. He also kept saying, “Theresa, can you believe this is how I died?” I didn’t know what the guy was talking about, because I intuitively felt like he didn’t die from hitting his head and yet that’s what I was being shown. Madone, can you imagine how confusing this message seemed? But it wasn’t my job to interpret it—just deliver the words. Turns out, the woman’s dad hit his head getting into his car, which gave him a cut that refused to heal. When he went to the doctor, he learned that the cut wasn’t healing because he had stage-four melanoma (it’s one of that cancer’s identifying symptoms). He died two weeks later.
Hey, Spirit, What’s Your Sign?
I’ve met enough skeptics in my life to know that not everyone buys what I do, so I want to try to give you a sense of what it’s like for me when I communicate with one or more souls. I’m not here to make you believe in mediums, though my guess is that if you bought this book, you’re at least a little curious! I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t really care if you believe in what I do. I’m just here to share what I feel to be true.
Before I start channeling, I begin with a short speech for a few reasons. For one, I do this to explain how I receive messages and how you can interpret th
em. My monologue is also my sign to Spirit that I am ready to work. I use this ritual whether I’m reading for one person or a venue of three thousand. At this point, your deceased loved ones start to clear out my own personal thoughts, feelings, and emotions, and they begin to replace them with signs and symbols of things I have experienced here in the physical world so that I can relay their messages to you.
Throughout a session, Spirit uses a vocabulary of signs and symbols to either (1) validate their relationship to you, and/or (2) deliver a specific message to you. I call this collection of signs and symbols my “Spirit library.” These signs can come with certain feelings, since I’m empathic, as I’ve explained, but I’ll get into that part later. I translate my signs as best as I can, and then deliver the message to you. Again, it’s your job to interpret how the meaning is significant. It’s a little like piecing together a puzzle or solving a Scooby-Doo mystery. Wait, does that make me Daphne?
When Spirit’s validating their presence or relationship to you, I ask them to be clear, unique, and specific. I don’t let Spirit give me obvious validations; if they do, I ignore the clue and ask them to try again, with more precision. At this time, they might mention something you said in the car on the way over or a specific piece of jewelry that’s special to you. For example, one time a grandmother’s energy came through and showed me four-leaf clovers in reference to her granddaughter, who just happened to have the woman’s Claddagh ring in her pocket. Or once Spirit told me a client had something pinned inside her bra, and the woman said she pins an evil eye and horn into her bra every day! She said she never leaves home without them, since she believes the evil eye keeps people’s negativity from reaching her, and the horn guards her from others’ bad wishes and boomerangs it back to them. Holy moly! I freaked myself out on that one.
There's More to Life Than This: Healing Messages, Remarkable Stories, and Insight About the Other Side from the Long Island Medium Page 3