There's More to Life Than This: Healing Messages, Remarkable Stories, and Insight About the Other Side from the Long Island Medium

by Caputo, Theresa

  So what kind of energy made the table move? You got me. I knew Marie’s grandmother’s soul was present for protection, but I didn’t sense that she was moving the table or that other Spirit made the piece glide either. The energy was something I didn’t recognize, and it was in the table. I also didn’t sense it was negative energy. I had my hesitations about airing the scene, because I thought nobody would believe it. But do you know how many emails I got saying, “Growing up, we had a table just like that”? Stop it!

  8

  Negative Energy—Do Not Enter

  If you’ve just flipped ahead, hoping to read a bunch of spooky tales about possessions, hauntings, and American Horror Story–type encounters, the next few pages may be a letdown. In fact, this may be the least scary chapter on negativity you’ll ever read in a book about dead people! The reason is because I don’t deal with negative Spirit, and if they’re around, I barely acknowledge them, much less interact with them. I have a similar MO when it comes to destructive people—I choose not to engage. But I can’t completely ignore the fact that negative people and negative Spirit exist, and they may be upsetting you, so I want to share my thoughts, experiences, and two cents on the topic. Just because I don’t like negative energy doesn’t mean I don’t have an opinion about it.

  In the last chapter, I briefly talked about how negative attracts negative, and positive attracts positive, in terms of transferring thought energy. But it’s important to also see how these vibrations manifest in the actual people, situations, and Spirit in your life. Spirit wants you to surround yourself with positive influences and spend less time in negative situations. I think this is because positivity benefits soul growth, and Spirit is really good at seeing the big picture and not just enjoying instant gratification. If there weren’t a long-term perk to being positive, Spirit would suggest we cheer ourselves up by eating a Philly cheesesteak when we’re sad or stressed out!

  When you’re upbeat and make an effort to raise your vibration all the time, it’s natural for good souls who’ve gone into the light to be drawn to your positive energy. They will surround, guide, and protect you, because they come from God, who is also good. But when you are fearful, destructive, or dysfunctional, then your home and life can be a very comfortable place for negative Spirit to thrive. Negative souls are immature and all too eager to feed off your fear and vulnerability—just like a deceitful, selfish, mean, or unreliable person in this world would. Not surprisingly, such low-level energies were not on the up and up in the physical world either. Their souls have a lot of learning to do before they advance on the Other Side, and they can spend a lot of time trying to get your attention and throw off your better intentions. But just as a close friend would suggest that you guard yourself from negative people by establishing boundaries, illuminating positivity, not harping on a bad moment, and seeing life through a glass half full, you need to do the same by guarding yourself from unscrupulous Spirit.

  People Who Need Positive People

  I realize that having a good attitude is no easy feat, especially when you’re busy, stressed, grieving, or all of the above, but your soul doesn’t need to go from Archie Bunker to Little Miss Sunshine overnight. You’ll need to make an effort to establish and then maintain a good attitude, but it’s worth it. It reminds me of how both my kids had braces and the tiniest adjustments to their crooked teeth eventually led to the most beautiful smiles. Then after the braces came off, they had to wear retainers to make sure their teeth didn’t go back to their old ways. Similarly, small shifts in perspective can make a big impact, and surrounding yourself with positivity is like having a retainer for your soul.

  Look around, and I’ll bet you’ll have no problem finding examples of how attitude adjustments made life easier and more fun. For me, it happens every day on the set of our show. I don’t have a lot of rules for the Long Island Medium crew to follow when they come into my home, but one is that they address everyone by name and say good morning to him or her. This sets the tone for the day and makes it enjoyable to come to work. I don’t always wake up with a grin, but small gestures like this brighten my outlook too.

  Your attitude toward the weather is another detail that can affect your day. Rain, for example, can drown a cheerful attitude in no time. You don’t need to have a phobia about it like I did to hate how it causes traffic jams, makes your hair frizz, and ruins white pants. But to keep from getting down, you know what I do? I think of the walk I’ll take when the sun comes out. And with heavier situations, like the death of a loved one, I won’t belittle your feelings by saying you should get over it by going for a stroll. Your process is going to be different from mine or the next person’s, and healing can take a while. But as you work through any situation, I find that having a hopeful outlook on smaller nuisances, like the weather, lets you pay more attention to handling the stuff that really matters. The fickle climate becomes one less thing you have to worry about.

  A lot of times, just anticipating a bad person or situation can create negative energy in you, well before the encounter ever happens. I know a woman whose mother-in-law crawls under her skin for at least a week before she’s due to see her. She gets a stomachache, starts petty fights with her husband, stomps around the house—all this because she expects to feel attacked by her mother-in-law’s criticism in the near future. But by getting her dander up ahead of time, the woman transfers her sour expressions to family and friends, and in some ways creates her own reality. Instead of huffing around, I suggested that she visualize the two families having a great time together and imagine her handling her mother-in-law’s insults in an effortless way. This sends a message to Spirit about the kind of guidance she needs. She can also be practical about prepping for the visit by coming up with replies ahead of time. The truth of the matter is that other people can help make us happy, but they’re not responsible for our happiness—we are.

  Spirit often suggests a great exercise to those carrying negative emotions connected to a person’s death, but I think it’s useful for any negative situation, really. They’ll say, “Visualize me standing in front of you, with a suitcase open at my feet. Please put all the negative burdens that you carry connected to my passing inside, close the suitcase, and hand it back to me with love. These are my burdens to carry, not yours.” So the next time you find yourself in a dire situation, I recommend that you try this visualization: put everything you wish you could say and do to that person into a large suitcase, close it (will it even shut?), and hand it back with love. We spend way too much time carrying other people’s baggage, and it’s time to send ’em packing.

  Why Negative Entities Don’t Scare Me

  Just as I don’t devote much energy to negative people, I also don’t spend time worrying about negative Spirit. I feel that the less I fear and acknowledge these entities, the less I will interact and connect with them. And I like to think that as a result, this is one reason I’ve personally never encountered demons, poltergeists, or other evil beings that scurry along roofs or possess people that can’t seem to ignore their presence. But just because I don’t deal with this bad Spirit, doesn’t mean that I doubt they exist. I didn’t experience the Holocaust or Great Potato Famine, but I don’t question that those events were real.

  I think you’re more in control of negative Spirit than books, shows, and films let on. I always ground and protect myself in God’s light, regularly sage, and when I channel, I ask for the highest good of all concerned and souls that walk with God. It’s when you don’t protect yourself and you feed into negativity that I think it can multiply. If your bed shakes for no reason, you can shut it down with saging and prayer, or you can encourage it with a certain level of fascination. If your cat skids across the floor as if it were kicked, you can research a priest and medium to get rid of the nuisance that caused it, or you and your friends can provoke the energy to do it again. You know what I mean?

  Not too long ago, I did a show in Vegas and met
this gruff, mustached, biker guy, and Spirit told me that he had abilities like mine. I asked him if this was true, and he said, “No, it’s not the same. I only see evil. I turn on the TV and can see who’s a child molester, or watch the news and know if someone’s guilty of murder. I don’t understand how you only see positive energy, when I only see negativity.” Okay, I have two points to make about this conversation. First, I can also watch a Dateline investigation and know who the killer is, but that’s not where my thinking ends. I intuitively find whatever good there might be in the situation—maybe the victim’s family became closer after her death, or the story raised awareness about gun control laws. I then say a quick prayer for the victim and for the family to know that the person is at peace. That is, I make a concerted effort to raise my vibration, to help buffer a negative event, for everyone’s benefit.

  Second, delivering healing messages from positive Spirit is a choice. During the show that the biker guy saw, all I delivered were positive messages—I did not sense or feel anything negative whatsoever, even though this man said that he did. In fact, I channeled a young girl whose boyfriend murdered her, and she left behind a son. Clearly this was a horrible, tragic, negative thing that happened, but I didn’t get gruesome or gory details from Spirit. Instead, the girl’s soul came forward to tell her family that she took responsibility for dating a man they never trusted, and she wanted them to let the authorities handle his punishment and focus instead on caring for her child. She brought the family comfort by letting them know she was okay and admitting that she put herself in a harmful situation, so that they wouldn’t feel any guilt related to her passing.

  So I’m not saying there aren’t negative energies out there, because you can’t have good without bad, and people make terrible decisions all the time, some of which may be influenced by negative entities. But you can control how much you let into your life and soul. Incidentally, Spirit also suggested that I tell the negative Spirit man that he could change the information he received if he wanted, but he just gave me a look like, “That’s easier said than done, lady.” And that’s fine, because I’m certainly not the last word on this topic, but the encounter made me think about how we all make conscious choices to frame a situation in a positive or negative light, and how it can affect our well-being.

  Positive and Negative Energy in Your House

  Since everything we touch holds on to some level of positive or negative energy, your homes and the land they’re built on are no exception. And because Spirit is energy, they linger too. Older homes can have more energy and Spirit than newer ones, because they’ve been around longer and acquired more of a history—more activities, events, and people passing in and out of them. New construction also has energy, likely from the land or your own departed loved ones dropping by for the afternoon.

  If Spirit lingers in your home, people automatically assume this is haunting, negative energy, but it doesn’t have to be. Because a soul can get attached to a building or property, it might choose to stay in the house, but more likely, the soul is visiting from Heaven and not there all the time. I know a man who occasionally sees the soul of the guy who once owned his home. The first time this happened, the soul told him not to be afraid and explained that he built the house and likes to see other families enjoy it as much as his did. If this guy didn’t have such an openly communicative soul on his hands, it would be easy to assume that his place was scary, because let’s face it, not everyone has a dead guy hanging out in their living room, and most movies tell us that when there’s a Spirit around, it’s bad. But this soul meant no harm, and the man asks for his privacy whenever he wants it. I suspect the soul also enjoys being around this man because he too is a lovely person. Would he have preferred that his house come with a spare bedroom or bonus closet? Sure, but there was no harm in getting good Spirit either.

  Sometimes when I walk into a home, Spirit will tell me what was on its land before the house was built—be it a farm, sacred burial ground, what have you—and if the energy that still resides there is positive or negative. During a private reading, Spirit told me that the home’s owner was genuinely upset about some trees that were chopped down in her backyard. She feared that she disrupted the land because under the trees were tombstones, and the company she hired to remove the trees got rid of everything! She was afraid the souls buried there would be angry and threaten her peaceful house, but a few of them actually stepped forward to say that since it wasn’t her fault that the graves were removed and she wasn’t building on the land, she shouldn’t worry. In fact, they found her sincerity a plus, and I suspect they’ll help keep her home safe from here on out.

  Homes that have experienced intense positive and negative emotion can hold on to that energy, but it doesn’t have to last forever. I once did a reading for a couple in their house, which was newly renovated and felt positive to me. But as I walked through it, in my mind’s eye I saw flashes of walls splattered in blood, and I even got a tinny blood taste in my mouth. I also saw a priest standing in the corner. This all startled me at first, but I was there to do my job and didn’t want to scare the couple by mentioning what I saw and sensed, so I went ahead with the reading. I should have known Spirit wouldn’t ignore the elephant in the room! During the session, they said the husband was a cheapskate, showed me yellow tape around the house, and told me that people had brutally died in that space. I shared this with the couple, and the wife validated that when they bought the house, they got it really cut-rate because a family was murdered in it and nobody wanted it. They’d gutted the house and had a priest bless it, and Spirit confirmed that it was now free of bad energy. But even though they’d ripped down most of the walls, the space still held that imprint for me. I couldn’t, however, feel anything menacing in it—the priest had taken its palpable energy away.

  Know too that the energy and Spirit you bring into your home can matter most of all. If your home feels happy or heavy, take a good look at your own life before you go blaming the previous owners or some dead lady’s soul that you swear is haunting the attic. Then grab that sage and start smudging. The best thing about sage is that it doesn’t work just on Spirit. It breaks up all kinds of negative energy. When I’m in an off mood or after an annoying visitor is at the house, I like to sage while saying a positive affirmation like, “We only have room in this house for peace, love, joy, and contentment. We don’t have room for negative thoughts, feelings, or emotions—please go to the light.”

  Standing Up to Negative Spirit

  More often than not, I’ve found that when people casually tell me that their home is “haunted” by a scary spirit, the space is really occupied by a nice soul that hasn’t been given boundaries. It’s like that hotel we filmed at for the show that was called the Padre Hotel in Bakersfield, California; here, a little girl’s soul told me that she and other Spirit watch over the place and like to sing and dance in the halls. These souls weren’t negative, but they do cause a ruckus, and if you’re not a fan of unexplained noises, that can seem scary. Less common is when a negative soul disrupts or haunts the living in a bad way, in which case, it’s important to call a medium or priest to efficiently handle it.

  Since I’ve never encountered a negative nuisance, I dug into Pat’s bag of stories for an example. Years ago, she helped a very mean and aggressive soul cross over. He was upsetting a ten-year-old girl who lived in a home that he’d occupied for many years. As Pat began to direct him to the light, he resisted her with such energy that it began to slowly push against her body until she bent backward. She spread her feet to anchor herself. It wasn’t painful, just uncomfortable, and she won. Pat called him a coward, and he broke. She’d brought a medium that could see and hear the soul, and the soul said he was afraid to meet his maker because of bad stuff he’d done to his own kids and the fact that he was now scaring this child. Knowing he was vulnerable, Pat then called his mother’s soul forward on the Other Side, and she came for her son and helped him c
ross.

  Ultimately, a lot of what made this negative soul back down is that Pat and the medium weren’t scared. As I’ve said before, fear is your worst enemy, regardless of whether you’re dealing with people who are dead or alive. Bill Murphy, the father of the little boy Brian I’ve talked about who drowned, said something interesting to me the other day about this. He has noticed a common theme among those on TV who claim that their homes and lives are inhabited by evil Spirit:

  One of the most interesting things I have gotten out of watching these negative type shows about demons and evil is that the people undergoing this problem all seem to have homes filled with an overload of religious items—pictures, statues, angels, crucifixes, you name it. I’m not talking about signs of faith, but artifacts that are kept because people are afraid. Fear is a negative feeling and will bring about negative results, so I think a lot of the problems they encounter may be fed by their response to it. If your fear of evil is greater than your belief in God as an all-powerful being, I suspect negative Spirit can feed off it.

  If you ever do find yourself feeling uncomfortable or afraid in a way that you suspect is Spirit-related, surround yourself in a bubble of God’s white light and protection and repeat, “This is not your space. In the name of God, you must leave.” I also suggest the Our Father as a universal prayer of protection, no matter what religion you are. Keep saying either one until the sensation ends. It’s essential that you don’t have fear when you do this, so treat an exasperating entity with the kind of determination you usually save for annoying salesmen who won’t leave your front door. Remember too that if you sense something that seems ominous, you’ll be able to tell that it’s coming from a bad place because of the messages and thoughts you’ll receive. Tricky energy will tell you what to do, while a soul that’s visiting from Heaven will offer you guidance. Guidance is loving and beautiful, and it nudges you in a certain direction with encouragement. Also, souls that have gone into the light are thoughtful about letting you know they’re around with signs, coincidences, and other gentle hellos. They’re not out to scare you, and if you ask them to scram or take a beat, they most certainly will.