W
hen I was four years old, I said to my mother, "When you go to heaven, we'll write letters!" I couldn't know then that I was receiving an intuitive insight from the future, alerting me to a very important aspect of my life's eventual work.
I would be able to stay in touch, to interpret for souls who had completed their allotted time in this dimension, to help maintain the connection for those who were left behind. My mother and I did stay in touch after her death. When my daughter was very young, she experienced meetings with my mother while she slept. They chatted about events and memories that only Mother and I had shared. The details that my daughter related about these meetings gave me great comfort. To know that my dear mother could still communicate and that she had gotten to know her granddaughter—though she had never met her in the physical world—showed me that our heart connections linked all three of us beyond death.
My ability to communicate with my parents, both of whom died relatively young—at age fifty-one—didn't bring them back to me. I can still find that pain, that hollow feeling of loss. But my intuitive abilities have expanded my perceptions about life, death, and a Higher Power and a larger, more purposeful, plan. We receive gifts from each of the challenges life presents. If we can allow these challenges to expand our perceptions, to help us grow spiritually, the Universe will connect us to those who need our insight. The Universe eventually sends us those with whom we are to share these gifts.
At one point in my attempt to understand how it is that I am able to see clairvoyantly beyond the illusions of death and linear time, I approached physicists with questions. I was gathering some interesting information, when two individuals came forward to caution me, "You do not need physics or science to define your work! Let it stand alone!" These two people were the late Willis Harman, past president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and author of several new paradigm books, and Gary Zukav, author of The Dancing Wu Li Masters and The Seat of the Soul.
Their message influenced the route my work and my writing have taken. I am continually shaping both my work and my writing to respond effectively to a growing hunger folks have today for information that may not be scientifically proven nor quantifiably defined, but which revives their spiritual identity and offers an expanded view of life that is down to earth, practical, relevant and immediately useful.
These people are wrestling with frustrations and disillusionment over all that their lives don't contain. I've helped many of them to awaken from illusion and integrate a new understanding of reality. My efforts are aimed at responding to this new eagerness and receptivity to becoming fully integrated, multisensory (trusting beyond the five senses), spiritual beings.
The single most important message of my work, and this book, is this: We've been misinformed about death. It doesn't exist, except as it concerns our bodies and other matter that wears away over time. The soul, energized by our spirit—our life force—is indeed eternal. It makes an endless journey through lifetimes, showing up for adventures that expand us in love and sometimes contract us in fear. Some of our experiences have enabled us to soar to greater heights, and others have tempted us with choices that spiraled us downward into darkness.
We come into this dimension to experience both the light and the dark. When we embrace both of these powerful forces within ourselves, acknowledging that our souls are vulnerable to the darkness of fear, greed, selfishness, jealousy, abuse, addictions, self-absorption—to name a few of the effects of our less-wise choices—we can awaken to these very important realizations:
- As life continually challenges us, sometimes in unimaginable ways, we can choose to use the same free will that can get us in to so much karma-creating trouble to make more conscious, illuminated choices in every moment. Wiser choices direct us toward more expansive, positive experiences.
- We are the sum total of all our experiences. The effects of both kinds of choices go with us beyond the death of the body into eternity, as the soul seeks balance and resolution. So, too, go the love, the memories and the humor.
- "Grace" can turn our lives around on a dime. Grace is an instantaneous bestowal of forgiveness and unconditional love that expands us to the farthest reaches of our timeless existence. It's a gift that we receive from the infinite Source when we take personal responsibility for our actions, actively seek balance and resolution, and then surrender—release our expectations of anticipated outcomes and give up our futile attempts at scriptwriting our life's plan—to the Source.
- Our soul is the generator that runs old programs, "soul memories," and our spirit is the spark that carries forth the good, the bad, the ugly and the beauty of all that we've embraced and chosen in each life.
My work as a clairvoyant "seer" has been my heartfelt pleasure and my greatest teacher. I am blessed to do this "work." It is my joy to collect perspectives that shed light on the seemingly unanswerable, provide solace for the inconsolable, give me greater courage to share my insights and strengthen my faith in the face of the unpredictable.
Much like an antenna picks up signals, I receive messages from "departed" souls, the ever-eternal loved ones and relatives of my clients. These souls are vibrantly "alive." The lack of physical form in no way diminishes their connection with those they love. Their messages are filled with humor, deep affection, detailed memories, puns, personal jokes and invaluable confirmation of our timeless nature.
For over fifteen years, I have observed—personally and professionally—hundreds of people around the world whose lives really do make sense within a greater plan. In many cases, when I see new faces in my audiences at bookstores and various speaking venues, or as first-time clients, I learn they have just experienced the death of a loved one. What seems to be overwhelming grief becomes an opportunity to change in unforeseen ways. They discover that the heart connection to those they have lost—sometimes stretching through many lifetimes—that makes the physical missing so unbearable, is the very same connection that continues to link them to those souls on the Other Side.
Many of these people are beginning to learn that they, too, can be receivers of highly intuitive information, of subtle or startling messages from the Other Side. We are all members of a still evolving multidimensional, multisensing species. My clients and students demonstrate this in their stories that follow.
I want to express my gratitude to my clients—to their eternal, never-ending souls—for their stories and their wonderful (and often inspiring) willingness to grow and expand from their personal challenges, challenges that often include the heartbreaking loss of a loved one. It is my privilege to greet them on their paths, as they follow their souls' natural inclination to seek resolution and balance, even in one lifetime. It is to those seekers that I dedicate Heart-Links.
A few words about terminology, since the words that I (and my clients) have chosen will have certain meanings to the reader, particularly when they connect to important, personal beliefs. I am respectful of the fact that my clients—and my readers—hold many differing religious and spiritual beliefs, and refer to a Supreme Being in their own, respective ways.
For example, I find that my religious Jewish clients refer to the concept of a Supreme Being as "Hashem" (meaning, "the name") rather than to diminish the greatness that it represents by even uttering the name of "G-d." My Native American clients call God "the Breathmaker," and clients who feel that using "God" gives spiritual pursuits a religious flavoring prefer "the Source." I usually use "the Source" when I refer to God, or a Higher Power.
I refer to "the Other Side" but hesitate to do so, because it implies a place "over there" or some "where" that we go between our earthly experiences. Although it's a bit lengthy, I usually prefer to use "the nonphysical dimension," in an attempt to stretch the reader into a perception of our eternal souls as not being limited to time, place or space.
I mention souls who have "made their transition," "left their physical bodies," have "passed over," or "died." I use these terms interchangeably.
Maybe one day, when there is more of a consensus about the existence of an energy that is infinitely greater than our "selves" and about the illusion of death—where we do (or don't) "go" and how we get "there"—the words we use will be simpler.