Читать книгу Signs from the Other Side - Bill Philipps - Страница 10

2 An Unlikely Path

Toward the end of the summer after my mom’s death, I was walking through a strip mall in Southern California with some friends when we passed a psychic shop. The psychic came out and stopped me.

“Wow!” she said. “You have an amazing gift.” She was moving her hands in the space around me, like she felt some sort of energy. I watched her as if she was out of her mind. “You should be doing what I’m doing. But the thing is . . . it’s going to take you about three years to understand what I’m saying.”

Was she serious? My friends and I had a good laugh and moved on.

But right on cue, three years later, just after my eighteenth birthday in October 2002, a weird thing began happening to me: I would go to bed each night with chills and a feeling that someone was in the room with me. I shared my experiences with my friend’s mom, Rachel, who believed in the spirit world and was someone I had often turned to for advice. She was fascinated by my story and suggested that I visit a metaphysical shop nearby. I wasn’t thrilled about the idea because I didn’t put much stock in places like that. I initially resisted going, but since the strange feelings hadn’t subsided, I decided to give it a shot.

On the night I went, the store happened to be holding a two-hour class on how to develop mediumship skills, or how to communicate with the deceased. The teachers immediately tagged me as someone with “an aura,” something I shrugged off as nothing but a setup for a future sales pitch. As the youngest person there and one of the few not dressed like a gypsy, I was most concerned with where the exits were and how I could get the heck out of there.

But I reluctantly stuck with it, and two hours later, I could not deny that the aura existed. I went through two tests, one that measured my extrasensory perception, or ESP, and one that tested my ability to connect with someone or something through the energy of an object. Not only did I pass both with tremendous ease, but I boggled the minds of the instructors and every other person in the room. I even brought one woman to tears because I was able to connect her with her close friend who had died.

When I reported to Rachel what had happened, she was ecstatic. She tested me further by having me give a reading to her. The spirit that came through to me during that reading meant nothing to her, but she told me to be patient. About a week later, Rachel met with one of her business clients. Through casual conversation, she figured out that the spirit that had come through during my reading with her the previous week was connected to this client, so she eagerly set up a meeting between us.

That client’s son had recently died. During my reading with her, I found I was able to tell her specific things about him that nobody else knew, as well as give her direct messages from this spirit, who I felt was actually inside my mind telling me what to say. So, a reading I had given to Rachel had been meant for someone she knew, which taught me that those on the other side had the power to orchestrate meetings between two complete strangers — her client and me — in order to communicate their messages to their loved ones.

As intriguing and exciting as this was, I didn’t drop everything and instantly become the channel that the spirit world obviously wanted me to become. As a recent high school graduate, I was about to start taking classes at the local community college, and I was going to continue voice lessons. I loved to sing, and I had been blessed with a rare operatic tenor voice. I was also working up to forty hours a week as a barista at a café. I decided to stick with the classes, lessons, and job while giving readings when I could. I figured, still being young, I had plenty of time to determine what I should — or was destined to — do with my life.

I worked on my psychic medium skills at the café by trying to determine the names of customers. I would pick them out of the line, ask the spirits for their names, and then ask the customers their names when they would come up to place their order. I listened for that inner voice from within, and nearly every time I was able to correctly name them or come awfully close. If I were completely wrong, I would usually discover that the name I had heard was that of someone else standing close by, such as next in line. Or I would learn that the name I had received wasn’t that of the customer in line but rather of the actual spirit tied to that person.

I eventually took my gift to another café on my off days, not as an employee but as a customer. I would sit at a table and try to figure out names of other customers and of the staff. I tried to be discreet in these self-tests, but the times I did tell people what I was doing, my efforts were met with unbridled enthusiasm. I thought they would freak out and call me crazy, but instead they wanted more, and word of my gift quickly spread. Customers would try to time their visits to the café with mine and sit by me. Sometimes they would bring their friends in to “show me off.” Servers would argue over who got to wait on me, with the hope that they could get a reading. I then began doing readings outside the café for many of the people there, meeting them in parks or in their homes, and they paid me for my time. This gift was taking on a life of its own, and it was taking over mine.

As a result, in January 2003, I left my job at the café. I enjoyed working there, but I was spread too thin and needed to give up something. With the readings providing me money for college and voice lessons, I made mediumship my job instead.

Every reading I gave increased my knowledge of the extent of my capabilities. Like anything else in life, the more I practiced this skill, the more I mastered it.

I learned that when I did a reading, I had to enter a trance-like state. Those on the other side were throwing information at me nonstop. Therefore, I needed to be laser-focused and share it immediately with my client as it came in. The message from the spirit was like the sound waves of music passing through a radio (me) to a listener (the client). I then had to help the client interpret it. When we were finished, it was necessary to completely disconnect myself from it so that I could psychologically prepare for the next reading. Each time, I expended an enormous amount of energy. If I hadn’t consistently “discarded” each reading when it was finished, my brain would have crashed from the overload of information.

I also learned early on that those on the other side were often fighting for position in my mind so that I would hear their messages. If I was reading for a group, it was as if their deceased loved ones were pushing each other out of the way to get to the front of the line. It was my job to try to separate their energies, like untangling a bunch of cords. That is why in a group reading it would likely take me a while to figure out whom the spirit was trying to reach, and why I counted on the clients to help me determine that.

Something else I learned was that a message from a spirit did not always immediately make sense to a client, but it would with time. For example, if we had determined that a client’s grandmother was coming through to us and she talked about some letters in a shoebox, the client might have had no idea what that meant: “Letters? I don’t know anything about any letters.” But that didn’t mean the letters didn’t exist and wouldn’t materialize at some point in the future. The client and I both needed to trust what the spirit was saying, no matter how little sense it made at the moment. In time, if the client had an open mind and open heart, the message would become clear.

I continued with the readings, voice lessons, and school for the next couple of years, until January 2005 when I made a major decision: I was going to attend the prestigious San Francisco Conservatory of Music to train as an opera singer. A few months earlier, I had been among roughly a hundred candidates who auditioned for just one open spot at the school — and I got it. The faculty identified me as a “young dramatic tenor” with a very rare “young Wagnerian” voice. They viewed me as someone who had tremendous potential to succeed in the world of opera. As successful as I had been doing readings, this was an opportunity I could not pass up.

But guess where the spirit world goes when you decide to move to San Francisco? With you to San Francisco. The spirits couldn’t have cared less about what my career plans were or that I was moving. I had been their channel, they trusted me, and they weren’t going to let that go.

As it turned out, my time at the Conservatory sharpened my skills as a psychic medium in a couple of ways. One way was by singing onstage, which taught me how to handle pressure in front of audiences and to trust my talents. The other way was through the vibration of the music, which was very similar to the feeling I had when tuning in to spirits. Music can raise your energy and cut through any negativity you are experiencing. For me, music connected my energy with my soul and produced an exhilaration that helped me connect with the spirit world.

I cut back on readings when I got to the Conservatory, doing them mainly by phone for people back home or face-to-face when I returned to Southern California for breaks. The only person I initially did them for on campus was a teacher whom I had told about my gift. A spiritual person herself, she was so excited to hear about my ability that she wanted to help me develop it while I was in school, and I agreed to let her. She taught me how to “sing spiritually” by correlating the way I sang with the energy inside me, and she also had me give readings to specific opera teachers at the school and at other colleges who she knew would be open to my gift — and it worked.

In no time, I was doing readings for some of the top opera people in the world. They were blown away by my abilities, and I was soon doing multiple readings a week. It was exhausting, but I felt a real responsibility to keep doing it. As strange as it may sound, abandoning those souls that had crossed over would have been an ethical failing, in my opinion.

After graduating in the spring of 2008 at the age of twenty-three, with an opera degree in hand, I decided to set it aside to pursue a full-time career as a medium. I still had a passion for singing but not at the same level as I did for creating a connection between the dead and the living. My singing might affect someone’s life for the moment, but my readings were changing lives forever.

I built a website by the fall and sent an email about my decision to all my family members and closest friends. Well, all except my grandma and dad. I needed to tell them in person, because I expected they were not going to be happy about my decision. Unfortunately, I was correct. My dad called me the devil and said I was a fool for not pursuing opera. Considering the sordid life he had led, I had hoped for a little more understanding from him, but there was none. My grandma at least listened to me, but she wasn’t pleased either. She was a devout Christian who believed that mediumship was not something to be messed with.

The irony, from my perspective, was that she had raised me as a Christian, to believe in and emulate Jesus, a healer and an instrument of love and peace. Providing emotional and spiritual healing for people by bringing peace and love into their lives through a connection with their deceased loved ones was my goal. How could I follow Christ any better?

What Grandma had taught me as a child about Christianity was the basis for what I was doing. I understood that the Bible said to stay away from mediums, but I couldn’t deny this unique gift — and yes, I believed it was a gift, because how could something that was bringing such joy to people be anything else? I wasn’t dabbling in Ouija boards or communicating with evil spirits. I knew I was doing the right thing, and I was doing it with nothing but pure and good intentions. I felt a responsibility to use this gift to bring happiness to as many people as possible, no matter who disagreed with me, even the woman I loved the most.