Читать книгу Angel Babies: And Other Amazing True Stories of Guardian Angels - Theresa Cheung, Theresa Cheung - Страница 5

‘When we are willing to live as adults in childlike spiritual surrender, we are nurtured and cared for so sweetly.’

Karen Goldman

I’d love to be able to say at this point that I saw angels when I was a child, but sadly that simply wasn’t the case. Sure, I was born into a family of psychics and Spiritualists and always believed angels were close by, because that is what I was taught to believe at an early age, but I wasn’t one of those children who levitated in my cot, had nightly chats with angels or saw dead people in the playground. I didn’t even have an imaginary friend! I was incredibly shy as a child and perhaps overly serious. I didn’t trust my imagination or intuition at all. Creative writing lessons in class were pure torture. Obsessed with lists and chores and ‘to dos’, I never allowed myself much time to play or dream. It was only much later in life that I learned the importance of balancing doing with dreaming.

One of my first memories–I must have been three or four–is taking everything out of the food cupboard and putting it back in colour-coordinated order, much to my mother’s dismay when she found out later. Perhaps I unconsciously chose the role of the organizer and the practical, level-headed one in our family as some kind of counterbalance because I grew up in a rather alternative family where talk of angels was commonplace and nothing was ever planned or seemed certain. We were constantly on the move, never staying in one place long enough to put down firm roots. My dad was disabled and we lived on Mum’s meagre earnings as a psychic counsellor and there were often days when we really didn’t know whether we’d be able to afford food, let alone pay the bills. My mum was never worried, as she always believed that angels would provide–and they did, as somehow we always had a roof over our heads and food to eat–but as a child I worried endlessly about the haphazard, unpractical nature of our lifestyle.

Falling Down

Despite being ‘the practical and sensible one’, I desperately wanted to be psychic and to see and sense things like my mother and brother, so I read books, attended meetings and meditated for hours. Nothing worked. It was like bashing my head against a brick wall. Although I was smart, developing psychic gifts was one challenge that hard work and discipline simply couldn’t help me with. Inside I felt disappointed with myself. School was hard for me, as fitting in with the crowd didn’t come naturally. Gradually I lost confidence in myself and self-doubt took over. Then around the age of 12 my world crumbled and my childhood disappeared forever. I developed an eating disorder.

Looking over my diaries from the time, I’m still astonished by how distorted my thinking was back then. The world around me was not as perfect as I wanted it to be and controlling food became my way of coping. For the next four or five years I was on a painful journey. Although my weight never fell so low that I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, I experienced life as a joyless battleground. Every day was a battle–to get out of bed, to get dressed, to function. At times my head was filled with thoughts of death, as it seemed to offer some kind of freedom. Every move I made was controlled by a relentless voice in my head. Regulating my food intake and my weight became my sole focus and nothing else seemed to matter. And in the process I lost everything. Any friends I did have disappeared, unable to understand or handle what was going on in my head. I also missed a lot of school as the once together and organized child disappeared into oblivion.

Thinking now about those dark and bleak days, I can see that even though I felt lost and alone and abandoned, angels were always there guiding me. I simply didn’t have the eyes to see them or the ears to hear them or the heart to receive them. They manifested their loving presence first and foremost through my family. I took it all for granted at the time, but I don’t know where I’d have been without my mother, who quietly and anxiously supported me every step of the way, even if those steps were sometimes backward ones.

Angels also manifested their loving presence at the moment when I needed them the most, though I didn’t realize it at the time. Only now, as I reflect back on a significant turning-point in my young life, can I see the hand of my guardian angel at work.

Seeing the Light

One summer morning when I was 15 I woke up with a blistering headache. I had not allowed myself to eat and drink anything but apples and black coffee for five days. The destructive and overwhelming voice of anorexia switched on the moment I opened my eyes, as it had done relentlessly for the past three years. Anorexia would tell me to do something and I would have to do it. It didn’t matter what it was that I had to do; to me, anorexia was going to provide the solution to everything–or so I thought. This morning it told me to keep going with my apple and black coffee regime and to increase my exercise programme to four hours a day.

Wearily, I swung my legs over the side of my bed and felt for my hip bones, reassured that they felt sharp and defined. I looked up and noticed that I had forgotten to close the curtains the evening before and that the window was open. This was rather strange, because I had never forgotten to close the curtains before and I suffered from hay fever, so the windows in my bedroom were never left open in the summer. I wondered if my mum had opened the window, but then I remembered that she was staying overnight with friends. I’d been invited, too, but hadn’t wanted to go. Mum had only agreed to go if I promised to call her regularly and eat a banana as well as an apple. I had called, but I hadn’t eaten the banana and had no intention of doing so.

I moved towards the window, squinting as the sunlight hurt my eyes, and tried to draw the curtains, but I simply couldn’t lift my arms. They felt too heavy.

I tried once again to draw the curtains, but it felt as if something was gently but firmly clamping my arms to my sides. So then I tried to slump back into bed, but my feet were rooted to the spot. I couldn’t move an inch.

I don’t know how long I stood there soaking up the morning sunshine, but it must have been at least half an hour. At first I struggled, but then I stopped fighting and simply stood there, allowing the sunshine to wrap itself around me. As I felt the warmth of the sun on my face, a sudden clarity came to me. I realized in that instant that if I continued down the road I was headed on, anorexia would eventually kill me. It was then that I promised myself I would never let it get to this point again.

From that day onwards my recovery was gradual but steady. I had made the decision to live. It took a while, but eventually mealtimes were no longer a battleground. My mum told me that an angel had drawn my curtains back, opened my window and wrapped its arms around me that morning, but although the thought comforted me I still couldn’t quite believe it. My practical, logical side told me that I had simply forgotten to draw the curtains the night before and that food deprivation had made me too weak to lift my arms. My fearful, anxious self told me that I wasn’t special or psychic enough for angels to bother with me. But even though self-doubt still plagued me, somehow my common sense and my zest for life had returned, and they grew stronger as time went by. There wasn’t room for anorexia in my head anymore. I started to take better care of myself and gave myself permission to have a life again.

There was a lot of work to do in terms of building my self-awareness and self-esteem, but my psychic journey began that day I stood by the window in the sunshine. I still didn’t think I would ever see, hear or sense angels, but my mum, who had seen and spoken to angels all her life, used to tell me that when I was ready to open my heart and my life to them they would appear. I doubted her then, but years later I realized that she was right.

However, it took a good 20 years before I was finally ready to let angels into my life. In the meantime I was simply too anxious, fearful and lacking in self-trust. The harder I tried to sense angels, the further away they seemed to be and the more abandoned I felt. What I did not realize was that all along angels were guiding my life through my dreams, my intuition and the ‘coincidences’ that happened to me, but I was too full of questions, insecurity and fear to acknowledge those experiences for what they really were–the voice of my guardian angel.

The full story of my spiritual awakening and how the voice of an angel saved me from certain death can be found in my previous books; for now, all that it is necessary to know is that as a child and young adult my inner eyes were tightly closed. It was only when I learned to relax and get a handle on my fear and self-doubt–or, to put it another way, to see the world again through the eyes of a trusting child–that they began to open. And then it was as if a psychic doorway had also opened and all the angelic sensations and incredible experiences I had longed for came flooding in. Then I knew what I had always known but had forgotten along the way. With a newfound lightness of spirit, I reclaimed my inner angel and the innate spirituality I had lost faith in.

The more I worked with and trusted my angels, the more they began to work their magic in my life. Opportunities came my way both in my personal and professional life and barriers broke down. It wasn’t long before I was presented with one of the greatest gifts and responsibilities of my life when I was asked to gather inspiring true-life angel stories and string them together in a book. Until then I’d distinguished myself as a writer with bestselling encyclopaedias about dreams and the psychic world, but the new book, An Angel Called My Name, entered The Sunday Times top 10 bestsellers list within a week or so of release. My mailbag swelled with letters from readers keen to share their experiences. It became abundantly clear to me then that my angels had been waiting for this moment and my life had been building towards it.

I realized that my task was to collect angel stories and bring them to a wider audience, because every angel story is a miracle, a living testimony to heaven on Earth. Each story demonstrates the very real presence of angels in our lives. Each can help people see that there is goodness in and beyond this world and that this goodness is more than a match for the pain, suffering and injustice we see all around us.

Although we have advanced technologically, the same cannot be said for our spirituality. Our inhumanity to each other has not been eliminated. We need a spiritual lift–a big one–to help us feel safe again. We need the restoration of our faith and trust–in one another as human beings, in love and in our ability to make humane and positive choices for ourselves and for others. In short, we need to hear about angels around and within us and the miracle of love and goodness they bring to the world.

An Angel Child

I’ve fast-forwarded a little here in my excitement, so let’s go back a decade or so now to one of my very first encounters with an angel child.

I’d made friends with a neighbour who had recently moved into a house two doors away from me. She was roughly the same age as me–in her early to mid-thirties–and she had a four-year-old daughter and was expecting her second child. I guess we bonded because at the time I was expecting a child too.

I’d known her for about a month when she asked me if I’d mind looking after her daughter while she treated herself to a haircut. Normally I’d have politely declined, as I wasn’t very good with kids, but this time I welcomed the opportunity to spend some time with a young child. You see, even though I did want to be a mother, I’d never been very maternal. In fact I’d never even held a baby or played with a young child. I felt uncomfortable around children. I didn’t think they liked me. If truth be told, I was a little apprehensive about becoming a mother and wondered if I was up to the task. I figured that it was high time I gave myself a trial run, so to speak.

When I arrived at my friend’s house, she greeted me at the door. I’d seen Sophie, her daughter, a few times before, but we had not been formally introduced. She was like a little doll and said, ‘Pleased to meet you,’ with an adorable lisp. Then she laughed and laughed before saying, ‘Abir says hello.’ I looked at my friend and she shrugged her shoulders and explained that Sophie was ‘at that imaginary friend stage’ and I should just ignore her. But I was working as a magazine journalist gathering stories for a series of articles about the paranormal, and I was immediately fascinated. I had no idea where this fascination would take me.

As soon as my friend had hugged Sophie, told her to be a good girl and left for her appointment, I asked her to tell me more about Abir. She was happy to oblige and told me that Abir was an angel who came to her whenever she wanted to see her. Chills ran through my body and I grabbed a piece of paper and a pen from my bag. I knew this was important and that I needed to write down exactly what she said. I asked her to tell me about Abir and this is roughly the gist of it:

Abir is my angel and she comes to me. She’s in this room now. Look just behind you. I always know when she is going to appear because whenever she is near she makes things smell fresh and lovely. She’s very beautiful and always smiling. She thinks you should smile more.

Sophie then drew a picture of Abir with huge blue wings and a purple light surrounding her and said I could keep it as a present because it would remind me to smile when my baby was born.

There was so much more I wanted to ask her, but just as I was about to, her mother came back home looking crestfallen. There had been confusion at the hairdresser’s and her appointment had been double booked. Being the kind person she was, she had decided to stand down for the other person and book an appointment another day. I told her that I’d be more than happy to sit with Sophie then. I showed her the picture she had drawn of Abir and she said I was welcome to keep it as she had quite literally hundreds. She opened a drawer and took out a dozen or so of Sophie’s angel drawings to show me, and all of them had the same smiling face and wings. Then she told me something which made me feel sad and I wasn’t sure why: she had a plan to knock ‘all this nonsense’ out of Sophie’s head.

As the day wore on I could not keep away from the picture Sophie had drawn of Abir. Even though her story sounded incredible, I believed it was possible she could be in contact with an angel because she was obviously an intelligent child. I did some research on the name Abir and was amazed to discover that not only was it an extremely rare name that Sophie was unlikely to have heard of but that its meaning was ‘fragrance’. Sophie had told me that things smelled fresh and beautiful whenever Abir appeared.

A few days later I looked after Sophie again when her mother went for her hair appointment. This time I sat with her at my own house. I was keen to talk about Abir, but Sophie was in the mood for playing, not talking, and had brought a sack of toys with her. I didn’t want to push things, so after I settled her down in the front room I started to do some light cleaning and tidying up behind her. I was just about to throw away a bunch of shrivelled roses that had been standing in a vase for way too long when Sophie ran towards me and begged me not to because Abir would look after them. I felt it was easier to comply with her than go into a long explanation, so I left them where they were and forgot about them.

The next morning I couldn’t believe my nose when I came down the stairs and was hit by the strongest rose aroma I had ever smelled. I went into my front room and couldn’t believe my eyes: my roses looked resplendent. There were even beautiful pink buds where dead stalks had been the day before.

I couldn’t wait to tell Sophie’s mum about the roses, but when I did she told me that she knew I meant well but she didn’t want to indulge Sophie’s ‘nonsense talk’. Respecting her wishes as a parent, I promised never to mention angels again when I met Sophie. I stuck to my promise and Sophie didn’t seem unduly distressed, especially once her mother had bought her a puppy to play with. Later I discovered that she’d been promised the dog if she never mentioned Abir again. I felt sad but whenever I saw Sophie with her new pet I liked to think that her guardian angel was still with her, just in animal form.

In my Dreams

A few weeks after my chat with Sophie, anxiety about becoming a mother began to get the better of me. I was an organized, tidy person and one thing I did know about babies was that they were untidy, chaotic, unpredictable and demanding. I was fine during the day when I was busy with my writing, but when I was relaxing in the evenings I worried about not being able to cope. I worried about labour and delivery. I worried about my child having an abnormality or dying during the pregnancy or labour. I worried about dying myself. I worried about whether I would bond properly with the baby, given that I didn’t feel that comfortable around children. I worried that I would be a terrible parent. I worried about money. I worried about combining work with motherhood. I worried about what having a baby would do to my body and to my marriage. I think you get the picture. I was a worry wort and it was starting to make me ill.

One night after I’d been reading some pregnancy magazines full of advice and tips, I felt overwhelmed. A wave of panic took over. Voices in my head told me that I wasn’t going to be able to handle this. My husband was away on business, so I had no one to cling to for reassurance. I lay down in bed, shaking and sweating, and pulled the covers over myself. I was finding it hard to breathe and my heart was beating so loudly it seemed as if it was going to burst out of my chest. It felt as though the whole world was swirling around me. My mouth had never felt so dry. I was absolutely convinced that I was either dying or going mad. Then I felt an overwhelming tiredness.

I must have fallen into a deep and heavy sleep, because when I woke up the next morning I felt calm and centred. I sat up, rubbing my eyes, and then looked down at my bump and gave it a gentle rub. As I did so, memories of a vivid dream flooded back into my mind.

In my dream I had been walking alone in the most beautiful countryside. It resembled the Lake District, a place dear to my heart. I decided to climb a mountain so I could get a splendid view from the top. The climb started easily enough, but soon I ran into difficulties. I hadn’t been pregnant at the start of the dream, but I was now. I was hugely pregnant and struggling to put one foot in front of the other. Turning back wasn’t an option, as when I looked behind me the path had disappeared. The only way was up.

Exhausted, I sat down. Then I became aware of a little boy tugging at my arms and telling me to get up. He was olive skinned and about five years old and had dark eyes like chocolate buttons. I told him I couldn’t climb anymore but he just laughed and told me that I could. His belief in me was infectious and I found myself following him up the hill. He was right–it didn’t seem so hard to climb then and before long I was at the top of the mountain. The view was spectacular. I turned around to look for the boy, but he had gone. I called out for him, worried that he might not have made it. I didn’t see him again but heard his voice saying, ‘You won’t get it right all the time and that’s fine by me.’

I must have woken up then because I couldn’t remember any more of the dream, but the words ‘You won’t get it right all the time’ really struck a chord. In a flash of insight–an ‘aha moment’, as it is sometimes called–I understood that becoming a parent was something I would need to learn as I went along. I wouldn’t get it right all the time and shouldn’t even try, because no one does. In any case, there was no right or wrong way to do things, just the way that suited me and my family. And if I did make mistakes I would learn from them, just as I would from the things that went right.

I’m not saying that after this dream the worrying stopped completely–it didn’t–but I didn’t have another panic attack and for the first time since I had found out I was pregnant I knew in my heart that things would work out fine for me and my family. And they did.

I’ve never forgotten that dream and I never will, because the moment my son was born with his olive skin and chocolate eyes I knew beyond doubt he was the little boy in my dream. It touches me beyond belief to know that he reached out to me in my hour of need even before he was born.

‘Before I Was Born…’

From the moment my daughter was born, two years later, I got the feeling that she wasn’t new to all this. You’ve probably heard the term ‘old soul’ before and it is certainly true that many children appear wise beyond their years. Some, especially those below the age of five, also seem to have an awareness of a time before they were born. My daughter was one of them.

Like me, my daughter was not prone to fantasy or make-believe as a child. She was practical, pragmatic and had a firm sense of right or wrong, always reporting in detail the truth or facts of a situation. That’s why I couldn’t have been more shocked when she was about four and a half and started to tell me about her life as an angel before she was born. She used to tell me that she watched over me and picked me to be her mummy and my partner to be her daddy and her brother to be her brother. By then I’d learned not to discourage or feel confused and scared by this kind of talk, as Sophie’s mother had been. In fact I actively encouraged it. I told my daughter how lucky she was to have had such a special time and how glad I was that she had chosen me for her mother.

My daughter will be ten next year and no longer talks about her life before she was born. It all slipped away when she was about seven. At about the age of six, however, she shared a new revelation with me when she told that she had a guardian angel now and she often saw her standing in the garden with huge strong wings wrapped around the house. I trust that even though she doesn’t mention her anymore she’s still there and that there are yet more angels surrounding my daughter and my son, keeping them safe and lighting their way.

A Special Connection

Because of my experience with Sophie and with my own children I had to know if other children interacted with angels in the same way. I remembered that my brother used to chatter to me about his angels when we were growing up together but, being his sister, I never paid much attention to anything he said! Now I asked for his help in my research, though, as he had become a secondary school drama teacher. I myself had been a secondary school English teacher for several years, so between us and two primary school teachers we knew, we conducted a brief informal, anonymous and voluntary survey of children from schools in our areas. What we discovered was breathtaking.

I simply asked children between the ages of 4 and 18 to tell me about angels in as few or as many words as they felt comfortable with. I also asked them to draw pictures of what angels looked like to them, if they wanted to. As expected, children over the age of 12 were less forthcoming as far as drawing pictures was concerned, but when it came to submitting stories, the teenagers were as willing to contribute as the younger children. This surprised me a great deal, as I had expected the majority of my submissions to come from the under tens, but it became clear to me that a particularly close bond exists between angels and teenagers as well as between angels and young children. In taking the time to explore these stories, a cross-section of which you will read later in this book, I discovered that angels appear to young people in some vivid and nontraditional ways. They aren’t always white winged and wearing halos; they are as rich and varied as the children who experience them.

I wanted to talk to children with different lives outside my area, so I continued to gather stories from children across the country from a wide variety of backgrounds. All of them shared their stories with candour and conviction, and my desire to share their words and images with a wider audience grew stronger and stronger. In fact, finding out about children’s encounters with angels was a catalyst for me, because children are still connected to a world so many of us have forgotten. I truly hope that reading their stories in this book will encourage parents, carers, teachers and anyone who comes into contact with children to honour and nurture their spirituality.

But it is not just validating children’s spirituality that has become my passion. I’m just as passionate about validating spirituality in adults, but what working with children has shown me is that they can teach us so much more about spiritual growth than we can ever teach them. Perhaps this is all part of an angelic plan. Sometimes the best lessons are taught by those who don’t think they have all the answers, but do know how to live simply and to the full.

Growing Up Again and Again

Much of my childhood and early adult life was lost in worry and anxiety. Having children of my own has helped me rediscover and nurture the child inside me, the part of me through which angels speak, but something I also learned while gathering and researching angel stories is that it is not necessary to have children to grow spiritually. All of us, whether we are parents or not, can reclaim the unquestioning openness of a child that helps them see what adults often can’t. All of us can grow up time and time again by reconnecting to the little child that still lives in us.

So what can children, whether inner or outer, teach us? First and foremost is simply to be. Children are masters at just being, living in the now, something we all tend to find harder and harder as we get older and responsibilities pile up. They are also willing to let the past go and let grudges go with it. This is a happy way to live.

In addition, children have the divine ability to freely give their love–no matter what. For me, before I had my children, the idea of unconditional love was just that–an idea. But by giving them unconditional love and receiving it in return I finally felt worthy of being loved and of loving myself unconditionally. I also learned how to forgive myself for the mistakes I’d made. My children taught me that. They have also shown me the rich rewards of opening my mind and filling it with new things, thoughts and ideas every day, but above all they have reminded me to give life everything I have. No matter whether I succeed or fail at a particular task or project, it is all a learning experience. But if I put a lot of time and effort into something I love, I will always find success because I will know, deep down in my soul, that I gave it everything I could.

All these qualities–the ability simply to be, to love unconditionally, to have an open mind and to live every day with passion, enthusiasm and a spirit of adventure–nurture and sustain that special bond between angels and children. And if as adults we can rediscover these qualities within ourselves, we too can stay young in spirit and reclaim our special bond with heaven, a bond that is our birthright.

Tread Lightly

Children seem to accept angelic encounters with far more equanimity than adults, perhaps because they have not yet experienced a clear division between the two worlds and are therefore, for a little while, a part of each. Sadly, as they grow older and acquire greater knowledge, many lose their innate spirituality and become unwilling to take things at face value anymore. The acquisition of knowledge as we age is not necessarily a negative thing, but it can work against nurturing the childlike qualities of open-mindedness, enthusiasm, trust and emotional spontaneity that draw angels nearer to us. It is, however, possible to grow older in years without losing touch with the child in your heart.

One of the greatest spiritual leaders in the world is the Dalai Lama. A journalist friend of mine who spent a week with him told me that his booming laughter echoed from behind closed doors and down corridors. It was a genuine, bewitching, spontaneous laugh. My friend had expected this great man to be serious and intense, but he was exactly the opposite. There was a twinkle, a child in his eyes.

Years ago, when I regularly attended courses, lectures and conferences, all too often the heaviness and seriousness of everyone involved weighed me down both spiritually and physically. I used to feel the same when I attended religious services, especially when reciting prayers in school assemblies. Everyone would bow their heads and mumble the words, often without feeling or thought, even when the words were beautiful. On one yoga retreat I attended I don’t think I heard anyone laugh for the whole ten days. It felt somehow wrong to me and made me start to think that perhaps I too was guilty of approaching the subject of spiritual development with far too heavy a hand. My research on children has shown me that the angels are attracted to children because of their openness but also because of their laughter, enthusiasm and energy. Perhaps all those years I had been too intense and serious, too ‘grown up’ if you like in my approach. I didn’t appreciate that when we laugh and experience joy we are closer than ever to our angels.

Perhaps because we’re dependent on gravity to keep us grounded on Earth we tend to become weighed down with the serious and heavy stuff, sometimes to the point of taking ourselves too seriously and becoming self-important. Angels are charged with important work–the spiritual tasks of responsibility, courage, dedication, truth, justice, commitment, patience and education–but they carry them out lightly, going about them with joy, celebration, spontaneity, wonder, freedom, openness and love. It’s often said that angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. This doesn’t mean they don’t have gravitas, just that they complete serious tasks with a lightness of spirit that comes from complete trust in the power of love.

Staying light in spirit and young at heart is not always easy, especially when life weighs you down with obstacles, pain and heartache, but angels have also taught me that life is not easy and it wasn’t meant to be. If there were no problems, no setbacks and no heartaches, how would we learn and grow spiritually? But if we can face the challenges life throws at us with the open trusting heart of a child, angels will stand by us even in the darkest hours of our lives and give us the courage, optimism, energy and hope to pull through. The meaning of the word ‘angel’ is ‘messenger’, and the messages they bring are always ones of reassurance, love, comfort and the knowledge that we are never alone in this life or the next. For those who believe (and there are many of us who do), just the thought of their presence, the very idea of them, is somehow comforting and adds a sweetness and lightness to our lives.

The Mark of an Angel is Love

I hope you will be as comforted and inspired and deeply touched as I have been by the stories I’ve included in this book. I hope they will encourage you to reclaim your inner child and grow up again with your guardian angel by your side, guiding you and watching over you.

If you don’t know where to find your guardian angel, just remember the mark of an angel is love. Angels are everywhere and they are always trying to communicate with you. They manifest their presence in your life through every smile, every heart, every act of kindness, every good thought and unselfish desire and every warm spontaneous feeling. Wherever there is love, growth and optimism, angels will be there.

Maybe you’ve just been looking in the wrong places and have been too busy to see that your guardian angel has been there before your eyes and in your heart all the time.