S
22
CAMOUFLAGE, A GUN, AND A NEW
his pain, but still, part of me was worried about what would happen if I was pulled to him. How would he receive the message the Other Side was sending?
And then, of course, the Other Side pulled me right to him.
It was a very strong pull. I walked over and stood in front of him, but he kept his head down, glaring at the floor. There was so much anger and tension around him, so much negative emotion. I didn’t know how to get started.
So I blurted out, “Hi!” in a ridiculously chirpy tone.
He slowly looked up. His eyes met mine. I was taken aback. There was a softness in his eyes that was in stark contrast with his gruff exterior, and it was heartbreaking.
A girl on the Other Side immediately came up on my screen.
Older than a little girl—a teenager, or maybe early twenties. She was communicating very quickly, barraging me with words and symbols and images. And what she showed me was awful.
“You have a daughter who crossed,” I said to him.
His eyes began to water and he loudly cleared his throat.
“Yes,” he said.
“And she crossed because…”
I hesitated.
“…she tells me she crossed because she was murdered.”
The man looked down again and didn’t say a word.
He didn’t have to. His daughter’s story poured out on my screen.
She had been murdered, and in fact everyone knew who her murderer was—her ex-boyfriend—yet for some reason, he hadn’t been charged with the crime. And this, the girl showed me, was a source of agony for her father. The injustice of what had happened was unbearable.
Then the girl showed me something that played across my screen like a film clip. This happens sometimes—a stream of images that is so clear and so vivid, it comes to me like a scene from a movie. The girl showed me her father, alone, in his house, dressed head-to-toe in
black clothes and camouflage gear. She showed me several rifles laid out on his bed.
“She is telling me that she tried to stop you all day,” I told him.
“She was there the whole time and she was pleading with you not to do it—not to kill her ex-boyfriend. But you didn’t hear her. You had your guns and you loaded them in your car and you didn’t listen. She is showing me that you were determined to find your own justice.
She says she was trying and trying all day to get through to you, but you just ignored her.”
The man was staring at the floor. The room was silent.
“You were going to kill him that night,” I said.
He cleared his throat again and wiped away tears.
“Yes,” he said. “I was.”
“But…but you didn’t. You didn’t kill him.”
He said nothing.
“You heard her. Your daughter says you finally heard her. You were so angry, you were going to avenge her death, but then you finally felt her and heard her and you listened. You listened to her.”
He began to cry.
“She wants you to know that you are not meant to avenge her,” I went on. “That is not your job. Your job is to continue to love her and honor her life. And she wants you to live your life vibrantly and to be engaged and to choose paths of love that elevate your soul, not paths of anger and hate and darkness that would diminish your light. That wouldn’t be honoring her. She says that karma is real and every soul has to take responsibility for their actions. Whether it’s here on earth or when you cross, every soul will be held accountable. But that is not your job. And if you had chosen to do it, you would have chosen a path of darkness. You would have created more darkness, not light.
“And now,” I went on, “your daughter wants to say thank you.
Thank you for listening to her, and thank you for not going through with it. Thank you for loving her always. She is just so grateful and so happy that you listened.”
—
My reading with this grieving father had a profound effect on everyone in the room, including me. When his daughter came through, she taught us all a very powerful lesson. A lesson about life paths.
In our journey, we may at times get confused and instead of following the highest path, we choose a lower path, one that constricts us, slows us down, leads us to dead ends. A path that takes us away from love and into darkness. When this happens, we end up living what I call a shadow life—a life that is a mere shadow of what it can truly be. One that doesn’t reflect our true strengths and potential. One that doesn’t allow us to share our true light and love and energy with the world. A lesser life.
I have read for people who are stuck in shadow lives, focusing on fear and anger. In many of these cases, I have seen how the Other Side never gives up, and always tries to steer us from the path of a shadow life to a higher path of love and light and meaning.
Why does the Other Side do this? Because our Teams of Light—
our loved ones and spirit guides and God energy—want nothing more than for us to be happy and fulfilled. They want us to lead lives that are based on love, not fear.
How do our Teams of Light steer us?
They do it with signs and messages that make their presence known.
Some signs are meant to say hello, or to let us know our loved ones who have crossed are still with us, rooting us on. But other signs are meant to help us make the right choices in our lives. These signs appear when we reach a crossroads—and present a choice between a lesser path and a higher path. These are the moments when the Other Side practically screams at us to get our attention and influence our choice.
Here is what happened to the man in camouflage. Consumed by grief and anger, he was on a path of hatred and pain. If he had followed through with his plan, his actions wouldn’t have changed
the past, but they would have changed his future. He would have had blood on his hands and on his soul, and gone to jail, and seen his own life ruined.
This is what his daughter was trying so hard to tell him—he was not meant to avenge her loss, because that is not our job here on earth. Our job is never, ever to follow a path of hate. Our highest and brightest life paths are always paths of love.
His daughter understood that it was her job to steer him toward that higher life path. The sign she sent him was not a visual sign. It wasn’t a bird or a rainbow or a license plate. It was what I call a clairaudient and clairsentient sign. Clairaudience is when we hear something through means other than our worldly sense of hearing.
For instance: A word or a phrase in our head that isn’t our own. A thought that isn’t our thought. A voice that isn’t our voice. Have you ever had something relevant and surprising just pop into your head—
something that seemingly came out of nowhere?
It didn’t come from nowhere; it came from the Other Side.
Clairsentient signs might be a gut feeling we can’t shake off. We may have an ineffable sense that a loved one is present. We might clairaudiently “hear” our loved one’s voice in our thoughts.
This man’s daughter reached out to him over and over again on that fateful day, when he was at a crossroads, but he either didn’t receive the messages or didn’t acknowledge them. Yet she persisted.
Even after he’d loaded his rifles into his car, she kept sending him the same message over and over.
Don’t do it. This is not how to show your love for me.
And finally, finally, he heard her.
As he explained to all of us in that room, “I heard her. I heard my daughter tell me not to do it. I felt her there with me, telling me not to do it.”
He listened to his daughter! He opened to her message! He heard her just as if she’d been there with him—which, in a very real way, she was.
And because he did, he wasn’t doomed to live a shadow life locked away in a jail cell with a mark on his soul. With his daughter’s help, he chose a higher life path—a path that gave him a chance to turn his terrible grief into something good.
In fact, he was already doing just that by deciding to attend the meeting, and having his daughter come through and teach us this powerful lesson.
Like the people in the incredible stories that follow, we all face choices that affect the trajectory of our lives and the lives of others, crossroads that suggest different life paths. What we need to understand, and what this man’s brave daughter teaches us, is that we are not alone at the crossroads. We do not have to make these hard decisions by ourselves. Our Team of Light tries so hard to get through to us in these difficult moments. They are determined to not let our fear or grief or uncertainty stand in the way of our highest life path.
In these moments, we need to listen to and honor the signs the Other Side is sending us:
A phrase or idea that pops into our head A gut feeling we can’t shake off
The voice of a loved one who has crossed The sense that your loved one is present
The signs are there! They will always be there! The Other Side will never stop sending us these incredible signs. They will never stop trying.
So we must stay open to them, and really look and listen for them and allow them to guide us toward our best, happiest, and highest life path. Because time and again I’ve learned that the choices we make, and the energy we embrace, impact not only our own life path but also the collective path of love that we are all on together.