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Danielle first heard the whisper when she was at a design conference in 2010. At the time, she was working as a marketing director for a respected product design and development firm. She was also living with her boyfriend of ten years, and they were planning to get married and start a family. At the conference, Danielle ran into a friend, Angela, and the two shared a ride home. During the ride, Angela told Danielle about a psychic medium she’d been seeing—me.
Not much later, Danielle reached out to me. She’d never thought about having a reading, but she felt the need to connect—it was the first whisper.
In our first reading, Danielle’s grandmother—Sally, as she was known—came through. Sally had been an important figure during Danielle’s childhood. Her parents divorced when she was five. “I spent a lot of time alone—writing, hiking, listening to music. Nature was my solace.” And she had Sally, whom she calls “a person of great joy and happiness and light. She was more of a mother to me than a grandmother. We’d spend weekends together, and we’d bake things and play games and tell stories and sing songs. She was creative and fashionable, and she had such great energy and enthusiasm for life and for the people she loved.”
Sally crossed when Danielle was sixteen—and now, nearly twenty years later, she was trying to reconnect. Sally pushed through in the reading, not even waiting for me to begin the process of clearing the way for her.
“She is very protective of you,” I told Danielle. “She is watching over you all the time. She says, ‘Do you remember how we used to hang out together on the weekends?’ Well, she says you still do. She is with you every weekend.”
Sally was also very insistent about relaying her message. “She’s a real spitfire,” I told Danielle. “It’s like she’s stomping her feet, saying,
‘Enough already, we want your life to go forward. You need to be more forceful, more verbal, and less patient.’ ”
Danielle understood what Sally was talking about: her boyfriend.
Their relationship wasn’t perfect. He was having trouble committing.
Every time they talked about getting married, something would come up to delay it. “I was beginning to realize that he wasn’t evolving and growing and on the same path as me,” Danielle says. “But even so, I loved him. It’s one thing to break up and leave someone when you’re over it and ready to go. It’s a very different thing to break up with someone when you love them but realize you have to move on if you want to grow.”
Danielle struggled with whether to leave her boyfriend until finally, she found the courage to go.
Because of a downturn in the economy, Danielle lost her job. Her bosses were very kind and gave her a generous severance package, but even so, it came as a total shock. “At almost the same time that I left a relationship of ten years, I got laid off from a job I had for more than eight years,” she says. “All of a sudden I was on my own.”
When we had our next reading, her grandmother had a very direct message for her.
“This is not a mistake,” I relayed. “This is not random. The universe took you out of your safe space. The universe did this on purpose. It is leading you to your highest path.”
Hearing those words didn’t ease the pain or take away the fear.
Not right away, anyway. But after a while, it began to make sense to Danielle.
“It was the universe giving me a clean break,” she says.
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Danielle traveled for six months, then came back and started looking for a new position. Very quickly, great offers came in. “I got a few from companies in Boston and others from San Francisco, and they were all amazing offers,” she says. “The kind of jobs you’d be crazy not to take.” She settled on one of the firms, and instructed the recruiter who was working with her to negotiate a higher salary.
Then a friend of hers asked her a simple question. “He said, ‘If money wasn’t an issue, what would you want to do with your life?’
No one had ever asked me that before, and it made me think.”
In fact, Danielle had a secret passion.
She’d always thought of nature as a safe haven. She’d been a vegetarian since the age of twelve and took care to live in a conscious, healthy way. When she allowed herself to dream, she thought about how to help people strike a perfect balance in their own lives. She dreamed of her own line of fresh juices and of becoming a yoga instructor.
“When I thought about starting a juice shop and teaching yoga, I just got very excited, but at the same time I told myself, Oh, you’re never going to do that,” she says. “I never once realistically considered doing it. I was single, I couldn’t afford it, I’d have to do it all on my own—I put up all these walls. And that’s where the dream stayed—buried behind walls.”
Instead, she focused all her energy on the job offer. One evening she was on the phone with her recruiter, who was telling her about the firm’s counteroffer. “It was a lot of money,” Danielle says.
“Everything was lining up for me to take the job.”
But during the phone call, she heard a pop. “I looked over at the outlet and saw smoke and sparks flying out of it,” she says. “Sparking and smoking, like an actual fire. And the weird thing is, nothing was plugged into it.”
She told the recruiter she’d think about the offer and hurriedly hung up. As soon as she did, the sparking stopped.
The next day, Danielle pressed the firm for a better offer, and that night the recruiter called back with an even more enticing counteroffer, including a lucrative bonus. And then the socket started smoking and sparking again.
Similar things had happened before—the lights in her apartment would flicker and dim, lightbulbs would unexpectedly burn out, she’d go to a friend’s house and the lights would start to flicker there.