Fear in the Course of Development

Not much more to report on this week in regards to working with the “new sight.” Tuesday was the start of a long week of dealing with a sore throat, congestion, headache … You know what I’m getting at: the blahs. Though it could have been worse. Typically when I get a cold, my muscles really ache and my body feels like it’s been knocked around by a freight train. That didn’t happen this time, and I have faired a heck of a lot better than some of my co-workers who were out for three or four days with this.

At any rate, I’m going to take a cue from my good friend Carol Geiler and talk a little about fear. If you haven’t yet, you need to check out her blog for the week, on the fear of being psychic. I have to say, this is probably one of the best blog articles I’ve read on the subject, and there were so many points that I could relate to from my own journey that I decided to scrap my original entry for this week and write a little about them. So, yes, I’m going to reminisce, and hopefully this bit of indulgence will show something as to the nature of spiritual development, namely that at times it can be incredibly uncertain, scary, and yet also the most expansive force in one’s life.

As Carol mentioned, the two main crux objects that produce fear when it comes to dealing with psychic phenomena is judgment and education. For me, I’d have to say the main culprit falls into the judgment arena. It’s one thing to do psychic readings for friends and people who know you, it’s entirely different when you set out to do it for complete strangers. When I first began, I started with friends from my job (which at the time was in downtown Seattle). Friends are easy, because you know they will forgive you and not hold anything against you if it turns out you are wrong in your reading, or conversely, if you’re absolutely right. Friends like to see friends explore, grow, and become greater. Friendship carries with it the sense of comfort from knowing the person, and hence less stress. The fear comes with the introduction of someone you have never met before, because you have no clue as to their orientation: how do they view psychic phenomena? How do they react normally to the strange and unknown? How closed up are they going to be because 1) they don’t know you, and 2) they may have prejudices and their own fears about things psychic. The first year of doing readings for me was a mixture of friends and strangers. However, the strangers were friends-of-my-friends, so there was some connection within the network. When my company laid off nearly two-thirds of the staff (me included), I had to bite the bullet and actually go do a complete non-connected, no-contact stranger.

That wasn’t easy. It was actually sheer terror. Here, Carol talked about such moments as resulting in either facing your fears directly or shutting them down. By this stage, I had done enough readings to know that I had some ability, but knew that if I didn’t keep moving forward, I would never know just how much more I could learn – and who I might be slated to help with whatever I could do. My sense of needing the education, mixed also with a meaning of purpose, helped me push through my fear. But I have to tell you, it was tough. I was an emotional and physical wreck leading up to the reading.

I had placed a simple flyer on a bulletin board in a supermarket advertising free readings. When I got the call, my heart ended up in my throat. On the day of the reading, my head was spinning with thoughts of “What are you doing? Are you crazy? You could potentially look like a total fool! My god, it will be a miracle if you get anything!” Yes, I seriously was terrified. But I also knew if I didn’t go through with it, I would never be able to look at myself in the mirror again. It was one of those things that, had I abandoned it, I would wander through the rest of my life asking the question “What if?”

It’s the “what if” that has propelled me to push through a lot of my fears. I prepared as best I could for that reading: I meditated, I recounted some of the really good “hits” from previous readings with my friends … I could feel my spirit guides pressing me on. When I got into the car to travel to the client’s location, I played soothing meditation music. When I arrived and stepped onto the pavement of the apartment complex, I don’t think I was any less fearful than what I was that morning when I got of bed. But I had made the trip and was going to move ahead so I would never have to ask “What if?”

And good thing I did, otherwise I know I wouldn’t be here right now. The reading lasted 90 minutes and was filled with some wonderful evidential details. My favorite piece of info was that I saw a Native American in my meditation prior to my arrival, and he handed me a book and said it was for the client. My client was not Native American, nor did she have any Native American paraphernalia on display. During the course of the sitting, the spirit showed up again. When I mentioned it, she laughed and told me she just picked up a book a few months earlier to speak a Native American language.

When the reading came to a close, I was on such a wondrous high. On the drive back home, I couldn’t wait to read another stranger.

Of course, time sets in and the further away you get from a reading, the more you get back into your rut. Though this first real “blind” reading was a major success, I still feared doing the next one. And the next one. And the next one. Even now, after having done this for eleven years, there are times I get frightened before doing readings - worried if things are going to work and if I will be seen as a loony, or worse yet, a fraud.

But one thing the course of my development has taught me: timing is everything. Though you may not necessarily believe in yourself, spirit doesn’t push you into something if they know you are not able to do it. For me, I’m a resistor – I push back when my spirit guides tell me to go do something. Again, fear has a lot to do with it. And when this happens, my guides will keep pushing, knowing that I haven’t given up the course, but am just dealing with fear.

This type of “fear in the face of development” all came up again when I had to do my first group reading, which was simply going to be an experiment. Again, I was terrified, but came through.

I could go on, but suffice it to say, fear for me has been a big issue in my work. And for some of you who know me, you might even say it’s held me back; a lot of people were predicting when I first got started over a decade ago how far out into the mainstream I was going to be, as if to say I was going to be the next celebrity psychic. That hasn’t happened, and I have no idea if it ever will or even if that’s where I want to be. But I still do the work because of what it says about the multidimensional nature of our beings, so that’s the force behind my drive these days.

Carol mentioned you could lose friends and family during this journey. Absolutely, and I’m no exception. I didn’t speak or hear from my family for nearly two years after I divorced my ex-wife – something I absolutely had to do because of the incompatibilities in our relationship, and psychic phenomena, though not all of our issues, was certainly a part of it. That event to this day is still the darkest period of my life. When I walked out the door leaving her behind, I prayed to my spirit guides that “they had better be right about this.” Yes, indeed, during my struggle to decide the course of my future leading up to that fateful day, they told me “You have to leave.” This was the true test of my faith, as I left everything behind. I took very little with me. And had to weather the storm of being called “crazy,” and having lost my mind by my family. I only had one or two close friends around me, and I still had to battle every day inside my consciousness for nearly a year that I was doing the right thing. I left my family, a home, a place that at least provided shelter, but never would have given me room to grow and be who I am meant to be. Now when I look back, had I stayed, I most likely never would have moved forward in reading groups; becoming a member of the Ghost Society; and writing a book and being on the radio? Forget about it. Not only that, there would be another very lonely soul in the world trying to find her way – my wife, Heidi. For those of you who see me and Heidi living such a great life, know that it came on the work of some very hard and fearful events.

When you open up to this kind of work, you really can’t objectively close the door and go the other way. For me, shutting down in my earlier years would have been tantamount to death. At the time in my former marriage I was very overweight and fighting for my own sense of self in the world; to have a purpose and a point for my existence and why the relationship was just never working. And, yes, when you come to the threshold of going out into the unknown, as I have done with attempting my first reading with a stranger, or my first group reading, or the extreme measure of ending a marriage, it is extremely terrifying. But again, timing is everything; spirit doesn’t give you something you aren’t prepared for. (I think this is different in comparison to jumping in with both feet when you are being told, on some level, it’s not the right time. Then the question becomes: how do you know the difference between the two? Well, I suppose that could be the topic of another blog.)

With the release of my book, I’m facing a new set of fears. Now I am being exposed to a wider audience – a whole massive slough of strangers throughout the world, as I call in and talk on various radio shows being broadcast over the airwaves and the internet. Feeling vulnerable? You bet. It’s not for the squeamish. But I’ve gotten this far and survived it all … So at least in this endeavor, I feel I have a very good foundation to jumpstart from. And is typical, when the guides told me it was time to write a book, I resisted. Then accepted. And have moved forward.

Yes, there is a fear with being psychic.

Development and evolution, in some respects, isn’t meant to be easy. It’s the challenges that make us grow and become stronger. And I think it’s something we all share.