Jump Girl Page 6

  After we moved out of the duplex on Elm Street, we occasionally visited our friends who stayed there. They still claimed they saw and felt nothing, but the snooping of their boys revealed something truly mysterious. They found a secret room between the barn and the back part of the house where we had lived. The only way to access the room was through a high window on the back side of the building. The window was so small that you needed to weigh less than a hundred pounds to fit through it. To climb into the window, you needed to stand on a stepladder or the back of another kid.

  As soon as you went inside the room—something I did only once—you experienced a strong sense of creepiness because it was filled with the old undertaker’s furniture and personal possessions. After his death, someone had barricaded his belongings in this little room and had gone to the effort of covering the door with a wall of the barn. This room was right next door to the icebox room that separated my parents’ room from the barn. I did not stay in the forgotten room for long because it triggered me psychically and made me feel sick. Sitting in there, I found myself knowing what the man looked like. He had been depressed and angry and had drunk a lot of dark liquor. He had been mean to his family, too, and they did not mourn his passing. The man had hated himself and had found little pleasure in life, and finally he chose to take his life. I could see him swinging from the rafters and was surprised to see that he’d used a chain instead of a rope. All of these visions came flooding in so quickly that I was afraid I would have a panic attack if I didn’t get out of there. I climbed the furniture and dove out the window, landing on the ground in tears.

  I will always remember that house. As an adult and medium fully in my power, I sometimes think about how I would have handled the situation differently if I had been called there. I would tear down the wall hiding the room from view and remove all the furniture and belongings hidden there, because objects have psychometric power. I would approach the ghost without fear and explain to him that he was indeed dead, and I would escort him to the other side, where his healing could begin.

  9

  How Old Am I?

  Most of my life I’ve been confused by my age and have often forgotten how old I really am. As a child, I thought from the perspective of myself in the now (of that time) as well as from the perspective of my older, wiser self. When times were challenging, I would counsel myself by saying that someday this would be just a memory.

  The problem with being unaware of my age was that I sometimes said and did things that seemed disrespectful. The information I communicated was truthful, but it was shocking and a bit much coming from a small child.

  One moment that stands out took place when I was about eight years old. I had walked down the hill to my grandparents’ house from church to find Grammy at the door trying to dismiss a well-dressed couple. The man wore a suit, and the lady wore a dress; both seemed prim and proper and a little uptight. I could tell that my grandmother was trying to be nice but really wanted them to leave. She stood frail in the cold doorway, recovering from a recent heart attack, as they proselytized. The fact that they were oblivious to her distress made me angry. I marched up to the couple and put myself between them and my grandmother, and I listened for a few moments as they preached about their religion.

  I had grown up feeling that Grammy Brown was one of the holiest people I knew, and I found their words—accompanied by threats of damnation—insulting to her character. My anger turned to ferocity. I laid into them, scolding them for not being more aware of who they were speaking to. I told them how inappropriate it was for them to harass the elderly. When I finished, they apologized to my grandmother and scuttled off the doorstep.

  Grammy ushered me inside and explained that, because I was a child, it was considered inappropriate for me to question the behavior of my elders. She also told me that she, too, thought their behavior was inappropriate.

  I stepped over boundaries another time when I saw my grandfather arguing with his mother. I got between them and put my finger up in his face and told him, “You have no right to talk to your mother that way. She brought you into this world. You show her respect!”

  My grandfather was so shocked that he turned around and walked off speechless.

  In moments when I’ve been called upon to do what I think is right, it’s as if my higher self steps in, pushes me forward, and says, “Speak up!” In these moments I feel righteous, ancient, and empowered. My posture changes as I step into the familiar role of authority. I say what needs to be said. I believe this is the reason why, when I made such pronouncements as a child, people responded in astonishment—and then did what I suggested.

  My mother noticed my inability to grasp my age. She often said I didn’t need her after the age of two. My innate understanding of morals and human nature was far more developed than most people’s. I attribute this to my close relationship with my higher self and my older selves. Speaking to myself in the mirror gave me a perspective on the world unavailable to others.

  Part 2

  Darkness and Light

  10

  When My Father Found God

  My parents didn’t go to church. My mother claimed to be a Methodist because she’d been baptized as one, and my father was agnostic, with little care whether God existed or not. He said the only time he’d ever prayed was when he was blown up in Vietnam. His prayer was simple: “If you exist, God, please don’t take me yet. I haven’t partied enough.” His kind of God. In his opinion, Sandy and I might as well go to church, just in case there really was a God.

  That all changed on the day when my father found God. I remember that day clearly because it was pivotal in my own relationship with Christianity.

  I came home from school on a wet November afternoon to find my father sitting at the kitchen table with Mr. White, one of my school-bus drivers who was also a minister. He was a gregarious, funny man who had a close relationship with Jesus—the kind of guy who announced his love of God loud and clear like a preacher working up the spirit at a tent revival. He cut his white hair in a military-style flattop and always wore a large, gaudy rhinestone cross around his neck. It looked more like costume jewelry than a spiritual amulet. His energy was that of a man born again, one who was good at heart but had committed his share of sins and had finally found his way to redemption. They were drinking coffee while Mr. White went on about the glory and forgiveness of God. My father carried deep wounds as a veteran of war, and he needed help to find forgiveness for himself.

  Shortly after Mr. White left, my father announced to us that he had decided to take Jesus into his heart and that we would start to go to church as a family. I was excited for the possibilities this new direction offered, and I looked forward to sharing the happiness I had found in the stories of Jesus’s kindness. Experience soon proved otherwise.

  My parents didn’t join the Advent Christian Church where they had sent Sandy and me. Instead they began attending a variety of born-again revival-type churches where sin was paramount and most of the attendees had a lot to be forgiven for. Stories of Jesus’s love were replaced with reminders of the need to put aside one’s sinful ways.

  Most of the adults who attended church with my parents were hypocritical. They stood up on Sunday and at prayer meetings to confess how they had put aside this vice or that, but then they picked it up again after walking out the door. My father was among those who did the confessing only to later continue with the same “sinful” behavior.

  One night while at Bible study, he stood up in front of the crowd and told everyone how happy he was to have quit smoking pot. On the way home, he happened to see one of his friends, and my father bought a joint or two from him and lit up in the car. I started crying and wailing in the back seat, “You lied to God! You lied to God!”

  I no longer believe that marijuana is wicked, but I do feel sorrow for my father’s need to lie in front of others and the ugliness of lying to one’s God. I don’t blame him because I know he was struggling with addiction
. I feel sad for the weight put upon people through talk of the wages of sin and the fear of hell. As a medium, I’ve never met anyone who has been to hell; nor have I been told of any soul who has been sent there.

  I feel that the burdens of life can be too difficult for some and that those who struggle with addiction are often among the most emotionally sensitive among us. This was true of my father. Someone of his empathic abilities never should have seen the face of war. Chemical substances seemed to help him block out his demons. What he didn’t know—and many others still don’t—is that these substances call in other demons that are seeking control of our lives.

  When we die, we review the life we’ve lived from a controlled perspective, seeing it from all angles. We learn how we were loved and how our actions affected others. For those with many regrets, this is retribution because they’re able to observe the stream of effects created by the choices they’ve made. But it’s not a form of punishment; in fact, it’s a means of healing. Those who create the most damage are often those who hurt the most. Such people usually have no idea how they were loved.

  For my father, true healing did not come until he lost everything most valuable to him and found the true nature of God in that darkness. He needed to face his demons head on and make the choice not to let them rule him. This couldn’t be done by putting on his Sunday best. It needed to be done through snot and tears.

  11

  Baptism

  I was nine when my parents decided everyone in our family should be baptized. I was excited about it because I believed in the healing powers of water and felt a strong connection to John the Baptist. Our church was more of a revival camp than an actual church, so we didn’t have a baptismal font. Our minister made plans for a group of us to go to a church in Littleton, New Hampshire, that had an indoor baptismal pool. This seemed powerful to me. The idea of full immersion was aligned with the original baptisms performed in the old times.

  In the church in Littleton, the baptismal pool was actually concealed in the floor at the foot of the pulpit. With the push of a button, two panels in the floor would separate, revealing a three-foot pool of water with stairs descending into it on either side. People entered the pool on one side and exited after baptism on the other, presumably changed by it.

  I had been psyching myself up for this experience for weeks. I was ready to give myself over to God. I wanted to be touched by his presence and made clean. Although I wasn’t sure what horrendous sins I had committed by age nine, I truly believed I would step out of the water a different person.

  As I awaited my turn to be submerged in the pool, I was told that our minister would not be performing the ceremony. Instead we would be baptized by the minister of the church that housed the pool. I felt weird about this. Initially I thought my discomfort stemmed from not knowing him and simply being nervous about being dunked under water by a stranger. However, when I stepped into the pool and saw the minister, I understood my hesitation. I felt repulsion and was filled with sudden anger. Somehow—I couldn’t explain how—I knew that the man baptizing me was unfit to do so. As he put his hand upon my shoulder, I knew he was unfit to perform a ritual that would cleanse my soul or that of any other person. I wanted to shout out my discovery to everyone sitting in the pews. I wanted them to know that the person claiming to officiate as our sins were washed away was himself filled with sin, real sin. I felt his lies, his deceit, his cheating, his self-loathing, and I was overcome with disgust and disappointment. I knew this with every psychic bone in my body, and yet I had to let him submerge me in the water and perform his ritualistic play for the audience.

  I was crying when I came out of the pool. Those watching the event only saw a young girl moved to tears by a holy experience. But I was crying tears of disappointment that such a repugnant minister of false holiness could be a representative of God, and that others couldn’t see what was clear to me. This experience wasn’t the straw that broke the camel’s back; instead it was the straw that began weaving the basket of my own spiritual beliefs.

  As a professional psychic, I now see that I was reading the minister, picking up the things he managed to keep hidden, parts of himself he didn’t want anyone to see. This understanding allowed me to re-embrace my love of baptism, although I’ve forgone church pools and now favor icy rivers. I find baptism to be a deep-seated, heartfelt experience, and I’ve repeatedly submerged myself in water as a cleanser and catalyst. I call such moments “God moments” because I completely and utterly let go when my body hits the water.

  My favorite spots for baptism are along the Ammonoosuc River in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. Once a year I jump into the cold water there as it rushes off nearby Mount Washington. I find the cold purity of the river helpful in my ceremony, for it clears away any thoughts I may be holding onto. The moment I enter the water, I release my burden and make space for what I need in my life.

  The summer following my baptism by water, I was baptized by the Holy Spirit at vacation Bible school. The baptism was performed by a couple of traveling Jesus hippies who came to town. This was 1981, and by then such people had become rare. They were free-spirited souls who played the guitar and generally saw God throughout the world around us. They helped teach Bible school and shared their love of God with us. They talked about how He had created everything—trees, birds, rivers, rocks, humans, animals, plants—which made everything a part of God. They taught that to walk with God is to take care of those in need and to bring comfort to those who suffer. Today I feel that this is the truest of my spiritual beliefs. We are all the creations of God/Goddess, and each and every one of us is part of that creator.

  On the last day of Bible school, we were invited to take part in a ceremony in which we would ask the Holy Spirit to join us. We stood in a circle and prayed together, asking the Holy Spirit to connect us to God and our higher selves. Then the couple performed the psychic baptism. The woman stood behind me with her arms on my shoulders as the man began to pray. When he placed his hand on the crown of my head, I felt energy move through my body from his hand down to my feet. It was electrical in nature, and I felt as if my body was filled to the brim with light. I began to cry, this time for joy. I knew that the power of God was real and that there were people out there who were capable of helping others connect through spirit.

  As an intuitive healer who has studied energetic healing in many forms—Reiki, Rune Valdr, sound healing—I believe the hippie couple activated my kundalini by connecting me to a higher power or God. This was one of the most authentic and profound experiences of my young life.

  12

  Eleven Pounds in Eleven Days

  When I was eleven years old, my father went away to meat-cutting school in Ohio with his friend Vinnie for almost a year. We didn’t see him while he was attending classes; nor did we hear from him much, because long-distance telephone calls were expensive. While the two were gone, Vinnie’s wife, Jenn, moved in with us to save money.

  When my father was preparing to leave, I felt sad because he had never lived away from us. My mom made it sound as though it would be fun to live with her and her friend Jenn, but I just felt a deep sadness. No matter how much they explained that it would just be temporary, I felt a sense of dread and kept imagining that he was going away forever.

  I know now that my fear was attached to a psychic knowing that I didn’t fully understand at the time. In childhood I couldn’t correctly parse out the timeline of the information I was receiving, which meant I often responded to future events as if they were happening in the now. I knew my father would eventually leave our lives, but my inability to determine when made it feel as if it were happening at that moment. I couldn’t shake the feeling that my father wasn’t coming home.

  Within a month of him leaving, I started getting sick. At first my mom thought it was the flu because I couldn’t keep anything down. I would eat a cracker or some Jell-O, and within moments I’d have to run to the bathroom. Even water was a struggle. I was so si
ck to my stomach that I had a hard time lifting my head off the couch. When my health didn’t improve within a few days, my mother took me to the family doctor, who found nothing wrong with me. Although he liked to drink hard liquor during office hours, I don’t think any doctor would have found what was wrong with me. It was a psychic sickness.

  I went home with my nondiagnosis and resumed residency on the couch. My mother kept trying to feed me, and my body kept rejecting whatever was put into it. After a week of this my mother brought me to church on Sunday for some hands-on healing. We were still going to the camp revival church. A few minutes into the sermon, the minister asked if there was anyone in need of prayers. When my mother raised her hand asking for prayers for me, I was mortified. He called me to the front of the church.

  My stomach did somersaults as I got up and walked down the aisle. I did not want to be the center of attention. I wanted to be left alone, maybe sneak out the door while no one was watching and curl up under a tree. But there I was, with all eyes on me.

  As horrified as I was walking down the aisle, I was soon even more horrified because instead of my normal minister, a man I didn’t know moved to the front to lead the prayer. Within moments his deep, holy-roller voice was summoning the congregation forward to join him in laying on hands.

  Let me just say here that the worst feeling for someone fighting off nausea is for twenty-five or thirty people to crowd in around you and try to put their hands on you. I spent the entire time praying I would not vomit on anyone.

  I do believe in the power of prayer, and I do believe in the ability to heal through spiritual means. Even at that age, I believed in such things. But I didn’t believe that the people performing the act actually believed in what they were doing; nor did they have the ability to channel spiritual energy. They were the ones I mentioned before, who professed their changed ways only to pick up their bad habits the moment they walked out the church door.