Part of my journey since 2009 has been learning to both listen to my guides, trust that I really am hearing correctly what they’re telling me (without the need of oracles), and trust that the universe (through the help of my guides) really does “have my back.” It seems that several people have been put on my path so I may also help them begin to learn these things. I see it now in my clients who ask how they may begin to speak to their guides (really, the key is in listening, as our guides always hear us and our prayers) and how to trust the guidance they receive. And as I see that and work back through my memoir, I see that such people have been sprinkled through my life since 2009. My soul has been a candle glowing with the light of the Universe, that others may also light their flames from the universal Source—as others before 2009 did for me, and others after 2009 added to the fuel, allowing my flame to grow larger and shine more brightly.

In April 2015, a friend asked in an email how I know my prayers have been/are being answered, and I replied. This person adds strength to my flame, and my flame in turn “enlightens” her life. In my response to her question. I referred to others who did the same for me. One person I referred to, for example, is the cousin of a friend.

This cousin—let’s call her K—was just beginning to come to terms with an ability she’d always had: seeing and communicating with spirits. K and I had met only a handful of times, and in all those times, I had never known of her gift. I only learned of it through our mutual friend, and that friend was the one who alerted K and I to the skills and talents we both had.

At the time of our meeting, I had experience in feeling energy and in listening to my guides for myself but not (I thought) for others. K contacted me through our mutual friend and asked to come to my home, a request to which I readily agreed.

She wanted to see me because her main spirit had told her she needed to. She was having a problem, and her guide told her that I could help her. I had no idea how I could help, but I was willing to try.

I had knowledge. I’ve learned that one of my special gifts is putting people in touch with the knowledge they need. I read voraciously, and I’m able to pass on knowledge and refer people to the right places, kind of like a cosmic reference librarian, I suppose. I didn’t doubt K’s ability, not for a second. And that gave her a bit more confidence, I think (if I may be so bold), that she could be more open to others about her ability. She could shine a little more brightly. And the information she provided me further confirmed things I had long suspected. (I like to think of this as spiritual triangulation.) She thus strengthened my light, made it a little stronger.

 

Another person I mentioned in my email response was Jennifer Hoffman, whose radio show, Enlightening Life, I listened to regularly. Listening to her show has given me more than a few aha! moments, causing some spiritual truths to “click” into place in my awareness. With each click, my flame shines a little brighter—and of course, the more brightly my light shines, the more other people are attracted to it. And the more they learn of these spiritual truths, the more brightly their souls can shine—and so on.

We all influence one another, in ways we don’t even realize, and we are aided from “the other side” in innumerable ways—again, in ways we don’t realize, even when we know “the other side” is working on our behalf. Each of us is a candle in a network of light.

 

(In case you’re interested, the text below my email response to my friend:)

As for how I receive answers to my prayers, it’s more a knowing, which is why it took me so long to trust that such knowings were messages and weren’t “just me.” I also sometimes “hear a voice” (in my head, of course, so it’s not really hearing a voice—kind of like *feeling* a voice). Again, I used to think this was just me talking to myself, but I’ve since learned it’s not quite.

The voice I hear is, I think, my higher self, Self, talking to me. It’s got a sense of humor like mine and sounds a lot like me (another reason I always used to think it was just me), but it uses slightly different sentence constructs. This is the voice whose favorite message is, I swear, “All will be well.” It came in loud and clear when I was panicking in the hospital [about] my vision—so clearly and with such authority that I knew it wasn’t “me.”

This is [also] the voice that told me (multiple times) I was pregnant this time around. And when I said, “Nope. I can’t be pregnant. This is just wishful thinking, like so many other times, so I don’t believe it,” the voice said, “You don’t have to believe me, but it’s true. But if you buy a pregnancy test, you’ll see I’m right,” and then it said it would say no more on the matter. (Yes, it basically said, “Fine, I won’t tell you any more, but I’m right.”) So then I went and bought a pregnancy test.

It’s only been since my vision debacle that I’ve learned to distinguish those voices and the knowing, honestly. I think part of it was because that’s when I finally gave up my ego, and I was home all the time and devoted my time to healing myself, not on work or a million other things. I’ve always just known things, and I figured that I’d picked those things up along the way from subconscious observation (in the case of knowing things about people) and from reading (in the case of facts and information).

But then I learned about clairsentience, and I stopped discounting those things as just my subconscious. There for a while, before I learned the feel of the voice, I got a particular feeling either in my third eye or in the crown of my head (probably the pineal gland?) with the message, so that helped clue me in to the fact that this wasn’t just me, but Self.

And then, of course, I was still paranoid. (Because I’ve had the feelings and the voice all my life, but our culture seriously discounts those and focuses on the mind, right? And so I had gradually come to trust voice and feelings less and less.)

[But] little things I was told started being confirmed, and I felt myself being nudged into certain areas of research and toward certain situations that benefitted me—a nudge toward this medium (yes, a medium) who confirmed this or that, and all those other little “coincidences” that are now termed synchronicity. I would get a feeling or knowing about something, and then I would get an urge to read the runes or tarot cards, and they would tell me what the voice/feeling/knowing had just told me, for example.

My final nudge into “full trusting” (though I still sometimes am dubious about how it will work out) was when I was pregnant with Megan. The cousin of a friend of mine wanted to come see me to talk to me because she was being told by “her ghost” (her main spirit guide, I think … she was just starting to learn to accept her gift) that she needed to. [On that visit] she confirmed a few things for me that she thought were true (that one of my great-grandmothers has been hanging out and watching over me since she died when I was 12), and I provided her with information and ideas about psychic protection that she had known nothing about.

After that visit, it sank in for me—really sank in—that “the other side” had worked to get her what she needed and to get me what I needed by bringing us together and helping us both trust the things that we had been doubting.

So, see, that’s a long story. But it was a long process. I trust now. I still sometimes wonder how in the world it will all work out, how we’ll be able to pay the bills when work slows to a trickle and we are getting paid way less than our weekly budget allows, but I trust that it will because it HAS so often.

Even [my husband’s] getting to be a believer now. He said that he had doubts about staying home instead of working and then further doubts when things got tight, but everything keeps confirming that we’re on the right path: We get tax returns far larger than we’re expecting; we manage to pay all of our bills and still have money left over for an occasional treat; we get a completely unexpected gift that makes this task or that task incredibly easier and allows us to be even more self-sufficient and efficient; we worry about how we’ll pay for prenatal care and delivery and then learn that it will cost us only a fraction of what it cost when we had insurance.

So, yeah, [a] long process of trust-building. I have to quiet the panic inside me, clearly let the universe know what I want/need (without too many stipulations, as Jennifer Hoffman says, because if we restrict the methods and outcomes too much, we can make it nearly impossible for those things to happen, or we don’t recognize it when it DOES happen), and then listen for the voice. Sometimes it gives me the feeling in my head if I’m not listening otherwise.

I also spent lots of time focusing on creating that feeling (which I think of as opening the channel to my Self) when I pray, and spending time listening, not just talking, when I pray. So now, I’ll open up when I want to have a chat with my Self, when I’m really worried, for example. I’ll carry on conversations with the voice, again, knowing it’s not me because sometimes I’ll get an answer I’m totally not expecting, and sometimes, I’ll get only silence, meaning that’s something I’m not allowed to be told.

The voice never searches for the right word, never hesitates, and speaks pretty slowly, so when things go silent, I acknowledge it and move on.