Corporate exec, Navy commander, police officer—people from all walks are finding connection to the Spirit world
I’m not your typical woo-woo type. I didn’t see ghosts as a kid, and I don’t wear gauzy skirts or feathers in my hair. I was always sensitive I suppose, and some people told me I was too sensitive. (Read my first Substack post about my general story here.)
Most of the people I’ve interviewed for my newest book, Tapped In: Spiritual Insights from the Lives of Mediums, Healers and Near-Death Experiencers are the same as me in that respect. They came from everyday backgrounds, which shows us that spiritual awakenings are happening for people just like you and me.
Medium Sally Hawk is one of 40 people I interviewed for Tapped In. She spent decades as a corporate warrior leading big companies like GE and Bank of America. One day, while flying on a private jet from a business meeting, something inside her told her to just quit her job. Just like that.
Without hesitation and at the peak of her career, she listened to that voice, knowing something else was in store. She followed a similar path to mine and stumbled upon mediumship. She ended up using her business expertise to start Very Soul, a global platform that develops and qualifies mediums. Three years in, the community includes 23,000 users and 2,600 mediums from 50 countries who have performed over 100,000 readings.
(Use the promo code TAPPED IN on VerySoul.com to get a free evidential reading.
It’s a great way to try it out if you’ve never experienced mediumship, or the practice of sensing, communicating with, or conveying messages from people who have passed away—or, more broadly, from the “spirit world.”
Stay tuned: I will be exploring the fear that some people have with consulting a medium or connecting more deeply to themselves.
I also interviewed Rich Braconi, who worked as a narcotics detective in New Jersey before he had a spiritual awakening that shifted everything in his life. He now teaches mediumship and spirituality at Lily Dale Assembly in upstate New York.
I chatted with David Williamson, an IT manager who lived with deep-seated anger for decades because of the racial discrimination he experienced in the South. He had a near-death experience at age 40 that flipped his belief system, allowing him to find compassion for people he used to hate. Now he can see why and how we stay divided as a culture, by creating false and limiting narratives about each other. (More to come on his story.)
Then there is Suzanne Giesemann, a well-known medium who has been named one of the world’s most spiritually connected people. She used to be a U.S. Navy commander and aide to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Her story and most recent revelations are in my book.
So many people are opening up to this awareness that we are more than this physical body in this physical reality.
We are an increasingly large group of people with diverse backgrounds, geographies, belief systems who understand that we are all connected, that we all can heal from our experiences and baggage. That each of us can find peace inside.
So how can YOU find that connection?
Meditate.
Yeah, I know. It’s not groundbreaking advice. For years we’ve known about the direct benefits of meditation. A growing body of research shows it’s great for your nervous system, for focus, memory, anxiety, stress and more.
But meditation offers us much more than that. It greases the wheels for intuition, peace, connection and healing. In fact, most of the people I interviewed for this book say that it was pivotal to their experiences and it now makes up part of their daily routine.
“Meditation is so important because it’s hard for us to even think about these things in our normal waking consciousness,” Eben Alexander, near-death experiencers, neurosurgeon and author of Proof of Heaven, told me in our book interview.
We widen our view in meditation. We discover that healing force of love. In fact, most near-death experiencers told me that, through meditation, they can go back to that amazing place of pure love that they experienced in their brief time on the other side.
There is no one way
If you’re like many people, you might say, “I can’t meditate. My brain is too busy.” Well of course that answer is a good reason why you should probably meditate. People think they have to shut off all thoughts. But instead, it’s simply about gently redirecting back to your breath or perhaps a peaceful image.
But if meditation is not for you, try mindfulness. Not long ago, I wrote a story for Yoga Journal about the many ways you can do this—ranging from eating slowly and noting the texture and taste of your food to walking quietly in nature with no distractions.
When I first started meditating, I used the meditation app Headspace. It simplified it with short sessions, cartoons and videos, and it worked. Other people like the variety of spiritual meditations on Insight Timer.
There are others tools:
Suzanne Giesemann has a simple three-minute meditation called Sip of the Divine in which you quiet your mind and ask yourself what you need to know that day.
Eben Alexander touts something called binaural beats as the best way to get to that theta brainwave state for deep spiritual meditation. Binaural beats are soundtracks of dual tones that coax the brain into the slow, dreamy rhythm of theta brainwaves, which appear in deep relaxation, meditation, early sleep, and creative thought. He now sells these recordings and meditation programs on his website Sacred Acoustics.
My mentor, Becky Hesseltine, and many other mediums engage in meditations called Sitting in the Power, which take you to a beautiful place where you can connect with loved ones on the other side.
The experiences can be magical.
One of the first times I did a Sitting in the Power meditation, I connected with my deceased aunt. I saw a bright flashing light in the corner of my vision and could sense her more than really see her. But I knew it was her. I saw flashes of a car passenger seat and then glimpses of a car window. It almost looked like a reversed photographic image. Then I heard the words “hear Sarah sing” in my mind, repeated over and over. Finally, I saw a beautiful meadow of flowers outside the car window.
I had no idea what it meant, but I relayed the experience to my cousin. That’s when she told me that her daughter, Sarah, was driving cross-country right then, and she had turned up the radio and sang out loud to keep herself from falling asleep. Sarah had just sent her mom a photo of a meadow of colorful flowers she had driven past.
This told me that my aunt really was in my meditation. She was with her granddaughter Sarah, protecting her on her long journey. I’ve since found that real-time readings with people are even more powerful and feel more complete, but this glimpse into where meditation could take me was a key moment. I realized then that I was tuning into a higher dimension.
For medium Kay Reynolds, meditation took a lot of practice, but eventually during one of those sessions she met her spirit guide and she saw her own soul, she told me during an interview for Tapped In. She said it looked like a beautiful, moving, colorful energy.
This experience was emotional and transformative for Kay. It allowed her to truly understand that she is more than her body. That she is a soul, and everyone else is, too. Even if a person irritates or upsets her, she remembers that person is just like her beyond this physical body, this ego self.
My invitation to you: Give meditation a chance. Make it a practice if you can. See what happens. If you already meditate, share your experiences!