At this early stage, I feel like I need to convince you that I’m really a normal person – in the context of ‘average’ male in his late forties.
Although at times I’ve questioned my sanity, I’m fairly normal and have what would be considered a normal career. I've worked hard and made my way up the corporate ladder, I like money, success in whatever I undertake, love my family and son, enjoy travel, passionately support my favourite football team, a game of golf with friends, like a drink, nice food and the simple things in life as well. I buy lotto tickets hoping for a win like everyone else, follow the fortunes on my brother’s greyhound and my neighbour’s horse, have a few shares without knowing if they will ever do enough to help pay off some of the mortgage at some time in the future and experience the ups and downs of normal day to day life and love like everyone else.
It’s just these damn feelings of a presence having been in and around my day to day life from pretty much an early age. Strange noises, visions of spirits, the feeling of someone being in the room or next to me, the sensation of being touched when no one is close by - I've experienced it all. As I grew older and learnt and understood more about déjà vu and intuition, read stories about the effect of the full moon on people and began to accept that gut feel was a common occurrence for many, I felt happy that there was nothing unusual at all about me.
Until that night in 1977. It had been a confusing week. A school colleague had committed suicide on the previous Monday and I was stunned but not surprised when I heard the news of his death via my father two days after. Dad was in tears as he told me and I sat there stunned as I had seen him the previous Sunday at Catholic mass where he seemed buoyant and full of laughs, having just played his first game of football.
I say not surprised because leading up to his funeral, my intuition was in overdrive that we, me or someone would receive or deliver a message as to why a happy, healthy and popular 15 would take his own life. I was relieved and felt pacified when a message from my school friend was read out by a family member at his funeral without really explaining why he had taken his own life.
That night, I had enormous difficulty getting to sleep and after trying to read, listen to music and count sheep in an attempt to get the sad events of the day out of my mind, I let my mind and imagination go free and undertook my first meditation session as a novice.
My mind wandered to a place that I often used to go to or imagine in my daydreams. It was a fictitious house near where I lived. I shut my eyes and imagined being in the front room of this small house where I could see out but nobody could see in. I imagined myself spiralling into the floor of this room and into the soil below. While I did so, I could feel the warm sun peering in through a window of the room and kissing the crown of my head. I felt as one with the earth and the sun.
I continued to spiral (my way of meditating in later years which I'll explain later), feeling myself overcome with warmth and a sense of calm, imagining the sun filtering through my head, down through the rest of my body and my arms and legs. I felt safe, protected, close to reality but half a world away, aware of what was happening outside but in a different space altogether.
Then, whether it was a dream, my imagination or something completely different, I felt what can only be described as a spirit presence that, while it didn't have the physical characteristics or features of my school friend who committed suicide - I instantly recognised by the way he 'communicated' with me.
He 'spoke' in an apologetic 'tone' and his message was simple. I had to go because I couldn't live with my family knowing I was gay.
I woke on my bed - back in the real world - and looked at clock. three hours had passed since I went to bed and my body was cold with sweat and I had a massive headache. I couldn't move and didn't want to. As a 15 year old boy, there are some things you just can't understand. As the years went on, despite my best attempts to rid myself of this affliction, despite suffering constant headaches that I knew were more than something a pill or doctor could fix, I avoided visitors, messages and my 'abilities' as a medium in lieu of a 'normal life and career.
That is until my grandma came to visit some ten years ago. My life hasn't been the same since.
My mind wandered to a place that I often used to go to or imagine in my daydreams. It was a fictitious house near where I lived. I shut my eyes and imagined being in the front room of this small house where I could see out but nobody could see in. I imagined myself spiralling into the floor of this room and into the soil below. While I did so, I could feel the warm sun peering in through a window of the room and kissing the crown of my head. I felt as one with the earth and the sun.
I continued to spiral (my way of meditating in later years which I'll explain later), feeling myself overcome with warmth and a sense of calm, imagining the sun filtering through my head, down through the rest of my body and my arms and legs. I felt safe, protected, close to reality but half a world away, aware of what was happening outside but in a different space altogether.
Then, whether it was a dream, my imagination or something completely different, I felt what can only be described as a spirit presence that, while it didn't have the physical characteristics or features of my school friend who committed suicide - I instantly recognised by the way he 'communicated' with me.
He 'spoke' in an apologetic 'tone' and his message was simple. I had to go because I couldn't live with my family knowing I was gay.
I woke on my bed - back in the real world - and looked at clock. three hours had passed since I went to bed and my body was cold with sweat and I had a massive headache. I couldn't move and didn't want to. As a 15 year old boy, there are some things you just can't understand. As the years went on, despite my best attempts to rid myself of this affliction, despite suffering constant headaches that I knew were more than something a pill or doctor could fix, I avoided visitors, messages and my 'abilities' as a medium in lieu of a 'normal life and career.
That is until my grandma came to visit some ten years ago. My life hasn't been the same since.
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