Infinite Life, Infinite Lessons

Wisdom from the Spirit World on Living, Dying and …, by Susan Grau (a summary by Pat Evert) 

• Introduction

Communicating with the unseen world of spirit has been a part of me since birth. I had more “imaginary” friends than you could count—but, I’ve come to find out, they were as real as it gets. I am here to tell you that the darkness of this world is what we need to experience to achieve our mission of soul growth. Our souls want to be here because they understand that we need the contrast to really know what we are made of. The spirit realm resides in us, through us, and all around us. Once we understand that, we realize we are never separated from the universal energy of Spirit. You are not alone in your struggles. As an abuse survivor, empath, and intuitive medium, my heart has weathered many storms on an intimate level, including the rippling effects of losing my two brothers and mother to suicide. These seemingly negative experiences are an invitation to discover deep insights into the essence of who we truly are and why we are here. I see that the pain, once again, has served me. Coming into a place of deeper self-awareness, I’ve been able to reach into the dark cracks of myself and fill them with a shine of gold. I have learned to embrace my pain instead of running from it. 

• The Light within the Darkness

“Your baby’s in the freezer.” Unmistakably, in my mother’s ear. She was no stranger to hearing odd voices. As a four-and-a-half-year-old, this dark was different. I knew I was in terrible danger. I felt the freezer door slam shut hard on my backside, locking me in. The boys had closed the garage door, sealing me to my fate. I would spend what my mother later said was between 30 minutes to two hours trapped there. As I began to lose consciousness, the fear ramped up into full-blown panic. And then suddenly, the lights appeared. “Stop screaming,” a strange but warm voice said. “We’re going to get your mommy. But first there are some things we want to show you.” 

I was somewhere between three and four when I was first molested, a trauma that continued throughout much of my childhood and gradually escalated into being trafficked throughout my neighborhood. The abuse continued for years in plain sight. This was not just happening to me but also to many children in the community. Once you’ve been abused, you tend to become a target for more abuse. Why do spiritually inspired creations have to grow up and experience pain? As the Buddha discovered, suffering is the human condition. We must pivot thoughts away from Why me? to What is the lesson in this for me? Then we will come into alignment with our soul’s highest growth, our soul purpose. The first and most important truth I will share with you is this: earth is a school, and life is a journey of lessons. Spirit communication is a gift passed down in my family. My mother had this ability too. While I have been an empath in tune with the spirit world, my near-death experience “pierced the veil” for me profoundly. 

Creating positive affirmations that focus on what you do want to feel or experience helps bring them into reality. Affirmations can create an internal environment for your soul that reaches beyond your thinking into self-knowledge and healing.

• The Room of Heart’s Desires

“Breathe slowly and stop screaming, Susie,” the lights continued to say in their gentle, warm way. The lights felt more and more welcoming. Sensing my growing trust, they slowly came closer to me. Their loving radiance felt so nurturing and safe. I will never forget this feeling of being guided by forces that were assisting me in crossing over. The lights somehow wrapped around me, offering me the warmest embrace I had ever felt. I knew I was safe. I became knowing, calm, and curious. I became ready for what lay ahead. I suddenly understood that the lights still brightly glowing at my side were angels. “You’re in the Room of Hearts’ Desires,” they said.  More accurately they sang. I quickly learned that when angels speak, words and music come out simultaneously. The beauty of their voices is the most exquisite sound I have ever heard, and it feels like medicine. I felt like I had entered a new world brimming with excitement and possibilities, and my soul was able to touch all this majestic beauty effortlessly. The souls I could see had already crossed over from their most recent lifetime, and I knew that some of them were people I loved. They had just crossed over and were being transported to another space I hadn’t yet reached.

With the bright skies above me and souls around me, I peered below and saw a dark abyss that looked like a well. I saw millions of words and sentences intermingling like they were swirling around in a blender. “What is that?” I asked in wonderment. “Those are the heart’s desires of every living soul.” Observing all the hopes, dreams, heartbreaks, and prayers of all the people on the planet mixing together in the well. I felt we were all one, making up a unified collective consciousness where every thought we have and every action we take affects the whole. Spirits come as we understand them so that we are not afraid. Angels are pure love. I invite you to view our perceived rejections in life as Divine redirection.

• The Reason for Life’s Challenges

What is the meaning of life? We all have an instinct that tells us there must be more to life than material-world monotony. The meaning of human life is to expand our souls and cultivate self-love through our choices. Hardships are the most powerful fertilizer in which to do so. Our darkest moments, when seen from a spiritual perspective, are when we attain our most profound soul growth. When carrying on the way things have been becomes impossible. It’s a change-or-be-changed moment. Just as the ocean will always have waves, life, too, will always have challenges. It’s not our job to try to lessen the waves but to become better surfers. The angels said, “we’re always blessing or blocking your path, guiding you toward what’s meant for you. We will pave the path for you—all you have to do is walk it, paying attention to both the blocks and the openings. We know what’s best for you. So when you release the thought patterns of what you think you should be doing and put your trust in us, your path will be easier.” The spirit world is waiting for us to see that they are always here to help us. Rejection is a difficult thing for our egos to cope with, but for our souls, it’s simply a redirection to a better path for our spiritual growth. If the path is blocked, it’s blocked for a reason. The spirit world is asking us to see roadblocks as redirects to a better path. They are intended to be accepted and appreciated as valuable experiences. Where has running and controlling ever gotten us except into trouble? Free will means that life becomes both more manageable and meaningful for us when we trust there is a spirit team guiding us—and we can better do what we are meant to do here. If everything were predestined, then our decisions would mean nothing, and the meaning of life would then become meaningless. We all have good reasons to feel victimized in this life, but when we make the conscious choice to be the victors of our circumstances, we truly grow on a soul level. Earth is our soul’s school. We spend a lot of time preparing and planning to do so. In the spirit world, you can know everything there is to know about your pure love-and-light soul, but until you experience a place that contrasts that with pain and darkness, you can never truly master an understanding of yourself. The light needs the dark to experience itself. “There are no bad souls, because all souls are from the spirit realm! However, there are injured and broken humans, and those injured humans make broken, unhealthy, and sometimes evil choices. They must face the harm they have done on their journey. “We take those souls to a place of healing, similar to what humans call a hospital. We help them bring light to the darkness they created for themselves and others while on the planet. It is not a punishment but a way of healing. Like seeds, we have the opportunity to grow when we are planted in dark soil. Our darkest paths can become our greatest assets—but it is a choice we must make to do so. Through healing and the ability to make new choices for our highest good, we break the cycle of harm.

• Creating Our Soul Contracts

Our free will doesn’t just apply to our time spent as humans. It also applies to the time we spend planning our human lifetimes when we are on the other side. I found myself in a huge room. “What is this place?” I asked. “This, Susie, is the Room of Knowledge, where souls make decisions for their highest growth in their next incarnation.” The angels showed me that upon our physical deaths, after being welcomed and congratulated for our brave journey, we experience a life review. We feel the way we made them feel, not for the purposes of punishment but for the opportunity to learn from our mistakes and inform the curriculum we choose for our next lifetime. Part of our soul stays behind to help guide us while the rest of our soul goes on to the human plane. We develop compassion from direct, firsthand experience. This is the true meaning of karma, which has nothing to do with retribution and everything to do with education. 

There are two types of contracts that help us achieve the goals of spiritual soul growth: Karmic and dharmic. Karmic soul contracts offer us the opportunity to grow and learn. Dharmic contracts are more positive and gentle. It is less about the individual’s soul and more about raising the frequency of the planet. Dharma helps to increase collective consciousness and the individual’s soul consciousness all in one swoop. 

An old soul, also called an advanced soul, is someone who has had many lifetimes. A new soul means new to experiencing this planet or, at the very least, one who has not been here often. Those difficult journeys are for the most advanced souls. These old souls come here to stimulate those spiritual traits inside us, ultimately helping align us to the highest paths we intended for our soul’s growth. If one of our soul group members wants a break from the earth plane for a bit, they still serve on our spirit team as a guide. The angels tell me that going back into my body meant I would have a more challenging life, but also that it would be worth it. It would serve to both grow my soul and help others grow theirs. Having the birthing experience had always been my number one desire in this lifetime. I endured five surgeries, along with three attempts at in vitro fertilization (IVF), to try to conceive without success. What we want the most isn’t always best for our soul’s growth. Not being able to conceive was the greatest grief of my life, but it also brought me the greatest gifts of my life. In the Waiting Station that I was about to be led into next, we begin the process of trading the knowledge we have in the spirit world for the firsthand experience of that knowledge in the human world. A dharmic life is knowing you have a higher purpose. That higher purpose is to be spiritually conscious of how you live your life.

• Among the “Dead”

At my next stop, the Waiting Station, I was shown that our souls enter the human body through water. And that’s precisely how I returned to mine. The Waiting Station, as I understand it today, is our life in-between lives—an intermediate space between life and the afterlife where souls go to acclimate once again to being human while waiting to be birthed (or in my case, rebirthed) into a body. It’s where we transition out of the spirit world. Here, we lose all the knowledge and freedom that we have in the spirit realm and simultaneously begin to relearn and adapt to the limiting rules of humanity. A brilliant light drew my attention to the top of a massive mountain to my left. I don’t know who it was, but I knew they were all-knowing and more loving than any being I have ever encountered. “It’s time to go, Susie,” the light angel confirmed as she drew closer. She explained that water is the element that connects the spiritual with the material, and all souls come to earth through it. “You’re going to go through many hardships in your life from this point forward. It’s going to be very painful at times, but you will help many people. You’re meant to be a healer, Susie. Are you willing to go now?” I began to say over and over to her, “Mommy, I’m in the freezer! Mommy, I’m in the freezer!” This time, my mother heard it, in her words, “louder than a scream.” “It’s time to step into the water now,” the light angel said. Life might be difficult, but what I learned in the afterlife equipped my soul to bloom in the dark soil. Afterward I could see spirits literally everywhere—and it terrified me. It is one thing to be surrounded by angels in the loving spiritual world, and another thing entirely being in the fear-based human world with different kinds of spirits constantly trying to get my attention. I couldn’t talk to my parents about it, and learned very quickly that it was a big no-no. This eventually stopped much later in life when I stopped being fearful of their presence. My sister, who also sensed the spirit world and has been my constant support system—from childhood to this day. The spirits became less scary as time passed and became my friends instead. I am passionate about relaying the importance of raising our vibrations while on this planet. By default, humans vibrate extremely low. Think of it as if we are energetic sloths—as lovable and capable and precious as sloths are, they are extremely slow-moving. The spirits, in contrast, are like hummingbirds. Upon returning from my afterlife journey, I felt as if I were walking in two worlds at once. Not only was I extremely sensitive to the spirit world, but I was also highly empathic to the human world. My new way of life was to walk among the “dead.” The “dead” among us still have things to say, still want to contribute, and still want to be a dynamic part of our lives. Adjusting back to “normal” with my “abnormal” gift was one of my life’s big trials, but as time went on, I got used to living in my “abnormally normal” reality, as I’ve come to call it. You can ask a loved one to enter into your dreams right before you head off to sleep. Tell them this is your heart’s desire. They are listening and will do their best. Be patient—it takes them time to figure out that energetic process.

• Becoming a Medium

We can all connect with the spirit world; we must choose (free will!) to plug in. I rejected my gift of spirit communication throughout my adolescent years. I was more concerned with trying to fit into the “real” world. It wasn’t until my late teens, when my nana died. I was extremely close to my nana, and her death was the first significant loss in my life. My soul recognized her familiar manner. “Yes, I am here to say good-bye,” she replied. “You’re going to find out tomorrow morning that I left your world, but we don’t die, Susie! I want you to know that I’m still here. I’m happy and healthy. I am no longer alone, and I love you.” This visit from my nana meant I could no longer deny how real it all was, and it scared me. It had become difficult to deny the consensus, what James, Lisa, and many of my teachers said: I was a true medium. Things are much better today than ever before for people who work with the spirit world. This allows spiritual healers of all kinds to become more and more authentically themselves. Authenticity—not hiding any part of ourselves. The truth is that I didn’t become a medium; I was born one and have always been one. It was my soul’s contract to do this work. The real journey for you, for me, for all of us, is self-love, which begins with self-acceptance. This is what the journey of “becoming a medium” has meant for me. My life purpose is to be a healer, which led to my stepping into my role as a professional medium. The group instructor said, “Susan, you are a really gifted medium, and you will help many with your abilities.” From there, I had to stop hiding who I was and “come out of the closet” as a medium. By tapping into this unseen dimension, we can enrich our lives and enhance our well-being. We each have the ability to connect personally with our angels, guides, and loved ones in spirit. But if we don’t die, what becomes of us, exactly? This is the question I spend most of my days trying to help people understand. We are meant to expand ourselves and refine our consciousness, both in our human and spiritual states of being. Inner peace is what true healing is—a process of looking at ourselves, not pointing the finger elsewhere. The moment I embraced the energy of healing, my life’s purpose began to unfold before me like a golden pathway. The sixth sense is our intuition, which can become stronger with practice and willingness. 

• Visitations

One of the greatest lessons of my life has been to realize that we don’t decide when we are done with grief; the intensity of grief decides when it’s done with us. My decades of professional work with grief, have shown me that one thing above all others expedites the bereavement healing process: the firsthand understanding that death does not end a relationship; it changes a relationship. Grief, then, is the pain of temporary separation. “Grief is resolved when the bereaved are able to recognize their continuing bonds with the deceased,” and that “ADCs [After-Death Communications] have been demonstrated to dramatically reduce grief.” 

Sometimes I need to ask spirits to send a lot of very specific evidence in order to get their messages across to their very skeptical family. Visitations like this continue to amaze me as they leave very little room for skepticism. The common message of all these stories is that visitations from spirits help us heal. Our loved ones on the other side visit us to help us along on the agonizing grief journey. It can be a source of comfort and hope to know that our loved ones are still with us in spirit, guiding and supporting us from beyond. “Why don’t my deceased loved ones visit me more often?” The candid answer is that spirits want you to focus on life, not death. Our loved ones on the other side always visit us to help us heal and continue moving forward in our lives. Visitations are always for healing. I am reminded that my spirit team always shows up. 

• Signs from Our Loved Ones 

A kind man said to his daughter, “Don’t forget who you are, Megs.” This was the exact phrase her dad always used when she needed loving support. How hard our loved ones work to send us messages from the spirit world. They communicate in a way that makes even the most skeptical people acknowledge the possibility of life after death. All of us are capable of receiving messages firsthand. It first requires being open—specifically, opening your heart. The rewards of committing to this long journey are priceless. The heart constantly relays insights to the brain, awakening new perspectives and emotions. The heart’s intuitive nudges assist us to better understand ourselves and the world around us. The heart’s intelligence helps us realign with Spirit, ensure better relationships, sort out difficulties with discernment, and discover new levels of personal growth. The magnificent and beautiful magnetism of the heart is felt by spirits and humans alike. Our intuition is the “voice of the soul.” The only way to see things for what they are is through your heart, not your eyes. We become more connected to our authentic selves when we tap into the intelligence of the heart. Integrating the heart and mind connection to your spiritual knowing is the dance of expanding your awareness of the afterlife. 

For successful communication with the other side, you must be willing to try. Spirits do not interfere with your free will. The spirit realm vibrates at a much higher frequency than we do here on earth. To connect with the other side, the most important thing we must master is raising the state of our vibration. Doing whatever we can to work through painful emotions and elevate our frequency is vital in connecting to our hearts. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention meditation, one of the most powerful methods of elevating your vibration. Our spirit guides usually offer guidance and advice to help us find our way through life’s challenges, while our loved ones offer us reassurances that they are still very much alive. Sensing their presence and acknowledging it makes room for even more communication. Seeing an apparition is rare, but when you see one, all of your doubt regarding the spirit world and your deceased loved one’s continued existence vanishes. Spirits communicate with us through every one of our senses, including touch. Lights flashing on and off, the radio changing stations, pictures or other items seemingly out of nowhere falling off shelves—these material manifestations are common ways of spirits communicating with us. Children remain very close to the spirit world, making a reliable communication pathway. One of the most common ways for loved ones in spirit to communicate with us is via symbols. Knowing it is your loved one communicating is as important as the messages being shared. Dream visits from our loved ones are a profound experience and a common sign because it’s a more accessible avenue for them to speak to us. The veil between their world and ours is thinner when our mind is at rest. It does help to ask them to visit! Before falling asleep, meditate on a memory you have with them. Family gatherings are a time when spirits love to be present and join in on the fun. Allow whatever comes in during these high-energy moments to flow to your heart space. Never forget that they love you and want to communicate with you. Love is the specialty of the heart, and love is the language of the spirit world. We connect through soul; we join through heart. If you can get in touch with your heart space, you can get in touch with your soul and other souls you love. 

• Mastering Fear, Harnessing Intuition 

The spirit world is completely free of fear; there is simply loving awareness. The spirit world wants nothing more than for us to have a life driven by intuitive, loving awareness, free of the vibration of fear, right here on earth. Chris Benoit killed his wife and young child in a horrific tragedy before ending his own life. Before the crime I was given some  “pre-incident indicators.” So, I dove into learning the craft of forensic mediumship and the confusing relationship between fear and intuition as best as I could. 

So in this encounter with Chris Benoit, how could I know the information coming through was a premonition, born from intuition rather than fear? There are two types of fear: real and illusory. Real fear is the kind that triggers primal responses that protect us. Real fear is set in the present moment and is essential for survival. On the other hand, illusory fear is anxiety about what could go wrong rather than what is actually happening now. Once we master our illusory fears, it clears the way to live a Spirit-led life guided by our intuition. It starts with examining the feelings in your gut. Feel anxious and overwhelmed? That’s fear. Feel calm and certain? That’s intuition. It isn’t a story that your anxious, fear-based mind created and is obsessed with. Intuition is a sudden knowing. Illusory fear is messy. Intuition keeps us safe—but illusory fear does not. If it’s imagined, shift gears; turn the volume way down on that irrational “what if” voice for a moment so that you can better hear what your calm, intuitive voice has to say. This entire chapter is about the vital importance of distinguishing between fear and intuition so that you and the people you love remain as safe as possible in an unpredictable world. Our inner intuitive voice truly is the voice of Spirit, and Spirit wants nothing but to help us. It’s our job to remember that strengthening trust in Spirit is the pathway to strengthening our clear connection to our intuitive self. Intuition and telepathy are natural forms of spirit communication. They don’t have to ask someone, “Are you sad?”—they just know. 

Here are my five phases to harnessing your intuition:

• PHASE 1: What Is This Feeling? You continue to wonder, is this real or am I making it up?
• PHASE 2: It’s Becoming a Familiar Feeling. It feels different from fear. It creates a gut feeling. You do not yet understand the difference between your thinking mind and intuitive sense.
• PHASE 3: Discovery—You Begin Tapping into Your Intuition. You realize the more you acknowledge it, the clearer it is. It’s time to practice, practice, and practice.
• PHASE 4: Release Fear and Trust the Process. It is time to release the fear of right or wrong and simply trust. Start your day with intuitive feelings instead of from the headspace of fear.
• PHASE 5: Let Go and Allow. In this phase, you are now letting go of the fear baseline and allowing the intuitive information to come as it deems necessary. Fear will always try to step in, but you are learning to effectively push it aside. You learn to master imaginary fear and then tap into and recognize legitimate warning signs via intuitive gut hits. However, when a society prizes the logical mind above all, it becomes challenging to take the road less traveled. 

• Healing from Grief

And this is how grief works: completely unpredictable, sneaking up on you when you least expect it, whenever it wants to. As you can imagine, breaking down like that in public felt downright humiliating, not to mention isolating, as clearly no one else was feeling what I felt. I was the “abnormal” one. It seemed everyone else went on with life as usual—living, laughing, and loving as if nothing had happened—while my life had just been flipped upside down and inside out. Shattered in one fell swoop. Grief is by far the most painful emotion a person can feel. Grief holds all the cards; it has all the control. Grief isn’t something you get to decide to be done with and walk away from. Life’s challenges are catalysts for soul growth—grief then becomes one of the most potent invitations available to us to embark on our highest spiritual path. It is a pruning back of all that no longer matters to awaken something deeper inside of us. A shedding. A rebirth. All that you believed and thought you were and the meaning you had previously given your life collapses with deep grief, to remember that you are a spiritual being having a human experience, not the other way around. Where am I? How can I possibly survive this without you—do I even want to? Welcome to the confused, anxious mind space that is grief. We are constantly processing through grief. One could say that life carries with it a continuous rhythm of loss. Love, joy, and grief are constantly cycling through our life experience. Birthing and dying are incredibly similar processes. Just as birth in this world is leaving another, death in this world is also birth into another. The problem is that the loved ones we left behind on the human plane don’t know we are safe. They, instead, are riddled with grief and plagued with thoughts of where we have gone and if they will ever see us again. That is why direct knowledge of the afterlife, of our soul’s eternal existence, is essential to soothing our grief. When we understand that grief is a normal part of our life journey and that it is actually helpful to our soul’s growth, we can start to look at ways to navigate through the grief. Historically, nearly all societies, grieving together in public was deemed essential. Healthy. 

Unexpected grief hits so hard and fast that you can’t take it all in—many people will drop to the floor, unable to hold themselves up. The worst part about sudden grief is that it leaves us with no chance to say good-bye, apologize, make amends, or say “I love you” one last time. While unexpected grief is a sudden hit to your soul, anticipatory grief, on the other hand, is grief on a low simmer. You begin grieving before the person you love dies, which can be a confusing state to be in. When the process goes on for a lengthy period of time, it can wear you down physically and emotionally, chipping away at you day after day until you don’t even recognize yourself. And then there’s the particularly confusing and painful grief of suicide. All suffering is dark, but I can attest that suicide is a whole different kind of dark. The healing it requires is all-consuming. When someone ends their own life, they chose to leave you in the most permanent way—seemingly rejecting you, your love, and their time with you. Suicide is always terrible and inconceivable, but when it strikes your core, your immediate family, it is life shattering. My mother’s pain of losing two children to suicide was unbearable for her. People who die by suicide are not bad or selfish; they merely want to end their intense pain. The pain doesn’t stop with suicide—it is just transferred to those who survive the loss. But I want to assure you here that all your loved ones are safe and happy, and they want nothing more than for you to continue living your life. There is no punishment on the other side for suicide; however, the ones who have chosen it do regret doing it because, with the clarity they receive on the other side, they can now see that even though human life is often painful, our soul wants to be here in order to grow. Rather than facing the terrible pain of grief and dealing with loss in a healthy way, we often run from it through various numbing mechanisms, resulting in remaining stuck in a cycle of what is known as complicated grief. Complicated grief is like being in a constant, heightened state of mourning, and it keeps us from healing. 

• Lean on others: This is first because it is the most important. Do whatever you can to talk about your loved one and the despair you are feeling at the physical loss of them with other humans, Especially if it is difficult! 
• Meditate: The practice of meditation helps bring us into the present moment, and that is precisely where grief resides. Address grief head-on, at least for a small part of each day.
• Move your body: the way to move grief out of the body is to move. It helps us release the blockages and can have enormous benefits. 
• Practice conscious deep rhythmic breathing in order to move us into the parasympathetic nervous system and induce a state of calm and relaxation.
• See a medium. Scheduling a session with a medium is an effective way to hear from your loved one and understand firsthand that they are still present and very much a part of your life. Your loved one in the spirit world is waiting for your grief to ease and your vibration to rise enough that they can communicate with you. Grief will always be a part of you. But it doesn’t have to consume you.

In grief, all your senses, emotions, and feelings work overtime to survive the intensive loss. Be gentle with yourself and know that as you go on this healing journey, your loved ones are right beside you, loving you and guiding you through one of your lifetime’s most painful—yet spiritually transformative—journeys: loss. Loss is a part of life because love is a part of life. Love and loss are synonymous—if you love, you will lose. You can’t have one without the other. That is the reality of being a human. 

• Empathy – The Path of the Heart

As an empath, there was never a time in my life when I could avoid picking up on others’ emotions. The positive emotions and the negative, it didn’t matter. I felt everything. While someone with empathetic qualities might very well possess a heightened ability to sense and feel the emotions, energy, and experiences of others, empath souls constantly live “in feeling.” They are absorbers of the tensions, heartaches, and happiness of the energy around them. Most people—filter their life experiences primarily through the mind. They think, analyze, employ logic, and then they feel. Conversely, empaths filter their experiences primarily through the heart. They sense, feel, engage emotion, and then they think. Everywhere we go, people tend to pour their hearts out to us. Even strangers are attracted to the gentle energy that we give off. 

• We are sensitives: We know what others are trying to communicate without ever saying a word. So it stands to reason that we would feel all the emotions around us and quickly become overwhelmed. 
• We want the truth: We suffer over people lying to us and tend to take it on as if we caused it.
• We hold on to horror stories: Once we feel it, we cannot un-feel it. We get overwhelmed when we are told the horrors of the world.
• Empaths are helpers and healers. If you’re not feeling well physically, we are going through all those emotions with you and want to help. 
• We are anxious: We feel the room’s energy. When we leave, we wear others’ feelings. 
• We are the go-to people: We have a naturally wise answer to your concerns and confusion.
• We are loyal to a fault: We want everyone to be their best, so we see them as their best self. When they prove us wrong, it is heartbreaking and shocking to us.
• We are intuitive: Don’t be fooled by our softness; we are wiser than you think.
• We love animals, and they love us.
• We are very often bullied and not part of the crowd.

You can think of an empath as someone who is led primarily by the heart-brain. They first sense the world around them with their souls. I call them “soul seers” because they see with their souls and see the soul in everything. Offering your empath child patience and love will help them learn to not only understand their gift but also to see what is right in their world. The empathic child can grow and expand their gifts and ultimately become healers in the world. Empathy is the medicine the world needs, and your empath child is a beautiful and unique soul here to deliver that medicine. 

Beware of Narcissists. Narcissists often enter the world of the empath, and an unhealthy dance occurs between them. Narcissists are attracted to empaths because they see them as having the ability to care for their needs and fill their large hole, so to speak. They look to be validated, and empaths are extremely good at validating others. Like empathy, narcissism exists on a spectrum. Empaths can have ulterior motives. In truth, there is a payoff to being reasonable and accommodating; it helps us to feel worthy and lovable. A true narcissist can appear overly charming, so it can be difficult to recognize them. The empath’s sensitivity is their strength. Narcissists throw it around as if it’s an insult, but the truth is that our sensitivity isn’t what’s wrong with us—it innately opens the door to our knowing, our intuition, if we will listen. Empaths understand the world around them on a deep level, lead with their hearts, and see with their souls—this is something to be proud of, not ashamed of. Reframing this and seeing your empathic nature as a strength rather than a weakness is extremely important on the empath’s journey. Here are a few tools the empath can use to minimize the damage of the narcissistic relationship, protect their well-being, and avoid allowing narcissists to enter their world:

• Set boundaries: Learn to say no! When dealing with a narcissist, limit your time with them. Keep your distance the best you can. 
• Practice self-care: Empaths need to learn to take care of their emotional well-being first. It is our duty to learn how to protect our emotional bodies. 
• Connect with other empaths: Work on your self-esteem. Be around other empaths who will encourage you and build you up. 
• Practice empathy without absorbing others’ emotions: Learning to have compassion and concern for others but not internalize their feelings is essential. 
• Seek professional support.

Empaths are mindful healers who have the ability to make this world a better place. Unfortunately, I’ve met my fair share of mediums who were not empathetic and even possessed narcissistic tendencies. That is why you must use caution when inviting a medium into your spiritual energy field. 

Signs of a Legitimate Spiritual Medium: They have a history of positive testimonials and reviews. They put your well-being first and foremost. They are educated regarding ethics. They provide specific, mostly accurate, and meaningful information. They will not ask for more money. They won’t encourage you to return every week or month. They are educated in their field and understand grief. They will not come from a place of fear and warnings.

I want to end by stating this important point: empaths are gifts to humanity and should be protected at all costs. The collective heart of society is broken. Empaths are tasked to help us mend it. They are here to help us see in a new way. While most people are mind-driven, an empath’s world revolves around the heart, and it’s the heart that heals and helps. Empaths who don’t yet understand their gift believe that something is wrong with them, when in truth, something is extremely right with them. We can all agree that this world could use a lot more heart. That’s what empaths are here for—to pioneer a better way of being for humankind. You can always become more empathic. Write down positive affirmations about yourself and repeat them daily. For 30 days, commit to writing down one thing you love about yourself.

• The Gift of Life

You chose to be here. To be alive in your human form, to be challenged, to experience duality are all things your soul desires. Through this gift of life, we are granted a significant opportunity that we don’t have in the world of spirit: to experience the entire spectrum of emotions. We have the chance to experience love directly—after all, how can we truly know love if we have never met hate? We can also begin to align more effectively with our unique life’s purpose that’s been laid out for us by Spirit—to walk our personalized Yellow Brick Road. 

It’s important to understand that although we are all part of the same spiritual ocean, so to speak, we are still unique, individualized drops of water in that ocean. No one is like you. Every part of you has been created solely for you by Spirit. And it’s when we recognize that every aspect of us is unique and has something to offer, something no one else on the entire planet has. “What is my soul purpose?” Our collective soul path is a journey of self-exploration, and at its core lies the practice of self-love. Every person on the planet’s soul purpose is to master self-love, and walking that path will, in time, reveal your specific life purpose—the one that is meant for you and only you. Lack of self-love doesn’t prevent us from loving other people—I’ve known many people who possess minuscule amounts of self-love that can shower tons of love onto others wonderfully. What lack of self-love actually does is prevent us from receiving love from other people, because if you don’t love yourself, you won’t believe that you deserve love from others. Self-love isn’t just about feeling good—it’s about, feeling worthy. This feeling of unworthiness often grows into self-loathing as it accumulates throughout our lives. The result of increased self-love is recognizing on a soul level that we are inherently worthy of love and acceptance. Self-love is the only effective weapon to combat self-hate. Many therapists report that lack of self-love is the number one issue they see among their clients—the root of all their surface issues. Our souls are here to learn self-love, but until we do, our lives are chock-full of self-loathing. We are all hardest on ourselves. If someone in your life treated you the way you treat yourself, you would have taken them out with the trash long ago! But by beginning to think intentionally loving and kind thoughts about ourselves, we take the first step on the journey to self-love. It requires us to confront our deepest fears and vulnerabilities and to let go of the beliefs and behaviors that no longer serve our highest good. A commitment to self-love asks a lot of us, but the rewards are profound when we are willing to do the work. Most important, we begin to connect with our highest selves and align with our grand purpose in this lifetime. It’s your job to choose to stop feeding yourself things that hurt your soul and begin investing in things that empower you—things that light you up! One of the most important components of developing more self-love is learning to forgive ourselves and others for past mistakes and hurts. Forgiveness holds the remarkable power to facilitate healing. When we choose forgiveness, we release all the negative energy, which in turn creates more room for love. Forgiveness means you are ready to heal and be free of the things that limit you and hold you back from stepping into your peace and power. I assure you there is nothing selfish about self-love. As author Parker Palmer explains in her book Let Your Life Speak, “Self-care is never a selfish act—it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer others.” Self-love isn’t about seeing yourself and your needs as more important than others. It’s about seeing yourself as good as and as important as other people. Self-love, at the core, is the process of remembering that we are all inherently worthy of love and acceptance from ourselves and others. We treat ourselves the way we want others to treat us, and by doing that, we attract more of that energy into our lives. Every step you take toward loving yourself unconditionally, is a step toward discovering that ultimate purpose—your one-of-a-kind gift that only you can offer the world. Our souls are crafted with great precision by Spirit, which means we come equipped with various talents and abilities that help us uncover and fulfill our life purpose. You integrate truly loving yourself with lovingly serving humanity in your own unique way. Every single moment of this life is a gift meant to be celebrated, and it is the journey itself that is the ultimate gift—living, dying, and the in-between. 

• Pure Love

Love is the most mysterious force in the universe—and the truth is that we don’t actually know that much about it. We learn that love is fundamentally who we are. Dr. Raymond Moody concludes, “whatever people were chasing before their NDE, afterward, they realize that what life is really all about is learning to love.” On a core level, we already know love; it is our soul’s essence. It’s inherent inside every single person alive, though mostly misplaced due to the fears, insecurities, and limitations that make up the human condition. 

The “love” that most of us are familiar with as humans, can quickly become messy, chaotic, toxic, and even abusive. The reason for this is because we have a brain, because we think, and thinking creates distortions to the otherwise pure love that we are made of. In the spirit world, there are no distortions. Here on earth, distortion is our default lens. We all have wounds because we’ve all had childhoods—no one is immune! Much of our life is an attempt to soothe and protect these wounds. In order to do that, we have a strong tendency to attach conditions to our affection toward other people—in other words, our love must be earned. Authentic, pure love doesn’t need to be earned; it is given freely and often. In this way, the conditional love we are all so familiar with isn’t really love at all, but fear masked as love. Conditional love is our baseline as humans with sizable egos. It is our way of self-preservation, a survival instinct. Our brains have all kinds of justifications for keeping conditions on love in place, including our fears of rejection or abandonment, personal insecurities, feelings of unworthiness, desire for validation from others, and even cultural and societal expectations. Recognizing what conditional love is and what it feels like is the first step in inching further away from it. Conditional love is the kind of love that states, “I will love you if you behave exactly as I need you to.” Conditional love thrives on these kinds of control-based expectations. Conditional love is love that rejects the darkness in another person—but the thing is, we all possess darkness. Every single one of us. Ultimately, conditional love is rooted in the obsession to control our lives, which means that surrender is the key to releasing the limitations we place on love. 

Conditional love is not healthy or sustainable for long-term soul happiness, and it’s not until we begin to shed those conditions we place on others and ourselves that we have the chance to really experience what true happiness and pure love feels like. The meaning of our lives is to learn (to remember) how to love. We inch further and further away from conditional love and toward embracing pure love in its place. This is the big work, the big lesson of human existence. We can learn to let go of the fears and insecurities driving our unrealistic expectations of others and embrace pure, unconditional love. 

In the world of spirit, there are no distortions. There, we don’t have brains to interfere with the communication process; it’s simply heart to heart, soul to soul. By opening yourself up to the possibility of experiencing this type of love and, even better, practicing connecting to it, you can have a life rooted in peace and compassion. What is love? We can try to define it, but the fact of the matter is that we will not fully know until we know. That being said, I can tell you with 100 percent accuracy that pure love of Spirit is who we are. Are you ready to release the conditional love patterns in your life and start to tune in to the frequency of pure love?