1

The Beginning

When I was a little girl, I would play in the alcove atop my bedroom closet. I often used to think that I was dreaming while awake, since I would see and speak with people that no one else in the house seemed even to notice. I remember telling my mom about my special friends, especially the Native American ones, who would visit and play with me.

By the time I was six or seven, I had developed a keen interest in the afterlife and in souls who could speak and connect with us from beyond the veil. I remembered lives I’d lived before and told my mom how I’d died in some of them. My curiosity about psychic phenomena was beginning to develop, and I am grateful to have had a mother who was gifted as well.

I was plagued with a number of ailments as a child, one of which almost took my life at the age of eight. I had pneumonia and a collapsed lung and was hospitalized for a number of weeks while antibiotics failed to alleviate any of the symptoms that presented themselves. That illness set a precedent for what would be a number of challenging physical conditions throughout my life, conditions that were initiated by the spirit world.

In energy medicine, a "miasm" is an imbalance in the energy field. It can interrupt or corrupt any variable that leads to healing. Miasms can travel with us through various incarnations, and some are passed down in the ancestral DNA of a person’s spiritual, emotional, and physical energetic matrix. It is my belief, from years of working with spirits and with clients in my healing practice, that imbalances in the energy field can come from various dimensions and understandings in the spirit world. At the appropriate time and place in a person’s life, they will be reconciled.

My miasm was already firmly established by the time I was rushed to the hospital one cold evening in New York City. My heart rate was slow, and I was barely breathing due to the fluid that filled my lungs. I remember being disoriented as nurses and doctors pulled me from the arms of my mother’s friend, who was carrying me. Limp and feeling forlorn, I held on to my mother’s hand as I drifted into the ethers. I remember the doctors working to find a vein to draw some blood for testing.

I knew that besides my parents, there were other souls around me, ones that no one else could see. And somehow, in the midst of all that chaos, I knew that I would be all right. I had to be. My mother and her father, my grandfather, both had had a spiritual sickness that manifested itself when they were young. As was the case with me, the traditional route to healing was of little avail for them.

As my mother remembers the story from her native Sicily, my grandfather fell ill at a very young age. His symptoms mimicked a coma in today’s pathology, but back then all the local doctor knew was that there was a young boy who would not wake up. After every method of waking my grandfather failed, a decision was made to call the witch doctor who lived on that part of the island. After many prayers, and with my grandfather still in a coma, the witch doctor summoned my grandfather to get up and get one of the family’s chickens, cut off its head, and then to come back to the bed.

That’s all my mother can recall of the story. Obviously, my grandfather eventually awakened from his comatose state. No one could have foretold that he would have a special child later in his life—my mother, who was never able to come to the fullest realization of her gifts, even to this day.

The spiritual pattern that afflicted my grandfather was passed on to my mother, and eventually to me. I don’t know all the genealogical history in my family, but I’m sure this spiritual pattern began before my grandfather was born.

When my mother was a young girl, she too went into a coma-like state and was actually being prepared for burial rituals when she awoke. She apparently had been "dead" for a number of hours. The local doctor could not get a heartbeat from her, and no one knew what had occurred. She says that when she awoke she was surrounded by faces staring at her, initially in horror at her resurrection. Then there was joy. Later on, they theorized that she might have had some sort of anaphylactic reaction to shellfish she’d consumed. But my mom has continued to gorge on shellfish all her life, without the slightest hesitation or consequence. She is indeed special, a chosen one of the gods and spirits. She still says that she thought she was dreaming every time the Holy Mother appeared at the foot of her bed, yet she traversed the streets of her town praying litanies to her. She never knew how she came to know the words of those prayers, but people would follow her and join in.

In my case, after a number of days in the intensive care unit, I was transferred to a regular bed at New York Hospital. There, I recovered slowly—the prescribed antibiotics still a futile strategy as far as I was concerned. When I left the hospital, I knew I was different. I couldn’t explain it then, as an eight-year-old, but I can explain it as I look back now. It is simple: I was no longer a child of this world only. I had been initiated into what would become an intense, intriguing, beguiling, and very challenging spiritual path for years to come.

The miasm had been passed to me not as a burden, but as an opportunity to heal the ancestral imbalances, if you will, of the generations before me. I guess God knew what he was doing, but I could never have imagined the life I was about to live.

2

My Shaman

Years later, the fragmented pieces of my spiritual path began to make sense . . . especially after I befriended a 2,000-year-old shaman in the spirit world who would later come to guide and protect me.

One day when I was in my late twenties, I was walking the streets of New York, my physical body visible to the naked eye but my spirit lurking between the worlds. I was praying for someone to help me in the midst of my healing crisis. With my shoulders hunched against the rain-drenched air, I walked slowly, asking the spirits for a healer, for a magician imbued with the teachings of white magic. I needed an herbalist, a dreamer, a spirit walker. Carrying my medicine bag and gifts for the one I knew must appear, I meandered impatiently and hopefully, trusting that the spirits would soon send someone to assist me.

Despite my years of training in the healing arts, my studies in various spiritual traditions, my training in shamanic work, and my abilities as a medium, I had nothing but my faith to go on in asking for this help. The miasm was beginning to heal on a different level, and I needed a way to move beyond it.

I was shielding my face from a cool drizzle that felt more like ice crystals when I heard small footsteps behind me. I knew they were coming from the spirit world. I stopped, held my breath, and waited to hear the footsteps again. There was silence. I waited another moment before I began to walk again . . . and there they were: tiny, mysterious, yet effulgent footsteps. Then a bright light began to emanate as an indomitable soul came forth: a shaman.

He looked at me quizzically, and through telepathic means let me know that he followed the traditions of his grandfathers. That meant that speaking to women was somehow inappropriate, but because of all the work I had done on behalf of the spirit world in the past, he deemed my "call" worthy enough to be answered. (As a medium, I expect spirits simply to talk to me or give me visions—this was the first time a spirit used telepathy to relay his intentions.) He let me know that he was fully aware of why I was there; I didn’t need to repeat myself. I was so in awe of his impeccable demeanor, and of a discipline I knew I could never harness, that I was trying not to laugh. He continued our "conversation" telepathically, letting me know that he would help and showing me how things were beginning to come full circle. Our conversation seemed to last for hours, yet in this earthly reality it was only minutes. He knew of my work as a medium and healer and was seemingly pleased about my work with plant medicine. After all, he was trained as a shaman in the ritual use of plant spirit medicine. As a spirit walker, he continues to utilize these gifts, imparting them to those of us in this earthly reality and also to his fellow brethren in the ethers. As we talked, he was accessing my memories on a soul level, letting me know through clairvoyant and clairsentient means what he was seeing . . . pictures of my childhood, of my initiations, of all the souls who stayed near me from beyond, and of the many remedies that had been given to me over the years to help me heal myself and those who came to me. The plethora of remedies and natural healing cures I had always used in my work came from souls like this shaman. I like to think of these souls as the plant gods.