Writing this book has been a journey toward my own freedom. For so many years, as a psychiatrist and a psychic, I felt exiled in two different worlds. Both parts of myself are equally dear to me, the currents of each running deep. During my years of medical training I cultivated a great respect for the rational mind. I also touch a realm that many people have yet to see, as real to me as the earth beneath my feet. I've struggled to heal the split between these two worlds. My spirit wouldn't stand for anything less.
My quest to become whole is unusual only in not having been acknowledged as a common path. We are all visionaries. Even if you don't think of yourself as psychic, our prescience lies latent, a shared legacy we each have the right to claim. That any of us have ever been forced to suppress our psychic experiences is a travesty, the toxic fallout from a form of ignorance I'm fighting to dispel. I hope my life may be a template so your path can be easier, so that many of the stumbling blocks I faced can be avoided or, at the very least, anticipated. The wonder I've felt at discovering the versatility and expansiveness of the spirit is awaiting you, too.
My path was intricate, often like a maze. I needed a decade to establish my center: ten full years of swinging back and forth like a pendulum to understand that this split was an illusion. It's not that the psychic resides in one realm and the rest of the life we lead in another. The barrier between the conscious and the unconscious is a lot more permeable than we think. These two apparently separate domains can be organically meshed. The secret lies in the vastness of out beings, our capacity to unite what on the outside seem like opposite extremes. We don't have to make a sacrifice, choosing to live out just one side of ourselves. There is a saner common ground. We can embody it all.
Through the Northridge earthquake, the Altadena and Malibu fires and the recent floods, for nearly two years I continued writing Second Sight. Despite these disasters and the lingering chaos they caused, still each day I felt I was slowly inching closer to myself. My tendency for many years was to take refuge in anonymity, never wanting to attract too much attention, wary that in doing so I would somehow come to harm. Expressing my true voice—not in a whisper but with outright assurance—never felt safe to me. Maybe it's because I was raised by a mother of such intensity and strength that I got used to living in her shadow. It let me off the hook; there was a comfort zone there. But as I came into my own as a psychic woman, I hungered more and more to put into words the yearnings of my deepest heart. This book has been my salvation, revealing the secrets I've kept to myself for such a long time. So many of my emotions are laid bare here. It has made me strong. This has been my healing.
No matter what I'm going through, especially when my heart is torn into a million pieces or I feel isolated and alone, my psychic dreams, visions, and knowings have sustained me. Whether a situation appears promising or downright dismal, I now have intuitive resources to look beyond the obvious, to achieve a deeper understanding of the picture. I always strive to hear the greater message—not acting hastily out of fear but driven by a sounder sense of truth. There's nothing mote empowering. A real gift of the psychic is that it allows us to tune in to an authentic inner authority, offering us an alternative to acting out the endless negative scripts we write in our own heads.
For me, the beauty of being psychic is moving closer to the wisdom of our own hearts. Though it can be simply a means of information gathering, I've found its highest value is in penetrating the layers of reality that reveal the interconnectedness of all things. My hope is that by turning inward, by pursuing a psychic path, you begin to feel a connection with yourself, with others and with the world around you, but most important with spirit. Then our pangs of loneliness and longing can finally be eased; the exile from ourselves is over. At last we've come home.
When I look at my life, the evolution of growing into my psychic abilities, I see a persistent image. I'm standing next to a massive block of unformed stone, steadily chiseling away. I know the rock is sacred. I know I must keep working, no matter how long it takes. There's enormous joy in this. And devotion, a willingness to return day after day, even though my progress may at times be hard to discern. The rock becomes more radiant as I work. Its angles, curves, and crevices are infinite.
What this image evokes in me, and what I kept coming back to in my own mind over and over while writing Second Sight, is freedom. The freedom I've felt liberating my authentic psychic voice, not having to pretend to be small anymore or conform to someone else's notion of who I should be. The freedom to soar as high and dive as deep as my spirit will take me, to forcefully and with pride speak my own truth. And so I feel blessed. With all my heart I wish the same freedom for you.
—Judith Orloff, M.D.
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