If attempts to find expression fail or are blocked, the repressed feelings will eventually make your body sick. It is my belief that most illnesses are caused by repressed or disowned energies within us.
—Shakti Gawain
The first edition of this book was published in 1993. For quite a while the Universe had been nudging me to write a book about the healing process. I kept pretending not to feel those nudges, remembering how much was involved with writing my first book, Hands That Heal(New World Library). Writing a book is a lot of work, and I wasn't sure how I was going to say the things that needed to be said.
I have learned over the years that I always get the higher guidance I need when I ask for it, and this time was no exception. As the nudges to write this book continued, my course of action was revealed through a dream that returned for three nights in a row. The dream was simple: I was standing in front of an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting, telling my life story to everyone in the group.
Anyone who has ever attended an AA meeting knows that members stand up in front of the group and give testimonials about their lives, telling about how it used to be before AA and how it is now. These stories provide support for everyone who, like the speaker, is in the process of recovering.
After having this dream for the third time, I realized that I was being told that I should share parts of my own healing journey with my readers. I should tell them about growing up in an alcoholic family, being addicted to alcohol and pills, being sexually abused as a child, being an unwed mother, suffering from depression, having poor health during much of my life, and, finally, experiencing my own healing.
In short, I should write a book about my healing journey, as well as the healing journeys of many of my clients.
And so, I begin.
Let me start by answering two questions that nearly every new client asks me. First, is Echo my real name? Yes, it is. And second, how did I become a healer? The second question is less easy to answer.
When I was seventeen years old and a junior in high school, I went to my first medium for a psychic reading. At the time, I was a typical teenager. I wanted to ask about my future husband and how many children I would have. Would I go to college? If so, which one?
Instead of answering any of these questions, the medium told me that I was born with psychic abilities and the gift of healing. She told me that one day I would be a well-known healer and psychic. I would teach others about their psychic abilities, would write books, and would become known throughout the world. I was stunned.
The medium could “see” other things, too, like the fact that my father was at home that night with a migraine headache. She told me to go home, lay my hands on his head, and ask God to use my hands to heal his headache.
When I got home, I told my dad everything the medium had said and asked him if I could put my hands on his head. He was as nervous and doubtful about this whole thing as I was. The only two healers I'd ever heard about were Jesus and Oral Roberts. You can imagine how tough it was for a shy, seventeen-year-old girl to think of herself as having abilities like theirs!
Nevertheless, my dad agreed to let me place my hands on his head and try to heal him. After twenty seconds my hands started to heat up like little heating pads and trembled a bit. I was scared to death! After about ten minutes, I felt my hands start to cool off. I removed them, and my dad announced that his headache was gone. Gone! No more pain!
That night, I couldn't sleep a wink. I kept wondering, “Why me? What does this mean? Why did God give me this ability?” I felt an overwhelming sense of responsibility. I wondered if news about my healing powers would spread and all the sick people in the world would depend on me to heal them.
As I lay in bed that night I asked God if He would please help me understand. I had always believed in Him, although I didn't know Him very well. Still, I felt confident that the help I was asking Him for would come.
A few weeks later, my psychic abilities began to develop. Every now and then I heard voices—voices that called my name or whispered something only I could hear. I never knew when I was going to hear these voices. They would just come out of nowhere.
One night as I was returning from a friend's home at about 1:30 in the morning, I was about to turn onto Highway 5, the fastest way home. I heard a voice say, “Take Highway 7.” The voice seemed so real that I looked in the back seat to see who was there, but nobody was to be seen. As I approached the Highway 5 turnoff, I decided to ignore the voice and take the shorter route, but as I began making the turn I could feel something holding the steering wheel, preventing me from doing so.
I continued toward Highway 7 and then, right across from an all-night gas station, my car had a flat tire. My first reaction was that this was real Twilight Zone material. Had I taken Highway 5, which was one of the most sparsely traveled and poorly lit highways in the area, I might have been stranded for a couple of hours.
The voice I'd heard that night and on previous occasions continued to speak to me. I didn't know where it was coming from. But I remembered that the woman who had told me about my gift had also talked to me about spirit guides who would help me along the way. Though I didn't know what this meant, I decided this might be the source of this voice.
For a long time I wandered around afraid, wondering what I was supposed to do with my so-called gifts. In an effort to answer some of the questions I was having, my mom and I took psychic development classes. We even bought a Ouija board and consulted it. We read all of Ruth Montgomery's books. Her The World Beyond really helped me to start putting together some of the pieces of the psychic puzzle.
A spiritualist minister in town called my mother one day and told her about a class she was going to teach for people who were psychically gifted. She invited my mom and me to attend. We met every week for nearly a year. I learned a lot about clairvoyance (the gift of seeing visions or images with the third eye—the psychic eye) and clairaudience (hearing messages from the spirits). She taught us about auras (the energy around the body), reincarnation, and karma. The ideas of reincarnation and karma really bothered me. I didn't want to think about life as something I chose. It was easier to blame others or bad luck for the things that seemed to go wrong in my life. I sat on the fence about reincarnation for a long time.
Even as my abilities continued to develop, being “normal” remained very important to me. One of the issues that has always been difficult for me is the expectation that psychics and healers should be kind of weird—dressing oddly, sounding strange, speaking in metaphysical “psychobabble,” and living with a black cat in a home that reeks of incense. I didn't want any of that for myself. For a long time, I made a lot of assumptions about spiritual healers, such as:
I'm not sure where I got all these ideas, but they influenced my feelings about myself for many years. I felt like an incredible failure as a healer because I wasn't living up to these standards. I worried that other healers knew something that I didn't.
Again, I asked God for help. Three days later, someone stopped by my office with a flyer announcing that Alberto Aguas, the internationally known healer from Brazil, was coming to Minneapolis to give a healing workshop. I felt compelled to attend.
The three-day workshop was a gift from God. Alberto and I became close friends. He stayed in Minneapolis for a month, and each day we spent some time together. We talked about everything: our lives, our work, our beliefs. I saw the humanness in this world-famous teacher. It was wonderful! Alberto wasn't perfect and didn't pretend to be. He didn't live up to that list of imagined standards for healers any more than I did. He spoke openly of being on his own healing journey.
As time went on, I felt a strong inner peace. I let go of all my silly expectations and accepted my healing abilities. I began to see the truth about people's healing processes, that these were taking so long not because of my shortcomings but because each of us has a process we must go through. The journey of illness and healing is often our best teacher, showing us how to live our lives in a better way. It is rare to discover shortcuts on that path.
Since that time, I have come a long way, both in healing myself and in accepting myself as a healer. Most of the time, I now feel peaceful about my work, my beliefs, and my journey. Most important, I now realize that I have always received whatever I needed along the way to accept my gifts and my humanness.
It has been nearly thirty years since I decided to come out of the closet and do psychic work on a full-time basis. One of the toughest challenges has been learning how to live peacefully with my gifts, accepting my psychic abilities while living a normal life. Even now, whenever I fill out an application for a bank account or other services, I flinch when I have to write in my occupation. However, I have found that the more I accept my psychic abilities, the more the world around me accepts them as well.
In the early years, when I was still supporting myself at regular jobs, I did my psychic work in the evenings and on weekends. I was very selective about whom I told of my psychic gifts. I learned early on that many people were uncomfortable about my profession. Some were afraid it might be evil to be psychic. Many people assumed I could read their minds, and they were afraid that being with me would force them to look at their own beliefs and feelings. For all these reasons people would squirm when I told them of my abilities, so for a long time I kept them very private.
Over the years, my method of working has gone through several changes, but some things have remained the same. When I do psychic readings I ask clients to think of questions before they come in for an appointment. When they arrive, I ask them to state their questions. Then I close my eyes, and through breathing and prayer, I go to a calm place within myself. I always ask God to help me bring the client accurate information that will help him the most.
When I first began doing psychic readings, I communicated directly with the client's spirit guides. Guides are loving, compassionate souls who want to help us. They know why we are here and what we are meant to accomplish. Through our thoughts, feelings, and intuition they guide us on our life path. After I contacted these guides, they would give me information about each client.
Later on, I asked God for a spirit guide who would work with me every day, so that I would not have to communicate with a different guide for every person. Shortly after my request, a guide appeared and introduced himself as John Joseph. He explained that he was here to make my life easier.
John was with me for five years, and we had a wonderful relationship. He was a tremendously helpful spirit, and I miss him. He was very loving, funny, and compassionate toward all people. John provided lots of important information for me and my clients, some of which I will share with you in this book.
Over the past forty-two years, the focus of my psychic readings has continually shifted. New guides have come to work with me. Through the information they have provided, I have learned much more about the healing process and the reasons behind our health challenges.
This book is very different from my first one, in that the focus is not on my psychic work but on the personal journey that each of us must move through in the process of our own healing. While many books speak of the healing journey and of the need to get down to the emotional roots of our illnesses, there were none that provided a map for this journey. And so it became my goal to provide that map, one that would be a helpful guide for anyone who was looking for a place to begin.
I would like you to think of this as a guidebook for your healing. I highly recommend that you get yourself a book with blank pages that you can use as a journal to keep a permanent record of the exercises at the end of the chapters. Having this record of your journey can be a valuable reference for you as you do this work, one that you will turn to over and over again, reminding you of how far you have come.
Now, let's get on with our healing journey!