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    Psychic: My Life in Two Worlds
    Psychic: My Life in Two Worlds
    Psychic: My Life in Two Worlds
    Ebook327 pages9 hours

    Psychic: My Life in Two Worlds

    By Sylvia Browne

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    About this ebook

    “I have known Sylvia for twenty years, and I have the greatest respect for her. People seek her out for her much celebrated intuitive skills, however, I have sought her out for her friendship and kindness. I applaud her for the peace and solace that she has brought to so many.” — Montel Williams

    “An amazing woman, an amazing life, and a book I couldn’t put down. Sylvia is a true inspiration.” — Jeanne Cooper, star of The Young and the Restless

    Reaching deep beneath the surface of her life—then and now—renowned psychic and #1 New York Times bestselling author Sylvia Browne (The Other Side and Back) candidly discusses details of her professional and personal experiences that she’s never publically revealed before.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMay 10, 2010
    ISBN9780061995477
    Author

    Sylvia Browne

    Sylvia Browne (October 19, 1936 – November 20, 2013) was a #1 New York Times bestselling author and world-famous psychic who appeared regularly on the Montel Williams Show and on Larry King Live, as well as making countless other media and public appearances. She also founded the Society of Novus Spiritus church, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2011.

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      Book preview

      Psychic - Sylvia Browne

      Psychic

      My Life in Two Worlds

      Sylvia Browne

      With Lindsay Harrison

      To every client, every audience member,

      everyone who’s ever read my books,

      everyone who’s ever touched my life along the way—

      you’ve contributed more to this book

      and to the journey of my soul

      than I can ever repay.

      Contents

      Preface

      One Growing Up Psychic

      Two The White Picket Fence

      Three For Sale: One Used White Picket Fence

      Four Ghost Stories

      Photographic Insert

      Five A Band of Angels

      Six Spirits, Readings, and Audiotapes

      Seven My Version of Health Care

      Eight Broadening Horizons

      Nine Another Beginning, Another Ending

      Ten More Hellos, More Good-byes

      Eleven How Long Has This Been Going On?

      Afterword

      Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      Other Books by Sylvia Browne

      Credits

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      PREFACE

      In case you’re wondering why I’ve chosen now to write my memoir, let me make something clear right up front: I’m not retiring, and I’m certainly not going Home yet. I’ve got far too much left to do.

      The simple answer to Why now? is that I’ve decided I’m ready to talk about my life and my work in my own words. In fact, I may make a habit of doing this every seventy-three years whether I need to or not.

      To some of you who’ve read my other books and/or come to my lectures, many of the stories in this book will be familiar. To all of you, I promise there are stories in this book you’ve never read or heard before, stories we can all laugh about and cry about and learn from together.

      I’ve included overviews of many of my philosophies and psychic experiences in these memoirs, and if you find yourselves wanting to read more about any or all of them, know that I’ve written entire books about each and every one of them. I’ve even written entire books about the fact that there’s a Father God and a Mother God, by the way. So please don’t let it throw you that for the majority of this book I refer to God simply, with male pronouns. The alternative is to use the word They, or He/She, which is just plain annoying. Besides, I don’t believe for a moment that They care what we call Him/Her, as long as we commit our lives to His/Her service. (See what I mean? In writing, as in life, get too bogged down with technicalities and you miss the whole point.)

      For the most part, though, this book isn’t about the spiritual psychic I am. It’s about the woman I am, not remotely psychic about myself. When I look back on this particular incarnation, I’m as mystified as you might be at the choices in my life that actually seemed like a good idea at the time. If you’ll forgive the cliché, this isn’t the story of a victim; it’s the story of a survivor, flaws, missteps, and all.

      It’s coming straight from my soul to yours, and I truly hope you enjoy it.

      ONE

      GROWING UP PSYCHIC

      I believe that before we come here from the Other Side to start a new incarnation, we write very detailed charts for our lifetimes to help guarantee that we accomplish the goals we set for ourselves. We choose our parents, our siblings, our friends, our enemies, our spouses, our children, our careers, our assets, our challenges, our health issues, our best and worst qualities, the best and worst qualities in those who are closest to us, and certainly the timing of it all.

      As I look back on this long, strange, complicated life I’ve lived, I just have one question about the chart I wrote:

      What the hell was I thinking?

      IT’S VALENTINE’S DAY 2009. I’m seventy-two years old. I’m blind in one eye, and I have a limp from an irreparable crack in my femur (a lasting token of my first husband’s esteem). I’m standing at the head of an aisle in an ivory silk dress, holding a bouquet, surrounded by a room full of family, friends, and my Novus Spiritus ministers. Smiling confidently back at me from beneath the arch at the end of the aisle is a tall, handsome, sixty-two-year-old man named Michael Ulery. In the year we’ve been together he’s seen me at my best and my worst, and he’s been nothing but kind, supportive, patient, hard working, and thoughtful. He’s so good natured and in such a perpetually good mood that I frequently stare at him, especially first thing in the morning when he brings me coffee without my asking, and say, What’s wrong with you?

      Michael is a successful jewelry designer and businessman. I first saw him in a jewelry store near my office in Campbell, California, at a time in my life when my position on relationships was a firm, nonnegotiable, Spare me. So you could have knocked me over with a feather when I found myself asking the store owner about the attractive man behind the counter who was busy helping another customer. On our first date a week or so later he apologetically admitted that when we were introduced he didn’t have the first clue who I was. Just when I thought he couldn’t be more perfect. And the rest, as they say, is history.

      So here I am, limping down the aisle into marriage number four (or number five, but only on a technicality), impossibly happy but also chagrined at the fact that obviously, when I was on the Other Side writing my chart, it seemed like a great idea to wait until I was in my seventies to meet the real Mr. Right. I repeat—what the hell was I thinking?

      Then again, if it took this long, and this much, to get to this moment, I might write that same chart all over again.

      TO GET THE requisite details out of the way: I was born Sylvia Celeste Shoemaker in Kansas City, Missouri, on October 19, 1936.

      My father Bill and I adored each other from the moment we first laid eyes on each other. He was a good-looking, funny, warm, affectionate extrovert who made me feel like the most important person in the world when he’d wink at me and say, That’s my girl. He was a postman who exercised his love of show business by emceeing all sorts of local events, and even in the worst of times we could make each other laugh until we cried.

      And then there was my mother. Celeste. As mean, self-involved, humorless, and disconnected a woman as you’d ever hope to meet. She was physically abusive when my father wasn’t around, and she delighted in telling me about lying awake at night trying to figure out how she could kill me and get away with it. Her way of dealing with situations that displeased her was to retire to her bathtub and soak herself into pretending they didn’t exist, which is probably why I remember her as being prune-y most of the time. My father had several affairs throughout his marriage to my mother, and I didn’t blame him. In fact, I always believed that the only reason he never left her is that he would have had to kiss her good-bye.

      I’ve come to know that there are people in this world called dark entities. Dark entities are those who, because they’ve turned away from God and abandoned His light, choose to spread nothing but darkness in their lives. By their own choice, when they die, their spirits don’t transcend to the sacred perfection of the Other Side. Instead, they enter what’s known as the Left Door, plunge through a Godless, joyless abyss, and cycle right back into some poor unsuspecting fetus again. If one of these days you read about someone in their late teens triggering a violent uprising in some historically peaceful country, you can confidently say to yourself, Oh, look, it’s Sylvia’s mother.

      It seems important to add that I took care of my mother in the last years of her life. My Gnostic Christian beliefs demanded nothing less, and beliefs without the actions to back them up are nothing but rhetoric. I admit it: I did it more for my own peace of mind and my certainty that it was just plain the right thing to do than out of any delusion that she would have done the same for me.

      My very earliest childhood memories involve my enraged mother chasing me through the hallway waving a wire hanger she intended to beat me with (after seeing the movie Mommie Dearest I wondered if my mother might have been the technical consultant); standing in my crib peering out the window, watching anxiously for Daddy’s black car to pull into the driveway so I’d be safe from her for awhile; and the incident I’ve come to think of as The Time She Tried to Burn My Foot Off.

      I was three years old. It was bath time. What I distinctly remember is Mother putting me into the tub, turning on a full blast of scalding hot water and leaving the room. My foot had to be treated for second-degree burns. Much of the aftermath is a little hazy. There was something about Mother explaining to Daddy that she’d had to leave me alone to answer the phone (take it from me, there was no phone call) and that she’d warned that damned building maintenance man a thousand times to stop cranking up the temperature of the water heater. And there was a loud conversation behind the closed door of my mother’s bedroom between her and an aunt and uncle who threatened to take me to live with them if there was ever another hint of abuse, no matter how accidental she claimed it was.

      That threat made Mother much more circumspect about hurting me—it never occurred to her to stop, but from then on she saw to it that there were never potential witnesses or visible marks. Not for a moment did her occasional, unpredictable bursts of rage inspire me to be more well behaved. They just inspired me to be faster, smarter, and angrier at her, until finally, when I was about seven, I ratted her out to Daddy. I can still hear his voice, and feel my heart bursting with love and gratitude for my brave, strong hero, as he turned to her and promised with quiet fury, I’ve never raised my hand to a woman in my life, but if you ever touch that child in anger again, I will tear you apart.

      I believed him. Clearly, so did she. She never physically hurt me again. Emotionally? Keep reading.

      DISPELLING MUCH OF my mother’s darkness throughout my childhood was the warm, loving flame of her mother, my grandmother Ada Coil. She was my inspiration, my mentor, my fearless defender, and the quiet sanctuary where my lifelong devotion to God had its roots. Without Grandma Ada, my life would have made no sense to me at all.

      Grandma Ada was brilliantly psychic, another link in a three-hundred-year psychic family legacy. I was the next link in that legacy, complete with a caul, or fetal membrane, wrapped around my head at birth, thought to be the sign of a child born with the gift. Grandma Ada didn’t tell me about the caul or its significance for several years, to avoid programming me for expectations that might never manifest. Instead she just watched and waited, loving me unconditionally, confident that if I really had inherited her psychic gift, there would be no stopping it, and no stopping me from expressing it.

      She was right.

      I HAVE NO memory of two psychic incidents that happened when I was three years old. But I’m told I informed my parents that I would have a baby sister when I was six (my only sibling, Sharon, was born a month before my sixth birthday). And I announced, Grandpa’s dead, moments before Daddy arrived home one sad afternoon to break the news that his father had just passed away from a sudden heart attack.

      Instead, my memory flashes from those days are limited to things that really mattered, like riding my beloved tricycle and being enchanted by fireflies and learning that roller skates worked much better on the sidewalk than they did on our grassy front yard. Doing my dolls’ hair, or hostessing tea parties for my stuffed animals? When I could be outside playing ditch ’em with the other kids in the neighborhood? Not a chance, thanks. (In case you’re not familiar with ditch ’em, just think hide and seek after dark with flashlights.)

      In fact, with the exception of Mother’s intermittent volatility, my early childhood was so ordinary that it made my first genuine psychic experience feel like a horrible ambush. I was five years old, pushing vegetables around on my plate at a boring Sunday family dinner, when I happened to glance over at my great-grandmother Hattie Braun. In less than a second her face went from perfectly normal to hideous, melting like hot wax down onto her neck, exposing her skull, nothing but gaping cavities where her eyes, nose, and mouth used to be. I froze, terrified, while she and everyone else at the table went right on idly eating and chatting away as if nothing unusual was happening. Finally I managed to tear my focus away from her and turned for comfort to my other great-grandmother Sarah Shoemaker, who was sitting next to me, which drove me to sheer panic when I saw that her face was melting too, just like Hattie’s.

      I leapt up from the table and ran to my father, grabbing his arm and begging him to take me home. I was hysterical, and I’m sure everyone was both worried and relieved when he made a quick, apologetic exit, carried me outside, and asked me what was wrong. Needless to say, it was no help when all I could do was repeat over and over again through my tears, Their faces were melting! Their faces were melting!

      Great-Grandmother Hattie and Great-Grandmother Sarah passed away within the next two weeks, just four days apart, and with a typical child’s logic of believing that everything that goes wrong is her fault, I was sure that somehow, thanks to those grotesque visions, I’d killed them. Shaken by the trauma, the isolation of my parents’ inability to understand what I was talking about, and the guilt of thinking I’d personally ended two sweet, harmless lives, I became a depressed, withdrawn, deeply troubled little girl.

      For the first of more times than I can count, Grandma Ada reached her strong hand into my confusion and pulled me out. She arrived at our house one day not long after my great-grandmothers’ deaths, recognized that something was very wrong with her cherished granddaughter, gently took me into her lap and said, Whatever it is, you can tell me, my sweetheart.

      I burst into tears and sobbed my way through the story of the melting faces no one else saw and the two resulting murders I’d clearly committed. Instead of staring at me as if I’d just grown antennae, she held me closer and said, First of all, I promise, you didn’t do one thing to Hattie and Sarah. They just finished their time here, and their bodies were old and tired, so they asked God to bring them Home. They’re happy and healthy now, living in heaven with Jesus and the saints and all the Angels, and it didn’t have a single thing to do with you.

      It made me feel a little better, and I asked if she was sure. She nodded and wiped away my tears before she added, Second of all, I’m sorry for what you saw that night at dinner. It must have been very scary.

      You mean, you believe me, Grandma?

      Of course I believe you, she assured me. I know exactly what it’s like to see things that other people don’t see, and I know exactly how alone it can make you feel. But it’s nothing to be frightened about, sweetheart; it’s because God gave us a gift that we’ll have with us all our lives. You and I are something called ‘psychic.’

      A gift? Was she kidding? No! I don’t want to be psychic! I protested through a new wave of tears. It’s ugly, and I hate it, and I don’t want to see melting faces for the rest of my life!

      Then here’s what we’ll do, she said. We’ll just ask God to never show you anything ever again that’s too scary or upsetting for you to handle.

      Before I could argue, she closed her eyes and began to pray. I prayed with her, and kept right on praying, and while I could fill libraries with books on the psychic visions I’ve had since then, I’ve never been given another one that was more emotionally challenging than I could take.

      Looking back, it’s extraordinary how significant that afternoon was in the course of my life. It gave me a very special connection to a woman I deeply loved, trusted, and admired. It gave me permission to embrace rather than apologize for what had happened to me because it came from God. It gave me a word—psychic—to call what had happened, which made it seem a little safer and less freakish. And although I wasn’t sure I understood or even quite believed this part yet, Grandma Ada, who never lied to me, said it was a gift, so I could at least try to figure out what it was.

      Almost immediately I began noticing that every night after I turned off my nightstand lamp, my bedroom began filling with spirits. None of them seemed interested in me; they just milled around among themselves like opaque shadows. To this day I’m not sure if I was becoming more finely tuned to the higher frequency of the Other Side or if my reluctant acceptance of being psychic attracted them to someone they knew would be able to see them, in a kind of Party in Sylvia’s room! celebration. What I am sure of is that while I never believed they meant me any harm, I found it unnerving to try to go to sleep with a semi-transparent crowd floating around the bed.

      I mentioned it to my mother, who immediately began drawing a hot bath for herself. I mentioned it to my father, who had long since become accustomed to having a psychic mother-in-law but didn’t have a clue what to say or do about it.

      I mentioned it to Grandma Ada, who’d had the same problem since she was a child, and she calmly handed me a flashlight to take to bed with me. (I still can’t sleep in a completely dark room, by the way. And if your children tell you they’re upset by spirits visiting them during the night, don’t tell them they’re imagining things. They’re not. Just assure them the spirits would never hurt them and give them a flashlight.)

      Before long spirits began appearing any time, anywhere, and one incident taught me two interesting lessons: that visions differ from one psychic to the next, and that psychics aren’t psychic about themselves. (For more proof of that second lesson, read the rest of this book.) One day Grandma Ada and I were tearing the house apart looking for a steel strongbox that contained some papers she urgently needed. When we got around to her bedroom, I saw Great Grandmother Hattie, Ada’s deceased mother, materialize and point to the back of a massive dresser. I shared this news with Grandma Ada, who hadn’t seen a thing, and it triggered her memory of hiding the strongbox behind the dresser where no one (including her, obviously) would ever think to look for it.

      A few nights later the family was gathered in the living room when I saw a spirit take shape behind Grandma Ada’s left shoulder. Grandma, I asked, who is that man behind you?

      Daddy, too accustomed to this kind of thing to even glance in our direction, went right on reading. Mother rolled her eyes and made a break for the nearest bathtub. Grandma Ada asked me what he looked like.

      I described him as tall, with reddish-colored hair and round wire-rimmed glasses, and I added, There’s a string around his neck, and it has a horn on it that he uses to listen to people’s chests.

      It’s my Uncle Jim! she gasped, more thrilled than I’d ever seen her. He’d been her favorite uncle, a doctor who’d died twenty-four years earlier in a flu epidemic, and she gave me an ecstatic hug to thank me for letting her know that this man she’d missed so much was around her.

      So there really was an up side to this psychic thing. Who knew?

      FROM THAT NIGHT on, it was as if floodgates had opened. I routinely saw spirits around almost everyone. I knew who was calling or coming to visit before the phone or doorbell rang. I guilelessly asked Daddy, in front of my mother, who the nice blonde lady was he was going to visit when he made some excuse to leave the house for the evening. I warned even the most casual passersby that there was something wrong with their liver or their gall bladder or their spleen before I even knew what livers, gall bladders, and spleens were. I can only imagine how relieved my family was when the time came for me to start school.

      My Jewish father, my Episcopalian mother, and my Lutheran grandmother were united in their belief that I was in serious need of some structure, strong guidance, and constructive focus. They weren’t wrong. I hadn’t learned yet how to control the images that surrounded me or how to separate myself from the psychic impact of the emotional and physical force fields everyone unconsciously gives off. I could easily become exhausted, depressed, anxious, or even physically ill in large groups of people from sheer extrasensory overload, depending on the moods and/or health problems of anyone in my involuntary radar. I still loved being with my neighborhood playmates, but I was beginning to feel isolated since none of them seemed to see what I saw, sense what I sensed, or know what I knew. From what I’d heard about school, there would be new things to learn and be stimulated by and a whole new group of children to make friends with, and I couldn’t wait.

      Somehow the Lutheran in the family came up with the idea that the perfect answer to my need for structure, guidance, and grounding would be a convent. Even more remarkably, the Jew and the Episcopalian agreed with her. In what seemed like the blink of an eye, Grandma Ada, Daddy, Mother, and I were all taking instruction in Catholicism and being baptized together in the church, and my formal education was placed in the firm, steady hands of nuns.

      I loved school. I loved learning. I loved being surrounded by friends my own age who playfully lured me outside of my own head for hours at a time. And I especially loved the nuns. I was in awe of their dedication and commitment and the fact that they knew God and Jesus and the Angels personally. I began wearing black around the house with a white hand towel draped across my chest, an improvised homage to the nuns’ habits, and I announced to anyone who’d listen that I was going to be a nun when I grew up. (Pause for exhales of relief from Catholics around the world that I clearly changed my mind.)

      My sister Sharon came along shortly after I started school. She was born without a caul and without an apparent psychic bone in her body,

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