SB LACROIX

“That’s not how my other patients describe the voices they hear,” he said, his voice steady and reassuring. “It’s much different. In fact, I have never heard it described the way you just did.”

“That’s good to know,” I replied, nodding my head with one quick, chin drop.

He was an extraordinary psychiatrist. Usually, they are all head, no heart, but not him.

While I thought I might be crazy, I figured it was more my imagination, however; a part of me knew it was neither. The trauma I experienced as a child did not leave me in one piece, and to survive it, I pulled myself deep inside my inner world where I shut out everything. I was quiet and highly introverted. In my inner world, I was safe, yet unaware of the abilities I had inherited.     

I hear voices. In the past, I assumed it was just me talking to myself, or I was balmy. One day that perception changed for good. I was in my mid-twenties and a voice said in a commanding tone, “Check your son.”  I was puttering about the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner when I heard it. I was gathering up some mail and was aware my six-year-old son had gone up to take his bath. I thought about asking my eldest daughter to check on him. It was when the voice responded to my thought that I knew it wasn’t just me.

“No, you go, now!” the voice commanded. Dropping the mail that was in my hands, I ran as fast as I could up the stairs.  As I rounded the corner, I saw the door to the bathroom was closed. He never closed it. I instructed him to leave it open in case he needed assistance, we could hear him call.

I moved toward the door, quickly opening it, and heard my own voice in a tone I had never heard before scream, “Oh my God!”

There in the tub lay my son. His eyes were closed. The adrenalin release was so intense, I couldn’t see that the water was encircling his sweet little face and not covering it. In that moment, it looked as if he were under the water.

Get him out of the water, get him breathing!  I thought, and I reached with swift force for the boy’s shoulders to pull him out.  As I pulled him, he woke and began to cry. He had been sleeping, and I startled him. My relief was so great, I too cried, hugging him as tightly as I could.

That day marked the moment I looked back at all the voices and I knew they were not my imagination.

Over the past decade, life changed a lot. My mother had recently died, and I heard my mother’s voice a lot. I reconnected with my cousin from my mother’s side of the family and became aware she (my cousin) was a psychic medium who spoke with the dead and did readings. I told her about hearing my mother’s voice. She explained to me that our great-grandmother was also a medium.

While in meditation, I asked my spirit guides if I am a medium like my cousin, and we inherited this from our great-grandmother, why was my method of communicating with the spirits different from my cousin’s? The spirit guide who answered me was the first one to ever speak to me as a guide, and he usually chimed in when I needed to be set straight on something.

“Your way is not her way. Your way is the ancient way, the way of the Shaman,” he said, his voice clear and direct.

I sat quietly processing what he said. Later meditation sessions revealed I had abilities from my father’s side of the family as well. Eventually, I came to understand what my spirit guide meant.

While I had channeled knowledge I was unaware I knew into poems and prose, (I wrote about that in Where Emptiness Meets Eternity ~ From Creepy AI Art to Spiritual Synchronicities) it wasn’t the same as when a voice began to recite a poem in my head, and I wrote it. Or when I wrote about the death of a beloved partner when mine was very much alive. They were the stories of the dead, and I as their scribe, allowed that pain to be expressed and released.

While my cousin gave readings to the loved ones of the departed to facilitate healing, my way was different. In the middle of the night, as the house slept, I would write while listening to music. The light of my computer screen and maybe a candle or a fire in the fireplace offered gentle illumination to the room. My consciousness would alter with the sounds of the somber music, the clicking of my keyboard, and the ticking of the grandfather clock. The atmosphere was hypnotic and rhythmic, creating a ceremony of sorts where the emotional pain being purged and processed wasn’t mine alone.

“If I’m not crazy, then what do you think it is?” I queried. I wondered if science had an explanation for hearing voices not caused by mania or psychosis.

“A gift,” he replied with a slight smile.

A gift, perhaps. A coding in the DNA, most likely. Clairaudience, most certainly.

The sepia photograph is of my great-grandfather, great-grandmother, and maternal grandmother whom I share with my cousin. I got married at the age of eighteen and unable to afford a ring, Mum offered me her grandmother’s size five wedding band that fit my ring finger perfectly. At the time, I had no idea I had inherited more from my great-grandmother than just her petite hands.