O'Connor & Associates

From my earliest childhood years I quite naturally experienced the ease and flow of dual dialogues; that is, having a five-sensory experience externally, such as a conversation with another person, while I was simultaneously aware of an inner presence and communion with a Spirit being. If I were alone, for example, as a five- or six-year-old in my bedroom, I would kneel at the window and converse out loud with the realms of nature and Spirit. This could be such an absorbing experience for me that I would at times not be aware of movement in the external environment. On one occasion I was startled to find my father kneeling next to me with his arm around me.

My natural inclinations for these multi-dimensional conversations led me to establish daily morning and evening routines. Since my religious tradition was Roman Catholic, I began attending Mass before school from second grade on. At night, in bed, I would enjoy the comfort of Spirit connection. In a classroom of 60-70 children, while the teacher was addressing the lessons of the day, I would be looking over her head at some image of Christ on the wall, and carrying on our personal telepathic chats. I learned to do this inconspicuously, since by sixth grade and onward my peers were already taunting me about my attending daily mass.

My teen years in a Catholic high school allowed me to visit the chapel daily, attend Mass often, and contribute musically by playing the guitar at Mass. My high school years flew by as I internally anticipated entering the convent at some point after graduation. The young man that I dated most consistently in high school entered the priesthood, and recently celebrated his 25 years as a priest.

I graduated from high school at 17 years old, and in the first semester of my freshman year in college I informed my parents that I would be entering the convent the following August. Although they encouraged me to wait until I finished college to take this step, they could see my resolve and did all that any parents could do to support my wishes. I longed to live among people who felt about God the way I did.

There were nine of us who entered the community together that August. It was a huge transition, of course, being 18 years old and adjusting to community living, to the molding process called ″formation,″ and training in the area of poverty, chastity and obedience.

I was fortunate to be given the time for and training in meditation, contemplation and prayer. However, from early on my body began to tell me that the structure and confines of convent life would not be for me. I began to have one respiratory illness after another, pneumonia, pleurisy, otitis media. Otitis media is infection of the inner ear, and it seemed that my body was leading me to understand that this was not the setting where I would hear clearly my life long conversations with God. After only several years, I took a leave of absence from the community. It was one of the saddest days of my life, as my parents picked me up to take me home, and the Superior General told me that I could go and ″live in the world but not of it.″

As a comfort to me in the months after my leaving the convent, the clarity and impact of my meditations intensified. I never returned to community life. It took me about five years to grieve that loss.

I investigated other alternatives for a life committed to spiritual connection. I traveled to meet women who were members of a secular institute. They took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and lived this commitment silently and singularly within their daily lives. I did not, however, become a member of a secular institute.

I became absorbed in my studies and graduated college with a bachelors degree in nursing. The inner familiar conversations became more remote as I entered the years of employment and service. My nursing experiences in and out of a hospital led me to graduate school. I attended the Yale School of Nursing in the specialty of psychiatry and mind-body medicine. This training taught me how to see, hear and sense communication with another in a way which over shadowed and suppressed my life-long abilities of seeing, hearing and sensing beyond the usual five-sensory means.

Even when I served as a chaplain at Yale-New Haven Hospital during the summer between my two years of graduate school, I prayed with staff and patients, but had all but forgotten how to hear, see and sense my spiritual ″bodyless″ companions.

I graduated Yale with a specialty in the areas of psychosomatic or mind-body medicine. In my graduate research I had people with years of chronic pain listen to a relaxation tape which I had made where I directed them to use their imagination to go inside themselves and find the central control room with all the switches and dials for controlling their inner experience. With only three weeks of using the process of turning down the intensity of their inner pain dial, patients experienced statistically significant less pain, depression and less use of narcotics and all pain killers. My research was entitled ″Self-Regulatory Techniques for Controlling Chronic Pain″ and was one of the first studies at the time identifying the strong association between body and mind. After leaving Yale I studied with Herbert Benson, MD and Joan Boyasenko, PhD at Harvard School of Medicine in the areas of mind-body wellness, the relaxation response, and psychoneuroimmunology.

Shortly after graduating from Yale, while consulting in an in-patient psychiatric hospital, I began in the evenings a private practice as a psychotherapist. I was holistically oriented in my work with clients, meaning I addressed many areas of their lives. From my nursing I understood anatomy, physiology, pathophysiology, pharmacology and psychology. From my personal experiences I understood spirituality and the importance of inner spiritual connectedness to full well being. From my convent experience, as well as from extensive training and experience in Eastern psycho-spiritual practices, I was comfortable incorporating visualization, meditation, breath and body awareness and other complimentary modalities into my therapy with clients.

I had learned in my graduate training how to gather information in formalized ways with clients which caused me to forget how I had been able to receive information from other dimensions earlier in my life.

After several years of practicing traditional psychotherapy, I began to feel that there would be a more direct and accelerated way to assist in client′s transformations. I set the intention that I would be shown by Spirit how to be more effective in my work. Each morning before I began my eight-to-ten sessions, I would walk in the space of my office and slowly repeat the following statement for several minutes: ″I am an open and clear channel, lovingly intuitive and wise.″ I did this for about two months and began to feel the energy in and around me tingle and expand, as though I were in the center of a large balloon that was being inflated around me. I began to also notice that I had more energy and focus throughout my days and evenings of work.

I continued using this ″I AM″ statement to set the tone for my times with clients. One afternoon, in the beginning of an hour session, I began to hear a distinct voice speaking to me and making suggestions about what input to give to the client. I was not at all startled, as I listened to this non-audible voice which came from about six feet out from my right temple. Imagine the position on a clock of one or two o'clock, if the client sitting across from me were in the 12 o'clock position – this is the direction from where the guidance came. This transferring of information to me about the client and about what would be of assistance continued to flow and increase over the subsequent weeks. I would be conversing with the client and at the same time conversing with the spirit just as I had done in my childhood. Initially my ego would not allow me to speak to the client about what was being spoken to me, and I would telepathically respond to the non-audible source of input that that was not what I was trained to say in my traditional psychotherapy. Gradually I began to throw out to the client some of the impressions, questions, suggestions which were being given to me on the client′s behalf, and I quickly saw the therapeutic effects for the client during and between sessions. The more I utilized the information the more it came. This clairaudience (the clear hearing of guidance coming from the outside and/or the inside of one's self) expanded into other forms of high sense perception as this is sometimes named.

Clairvoyance (clear seeing which offers guidance as pictures, impressions, movies on one′s mind screen or mind's eye) also began for me. For example, I was magically shown handwriting on my mind screen and was able to identify that handwriting from letters of many people which the client later brought to a session. Once the handwriting from her deceased father′s letter was identified as that same writing I had seen the prior week on my mind screen, information came to me about the client's history of sexual abuse, where her father was the perpetrator. Then a startling thing happened. Her father, who had been deceased for 10 years, came into the space of the session and I was able to describe him accurately to the client. The father′s energy field was gray and dense, his head was bowed in shame and remorse, and he ultimately ″attended″ several sessions to work through with his daughter what had happened between them. His field became lighter and brighter with each passing week, and when father and daughter had finished their dialogues with my assistance, her father moved on, did not show up again, and the client completed her therapy work in a much accelerated way. This type of unique ″family therapy″ has become commonplace in my therapy and coaching with clients. At the time of my first experience with this phenomenon in the late 1980s, which is the experience I shared here, I was unfamiliar with the depth of healing which this depth of work facilitates. In recounting my original experience in a peer supervision group, I was informed that I have ″mediumistic tendencies.″ Through this forum of trans-dimensional communication, deceased husbands have guided their widows in selling the companies left unattended with the husband′s physical departure, decreased children and 9/11 victims have comforted grieving parents and relatives, and those with a history of incest have been able to clear their pasts with deceased perpetrators.

Other methods of guidance have become second nature for me over the past 15 years. Clairsentience (clear feeling which involves receiving guidance as an emotional or kinesthetic feeling, such as a knowing in the solar plexus or a pain in the heart center) and claircognition (clear or direct knowing of information without knowing how you know) have also greatly enhanced my experiences with clients.

The guidance I receive on clients' behalf extends beyond the times of our physical or phone meetings. When I meditate in the morning, I am given information relative to the people I will meet with that day, and between meetings I often receive guidance which I pass on to the respective client.

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