Spring has finally sprung! And you know what that means—it’s time for me to bring in a shovel to dig my way out of all the paper that’s accumulated in my office.

Spring cleaning rituals have been around almost forever. Some historians believe they started as far back as 3000 BCE. We have always felt called to be in sync with nature as the days get longer and brighter.

This is the perfect time to clean the windows and then open them to let in the fresh air. But you know that. Here are some ways to spring clean your energy.

• Smudge the corners using white sage or palo santo. Move that chair, cabinet, plant stand, whatever it is that never gets moved out of the corners of your rooms and smudge. Start at the floor and let the smoke waft up to the ceiling.
• Make a list of the things that are weighing you down. They can be physical, emotional, or spiritual. They can be people, situations, or things. They can be tasks, habits, or relationships. Take a long look at this list. What can you eliminate to lighten your load? Do it.
• Make a second list, this one of changes you’ve been wanting to make. They could be big, like finally moving to the city that’s been calling out to you. Or small, like updating your wardrobe. Just remember that cutting your bangs is rarely a good idea.
• Sit and imagine what it would be like to be renewed. What would that look like? How does a new beginning feel? If you could have a fresh start, how would it change you? You can have that fresh start. Choose a word or phrase to inspire and motivate you.

While you’re at it, go through your keepsakes and pass on one or two things to someone who’d love them. Donate to a worthy cause, either money or time. Look at your subscriptions and discontinue any you’re not actively using.

The more we let go, the more room we have for something fresh to enter our lives. Let go of the old energy and embrace the new.

This is the after photo. I’d be too embarrassed to show you the before!

You’re familiar with Dr. Gary Chapman’s five love languages, aren’t you? He says they are words of affirmation, gifts, acts of service, quality time, and physical touch. If you don’t know yours and like taking quizzes, you can do it here.

But what I want to know is what is your unique love language?

Sure, I love to receive a gift, whether it’s something that sparkles or hickory nuts someone found and knew I’d like. Or hearing someone say Let me do that for you makes me feel well taken care of. But you know what really makes my heart sing? Crazy synchronicities with someone.

For example, a friend sent me the lyrics to that awful song from the 70s Signs (torture yourself with it here) and the next day I just happened to flip to it on the radio. Or I’m telling a friend about seeing Spike Lee at a Bulls game at the United Center back in the day—and then found out I was relaying the story on Spike Lee’s birthday. Synchronicities like this make me feel so, well, in sync with someone I love.

I also feel connected to someone when they know what I’m thinking without my having to say more than a word or two. It usually sounds something like this,
Me: Where’s..
Them: On the bathroom counter.

It’s probably no surprise that a psychic medium feels love and connection through synchronicity and telepathy. Another one of my unique love languages is inside jokes. Well, maybe not entirely unique. I have a friend who kiddingly says she stays with her husband because it would take too long to establish inside jokes with someone new.

What’s yours? Do you feel taken care of when you don’t have to be the first one up in the morning? Could you die from sheer delight if someone makes you a cup of coffee just the way you like it? Would you do anything for someone who doesn’t always make you choose where to go out to eat or what TV show to watch in the evening? Or maybe the opposite—lets you wield the remote.

Asking what someone’s unique love language is a great question when you want to get to know someone better—even if you think you already know all about them.

A friend recently recommended the Tara Sharp* book series to me. The books are light but engaging and I’m enjoying them. There’s even a character named Toni! But Tara is the main character, and she can see auras. There’s anther character in the third book of the series who has the gift of clairalience, or psychic ability through the sense of smell.

This got me thinking about all the ways we are able to pick up energy.

Clairvoyance is the ability to see people or events at a distance, either a distance of location or of time. Often, when working with a client, I’ll see where they grew up, a dead relative, or something physical like their mother’s favorite flower.

Clairaudience is psychic hearing. It might be a song, a bird singing, or a voice. Have you ever woken up because you thought you heard someone calling your name? If so, you might have the gift of clairaudience.

Clairsentience comes from clair-, meaning clear and –sentience, which means feeling. This can be the ability we all have to pick up on someone else’s energy. It can also be feeling what someone else is physically feeling. If you’ve joined one of my Facebook Lives, you’ve witnessed me feeling someone’s headache or back pain or foot neuropathy. It can also describe feeling what someone else is feeling emotionally (also called empathy).

Clairgustance is especially fun. This is psychically tasting something. I have one client this happens with regularly. I know when she’s had pizza for lunch or just snacked on popcorn.

Claircognizance is the trickiest. It means clear knowing and it’s the receiving of information without any tangible evidence or facts. It seems to be outside of logic. How did I know that? I just knew.

Beyond, or maybe within these abilities there are precognition, perceiving or predicting future events; retrocognition, or seeing past events; and remote viewing, which is seeing things that are happening at a distance or outside normal perception.

We all have psychic abilities. What’s yours? Trust it. Listen to it. With practice, it will become stronger until eventually it’s your superpower.

*The Tara Sharp series by Marianne Delacourt is available on Kindle. It’s Australian and difficult to find in print.

You’re a compassionate person, right? If a friend applies for a job and doesn’t get it, you’ll show up with ice cream saying there, there, won’t you? You probably encouraged her to apply for the position in the first place even though it was a stretch.

But when you’re the one who has gone for a job that might be a above your current title or salary and you’re not the candidate chosen, how do you treat yourself?

Susan David, Ph.D., an award-winning psychologist and author said, “Compassion gives us the freedom to redefine ourselves as well as the all-important freedom to fail, which contains within it the freedom to take the risks that allow us to be truly creative.”

Why are we so willing to be there for others but not for ourselves?

Life requires us to take risks. What if you have never taken a chance in your life because you were afraid you’d fail. What would your life look like? You might still be living in your childhood bedroom working at the job you got in high school with no love life.

Seriously, take a look at the risks you’ve taken in your life. Here are some of mine.

A couple of unusual risks: I took an exam to get into the private high school I wanted to go to and filled out the little dots horizontally instead of vertically. Oops. So I went to the public high school where I got my start in public speaking because the forensics (public-speaking competition) coach thought I had talent. I was also able to graduate early and went on my own to study in Paris.

And the more usual ones: I got married. I had two children. I handled my own divorce (no lawyer!) when my marriage got threadbare. I got married a second time, which meant leaving a job I loved and moved myself and my kids to a new state. What if it turned out my kids hated Illinois? What if I never got a good job ever again?

Did any of those risks come with stress? You know they didn’t. Was success guaranteed? Nope. Am I happy I took a chance on myself? Absolutely.

How is your life better because you dared to dare?

What should you dare to take on next?

My Saturn has returned
When I turned twenty-seven
Everything started to change…

I heard Kacey Musgraves’s new song the other day and it reminded me that I had promised someone to look into my Saturn return.

You know how we have a new moon about once every twenty-nine-ish days? During its cycle, the moon passes through each of the signs of the zodiac. Today we have a new moon in Pisces. In roughly two weeks, on March 25^th, we’ll have a full moon in Libra (and a lunar eclipse!). All the planets travel through the zodiac with varying frequencies. Venus takes 225 days. Mars takes almost two years. Saturn takes close to thirty years.

When each planet goes back to the sign it was in when you were born, it’s called a return.

Saturn, the sixth planet from the sun, is associated with time, regulations and boundaries. This planet rules with tough love, demanding that we learn lessons the hard way. What lesson, you ask? Here’s how to find out.

Go to a site that calculates your birth chart (click here for my favorite). Enter your date, time and place of birth. Find where Saturn was at that moment by scrolling to the section with your planet placements and houses. Then google separately what does Saturn in _____ (the astrological sign it’s in) in the ___ house mean?

I looked at my Saturn returns a little bit backwards. I thought of what was going on in my life at both ages 30 and 60. The first thing I thought of was that, although I was married, I was severely tempted to stray by gorgeous men. I also remembered that at 30 I took on a much bigger role at work. At 60, I closed my wedding officiant business and pivoted to what I do now. Then I looked up what Saturn in Capricorn in the seventh house means.

Allow me to quote Dr. Google: “…if you have Capricorn in the 7th House, your Saturn return could bring up themes around committed relationships.”

Ahem. My Saturn returns were my wake-up calls to address any issues I’d had with fidelity in my life. There are more meanings and implications, (especially around business) but for me, that relationship theme was a biggie.

Our Saturn return highlights what we are here to learn and master in this lifetime. It’s the curriculum your soul has signed up for this time around. It might knock you on your ass. Or. if you’re willing to do the necessary work, It can be a time of powerful transformation.

When I was a new parent, life was hard. I had two kids less than two years apart (my choice and what the hell was I thinking?) and a full-time job. My husband (long since an ex-husband) was going to nursing school and working. Money and time were tight, and it felt like I didn’t have much support.

I had my kids when I did because I wanted them to be out of the house by the time I was fifty. As the old Yiddish saying goes, Man plans and God laughs. When I was forty-eight, my then nineteen-year-old daughter had her daughter. She and her husband lived with us. They both worked and I took care of the baby. And when the second one came along, well, let’s just say my house looked like a daycare center. And it was hard.

I’ll confess, I felt like a toddler whining, It’s not fair!  Who promised me fair?

But still, wasn’t life supposed to get easier as we get older?

Not necessarily, wouldn’t you agree? Easy isn’t a condition, it’s a feeling. What stresses me out might not be what stresses you out. You might find the chaos of an infant and a toddler enjoyable. I might take your biggest pain-in-the-neck in stride.

It’s important for me to remember that even though I can’t control my circumstances, I can control my energy. I can always choose how I react. I decide how to meet and face difficulties. I get to create the life I want.

Energy can be shifted by using affirmations like

I have the power to overcome any obstacle. No matter what is going on, I can be strong, powerful, and self-directed.

Or

In every moment I have the power to choose how I feel

And when that seems nearly impossible, we can co-create with Spirit.

We have a spiritual team that is always available to us, angels and guides who would love nothing more than to help us out. All we have to do is ask.

Here’s how I call on my spirit squad each day:

Guardians, guides, spirits, and ancestors who work for my highest good, be with me today. Guide me; guard me; show me your love.

And if there’s something specific I need help with, I’ll throw that in.

We have the power to create a life that feels easy. If only I had known that back in the day.

If you’ve had a session with me or if you watch my Facebook Lives, you know something I say a lot is You can’t make this s#*! up.  I say it when I experience coincidences (one of my best friends made the exact same things for the Superbowl as I did: pork chili with tomatillos. What are the odds?). And I say it when I pick up something freaky on the intuition hotline. Last week definitely had me saying You can’t make this s#*! up.

In my Cards & Clearings Live last week, I picked up on someone who was feeling cold and scared. It felt like there was trauma attached to whatever this was, too, and that they were all feeding into each other. The fear was making this person cold, the trauma and cold were making them afraid.

Usually, after a Live, someone will send me a message and say That was my dad—he had COPD or That was me—my nose was running because I was eating something spicy. No one claimed the fear and cold and trauma during that Live.

I had a session with a client immediately afterward. I asked how she was doing, and she said great, but… she had wanted to meet with me because a young woman in one of her classes, Sabrina, had gone missing. In the mountains. In Wyoming. The authorities had just recovered her body, she was dead, but they were not saying how she died. Was it suicide? Was she attacked? Was it exposure? My client was rattled, as most of us are, when there is a death, especially of someone young, and no answers. Life can be so fragile.

We talked for an hour, working through her emotions and discussing what, if any, practical things she could do.

Later that same day, it occurred to me that maybe what I had picked up during the FB Live was from the missing young woman. I texted my client, told her what I had experienced, and asked her to let me know Sabrina’s cause of death.

The next afternoon, she did. Sabrina had died of exposure. She was definitely cold, most likely terrified, and had probably experienced trauma such as falling and hitting her head.

“By the way,” my client said. “I watched your Live. You mentioned hearing the song Hold On by Wilson Phillips, so I watched that video, too. It’s filmed in a place that looks exactly like where Sabrina was hiking.”

I had forgotten that part.

Mind blown. You can’t make this shit up.

Yesterday, I was out the door by 7:00 to pick up my grandson. He’s crawling now and is a little perpetual-motion machine. P.S. The little guy refuses to nap. I dropped him off in the late afternoon and rushed to the middle school to see my granddaughter’s basketball game (her team won). I got home and checked my schedule for today. It’s jam-packed and yet I wondered if I could squeeze a pedicure in between seeing a client and going to volunteer at the elementary school.

Screeeeech! Time to put the brakes on. What about the meditation practice I wanted to pick up again? Where can I fit that in?

My word for 2024 is presence; my resolution is to be more present in my life. I’ve been trying. When I walk our dog, Betty, I try to listen to and identify the birds calling. I try to remember to feel the air on my skin (what little of it is exposed in February). I remind myself to notice the hoarfrost on the trees, the animal tracks on the path instead of writing a blog post in my head. When I’m at Gianna’s basketball game, I watch rather than make a grocery list.

But I have got to stop running around so much I fall into bed exhausted. I need to embrace both stillness and silence.

One way to embrace stillness and silence is to wake up before the rest of the world. Rather than moving into activity, stay still. Leave the lights off. Don’t pick up your phone or turn on music or the TV. Be still and simply listen.

We think of silence as the absence of sound, but silence has its own weight and quality. Listen. What do you hear? Your heartbeat? The furnace or fan? Traffic?

Stay in silence for as long as you can. Can you give it three minutes? Can you remain silent until you feel it move into your core? Can you feel its gentle pulsing? Can you allow it to cleanse you? If you can remain silent for five minutes, you’ll feel vibrant and connected to the Universe.

You may prefer to do this at night if you’re the last one up. Or take five minutes out of your day to experience stillness and silence.

Silence is always there — vast, potent, and available for us to step into any time we choose. Give it a try this week. Let me know what it felt like for you.

“Did I fulfill my soul contract with my ex?” I asked Robert. “Or will I have to marry him again?” Just thinking about it exhausted me.

I went on to explain that one afternoon shortly after my ex and I got together, all the past lives we’d spent together flashed in my mind’s eye. So. Many. Past. Lives. And when I went to divorce him ten years later, I wondered if I had finished whatever it was that kept us coming back together. Had we completed the pattern? Were we free to move on in the next life?

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about trading readings with Robert, a psychic who does energy work similar to what I do. Unlike me, he invites his clients to ask Spirit questions.

After I stopped talking, Robert looked off over his right shoulder while he consulted the other side.

“They say yes, divorcing him was the right thing to do. But they also say that your souls have a great love for one another. You’ve been together in many, many lifetimes in different relationships: parent and child, siblings, partners…,” he trailed off and then said, “And you’ll be together again next time.”

I expected to feel frustrated and tired when I heard that. But instead, I felt oddly at peace. I could feel the truth in Robert saying that my soul and my ex’s had a great love for one another. There’s a reason we’ve been linked together for centuries. I’m no longer looking to the cosmic future with a sense of foreboding.

Through a series of synchronicities, I was introduced to Robert. I suggested we exchange readings. He told me to think of some questions I wanted answers to, but I didn’t feel I had any questions. I simply wanted to see what came up. And I’m glad I did because I never would have thought to ask about my ex.

Follow the breadcrumbs Spirit leaves out for you. Trust your intuition. Say yes to invitations that take you out of your comfort zone. You might just get the answer you didn’t know you needed.

Make a wish

Did you ever wish on a star? Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight…

Or make a wish while throwing a coin into a fountain or well?

Do you still make wishes?

Wishing on a star is like sending our intention out to the Universe and then waiting for it to manifest with Divine timing. Shakti Gawain, in her book Creative Visualization (an excellent book, BTW), has an exercise where you envision your wish, wrap it in a red balloon and see it flying off into the clear blue sky. And then you forget about it as you allow it to find its way to fulfillment.

Wishing with a coin, you infuse the coin with your intention and then let it go as you toss it into the well or fountain. You give your wish to the Universe and then let it go. You don’t sit down next to the well, leaning your back up against it, waiting. You walk away. You don’t go back day after day, tossing in coin after coin; you trust.

The best intentions are infused with feeling. Can you feel what it will be like when your wish comes true? Can you live with gratitude today for what is coming your way in the future? Can you live as if your dream has already been realized?

Go ahead. Make a wish—either on a star or in a fountain or just sitting in a meditative state. Bring as much real emotion to it as you can. Get your imagination involved as you see yourself living your dream. And then wait with a spirit of gratitude for it to manifest with Divine timing.