How Jonathan realized his psychic gifts and used them to create PetMassage Part 1

On Christmas 2014, I found myself rereading the pages of the book Transitions, PetMassage Energy Work for the Aging and Dying Dog. It has been over ten years since I poured my heart into its writing. The process at the time was cathartic; an exercise that I was compelled to do. The response that I have gotten from the people who have read it is truly heartwarming. I’m so pleased that I am able to help others through the process of their dogs’ transitions.

Now, that I that have some distance, I thought that reediting it to an eBook format would be easy. And then, I started wondering where I got the skills I describe in the book. How did I get to the point where I realized I had the wherewithal to help dogs and their people?

Christmas is an especially reverential time for me. We live in a culture that gives huge amounts of energy to winter holidays. A lot happens at Christmas-Solstice  time. People get engaged. Couples break up. Babies are born. It seems that a lot of people die around Christmas. It was on a Christmas Eve in 1985 that my dad died.

The death of a parent has a profound influence on each of our lives. Death affects each of us, of course, in our own way. I was lucky to have a dad who was my friend. He was a role model. He quietly embodied personal and professional integrity. He demonstrated through his actions, for me, how to love.

I had given him plenty of opportunities over the years, to hone his practice of unconditional love. Supportive and encouraging always, even though he might not have understood all the career or philosophical or religious paths I chose to embark on and compulsively follow.

I have a story that I carry of his death. The experience that I shared with him as he died triggered the insights that I needed to eventually develop my canine massage practice. The gifts that I received in the story are part of the core curriculum in the PetMassageTM School.

What happened to me that night will give you insight about the dynamics of PetMassageTM for dogs.

The time, the place, the scene. In the 1980’s I owned and operated art/picture framing galleries in Chicago. One of them was right on Chicago Avenue, close to Wabash, just about a hundred yards from Michigan Avenue. It was the On Chicago Gallery. It was closing time on Christmas Eve. It had been a busy holiday season. The last of the artwork and custom framing orders had been picked up. I locked the front door and retired to my workshop where I could relax and enjoy a quiet glass of wine.  I sat on my metal stool at my dimly lit work table, noting that everything I needed to do had been completed. All of the manic rush-rush hurry-hurry of the season was over. It was calm and quiet as I reflected on the customers with whom I had interacted during the past few days.

As I sipped, I was suddenly aware of a new set of scents and textures. I tasted a clear fresh frosty breath and sensed the presence of other aromas. I was re-experiencing an event from another, earlier, time and place. I had never experienced anything like this before. I was remembering, in vivid detail, an experience that I had with my dad. It was a moment that I spent with him during a morning one Sunday when I was a child. This was truly extraordinary!

The time, the place, the scene. It was a freezing cold early-early Sunday morning. I was delivering my morning paper route, except because of the sub-zero cold, my dad was driving me. Stacks of thick newspapers were piled on the front seat of his new Chrysler. I felt a twinge of guilt when I saw the dark rectangle of newspaper ink on the new upholstery. But he didn’t seem to mind. He was okay with that. As I ran back and forth from car to front doors delivering papers, I ran through the frost cloud of my breath. I tried to keep my mouth away from that cold wet spot on my scarf. I weighed so little that when I stepped on the icy surface of the snow, I left scarcely a footprint. I thought that was pretty special. I opened the car door and grabbed an armful of papers.

The inside of the car was warm. I noticed the contrasts between the cold clean fresh and the interior smells of Mennen aftershave talc, newspapers, cigarette smoke and that new car smell. I was the invisible man who walks but leaving no footprints, I told him. I’d close the door and he’d pull a couple of houses further down the street where I’d return for more papers. We were a team working together. Afterwards we would drive to the White Tower diner for wheat cakes.

That was it. While I was pouring myself a second glass, wondering why I was thinking about this pleasant, inconsequential scene, the phone rang. It was Mom. She told me that Dad had died just a few moments ago. I wasn’t even aware that he was in hospital. She said that she understood that I was busy with my holiday rush and she didn’t want to distract me.

Of course. She and Dad had owned stores and worked in retail most of their lives. She believed that when you have a business your priorities are to take care of your customers.  I was carrying on the family legacy of entrepreneurship. Dad was very proud my art gallery and picture framing business. He was thrilled with the professional life I had created.

“Just before he stopped breathing,” she mused, “he had the sweetest smile on his face.”

I knew in an instant exactly what had happened.

He had somehow connected with me, spirit to spirit, to share this simple, ordinary, memory. It wasn’t one of our big memories, like the time we’d attended a major league baseball game in Detroit. I was in little league; played shortstop. It was 1961, the year that Roger Maris and Mickey Mantel were in a media-crazed duel to break the world home run record of 60. The Tigers were playing the New York Yankees. Both Maris and Mantel hit homers. It was incredible. The Yankees won, but the Detroit crowd went wild anyway. We did, too. But that wasn’t the memory he shared.

Somehow this particular random Sunday morning memory had been the one to bubble up to the surface for review. It was simple, and clean, and beautiful, and profound. It somehow described our entire relationship. He was always there for me, as a source of strength and stability when times were good and when they were not. We had always been mutually respectful friends, even when I was a ten year old. He simply helped me do my job.

My job, of course, was to be the best me I could become. It was this farewell gift to me that changed my perspective on life and death. It gave me an appreciation of the memories, the quantity of them, and the significance of each of them.

The layers within this experience provided a “course correction” to my perceptions of what life is all about. What I realized that night is that our lives are made up a lots and lots of little times. Some are of happy times and some are of sad times. Some are crazy vivid, like the baseball game between the Tigers and the Yankees in which … well, you know. Most of our memories are ordinary and not especially memorable.

All of them are meaningful. All of our experiences are encoded in our minds. Every soda you’ve opened, every person you’ve met, every walk you’ve taken, every crack in the sidewalk you’ve noticed, every billboard, every fencepost along a country road, every TV show, every unusual cloud formation. Each of them. All of them. A string of pearls.

Every moment holds within it opportunities for choices. Each of these momentary experiences is an opportunity to do our best, be our best. Of course, there are variations to every theme. We’ve all made mistakes. We’ve had errors in judgment. We’ve done some brilliant things. We’ve done stupid things. That’s how we learn (I’m told). Taken altogether, we are creating a general theme, a trend, a way of life. We are creating our own stories, our own paths. We are controlling the evolution of our own life journey. A string of pearls. That was one layer.

I had studied the works of Edgar Cayce. I had immersed myself in the soul traveling exploits of Paul Twitchell’s Eckankar. I had read all about the Buddhist monks who could astro-project from one mountain top to another. I had absorbed the stories of Richard Bach’ reluctant messiah and believed that I could swim in dirt, too. I was fascinated with the possibilities of ESP. But, until that moment, I was still HIGHLY skeptical about claims of psychic powers. Woo-woo, I can read your mind!

I had dreamed that it was possible. Now, here was an actual experience that demonstrated beyond a doubt, that someone could sense someone else’s thoughts. Thoughts are things. Thoughts could be transmitted. These abilities, or powers, or gifts to receive thoughts, do exist. More than that, I realized that each episode of the memory is layered and interwoven with an enormous amount of content. A lifetime’s worth.

The entire ensemble of sounds and images, smells and sensations, context and emotions, references to previous memories, projections of future events, are all present. This is the substrate, or subtext, supporting the whole of the expression. I was experiencing the multi-sensory video of someone else’s moment it time. Pretty cool. Eh?

I’d received the thought from Dad, who was in a coma 300 miles away, and shared it with him. I shared the nonverbal experience of my dad’s memory. I shared the life force of the moment; its quiet unassuming ease, its comfort, its love. I observed the whole thing — consciously. I could remember it. I was able to describe what I was experiencing in intricate detail, just as I have done here. It was as if it were happening for real, in real time. I was not seeing symbolic images or metaphoric random pictures that I had to interpret. It wasn’t patterns in the snow, or images that emerge from tea leaves. I was experiencing an actual scenario by someone else, as it was experienced the first time, through their eyes and filters.

The awareness that such ability even exists shifted the direction of my life. Paranormal does exist. It could be done. I could do it. And, hey: it happened to me. I did, do it.

The questions then arose. Was this some random event? Was the experience repeatable? Could I recreate the conditions necessary to access information like this? And, what were the conditions? Did I have special psychic abilities that I could develop? Could I experience the Akashic Record like Edgar Cayce? How could I learn to open my psychic antennae? Could I learn to receive at will?

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