Leslie Sheridan

HOME

What is home? Is it a place, a person or a thing? Is it a state of mind? Is home where you feel comfortable, safe, secure and loved?

During my search for home I have found that home should not just be a house. In the last four years I have lived in six different spaces. I believed I was trying to find a new home that replicated the house in the neighborhood that I lived in with my now ex-husband and our two children for twenty-five years.

But, I have come to realize that it wasn’t a physical house. It was the people in it and creating the memories that would last a lifetime and the love and the holidays and the traditions that were created and customary year after year. It was family.

Now single and an empty nester, I went from living in that beautiful house to living like a nomad in apartment after apartment to temporarily living in a friends house and finally swallowing my pride and moving back in with my dad and mom in late winter of 2020. That was space number 5. I had planned to stay only a few weeks at the most to regroup and find somewhere permanent to live when Covid-19 changed all of our lives forever. A few weeks staying with my dad and mom turned into nearly two years. It appeared then to be a blessing in disguise but also a punishment. I read a lot of books and binged TV shows to pass the time, like nearly everyone else. And I sometimes stayed up all night writing pages for an unfinished memoir.

Living back home as an adult with mom and dad was much different than when I had lived with them as an adolescent. It was humbling and confining, like being a teenager who has to live by her parent’s rules under their roof. Well, maybe not that much different. I had had a home of my own for many years and liked my own living space and living by my own rules and having my freedom. But, I learned to adapt. And they did, too.

There was a silver lining. I was healing. It did not happen all at once. The grief I had been carrying of my recent past life with my family was giving way to acceptance. I learned to relax and realized that I was with my family, the one I grew up with. I was safe, secure and loved.

And then suddenly, the Winds of Change blew in, clearing away the dark clouds and allowing in the sunshine. The Pandemic was easing. Shortly after that I found a new safe and secure home of my own to live in and a new life to begin.

SWEET DREAMS

In 2014 I self-published my first book, Sweet Dreams, a semi-autobiographical story about the little and not so little synchronicities that began my spiritual journey. I call them synchronicities because they were events that occurred once and while I wasn’t aware of what was happening then, I recalled them later on and knew they were important to my spiritual growth.

Lying awake at night listening to album sides of Meatloaf’s ‘”Bat Out of Hell” as an adolescent in the late 1970s, I wondered what happened to us when we died. I knew about the soul within us from sermons I was forced to listen to in church growing up. What happened to all of those souls? A few short years later I would be distraught about my best friend’s soul when she passed away suddenly.

And, it was because of that event that my spiritual journey went up a level. When I left home shortly after her passing to live briefly with my grandparents in Florida (in the book it was New Mexico where Rosie relocated to be with her grandmother).

Grandma Shirley, (I used my actual grandmother’s name in the book), was the first person to talk to me about death and dying and that it was okay to grieve for my friend. But, one day she worked a conversation of reincarnation into our lunch. It went completely over my head. She talked about deja vu: grandma Shirley knew she’d been here before. I recalled a nightmare that I had prior to my best friend Spacey’s passing one day and immediately told her about it. It was a dream about how I had found her body. I asked my grandmother if my dream was what caused Spacey’s death. She assured me I did not and explained it was a prophetic dream. I felt safe talking with Grandma Shirley about this. She was never uncomfortable or dismissive when I had questions.

Dreams increased from that point: prophetic and visitations. Dreams were guiding me and healing me. Another teacher appeared when my grandmother made her transition. More teachers would appear and events and dreams increased because I was ready to move forward on my spiritual journey.

When I finally started to write Sweet Dreams, I knew that I wasn’t alone. One presence that made herself known was Spacey. She cheered me on and cracked me up when she said this story would be a great movie and gave me gentle nudges when I wanted to stop writing. I have always said that I am not a writer but I am proud of this story. It is a story of healing and love and friendship.

Afraid of Dying

“You have to stop that.” , a friend recently told me. “Just think about living your life.” This was in response to me telling her that I was afraid of dying. After two brushes with death within three months I was wondering when the next one would happen. Everthing comes in three’s.

The beginning of this year was my first brush with dying after falling and hitting my head on a rock. I recalled seeing white and feeling paralyzed. I don’t recall how much time passed, but I was able to feel everything again and get up and find help. My first thought was no one will know I’m here. Two months later a car accident that totaled my car could have killed me. Miraculously, I had only bruises and a couple of contusions. My primary concern in both of these accidents was that I get a message to my twenty-something children in the event of my death: That I love them.

I had only been afraid of my own death one other time. Shortly after the birth of my youngest child I’d had a dream where everything was dark. A man rode up to me on a motorbike and I had a choice to stay where I was – which was not great, or to follow him out of the dark, fiery, dingy cave. Having been fairly new to interpreting my own dreams I didn’t know yet that the dream was not about literally dying. But, it terrified me. I had a new baby and a toddler to care for, and they needed their mom. I didn’t have time to die.

During a past life regression I had been murdered and saw my soul leave my body and float above it, then go through a blue tunnel to the other side. It didn’t hurt during the regression and the sensation of crossing over was peaceful. I felt love and happiness on the other side (of the veil).

I thought about the meaning of both accidents and what the universe might be telling me. One accident might be random, two are not. I’ve said that I am not afraid of dying after experiencing my past lives. However, my own mortality made me realize I am afraid of leaving loved ones behind. And there’s more that I want to accomplish.

Last Full Moon

Auto Cumulus clouds illuminated by a full moon, the last full moon of 2021. I have released a lot in 2021. I’ve grown emotionally. I’ve experienced intense change personally. We all know there has been much change globally.

2021 (2+0+2+1 =5) in numerology is 5. The number 5 symbolizes change. A full moon also symbolizes change. Releasing the old and anything no longer needed so that growth can occur. For me releasing habits and limitations have been challenging. What has been a long time coming has resulted in something that feels like freedom.

Like a Chrysalis morphing into a beautiful butterfly, I feel free from those limitations. Moving forward.

Spiritual Awakenings ~ Grandma Shirley

Grandma Shirley ‘s holiday cookie specialty was snowball cookies, a melt -in- your- mouth butter cookie with nuts and covered in confectionery sugar that resembled a small snowball. I would eat them as fast as she could make them. They were too irresistible to leave alone on the plate. Snowball cookies (a.k.a. Russian Tea Cakes and Mexican Wedding Cakes) are what she called them for young children. They were not for me or my sisters or brother, but for one of the organizations that she volunteered for. She had a kind and generous spirit. She taught me a few life skills in addition to baking such as personal finances. Grandma Shirley was one of my first spiritual teachers. She introduced me to reincarnation.

In the early 1980’s reincarnation was beginning to become part of the vernacular and Shirley Maclaine played a big part in it. I recall seeing the magazine with her in it and the subtitle about UFO’s, that my mom left on the coffee table. It scared me at the time and I threw down the magazine. This was after my encounter with Grandma Shirley when she told me she believed in reincarnation. She tried to explain to me that when someone we love dies or transitions, as a friend of mine had recently, they don’t really leave us. I loved her but I had no idea what she was talking about.

Fast forward about seven years when my spiritual journey started accelerating. I had already met my spiritual mentor HB who had handed me ‘Out on a Limb’ to read. As I’ve mentioned before, I was ready for this. It was the right time. So, when I saw my grandma Shirley again I did not feel freaked out. We had a mutual interest in reincarnation. She talked about the feeling that she had been here before – where she and my grandfather were currently living in the northeast. I understood what she was saying. We were on the same psychic wavelength.

I saw grandma Shirley a few months later in the hospital where she was dying from leukemia. She succumbed not long after that and made her transition. She didn’t push her beliefs on me. Sharing her spiritual beliefs with me was another way that she showed her love. Perhaps, we’ll be in another life together. It was a wonderful ‘life’ skill she imparted to me. And her snowball cookie recipe.

Spiritual Awakenings

“Spiritual Awakening is a shift in consciousness – an initiation into an expanded sense of awareness.” ~ Melanie Beckler

Preface

A spiritual teacher is the one that told me I had a lot to say about my experiences. At that time, I had experienced much: my feelings of spirituality versus religion, dreams, channeling, paranormal, teachers entering and exiting my life, past life regressions, intuitives and divination and last but certainly not least visitations. I was growing spiritually. But there was much more that I needed to learn and the universe was guiding me to new teachers and mentors because when the student is ready, the teacher appears.

I have been blessed with many more spiritual experiences since that time about ten years ago. That teacher suggested that I write a book. I was skeptical but kept an open mind. The only problem was I did not write. That is, I did not like writing. I did not like writing in my academic life or my career. A middle school English teacher assigned a creative writing project. I think I wrote a paragraph where in it I wrote something like, “…the tops of my boots wilted over like rose petals.” She loved it and told me to keep going. My creativity wilted just like those boots. I’m not sure why I did not like writing. But as I grew older my dislike for writing did not change. In a committee I was involved with where I worked at the time, I was tasked with coming up with a mission statement. Just a short paragraph that tells everyone who we are, what we are and how we might attain our mission. Naturally, I froze. And then I asked someone else for help in writing it.

Several years later during a career change due to the economic turn down in 2008, I took several classes at a community college to sharpen the saw or change direction altogether. And that’s almost what happened. On a club board in the student lounge there were several options for participation. One that really popped out was the school newspaper. The suggestion to write came to mind as soon as I saw it. I amused the universe and attended the first club meeting. I read a lot and listened to the news that was delivered on news broadcasts, so I thought I knew how to structure a story. At the journalism club I learned to write, investigate and report and discovered that I liked writing. The words just flowed. How the words flowed or where the inspiration and motivation comes from is a mystery to me. They flowed into a blog and (so far) two books. At each step on my journey the universe has opened up for me at the right time, like each petal of a lotus that is blossoming.

Summer Break

I’ve taken a hiatus from writing this summer not because I’ve been on fabulous, adventurous vacations. Not this summer.

Earlier this summer a beloved family member made her transition to the spirit world. She loved rock and roll, was not religious at all and was supportive of my writing. Then, there is the matter of my day job that has had me so stressed out. I’ve also been thinking about writing a new chapter.

Being outside in nature this summer, however, has been relaxing and inspiring.

A Dream Awakening

My first dream I remember to this day because it was a precognitive dream of my high school friend, Spacey. I don’t recall the actual date – the recall came later after she had passed away.

Nearly a year after her transition I experienced my first visitation dream. That’s not to say I didn’t have any dreams before then, I just don’t recall any. In between these two dreams I had others including another precognitive dream, this one about an event in my future which came to pass. I recall these dreams with clarity to this day without having to consult a journal. In my experience visitations and foretelling dreams such as precognitive and prophetic are dreams or experience’s that stayed with me.

Since that first dream forty years ago, I continued to have dreams, some that I could recall without the aid of a journal to remind me. Although it was not precognitive or a visitation dream, I was learning to recall and remember my dreams. As soon as I recalled the dream, upon awakening or later in the day, I wrote it down on a scrap of paper. One scrap of paper with dream details on it eventually became an accumulation of pieces of notebook paper, backs of receipts or the envelope of a bill or junk mail that was within reach. I then knew it was time to get organized and buy a journal to put these into and continue writing down the details of my dreams. But the reason for writing my dreams down was that they began to increase in quantity and intensity.

I had become aware that I was having more than one dream a night. It didn’t take very long to fill up that first journal with my nightly dreams: nightmares, prophetic and precognitive, visitations, sleep paralysis and other helpful and interesting dream types. I had also filled the journal with doodles to illustrate what I could not always put into words and so that I could refer back to the dream later, especially if I had the dream again (recurring dream).

Recalling and journaling continued for a time. I shared my dreams with those I knew in an effort to share this new interest and to me, phenomenon. I don’t believe that I shared these dreams to start a conversation but that is exactly what happened…eventually. Some people thought it was a novelty, like when we all started to see psychics that became so popular to do in the 1990’s. Others thought dreams didn’t mean anything in particular and that maybe I was a bit odd. And then, sometime later, those same people began to share their dreams with me!

Not very long after I started to keep a dream journal, I went to a book sale and found Rosemary Ellen Guiley’s The Encyclopedia of Dreams: Symbols & Interpretations (Berkley edition, 1995). I needed it. The universe was telling me I was ready to start assembling the symbols and solving the message. This book had enough of the more common symbols to get me started on interpreting and understanding my dreams. I got some help from Shyla, a spiritual teacher and I learned to intuit what I could not find a symbol for either in the aforementioned book or a couple of dream dot com sites that I found on the internet in the late 1990’s. Ultimately, I learned to gather all the symbols and my intuition and go with what resonated with me. And that I feel is the most important component of dream interpreting. A bunch of dream symbols put together are just symbols. But, how does that feel to the dreamer? Does the dream symbol or symbols resonate? The meaning of the dream should be a good fit, after all, the message is specific to the dreamer.

The Universe has guided me through each stage of dreams: recalling, journaling and interpreting. Dreams have been one of the most enlightening lessons on my spiritual awakening path. They have become, for me, a helpful divination tool to download messages from my consciousness with the help of my guides and the universe. Being a teacher of dreams to others has been an unexpected gift. People I have helped like to have the dream interpreted for them, but I also want to teach and empower them to interpret their own dreams. And that is because the universe has a message for them.

*all photos by Leslie Sheraden

Knowing, Hearing, Seeing, Feeling: The Clairs

Shyla shared with me that she was afraid to see a ghost, that is, an earthbound, while she was investigating a haunted house with a paranormal group. She told me she had been lying on a bed in a bedroom of this haunted house when, with her eyes closed, a female presence got on the bed with her and was talking to her. Shyla said she was afraid to open her eyes to see this ghost; she didn’t want to see her. My reaction to this was a mix of surprise and interest.

Shyla was a spiritual teacher and an intuitive medium. She had the gift of knowing, feeling, hearing and seeing, what I call the four clairs: Claircognizance, clairsentience, clairaudience and clairvoyance.

I have heard that anyone can be one or all of the clairs. I am mostly all four by admission. I have seen energy mostly in the shape of orbs and flashes. It frightens me now just as much as it has my whole life to see them. I don’t want to see a ghost or spirit or apparition. I’m not sure where this fear comes from, perhaps I learned to fear them at some point in my early childhood.

My other senses became stronger, particularly clairsentience. My inner and outer energy radar can feel energy from those living on earth as well as earthbounds. At first feeling earthbounds was frightening and I would run from the room. I still do. I learned to tell them to go away because they don’t belong here on earth and they don’t. They need to cross over first and then they can visit earth another time. Problem is, they don’t know they’re ghosts; they think they’re still flesh and blood.

Conversely, feeling a crossed over loved one is different to me. I feel love and an awareness of who it is. I feel Shyla when she’s around – she’s still teaching and inspiring me.

**All photos by Leslie Sheraden

Crossed Over Loved Ones

I believe that when our souls leave our human bodies they go to the Other Side of the veil. They go home. When I recalled my soul leaving its body in a past life during past life regression therapy, it did not hurt. While the action of my death in that life may have been painful, I did not experience that during the past life recall. I did not feel panic or that I wanted to leave. In fact, it felt quite natural. As I went through the blue tunnel, where departed souls travel to the other side, I felt pure love, lightness and peace. It was not at all scary as I once believed death to be.

When Spacey passed away, the pain that I felt in my body, head and heart was impenetrable. No amount of hugs and hand holding would have lessened the pain. No one talked with me about death, except for expressing sympathy. I only knew from church sermons when I was young that when we die we go either to Heaven or Hell. I hoped she would go to Heaven. I only knew that she was gone and I would never talk with her again. Eleven years later when Grandma Shirley passed on, I understood more about the soul; where it is after the body is no longer needed for its journey here. It did not mean that I missed her any less or that I did not mourn her. I recalled our talks a year or so before she left this world about reincarnation and that death was a part of the life cycle.

As more loved ones passed, understanding grew and pain lessened. I knew that they passed from the physical world to the spirit world. They are still with us in spirit. When I was first aware that I was experiencing visitations I knew that it was communication from crossed over loved ones.

Linda was a co-worker at a media company we worked for in New York. We both worked in accounting: she was the accounts payable and accounts receivable bookkeeper, I was an office clerk. I was younger than her by about twelve years; she was married with older children. I was recently married and was starting my family. She was supportive of me and I looked up to her. One morning on the radio a news report said a young man had been killed in a motorcycle accident. He was Linda’s youngest son. I was heartbroken for her.

A few years later I had a dream. Linda and I were sitting at her desk. She was cross training me on an aspect of her job. She was sitting in front of her computer and I was sitting to her left. On my left were three beige 4 drawer lateral filing cabinets. While Linda was showing me something, I suddenly looked up at the end of the cabinets. I knew someone was there. A young man I did not know was wearing khaki pants and a waist length brown jacket, unzippered. He casually walked from behind the cabinets, looked right at me and said, “Please tell my mom I’m okay.” And kept walking. I had never met her son but I knew this was him in my dream. Later, when Linda was training me on something I would be doing for her, we were sitting just as we were in my dream. I related this message dream to her. At first Linda did not believe that souls could connect with us in our dreams or connect with us at all. But she thanked me for telling her.

My visitations with Peggy during automatic writing, Spacey getting my attention while I followed a service truck that bore her nickname, and Grandma Shirley sitting next to me in bed talking to me and others that I knew that have visited me in different ways, have shown me that we all transform from the physical world to the spirit world. Physical death is not the end. My crossed over loved ones wanted me to know this and that they are just visiting.

*all photos by Leslie Sheraden