What many people may not know about me is that I’m intuitive and often pick up on people’s energy. This sixth sense can be helpful as a writer and at times pretty eerie or creepy depending on your perspective.
I think this intuitiveness has probably always existed on some level for me, but being consciously aware of it is another thing. One of my earliest memories is being in elementary school and knowing my friend would be moving far away. She was really bummed and I was too, but something about knowing it in advance just took away her thunder. I think I kind of filed that information away and told myself “people don’t want to know the ahead of the moment stuff,” and gave myself the very kid like directive…”don’t be a weirdo”.
Years later as a teenager, I wrote poetry with wisdom and philosophy that spoke like a classic in kind of an embarrassing way considering I wanted to try and be “normal”. Of course, that never happened as a teenager, not with a friend who believed she was reincarnated as Ann Bolyn and that her feet had been eaten by a shark in another life. Together we’d theorize about past lives. Her mother even hypnotized me and I found a couple of those former selves. In one I did something with humanity and held a scroll. Maybe I was a writer back then. I saw myself as an architect in another with huge calluses and the last one that made me cry showed a beautiful feudal estate and being forced into marrying someone and saying goodbye to my true love.
At the time my friend and her mother believed that I tapped into my past lives and that it explained everything. I assumed the images came from reading or a movie. Yet, the thought that I was someone else in another time tickled the imagination… and invited me into the world of stories. Since then, people often say I’m an old soul. I just smile…maybe I am…or maybe I’m writing a story or living the story that I wrote before. Wink…wink…nod…nod…
My intuitiveness and self-awareness of this “other knowledge” became much stronger as I got into fiction writing. I found my destiny and believe it found me. It emerged in a big way with my novels. One of the whackier validations was when a photographer contacted me about my book, Jen-Zen and the One Shoe Diaries. He shared an artistic vision similar to the character, Brad. They both photographed single shoes. The novel itself is fictional, but I know I tapped into the real life photographer’s energy on some level. One of my clairvoyant friends said that,” it confirmed that what I'm doing is real.”
Over the past five years this “other sense” has been getting stronger. I know it’s there on a conscious level now, but don't always understand it. It’s part of the mystery and one of life’s sweet surprises.
A few months ago when we experienced the bad fires in San Diego, I saw an image of an Indian stirring smoke embers. I knew right then that the fires would be put out soon. A month later, I had another vision. I saw umbrellas falling from the sky, which I thought was really strange, until it rained the next day.
Now all these incidents may sound unusual and fodder for the imagination, that’s what I think too. It’s all the more reason to write. Like I wrote in the novel, “Intuition is a fool’s wobble until you set it straight.”
Julie Ann Shapiro is a published author and a marketing expert who helps entreprenuers develop their business. For more information on her services, visit her websites.
http://www.julieannshapiro.com
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