Adventures in Perception

Real-life accounts of love’s healing power to transcend time and space

This is a story of my journey, and it’s a wild ride. Follow me on a selected trek beyond the limits of traditional marriage and family counseling to increasingly unusual—and eventually downright paranormal—healing abilities. From reading other therapists’ hands…to dreaming my clients’ dreams…to meeting ancestors of the people who came to me, my path has taken me into uncharted territory. And, it has been an experiential confirmation for both my clients and me that consciousness continues beyond this physical life and that love transcends death—a timely message in these days of fear and uncertainty. At first disconcerted and doubtful, over time, I have come to possess great confidence and faith in the gifts these experiences offer both for my clients and me. Join me as I point out some landmarks in the rich landscape of my life.

Rational or Crazy

My parents were Jewish atheists. They were certain that there was just this three-dimensional world and then nothingness. If it wasn’t rational or explainable, it was crazy; and crazy was bad. They did not act or think rationally, however. They said one thing, did another and were unaware of what they were really communicating to their children. “If you don’t stop crying, I’ll give you something to cry about,” as if I weren’t crying about something in the first place.

Reading Hands

I also discovered that I had an aptitude for reading hands through some synchronistic events. This also shook me up because I had been trained to think that kind of thing was a fraud. Gradually, I discovered that reading hands was a fun way to meet people at parties and develop my intuition. When I read hands, sometimes information would flow to me about the growth challenges in people’s lives and their talents, gifts, and life purpose. Later I began to teach intuitive and psychic development using hand reading as a way of practicing and developing intuitive and psychic perceptions.

When I was in my thirties and working on unraveling my family programming, I told my therapist a funny story about getting an improvisational acting job by reading the interviewer’s hands. When the man showed me his hands, I had a glimpse of someone who reminded me of Charlie Chaplin and said, "You were very close to your grandfather.” It turned out his grandparents had raised him, and he still missed his grandfather.

Then my therapist asked me to look at her hands. As I examined the lines, I somehow knew that she was about to face five challenges that would call for her to make five decisions. I didn’t know where that information came from and thought I might be making it up, but I said it anyway. She was surprised and said she was already facing one of them. Several years later, I bumped into her in the lady's room at a public event. She told me that the five challenges and decisions I had mentioned had appeared exactly as I had described. She thanked me and told me what I had said had helped her prepare for the decisions she had needed to make in her life. Throughout my therapy with her, she had encouraged me to open and use my intuition, and I felt safe with her in that realm.

Keeping it Hidden

At various points in my life, I had been told I had paranormal abilities. Over the years, dreams and visions would appear and guide me onto new paths or through treacherous landscapes. My upbringing taught me that most people discounted intuitive-psychic perceptions and feelings, and I also tended to discount my own. When I became a therapist, I generally kept my hand reading “hobby” hidden in professional circles. Often when I read someone’s hands, I had to face my own fears about whether I could really do it or whether I was crazy to be doing this. Yet over and over, the information I received proved useful and accurate: these experiences again pushed me to accept that reality was much wider than I had been taught, and they helped me dismantle old beliefs as my intuition and connection to spirit expanded.

Encouraged by My Peers

Using intuitive awareness is often considered a feminine form of perception. At a conference entitled Feminism and Family Therapy in the early nineties, I was encouraged to value my abilities and see how I could use them to assist others in ways I would never have imagined. At the conference, Ann, my roommate, was a therapist whom I had met at another conference several years earlier. At that time, I had read her hands for fun, and we had become friends.

Beyond Traditional Therapy

I found I could save people many therapy sessions when I used the gifts of hand reading and what I later began to call holographic or vibrational healing. Having my emerging skills valued instead of feared or ridiculed by other therapists gave me a push of confidence to share them more in my professional work. I was always careful to tell people who came for this work that it was outside of the scope of my license, and I was not seeing them as a marriage and family therapist.

I now regularly experience how we are all deeply connected. When we feel our connection, which is love, we can gain awareness far beyond the knowing and perception of our intellectual-ego minds.

I am finding that much of what I learned and experienced can be taught to others. What people call psychic is really the ability to perceive higher energy bands. Meditation and spiritual practices, and trauma can activate these and many other “paranormal” abilities. As we wake up the 90% of the brain that quantum physics describes as being related to greater perception through dimensions, we can all discover a deeper connection to life, the planet and each other. This is a small sampling of my early adventures in perception and healing that range far beyond what the medical establishment accepts as reality. Indeed, it has been—and continues to be—a wild ride.

• Laurie A Roth, MA, MS,? is a hypnotherapist and was an LMFT (Licensed Marriage Family Therapist) for 35 years. She is also a musician, composer, sound healer, psychic,? and former radio show host. She leads workshops and classes in meditation, intuitive development, healing and creativity. Laurie loves helping people transition into higher states of awareness and joy, and access their own intuition, creativity and soul talents.