Month: January 2014

A Spiritual Leap Of Faith

It’s my last day as a resident in Massachusetts. Hopefully in less than 12 hours I’ll be getting on the highway with my closest friend driving my Penske rental truck and me following closely behind in my Camry Hybrid. While I can definitely say I’m feeling a sense of relief that this day has finally arrived, there’s also a strong part of me feeling a lot of fear as well. That’s only because I have no idea what my future holds in the city I’m moving to and truthfully, I believe I’m taking a complete spiritual leap of faith heading there.

Life is really all about choices and sometimes I just wish God would make some of them for me. But more than not, God has presented me with options throughout it where choosing any one of them has often been very difficult. My move today is actually one of them. As I head to my new home in Toledo, OH to live with my partner of now two years, I have more questions for God than any answers I’ve been receiving.

I promised myself twenty-four months ago when I met my partner online that I would take the relationship with him slower than ever before. As we grew closer together month after month, merging our lives together slowly but surely, I was constantly avoiding having the conversation with him about living together.

Frankly, I’ve been quite comfortable remaining in Massachusetts for the past six and a half years because it’s where I began my real recovery from an addiction-prone life. It’s also where my closest friend of almost seventeen years has lived, where I’ve had free state health care and government assistance given my unemployment status, where I’ve found holistic practitioners who have continued to help me on my spiritual path to heal my mind, body, and soul, and where I’ve made connections to many people who I know have truly cared about me. But unfortunately, Massachusetts is not the area where my partner lives or where his place of employment is situated. I always knew that if our relationship lasted, I might have to go outside my comfort zone and move once again in my life.

Up until now, I’ve moved quite a bit and have lived in the following cities over the years in this order: Poughkeepsie NY, Rochester NY, Fairfax VA, Falls Church VA, Rockland MA, Falls Church VA (again), Chincoteague VA, Berlin MA, Brockton MA, South Weymouth MA, and East Weymouth MA. Moving again and again to each of these places became exhausting. I attempted to make geographical cures with so many of those moves. That is why I promised myself this time around that I’d take things much slower with my current partner. The last thing I wanted to do is make another quick one of those again as those geographical cures never worked. Also, I kept telling God that I wouldn’t move until my physical pain levels dropped significantly. Somewhere along the lines though, a voice kept getting louder inside telling me it was time to move on.

Then came the day where I discovered my partner had cheated on me during a self-sabotage attempt, as he believed I was never going to move there at all. Since that occurred, I also noticed my pain levels weren’t lowering either, which started causing me great doubt and resistance to moving again. That was until one of my spiritual teachers told me something rather profound.

“What if things aren’t going to get better in your life, including your relationship or your pain levels, until you take a leap of faith and move in with your partner?”

I was completely dumbfounded when I thought about the statement, except I felt on some level there might be great truth to it. There have been many times in my life where I’ve had to take a leap of faith not knowing what was on the other side. When I did, God always caught me, so why should this be any different? That’s when I gave my landlord a two-month notice back at the end of November last year. Doing that much was easy though, because a part of me believed that maybe now God would start lowering my pain levels. Well as of the time of me writing this, it hasn’t happened yet and I’m a little scared.

So I honestly don’t know what’s in store for me in Toledo, OH, but I do trust that God has a wonderful plan in store for me there that I’m just not able to see yet. Regardless, I am grateful to God for all the spiritual lessons I learned during my entire stay here in Massachusetts. And as I take the final step of my spiritual leap of faith in just a little while from now, I’ll be sending my love to all the people I’ve known here in Massachusetts, as each of you helped me in your own way to grow into the spiritual person I am today.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Psychic Connections And Psychic Phenomenas

Have you ever thought about a person from your past that was once close to you, but hadn’t been a part of your life in quite sometime for whatever the reason? Have you ever gone a step further by attempting unsuccessfully to track them down because you really missed some part of that connection? If you can answer “yes” to both, then the more important question I want to ask you is this. Did that person ever suddenly reach out and contact you shortly after your unsuccessful search for them? If so, it’s quite possible you may have experienced one of your very own psychic abilities.

The word “psychic” has always drawn many harsh critics in this world, and for a long time, I was one of them. For many of the earlier religious years of my life, I labeled anything that fell under this term as either being “devil-based” or a bunch of crap. But then I started noticing strange phenomena happening to me at times that I couldn’t explain through science or rationality. The following is a list of just some of them:

  • Knowing what my friends were going to say before they even said it
  • Have knowledge about certain events or actions in a person’s life that I was never told about
  • Having frequent Deja Vu experiences
  • Thinking about a random person out of the clear blue and suddenly the phone is ringing with them on the other end

And of course, my most recent experience with this was when I searched intensively on the Internet for a close friend I lost touch with many years ago. His name’s Steve and at one time, was one of my best friends. I met him back in 2005 when I lived on the small island of Chincoteague, VA during the years where I owned and operated a bed and breakfast there. He wrote for the local newspaper and became interested in some of my random writings about a meditation retreat I had gone on. To make a long story short, he suggested I write an article about those experiences, and that eventually led to me becoming a monthly columnist for his newspaper. It was through that experience where I learned about my passion to write. And it’s also where I developed a wonderful friendship to a guy who helped me to get through several lonely and very difficult years of my life. Somewhere along the lines though, after I moved far away from that island, I lost contact with Steve. More than five years passed until just a few days ago when I started thinking about him again. I went onto the Internet to look for him but I found nothing other than an old image on Google. Silently to myself, I wished him well and went on with my life. Three days later, I received an e-mail from my website that was sent by him!

When enough things like this begin to happen in life, it becomes harder and harder to write them off as coincidences. In this case, something more was going on that I tend to believe was a psychic connection. I say this because of what I learned from Steve once I got on the phone and spent an hour catching up with him. It was then that he told me how much he had been thinking about me lately. Ironically, in that same period of time I too had been thinking about him, which is when I had tried to locate him on the Internet.

I’ve often tried to duplicate what happened between Steve and I, but with others from my past. There are many people I’ve lost contact with over the years and been unsuccessful in my efforts to track them down. None of them have ever reached back out to me either. So its made wonder if a psychic connection only happens when God wants it to happen. Maybe God wanted Steve and I to rekindle our friendship for some reason that’s beyond either of our comprehension?

Whatever the reason, I’m just grateful for when those strange psychic phenomena occur in my life, like I believe it did with Steve. I give God thanks for reconnecting me to someone who helped guide me long ago on part of my spiritual path, even when he probably didn’t know he was even doing it. It’s because of Steve that I ever even learned about my passion to write. But even more importantly, it’s quite possible that I wouldn’t even be sitting here right now writing this entry, and maintaining this blog, if God had never put Steve in my life in the first place…

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

Mantra For The Day – For Developing Patience

The greatest test a person must face when they want to become a more spiritual person in life is to learn a very high level of patience. Today’s mantra is specifically geared towards achieving this. So I encourage you to practice saying the following mantra as many times as you can today, especially if patience is currently not one of your best virtues in life…

“In every area of my life, I am patient with everyone and everything.” 

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson