Growing up, I saw and felt and understood so many things that I never told anyone about. I was never sure what I was or who I was, I figured there had to be some reason that I would receive so much attention from energetic beings on all ends of the spectrum. I had no idea how to tell my mom that some nights I woke up and I felt invisible hands choking me or that I saw luminescent eyes staring at me from the closet. Would it even do any good to tell anyone? Or that sometimes I could see spirits moving around or hear footsteps of people that weren't there, or maybe that I could sense auras and see colors around people's bodies. Would it have made a positive difference? I suppose I'll never know. While I learned to embrace these encounters, it was never anything I shared with anyone growing up.

Our family has a long history of spiritual attunement, but most of what's held onto are ghost stories. My family has stories going back to every house they've ever owned or lived in. It wasn't unheard of for us to sit around and swap ghost stories with each other for hours, but despite all our interest and experience in it, almost none of us knew what to do with any of it. I knew I was telepathic from an early age, I was able to hear things that people didn't say and know feelings they were experiencing without them even being physically near me. I remember once in middle school during summer vacation, I experienced severe stomach pains for two days with no explanation for them whatsoever. When we got back to school after the break, I told my friend about it and she started bawling. Apparently, she had been in Mexico during her break and experienced a miscarriage while she was there. This happened on the exact days of my stomach pains. Like I said, the things I never told anyone about.

Back to being telepathic as a child, I knew that these ghost stories secretly scared the hell out of my mother. Whatever she experienced growing up combined with her belief system surrounding energetic beings, she didn't mind talking about it but she was still afraid of it. I can't really blame her, most people are. They fear something that has no form and is foreign to their solid world. Those people don't remember what it was like to be formless, what their existence was before they took residence in that body. And since she held this fear, I never really spoke of my experiences or my dreams. The things that used to come to me during my childhood were equally amazing and horrific, although looking back on it, it seems the earlier years were more horror than amazement. I remember always being afraid as a child. Afraid to wake up and hear noises. Afraid to wake up and hear voices, or see shadows move or knocking sounds on the outside of my second story window or see eyes in my closet. I remember my TV would always change the channel by itself. It was one of those cheaper TV's that only allows 2 digit channel numbers, so the highest channel was 99. Well whenever you would push a number three times, it would end up as a one digit number, like if you pressed the 2 three times, it would go to channel 22 and then 2. Well the TV, at least once a day, would change itself to 66, 6...then it would pause and go three more times. Basically, the number 666 was being sent to me repeatedly through my TV.

I told my mother about this once, but we adults, we have an amazing way of shutting our third eye and closing the veil and denying that anything outside ourselves exist at all. I can't blame her for shrugging it off, it's much easier to pretend that your son is imagining things than to think that some entity is sending the number of the beast through your son's TV. Denial has got to be one of humanity's sharpest tools, always on hand to cut the truth down into small pieces and make it go away. Now whether or not the "devil" himself was out to get me is neither relevant nor important. The message was one of fear, plain and simple. I knew a few basic equations. Devil = Bad Guy. 666 = Mark of Beast. Devil = 666. So the meaning behind the message was clear, be afraid because there's something after you. My sister was still living at home during all of this, so I was still in the smallest room in the house at this point. And let me tell you, I hated that room. I used to have the most awful nightmares in that room, horrible visions and feelings of dread. If it weren't for my grandma coming to me and showing me that I had the power to get rid of them, I would probably be little more than a shell right now, all chewed up from an uncontrollable stream of visions and encounters that I had no idea how to deal with.

I felt alone growing up when it came to this aspect of me. There was no one around that had anywhere near my sensitivity to these energies and most people don't feel comfortable with it, even if they do believe in it's existence. It's not much of a wonder that I eventually developed insomnia from the information overload. I would lay awake at night as things raced through my mind. I wanted to sleep anywhere in the house but in my room, that room just had a heavy feeling to it. And no matter how much I felt or saw, I knew that I didn't have anyone to go to that could help me through these things. This is why God sent my Grandma to me, to give me the tools I needed to handle these energies and empower me against them. The timing was truly divine, for if things had kept going the way they were, these encounters and entities surely would have broken me.

When my grandma spoke to me, she told me that I had a gift and that I was able to see and understand things. She told me that sometimes these things I see might be bad, but that there was a phrase that I could say that would make them go away. She told me that if I ever felt there was something there, not to be scared and simply say, "If you are here from God, then please tell me what you want, but if you are not, then in Jesus' name you must leave." It wasn't very long after she taught me this that I found myself needing to use it.

By this time, my sister had moved out to college and I had moved into her room, which was much bigger and in the front of the house. More importantly though, it wasn't that awful room that I had spent so many years in. I felt like moving rooms would set me free from these things that would come after me, but this didn't prove to be the case at all. Apparently if you move the flame, the moths move right along with it. One night, I was sleeping soundly in my bed when I was awoken by the most viscous 'boom' sound I'd ever heard. It sounded like someone had slammed a train into the wall behind my bed. The only problem with that is, my room was on the second story and that wall faced the street. There wasn't any way someone or something could have slammed against the house. I had just enough time to be scared shitless when I heard the 'boom' a second time. It was loud enough that it made my room shake with the sound. I lay there terrified, waiting to see if it would happen a third time. My Grandma told me that only God had the power to come into the world in sets of three and that the devil, having less power, would only be able to manifest in sets of two. Well I got the message loud and clear when I heard this sound twice, something not nice was there. I turned on the TV and went to the bathroom to clear my head and splash some water on my face. When I came back into my room, I noticed the Kathy Ireland poster I had on my wall above my bed looked a little different. When I looked closer, I noticed that her mouth was moving along with the words that were coming from the TV.

As you can imagine, this thoroughly freaked me out. I layed down on the bed to watch some TV and realized there was something sitting in the chair that was in front of my TV. It was just sitting there and smiling at me. It wasn't a pleasant smile, I could feel the malice and hate pouring off of this entity. I was literally paralyzed with fear. My mouth was dry, my heart was racing and I found myself unable to make any sound. I knew that if I could just say the phrase my grandma told me, it would go away and I would be fine. The trouble is, I couldn't speak at all. The more I tried to talk, the more this thing laughed at me and made fun of me. It started to talk to me, saying, "You just can't do it, can you? You could get rid of me if you could just find the courage to speak, but you just cant do it." Then he began to laugh and laugh. I kept praying in my head for strength to speak, for the courage to open my mouth in font of this horrible thing and make him go away. After several minutes of this taunting and my paralytic fear, I finally mustered up the strength to say the whole phrase in it's entirety. Immediately, the beings expression changed from happy to extremely angry. His eyes gowed and he huffed air and then he was gone. I just lay there for a long time trying to catch my breath and calm myself down so that I could actually get to sleep. I did manage to get sleep eventually, but it was a few hours before I could get calm again.

I didn't know how to tell people about these things, they might think I was crazy or something. So I kept it all to myself and never really told anyone else about it. Even to this day, my family knows, at best, a small fraction of the things I saw and experienced. My friends know almost none of it. I suppose I have shared with my loved ones based on what I knew their tolerance level to be. Most dont believe in any of it, so telling them wouldn't really be productive.

Sometimes I still don't know how to tell people about the things I see and hear, but I am more open now than I used to be, even though I still get strange looks sometimes. It's just my crazy life.