I’m going to take a spiritual right turn here, because the way I am experiencing this pregnancy is heavily influenced by my spiritual beliefs.  I have been an empath and psychic medium my whole life, and a Reiki practitioner for years.  I completed a grad program in mental health counseling so that I could combine clinical trauma work with my more spiritual healing practices.  I now have a private practice where I combine trauma counseling, Reiki and energy work, shamanic healing, past life healing, channeling and mediumship.  I strongly believe in life-to-life soul lessons and relationship contracts, and the much bigger picture of why we are all here.  My experiences as a medium have unequivocally proven to me that there is another plane on which our souls continue to exist after our physical body dies, and we return to this planet repeatedly to challenge ourselves to learn, grow, evolve and eventually master deeper soul lessons like unconditional love, empowerment, kindness and balance in mind, body and spirit.

My spiritual journey the last decade has absolutely changed my life in every way, and I now see it influencing every part of my life, all the time.  For example, I have felt my future children’s souls around me for the last year and a half, basically since we started trying to conceive.  I have many medium friends who also felt them around me, at different times a boy and a girl.  For a long period I felt male energy around me and was convinced my first would be a little boy, but then it switched to female energy and I felt my first would be a girl and the second would be a boy.  And for some of that time, we all even wondered if they would be twins, because that was the energy that was coming through!

Second, I’ve actually met my baby already.  To clarify, I met the soul who will be my daughter in this life, through a type of psychic meditation where I connect with those on the Other Side.  I visualize myself visiting a cliff over an ocean, with mountains beyond, and when I show up I am able to communicate with whoever shows up.  In the decade I’ve been meditating in this way, I’ve been able to meet with my guides, deceased loved ones and a lot of new friends on the Other Side with whom I now regularly visit.  I don’t know why I was surprised, but my future child was no exception.

“She” was a “he” last time around, and surprisingly, that soul had not been on the Other Side very long after his last life – only seventeen years.  His name was Matthew Shepard, and he was born two months after me, in 1976.  He was murdered at the age of 21, the victim of a hate crime for being gay.  Because of his brutal death, important hate crime legislation was enacted and gay rights equality and advocacy rose to a new level in our country.

That is a powerful soul, coming here with the goal of sacrificing himself for the greater good and evolution of humanity.  I am totally humbled by the knowledge that this soul has now chosen to be my daughter.  Or rather, we all contracted this together, me, Matthew, my husband and our other future child, before incarnating into this life – because we choose and create all our relationship contracts before each life, even the most difficult ones.  All relationships are designed to help our souls learn, grow and evolve.

More than likely, the four of us have shared various relationships for many other lifetimes.  Soul connections usually run deep.  But I am still in awe.

Anyway, I met the soul of Matthew in January, when I was going on a year and a half of difficulty conceiving.  We now know neither F. nor I was infertile and we were both perfectly healthy.  Instead, it was all contingent on the “bigger picture” of life, and simply put, Divine Timing.  I had been told as much in a meditation last fall when I spoke with my guides and my closest friend on the Other Side, Heath (Ledger), but it was difficult to trust that everything was physically working when we kept “failing” at conception.

In January 2015, the week I launched my new business website on Facebook and “went public,” I suddenly started receiving signs about Matthew and even dreamed about him.  This has happened many times before, when I’m about to meet someone new on the Other Side.  I will see their picture or references to their name or their work, and it’s designed to get my attention so I’ll meditate.  And when I show up on my cliff, they’re there, ready to meet me.  But this felt different, and somehow I knew it had to do with my future child.

I had known who Matthew was because I was in college at the time of his death, and the entire situation shook me.  I have always been a rabid activist for the disenfranchised, and gay rights was a particular focus of mine because of terrible experiences several friends had gone through – not to mention several past lives where I had been the victim of violent prejudice for being gay.  When I read about the brutality of Matthew’s murder, I was horrified and it stayed with me for a long time.  Now, I wonder if there was also a deeper part of my soul that recognized my bigger connection to him, even if I wasn’t consciously aware at the time.

I was intrigued by my January dream and his name echoed in my mind for several days.  I looked him up online, and interestingly, I had “liked” the Facebook page for the Matthew Shepard Foundation several months earlier, and had forgotten about it.  So I scrolled through pictures, and suddenly found a black and white one which absolutely struck me to my core.  He is a teenager, looking directly at the camera, a faint smile on his face.  He looks incredibly young and innocent.  His beautiful eyes are rimmed in dark lashes, and as I stared at them, I realized I knew those eyes.

Instinctively I put my hand over the bottom half of his face, just staring at those eyes, and I could actually see them as the eyes of my future daughter.  It was eerie, and very difficult to explain.  I just knew.  This was going to be my child.

That night, Heath and several of my main guides showed up to talk to me about all of it.  And, they brought Matthew.  Essentially, the act of launching my website publicly was the benchmark they were waiting for in my personal growth.  Though I had desperately wanted to get pregnant in 2014, having turned 37 and feeling very “old,” I needed that full year to do some deep healing, clearing and spiritual work.  Despite years of therapy, personal exploration and spiritual growth, there was apparently still old energy – fears, wounds and cognitive distortions, much of it stemming from past lives – that needed to be cleared out.  Because I was guided to do so, I tackled a ton of my lingering, deep-seated issues and purged more than I ever thought I could, in the span of about 6 months.  I also graduated from my masters program, and my husband graduated from his, and we finished up some long-running cycles in our lives.

One of the biggest advances in my personal growth was starting my own private practice in the fall of 2014, putting myself and my spiritual framework out into the world and owning who I was without fear of rejection or persecution.  I have been very secretive about my medium abilities and spiritual beliefs my entire life.  I came into this life with vivid and traumatic soul memories of severe and repeated persecution in many, many past lives for doing this kind of work.  The deep, wounded energy and fears were still embedded within me, despite the fact that I have never dealt with any sort of rejection in this life pertaining to my abilities.  As a result, the majority of people I’d grown up with, attended college with and worked with as an adult never knew I was a medium.  I shared my spiritual beliefs and experiences only with the closest of friends.

So starting this business was especially hard for me.  I worked all summer to prepare myself, taking business classes, creating a website and renting an office space.  The website took the longest, because writing up all my services and philosophies, putting down in words my belief systems as well as all my skills, was an incredible challenge.  I found it made me feel very vulnerable and exposed.  And that was one of my deepest soul lessons, to let my light shine (to use a cliché) brightly and strongly and with pride.  To put myself out there, trusting I would be safe, so I could follow my path and help the world in the way I came here to help it, this time around.

Thus, though it sounds small, posting my website publicly on Facebook for everyone to see was a huge milestone.  And Matthew was finally ready to come.

In my January meditation, my guides and Heath explained all of this to me.  Matthew stood shyly to the side, and then they introduced me to him.  I already felt he was family, so I immediately hugged him tightly and told him I loved him.  Matthew told me he had decided to be female this time around, to help fight the patriarchal system and bring balance to our world with very specific, strong feminine energy.  That’s when I began to get an inkling of how powerful this child would be, and I strongly felt she would grow up to be a passionate fighter of injustice, prejudice and inequality.  I felt we’d have a fiery, feisty little advocate on our hands, and it simultaneously thrilled and intimidated me.

My main guide, Malcolm, then told me very seriously that this impending pregnancy was the chance for me to practice another one of my soul lessons, the power of thought and intention.  He told me if I expected the pregnancy to be high-risk, unhealthy and full of uncomfortable symptoms, then that would happen.  If I expected that it would be smooth and joyful and balanced, it would be. This was my chance to test my fledgling belief in manifestation and creating my own reality, fledgling because I’d grown up in an emotionally chaotic environment where pessimism and worst-case-scenarios reigned.

I took Malcolm’s message to heart, and the next month, I was pregnant.  Interestingly, I no longer felt a male energy around me – she was distinctly female, and powerful.  I immediately began to visualize a balanced partnership between me (my thoughts), my body, and my baby.  I saw this partnership as three interlocking circles, overlapping and creating a balanced, healthy co-creation.  My mantra became “healthy, joyful, balanced partnership.”

I talk to her every day, checking in and thanking her for coming to us.  I Reiki my belly whenever I’m resting.  I thank my body for handling the pregnancy so well this far, and promise to honor what it needs throughout.  I’m beginning my sixth week and so far, the only symptoms I’ve had are a little cramping and fatigue, but nothing extreme.  I am determined to keep it this way, and face each day I am pregnant with joy, gratitude and excitement.  We are partners, my baby and me, and we will have the best nine months.

She is coming to do great work, and given her past incarnation, I want her entry back into this world to be as smooth as possible.