Looking over my diaries from the time, I’m still astonished by how distorted my thinking was back then. The world around me was not as perfect as I wanted it to be and controlling food became my way of coping. For the next four or five years I was on a painful journey. Although my weight never fell so low that I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, I experienced life as a joyless battleground. Every day was a battle–to get out of bed, to get dressed, to function. At times my head was filled with thoughts of death, as it seemed to offer some kind of freedom. Every move I made was controlled by a relentless voice in my head. Regulating my food intake and my weight became my sole focus and nothing else seemed to matter. And in the process I lost everything. Any friends I did have disappeared, unable to understand or handle what was going on in my head. I also missed a lot of school as the once together and organized child disappeared into oblivion.
Thinking now about those dark and bleak days, I can see that even though I felt lost and alone and abandoned, angels were always there guiding me. I simply didn’t have the eyes to see them or the ears to hear them or the heart to receive them. They manifested their loving presence first and foremost through my family. I took it all for granted at the time, but I don’t know where I’d have been without my mother, who quietly and anxiously supported me every step of the way, even if those steps were sometimes backward ones.
Angels also manifested their loving presence at the moment when I needed them the most, though I didn’t realize it at the time. Only now, as I reflect back on a significant turning-point in my young life, can I see the hand of my guardian angel at work.
Seeing the Light
One summer morning when I was 15 I woke up with a blistering headache. I had not allowed myself to eat and drink anything but apples and black coffee for five days. The destructive and overwhelming voice of anorexia switched on the moment I opened my eyes, as it had done relentlessly for the past three years. Anorexia would tell me to do something and I would have to do it. It didn’t matter what it was that I had to do; to me, anorexia was going to provide the solution to everything–or so I thought. This morning it told me to keep going with my apple and black coffee regime and to increase my exercise programme to four hours a day.
Wearily, I swung my legs over the side of my bed and felt for my hip bones, reassured that they felt sharp and defined. I looked up and noticed that I had forgotten to close the curtains the evening before and that the window was open. This was rather strange, because I had never forgotten to close the curtains before and I suffered from hay fever, so the windows in my bedroom were never left open in the summer. I wondered if my mum had opened the window, but then I remembered that she was staying overnight with friends. I’d been invited, too, but hadn’t wanted to go. Mum had only agreed to go if I promised to call her regularly and eat a banana as well as an apple. I had called, but I hadn’t eaten the banana and had no intention of doing so.
I moved towards the window, squinting as the sunlight hurt my eyes, and tried to draw the curtains, but I simply couldn’t lift my arms. They felt too heavy.
I tried once again to draw the curtains, but it felt as if something was gently but firmly clamping my arms to my sides. So then I tried to slump back into bed, but my feet were rooted to the spot. I couldn’t move an inch.
I don’t know how long I stood there soaking up the morning sunshine, but it must have been at least half an hour. At first I struggled, but then I stopped fighting and simply stood there, allowing the sunshine to wrap itself around me. As I felt the warmth of the sun on my face, a sudden clarity came to me. I realized in that instant that if I continued down the road I was headed on, anorexia would eventually kill me. It was then that I promised myself I would never let it get to this point again.
From that day onwards my recovery was gradual but steady. I had made the decision to live. It took a while, but eventually mealtimes were no longer a battleground. My mum told me that an angel had drawn my curtains back, opened my window and wrapped its arms around me that morning, but although the thought comforted me I still couldn’t quite believe it. My practical, logical side told me that I had simply forgotten to draw the curtains the night before and that food deprivation had made me too weak to lift my arms. My fearful, anxious self told me that I wasn’t special or psychic enough for angels to bother with me. But even though self-doubt still plagued me, somehow my common sense and my zest for life had returned, and they grew stronger as time went by. There wasn’t room for anorexia in my head anymore. I started to take better care of myself and gave myself permission to have a life again.
There was a lot of work to do in terms of building my self-awareness and self-esteem, but my psychic journey began that day I stood by the window in the sunshine. I still didn’t think I would ever see, hear or sense angels, but my mum, who had seen and spoken to angels all her life, used to tell me that when I was ready to open my heart and my life to them they would appear. I doubted her then, but years later I realized that she was right.
However, it took a good 20 years before I was finally ready to let angels into my life. In the meantime I was simply too anxious, fearful and lacking in self-trust. The harder I tried to sense angels, the further away they seemed to be and the more abandoned I felt. What I did not realize was that all along angels were guiding my life through my dreams, my intuition and the ‘coincidences’ that happened to me, but I was too full of questions, insecurity and fear to acknowledge those experiences for what they really were–the voice of my guardian angel.
The full story of my spiritual awakening and how the voice of an angel saved me from certain death can be found in my previous books; for now, all that it is necessary to know is that as a child and young adult my inner eyes were tightly closed. It was only when I learned to relax and get a handle on my fear and self-doubt–or, to put it another way, to see the world again through the eyes of a trusting child–that they began to open. And then it was as if a psychic doorway had also opened and all the angelic sensations and incredible experiences I had longed for came flooding in. Then I knew what I had always known but had forgotten along the way. With a newfound lightness of spirit, I reclaimed my inner angel and the innate spirituality I had lost faith in.
The more I worked with and trusted my angels, the more they began to work their magic in my life. Opportunities came my way both in my personal and professional life and barriers broke down. It wasn’t long before I was presented with one of the greatest gifts and responsibilities of my life when I was asked to gather inspiring true-life angel stories and string them together in a book. Until then I’d distinguished myself as a writer with bestselling encyclopaedias about dreams and the psychic world, but the new book, An Angel Called My Name, entered The Sunday Times top 10 bestsellers list within a week or so of release. My mailbag swelled with letters from readers keen to share their experiences. It became abundantly clear to me then that my angels had been waiting for this moment and my life had been building towards it.
I realized that my task was to collect angel stories and bring them to a wider audience, because every angel story is a miracle, a living testimony to heaven on Earth. Each story demonstrates the very real presence of angels in our lives. Each can help people see that there is goodness in and beyond this world and that this goodness is more than a match for the pain, suffering and injustice we see all around us.
Although we have advanced technologically, the same cannot be said for our spirituality. Our inhumanity to each other has not been eliminated. We need a spiritual lift–a big one–to help us feel safe again. We need the restoration of our faith and trust–in one another as human beings, in love and in our ability to make humane and positive choices for ourselves and for others. In short, we need to hear about angels around and within us and the miracle of love and goodness they bring to the world.
An Angel Child
I’ve fast-forwarded a little here in my excitement, so let’s go back a decade or so now to one of my very first encounters with an angel child.
I’d made friends with a neighbour who had recently moved into a house two doors away from me. She was roughly the same age as me–in her early to mid-thirties–and she had a four-year-old daughter and was expecting her second child. I guess we bonded because at the time I was expecting a child too.
I’d