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In Sync with the Stars:

Clairvoyant closes eyes to see more clearly

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By Celene Adams

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Hillcrest clairvoyant and medium Connie Stewart began life by closing her eyes to her surroundings.

“I grew up in a shack alongside the Louisiana Bayou,” Stewart said. “I had to shut my eyes to the poverty and abuse I grew up with in order to survive.”

Once, Stewart even literally lost her sight for a while, when her alcoholic father beat her about the head.

“Subconsciously, he hated my psychic abilities, so he always went for my head,” she said. “But hard as he tried, he never could, because I would jump out of my body and go up to the stars.”

There, floating in the ether amongst her “twinkling friends,” Stewart knew her spirit was safe─a “quiet, soft, normal” feeling she otherwise only felt at her grandmother’s house.

“Sometimes, when I was sitting on the floor at [Grandma’s] feet, I saw a fuzzy image behind her head. It had a pink tint [that] felt very loving and reassuring,” she remembered.

Unlike Stewart’s father, her grandmother encouraged psychic ability─at least, “telepathically,” and when the young sage remarked on the colors in her grandmother’s hair, the old woman would laugh with pleasure.

Then, one day, as Stewart was fishing about in the toy box her grandmother stocked just for her, she found a storybook.

It “edged itself between my fingers,” Stewart recalled, “even though I’d never seen it there before.” 

The book was about Merlin the Magician, the wizard in “King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table.”

Handing it to her grandmother to read, Stewart waited intently.

"This then is Your Quest,” the story began. “You must travel to the otherworld and retrieve for yourself an amulet of your personal power. In doing this, you will face many choices, and you will be asked to overcome many of your deepest anxieties and fears.”

Her grandmother’s voice had taken on a serious tone. Yet, for the next three decades, Stewart would be largely unaware of any “otherworld.” After her father threw her out of the shack as a teenager, her life became conventional: She married, at 18, had a son, and left the Bayou to work in a corporate environment. Occasionally she’d experience a “random and chaotic” sixth sense—knowing, for instance, that someone was about to die or a disaster was going to happen. But it was more frightening than empowering.

“When [psychic ability] comes to you randomly it feels [scary],” she explained. “You never know when it’s going to come, and you don’t know what’s going to hit you.”

Stewart tried to ignore such prescience. But she would not escape her gift as neatly as she’d escaped the Bayou, and when the company she worked for sponsored a seminar in intuitive leadership, her life took a turn toward the work she now considers her “calling.”

One of the women in the class “sort of aligned with me,” she recalled. “She sat down beside me one day and said, ‘Just face it. You’re … psychic.’”

Until then, no one had ever spoken those words aloud. Not even Stewart herself.

“It was a defining moment,” she said. And she interpreted it as “permission” to begin investigating and developing her abilities.

But Stewart was still afraid and conflicted. It wasn’t just that her father had tried to annihilate her for the “something in my eyes that he couldn’t understand;” she also feared becoming “crazy,” like her schizophrenic mother.

“Mama was either crying or eerily silent most of the time,” Stewart remembered. And whenever she was about to have a mental breakdown, she’d rock in her chair and sing the same song over and over. “I can still hear her now. It was John Denver’s ‘Sunshine on my Shoulders.’”

Stewart still shudders at the memory. Yet while she could keep her psychic visions at bay during the day, when night fell they arrived in the form of dreams. “There were shaman, medicine men, and a lot of mystical people from times gone by.”

At first she was terrified, but then, it hit her: She was being shown that she was one of them.

Realizing that she’d had a previous life as a healer, Stewart was growing excited about her powers. But her husband was horrified. Just as her father had been, he feared she could see through him and accused her of reading his mind.

This time, though, Stewart could neither suppress nor ignore the internal process that was in motion—or, for that matter, the objects that were moving around on the outside.

“I was sitting in my car…when all of a sudden ‘boom!’ a tree branch fell on the hood. But [there wasn’t] a tree in sight,” she recalled. 

Kleenex boxes, water bottles, books─they were all moving, seemingly of their own volition, and Stewart was petrified.

“I called the woman in the [intuitive leadership] class, and I said, ‘I’m so freaked out; I think I have poltergeists!’”

But the woman wasn’t alarmed.

“That’s not spirits or ghosts,” she assured the frantic Stewart. “It’s your own energy—your gift. … You’re working so hard to push it away that [it’s] kinetically moving objects.”

It was then that Stewart decided to find a mentor.

“I said to my husband, ‘I need to find somebody who has all the abilities I have but who knows what to do with them,’” she said.

Within an hour, the phone rang. It was a woman from her home town in New Orleans, a clairvoyant medium and healer she’d met only indirectly once before, inviting her to attend a workshop.

“Sure,” Stewart said. “And, by the way….”

But when Stewart’s husband learned his wife planned to spend two weeks studying with a “psychic,” he threatened divorce—an ultimatum that gave Stewart pause.

Torn, she hesitated. If she studied with the mentor, not only would she risk losing her husband, she’d also have to travel back to Louisiana─deep into the forest to connect with the energies her father had tried to exorcise years earlier.

Rather than continue to be afraid of her gifts, however, Stewart was determined to learn to summon them at will. So she accepted the adventure that beckoned.

“I went into deep discovery,” she said. Every day, “from sun up to sun down, we

worked, we worked, we worked.… I had all the raw ability, but I didn’t know what it meant, how it worked, or how to willfully direct it,” she said.

Pursuing the path toward her heart’s desire felt “glorious,” yet returning to her husband, who remained resistant, was heart breaking. And so, convinced that she needed to be “free on a soul level,” Stewart decided to abandon both married life and her corporate career.

For the next five years, before opening SoulSync in 2002, Stewart read part time for clients. Financially, it was a struggle, and, at first, she also held a part-time job. But she soon found she needed to devote all her energy to honing her skills.

The work involves much more than readings, she said. “It’s all this research, and all the things you have to do to be ready, and coherent and alert and observant….It’s a lot of energy work.”

Dream interpretation, remote viewing, energetic space clearing: such services require regular retreats into her “inner forest” to commune with spirit guides and replenish healing energies, she said.

But it’s work that she does with her eyes shut. After all, as the poet Rumi once wrote, we must “close both eyes to see with the other.”

 

 

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