An Angel Called My Name: Incredible true stories from the other side. Theresa Cheung

terribly good at details and failed basic editing assessments. It makes me laugh now as I often spend days speed typing but back then I was truly hopeless; even being asked to type up a basic letter freaked me out.

      One Monday afternoon I was travelling home from London after yet another unsuccessful interview. There were big delays on the railways – nothing much has changed, has it! Anyway, my train was cancelled and there wouldn’t be another one for an hour. I wandered around Waterloo station for a while feeling a bit lost. Back in those days stations weren’t such great places to hang out, but I did find a cold bench to sit on.

      I was soon joined by a couple of guys with some delicious-smelling fish and chips. I shuffled to the end of the bench, trying to ignore my rumbling stomach, and started reading my newspaper. The guys were quite noisy talkers and I couldn’t help but overhear that they were students at the London College of Publishing and Printing. Like me, it seemed they were in the process of applying for jobs in the publishing industry. One of them was excited about an interview his tutor had fixed him up for next week at Unwin Hyman books. He said the only drawback was that he had to pretend he was into all that psychic stuff but he’d read a few books in the next few days to get clued up. My ears pricked up and I took mental note. I phoned the publisher the next day and asked for application forms. Needless to say I got the job because I didn’t need to pretend I was into that ‘psychic stuff’.

      If my train hadn’t been delayed that day I might never have got the job that was perfect for me. Remember, this was back in the eighties and books about the psychic world and jobs working with them were far rarer than they are today. If I’d got any of the other jobs I applied for in publishing it wouldn’t have worked out because the subject matter would not have engrossed me. At the time I took all these coincidences for granted but looking back, I truly feel that I was being guided in the right direction.

      It was when I was working as an editorial assistant that I discovered what I really wanted to do with my life. I wanted to write the kind of books I was working on. I loved writing the blurbs on the backs of the books and the authors were always so pleased with what I had done. I enrolled on an evening course in writing and journalism and started to get a steady trickle of small jobs for mind body spirit and healthy living magazines.

      Several twists and turns of fate later I ended up living in Dallas, Texas. I wasn’t writing books yet but I had got the process started by working in journalism. I was also very happily married by then with a baby boy complicating my life in a delicious way.

      It was while I was living and working in Dallas that a psychic doorway opened – I heard my mother actually speak to me in my dreams. As anyone who has lost a loved one knows, it’s one thing helping other people cope with the loss of a loved one but a whole new ball game when that person is you. I’m 43 years old now. I’ve had my heart and my bones broken and lost close friends, but nothing will ever compare to the pain I felt when my mother died after a year-long battle with colon cancer that spread to her liver.

      I was 25 when she died and the pain was deep, wrenching and unbearable. I would have given anything for a sign from her that she was still with me, watching over me, but nothing came. I cursed my lack of ability to see, hear or touch her or make contact in any way. I felt like a failure. My brother tried to ease my suffering by telling me he sensed her presence constantly around us both but that didn’t help much. Why didn’t she make contact with me? Why wouldn’t the angels speak to me?

      I got very disillusioned. I questioned my assumptions about the afterlife. I challenged my mum to prove to me that she hadn’t gone but all I got was silence. What I didn’t realize in the years that followed was that she was sending me gifts from the afterlife all the time but I wasn’t ready to see them. My radar was tuned too low and I questioned what I should have instinctively known. My mother was constantly whispering to me. I just wasn’t listening.

      For several years after she died I would for no apparent reason tear through my house, desperately trying to find a photograph of her. I was terrified that I had forgotten what she looked like. I needed to remember. Then at night she would visit my dreams. She seemed so real. She walked, talked and laughed. She didn’t speak to me directly but she had all the endearing mannerisms I loved. She also appeared healthy, happy and whole. The last few weeks of her life as she battled cancer she had lost her glow, but in my dreams she was vibrant again.

      But dreams weren’t enough for me! I wanted my mother to talk to me, to appear to me, to give me advice like she always used to. I wanted her to show me there was an afterlife. I didn’t recognize their impact on my life at the time but the dreams I had of my mother were a great gift from the afterlife. They were so regular and frequent that they did unconsciously give me the strength I needed to keep moving forward with my life. Dreams, along with coincidences, are perhaps the easiest ways for spirits to communicate with those of us still in the physical world. They are also the form of communication least likely to alarm or cause fear for the dreamer. With my nervous disposition, that’s probably why my mother chose dreams as her first way to keep in touch with me.

      It wasn’t until eight years after she had died, when I’d done some growing up and calming down, that my mother actually made contact with me in a night vision. It wasn’t like the dreams I’d had of her before when she didn’t seem to be aware of me. In this dream I wasn’t witnessing her, she was aware of me. She was interacting with me. She was speaking to me. The full story is in the introduction but, to briefly recap, she told me to take the right path and because I followed her advice the following day my life was saved. This dream unlocked a psychic door and a few months later that door was flung wide open when I heard the voice of my mother at the birth of my daughter. This time she wasn’t speaking to me in dreams, she was speaking to me when I was fully conscious. I couldn’t see her but I could feel her and hear her so clearly it was as if she was standing next to me.

      ‘You are making things worse for yourself than they need to be,’ I heard my mother say to me when I was in labour. ‘Don’t let your fear of the unknown give you even greater pain. You can do this. I know you can.’

      In the first few days of my daughter’s life my mother’s words went around and around in my head. I was being given a clear wake-up call from the afterlife. It suddenly became clear to me that gifts from the afterlife had been showered on me in the past through dreams, hunches and coincidences, but I hadn’t been able to recognize them for what they were.

      All these years that I had thought I wasn’t psychic I had been psychic all along – I just hadn’t realized or accepted it. And the reason why I had not accepted it was fear. I was frightened of not fitting in. I was frightened of being called weird. I was frightened of not living up to my mother. I was frightened of what my dreams, my sudden hunches and my feelings would tell me about myself and others. I was frightened of my own power. Until I recognized that my fear was holding me back I couldn’t understand or interpret these feelings. I needed to relax. I needed to stop trying so darn hard. I needed to listen to my intuition, rather than try to explain it.

      In the past I’d convinced myself that the reason people, even those I didn’t know very well, would often open up to me was because I looked friendly and non-threatening. But now I could see clearly that I have the natural gift of empathy. I just lacked confidence in it. Empathy is the first step to psychic awareness. It’s the ability to imagine what things look or feel like for someone else. Have you ever imagined what it would be like to be someone else? Have you ever sensed the feelings of joy, loss, sadness or excitement before the person actually experiencing them tells you about them? This is empathy at work.

      Empathy is a gift everyone – yes everyone – has. Even scientists agree that we are all born mind readers. Think about it. Whether we know it or not, without the ability to empathize with the thoughts and feelings of others, we couldn’t handle the simplest social situations – or achieve true intimacy with others. To unlock the hidden potential of empathy, however, you need to trust it. My lack of self-belief had been the barrier or block to my psychic development all these years. Like everyone, I had had the gift all along. I just needed to believe in it and go with it.

      I often wonder how many other people there are out there, like me, who want to see and hear an angel