Tag: telepathy

What They Want Us To Know

On By Sherrie CroninIn features and reviews6 Comments

Today it is my pleasure to welcome author Shawndra Mcwhorter and her non-fiction inspirational book What They Want Us To Know: Messages of Hope, Meaning and Unity From the Animal Kingdom.

Author’s description

Have you ever wondered what animals would tell us if they could? This book will give you that chance to find out! By being able to receive downloaded messages from wild and domestic animals, Shawndra translates their messages for us. These animals have shared powerful messages of unity, connection and purpose, and steps that each of us are able to take to deepen the connection, find more meaning in our lives, and become the humans that the animals know we can be. You’ll hear messages from 12 different animals on what they want us to know in order to live a more profoundly amazing life. You’ll be given the opportunity to learn ways to be more compassionate, tolerant and heart-centered, to the animals and to each other.

A Guest Post on Balancing Life, Writing and Work

Even though the idea of this book came to me (was given to me?) in 2004, it took until May of 2020 to begin writing it. I really believe that I had to do a lot of healing work on myself in order to be able to ‘meet’ the animals on their level in the higher realms and translate their messages. I can look back now and see so clearly that I was not as open and ready to hear them then, as I am now. I’ve gone through major healing and evolution in the past several years, and it really feels as if one reason was to be able to be fully present and hear these animals clearly and with an open heart.

So while I was working full-time for the State of Washington, I had a side gig as a Reiki Healer. It wasn’t until May of 2020 that I finally found my way into a writing program. Once I found the right program, the right coach, the right publishing opportunity, the book poured out of me. I was still working both my jobs but it was finally the right time. I was able to submit the manuscript to my publisher three months after I started writing and it’s been a whirlwind since. I still work full-time so when I have to have calls with my publisher, social media manager, web site developer or work on my book promotion I make sure to pack my laptop, lunch and hunker down during any breaks during the day. A lot of this work is done at night. I space out my promotional calendar though over months vs days and weeks just knowing I don’t have the time and space for much more than that.

About the Author

Shawndra McWhorter has been an animal communicator since 2000, and is also an Usui and KarunaⓇ Reiki Master, working with humans and animals. Shawndra has helped more than 500 animals and their humans with her communication and healing skills. Shawndra is a past president of Washington State Animal Response Team (WASART), and also serves on the Board of Directors with Kindred Souls Foundation, both 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations dedicated to helping animals. Shawndra began her disaster animal rescue work in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, where she deployed outside of New Orleans, LA to help rescue and care for the animals left behind. She has deployed to Chile, Peru, and to several states in the US volunteering helping animals recover from disasters. Shawndra also volunteered with Wolf Haven International in Tenino, WA for nearly eight years, and is still active in supporting their mission. She is the owner of Sanskrit Healing, using her skills to help humans, animals and the environment find balance. Shawndra has spent most of her life helping others and won an Emmy for a documentary that she directed and edited on illegal aliens in Southern California. Her approach is to educate and help others make mindful, ethical choices based on facts and data. Shawndra currently lives in Washington State with her dog Norman, who survived the EF5 tornado that hit Moore, OK in 2013.

Find the Author

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Shawndra-Mcwhorter-Author-106688011143920
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shawndramcwhorter/
Shawndra Mcwhorter – https://shawndramcwhorter.com/

Buy the Book

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/What-They-Want-Us-Know-ebook/dp/B08PJ28NWQ/ref=sr_1_1
Goodreads.com:  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56422248-what-they-want-us-to-know
Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/what-they-want-us-to-know-shawndra-mcwhorter/1138596437

Yes, there is a giveaway

The author will be awarding a $50 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

Enter here to win.

This post is part of a tour sponsored by Goddess Fish. Check out all the other tour stops. If you drop by each of these and comment, you will greatly increase your chances of winning.

My Favorite Excerpt

Chapter Nine Norman the Dog

NORMAN IS THE DOG WHO currently shares my life with me, and as you can see, he is adorable! In 2013, an EF5 tornado hit the vicinity of Moore, Oklahoma, causing two billion dollars of damage, including the major destruction of two schools and more than three hundred homes. It also killed twenty-four people. After the disaster, I volunteered with American Humane to help care for the animal survivors in an emergency shelter. I flew out there and was working with the feral cats and cats with feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV). A few days after I had arrived, they brought in the last of the “tornado dogs” from the Moore Animal Shelter and put them in a quarantine area. The other volunteers working with the dogs spent all day cleaning crates and walking the dogs. Since I certainly wasn’t taking the cats for walks and feral cats wanted nothing to do with any of us, I had extra time, so I offered to help care for these quarantined dogs.

Thank you!

Shawndra Mcwhorter — we appreciate your sharing your book What They Want Us To Know: Messages of Hope, Meaning and Unity From the Animal Kingdom with us! Best of luck with sales, and with all of your future writing.

Outraged by the day-to-day fears endured by more than half of his fellow humans

On By Sherrie CroninIn women

I just came across this description of a male telepath who discovers sexual harassment. Yes, he is a fiction, but he has something worthwhile to say.

Olumiji had spent his adult life carefully cultivating his outer calm. Thanks to receptive abilities that he had struggled with since adolescence, his days were often spent filtering out the wild, uncontrolled emotions of those around him…

His … specialty involved search and rescue. Telepathy was more of an ability to sense emotions than it was a skill at reading minds, and as such, it was a fairly poor tool for locating confused and distracted humans at a distance. However, those trapped by natural disasters tended to be close at hand and to broadcast mental pleas for help quite forcefully. This made them relatively easy for a good telepath to find.

Rescue workers the world over had come to know Olumiji as the tall, thin Nigerian man who showed up after earthquakes, mudslides and tsunamis to offer assistance, and who had an uncanny ability to find barely alive souls in the wreckage. He stayed out of their way and asked for nothing in return, so most wrote him off as a harmless oddball. Some speculated that he may have lost a loved one himself long ago in a natural disaster. In a way they were right. Olumiji had never lost anyone, thankfully, but he heard the cries of the desperate so often and so well in his own head that deep in his heart he felt connected to every human who had ever died yearning to be found.

He had one chink in his armor of outer calm, and he knew that it was born of guilt. As a male in his home country, he had grown up accepting the many casual ways that young women were forced to have sex. From arranged marriages to gang rapes, from bizarre bridal customs to forced prostitution, the horror of lacking ownership of one’s own body escaped him completely—until his own budding empathy let him discover it, and then left him outraged by the day-to-day fears endured by more than half of his fellow humans.

Don’t dress that way. Don’t go out at night. Don’t talk to him. Don’t meet his eyes. Any of it can earn you pain and humiliation and even more fear, and everyone will tell you it was your own fault. Olumiji had been simply astounded.

And for all the people he had calmly rescued and helped since, every time a case came his way where a young woman was put at greater risk, merely because she possessed a vagina, or worse yet, a hymen, he felt a deep burning anger at a world that treated such as “unavoidable.”

“No,” he wanted to scream. “This is not unavoidable. We are better than that. We have to be.”

 

It’s never too late till it is

On By Sherrie CroninIn courage2 Comments

Every once in awhile I know exactly what my husband means and those rare moments of perfect communication are gold. Such was the case with his “it’s never too late till it is.” Because it isn’t. You follow me?

27-Courage-27I still have the short-lived vantage point of watching those both a generation older and younger than me make decisions, and am always sad to hear someone decide that it’s too late for something they want. Education, relationships, children, adventures, the challenges of climbing a mountain or starting a business. My wise partner is right. Time can make some things more difficult, even much more difficult, but only we decide they are impossible. Until of course they are, at that moment when all of our chances are gone and we’ve done whatever it is we are going to do in this life. Nothing is impossible until then, and instead of finding the thought morbid, I find it oddly uplifting.

Of course, this bit of wisdom is unlikely to make it onto t-shirts anytime soon. Our culture is poorly suited to thinking about our own death, at least for more than a fleeting and uncomfortable second or two. That is why I was surprised when I continued with my task of updating the page on this blog about the music referred to in c3. Near the end of the book, my eighty-something telepath Maurice picks a song to relax him as he tries to use his telepathy to accomplish something that has never been done before by a telepath anywhere. Being a West Texas boy and life-long fan of Buddy Holly, he goes for the classic early rock song “That’ll be the Day.”

Only I wasn’t all that familiar with the lyrics to the song. They go “that’ll be the day … plonk plonk plonk … that I die.” I think that “that’ll be the day that I die” is an old expression roughly equivalent to “when pigs fly” but it is a little odd given our collective desire to never think about dying. The song came out in late 1957, and the day that Buddy Holly died was February 3, 1959.

My character Maurice, in his late eighties, probably thinks about death more than I do and I like to think, after the fact, that the fictional Maurice likes this song even more for its disturbing reminder of mortality. Being old, or at least being old well, takes courage and Maurice has an abundance of that. Please enjoy the short excerpt below to see what he is attempting.

That is how one lovely evening in mid-April Maurice found himself settling on to his couch to try something that had never been attempted. Teddie’s mother Lola was with him to make sure that he remained physically well, but she had sworn to remain mentally removed.

Maurice took a long swig of the sweet iced tea that he loved before he settled back and closed his eyes. Lola offered to put on some music for him while he relaxed and waited for the group in India to be ready. He was a West Texas boy through and through and still didn’t think that most country music held a candle to his favorite musician, Buddy Holly. Certainly not the modern stuff. He smiled as Buddy’s 1958 hit “That’ll be the Day” filled his living room and his mind.

Well, this would be the day that he would ride along in a young girl’s mind as she left her own body behind in the Himalayan dawn. He would join her as she danced into the air to travel through what Olumiji called the abode of light. In this world of waves, she could, incredible as it sounded to Maurice, find a friend a thousand miles away. Then both she and Maurice would desperately look for clues to the friend’s exact location, proving that one never knew what a day would bring.

I was so happy to find to find this wonderful recording of Buddy Holly and the Crickets performing “That’ll be the Day” live on the Ed Sullivan show on December 1, 1957. Go ahead, take a sixty year walk back into time and enjoy!

You can also listen to and purchase this classic at Amazon.

(If you enjoy reading about how the favorite songs of characters in a book can enhance a story, check out my post on greed and the Metric hit “Gold, Guns, Girls” at Never Enough on my blog for the novel d4.)