Do Dead People Watch You Shower? by Concetta Bertoldi Page B

pulling them away any more than God is being pulled away to hear our prayers when He’s already listening to somebody’s prayer in Italy. They are not limited so it’s no problem for them to be everywhere at once. They are always available to us.

Do you have any control over who comes through when you do a reading?
     
    I have control over keeping a negative energy out. I always start out saying that only those in the Light of God may speak to me. I won’t have any negative entity around me. Not in my presence or in my home. I want no association with anything that does not come from God.

Can you zoom in somehow on a particular spirit? Can you choose who comes through?
     
    Well, first I will ask my client’s permission to listen. I will touch her hand and ask her to say her name and that will in some way alert the Other Side that we will be looking for someone with a connection to this person, my client. Then the person who is getting the reading has control over who comes to speak with her. She can ask for a particular person. Or if there are several people there that I describe, the person can say, “I just want to talk to my father,” and the others will go away. There are some cases where spirits on the Other Side have an apology they want to give or may have a message that they want to have sent to someone. They don’t get that many chances to connect with people here on this side and don’t want to miss the opportunity, so they will be insistent.

Is it really necessary to ask your clients for their permission to listen?
     
    I just think it’s polite. If I don’t get permission I feel that it’s like eavesdropping. I mean, if I come visit you, I’m going to ring your doorbell, right? I’m not going to pull back your drapes and leave my nose print on the glass to see if you’re home. It’s only courteous to ask first. I try to give the respect that I’d like to get.

Do you ever hear from people that your client doesn’t know?
     
    Oh, very often! Nobody can know all the family members who have crossed before them. Frequently there is a spirit whom the living person has not even met in this lifetime, but who has a special relationship with that person as a soul over a number of lifetimes and he is checking in. Or sometimes it is a member of the extended family or even the deceased relative of a neighbor, someone with a connection of some kind to the family on this side. I’ve had people come for readings who will tell me, “You know, you were doing a reading for my neighbor and my family was mentioned.” The spirit is just using my client as a messenger. I always tell my married clients that if a name is mentioned and they don’t recognize it, it could be someone in their spouse’s family since everyone is together over there and his family and hers are all seen as one.
    I once was doing a reading for a new client and her mother-in-law came through. I had no idea that her husband’s mother had crossed when her husband was still in college and she and her husband had not met or married until twenty years later so I didn’t know that she had never met her mother-in-law. Anyway, the mother-in-law gave my client some messages for her husband, and then she was showing me a kitchen cupboard and some little thing of hers that she said my client had saved in her cupboard, and she said that it made her happy that my client had kept it and would occasionally take this object out and look at it and think of her. I knew for sure that it wasn’t dishes—it was some small tchotchke kept in her kitchen cupboards—but my client said she didn’t have any idea what her husband’s mother was talking about; she said she’d ask her husband when she got home. But then something clicked for me and I asked my client whether her husband had a sister. She said, Yes, she did. I told her, “I got that wrong, it’s his sister who has the little thing in her kitchen cupboard—you need to tell your sister-in-law