I did a psychic reading awhile ago, for a woman to speak with the spirit of her deceased father. During the reading, she asked about her ex-husband (still alive), to which her father replied without hesitation, “He’s a weed.”
The father then showed me a scene in which his daughter was a rose bush. The rose bush was beautiful, but stunted and with only one, small flower. Next to the bush was a giant thistle, towering over the rose, stealing light and nutrients. In the scene, the rose wasn’t asserting its power in the flower bed. The rose was allowing the weed to flourish and to take whatever it wanted from the rose.
Weeds, in the form of people, have problems that are more pressing than yours, needs that are greater than yours, and goals that are more important than yours. Weeds are opportunistic, grow where there is the smallest opening for them to grow, and steal what they want or need from their surroundings. We all know people like this.
Human weeds come in two basic forms: the thistle and the dandelion. The modus operandi of each are slightly different, but the end result is generally the same: they are both energy thieves.
The thistle plant grows large and fierce. It has big, spiky leaves that literally poke the surrounding plants out of its way. Thistles grow tall and bloom abundantly, producing an overwhelming number of seeds. What is not readily apparent, however, is that the thistle is not well-grounded and has a small, shallow root system. Thistles, if grasped at their base, are actually quite easily removed. Bullies are usually thistles.
By contrast, the dandelion plant grows from a tap root that tunnels deep into the soil and puts up a fight if you try to remove it. Dandelions anchor themselves to one spot, choking out any plant that previously grew there. They don’t cast shade on the plants around them, but they do steal nutrients, produce abundant seeds, and colonize the area. Over time, one dandelion will come to dominate their patch of soil. Clingy, needy people are usually dandelions.
In conceptualizing this post, I wasn’t sure where to go from here with this analogy. In my real-life flower beds, I pull the weeds and toss them in the compost bin. But for human weeds, we can’t go around killing them and tossing them in dumpsters. We will go to prison, and they will never learn.
And then it came to me in a flash: Oh, good Lord, I used to be an effing weed. Painful to admit. Impossible to refute. I was a weed of the dandelion sort, never a bully, but always a master at stealing the energy out of a room. I got kicked out of a lot of rooms. I was barred from many more. And eventually, I found myself in a life full of nothing but weeds. And I do mean all weeds, all the time. I HATED IT. “Those people” failed to understand that my problems were bigger than theirs, my needs greater than theirs, my life more important than theirs. They fought me for energy and attention. I ranted. I raged. And then I learned. And I changed.
I learned to manage my attention-getting behaviors. I became more passionate, less melodramatic. I learned that milking a situation for sympathy is annoying. I noticed how often I did just that, and quit. I learned that stealing energy from other people is bad. I quit doing that, too, and learned that exchanging energy with other people is not only possible, but wonderful. I learned how to listen without interrupting. I grew to like it. I learned that lots and LOTS of people have problems bigger than mine. And most importantly, I learned that oftentimes what I need is not the favors I used to bum, but hugs and encouragement to do those things myself.
I now look for and work towards true reciprocity in my relationships. I seek the yin-and-yang of life, where I get my needs met, you get your needs met, and nobody has to take anything from anybody. I am getting better at standing on my own two feet. I am less angry, more generous, more aware of the abundance in my life. And I love my life A LOT more than I did when I was a thieving weed.
And so……this is where I shall go with my human weeds analogy: if you are a rose, please don’t give up what is rightfully yours without a fight. You have rights and needs, too. Also, please don’t surrender and sacrifice just because you feel bad for a weed. Weeds are thieving, master manipulators and con artists. If you have weeds around you, gently (or vehemently….) pull them out. And don’t feel bad about it afterwards — they will move on. They will move flower bed to flower bed until the only place they are welcome is in a field of other weeds. And they will learn, and you will be free to grow.
And if you are a weed attached to a rose, step back into the weed patch and let the rose flourish. There is no danger to you in doing this. You don’t need to steal energy and resources to get your needs met. Trust me, rain will fall on you wherever you are.
It is, to me, an alarmingly, personally, painfully simple fact that a flower bed is too nice a place for a weed. In the story above, the woman’s ex-husband kept coming back to her with increasingly desperate tales, asking her for money (post-divorce, mind you!). And on more than one occasion, she gave it to him. She could not afford to do this, and her sacrifice meant she could not retire. He was not entitled to that money. To me, it was a con and he was stealing. He needed to be told NO!, to be removed from the cushy flower bed, and to be forced to face hardship in order to learn self-reliance.
In my own story, I needed to struggle to learn. I needed the bootcamp of weed-on-weed combat in order to identify my strengths. Actually, to discover that I had strengths at all. Like me, human weeds need to face the ordeal of growing in a crack in the sidewalk, or in a field of other weeds, to change and evolve to a more equitable way of being human. Pulling the weeds out of the flower bed of your life is not a mean thing to do. It is the same as blocking calls from con artists — necessary for your self-preservation, and a tough-love message to weeds everywhere that stealing is bad.
Earlier this week, BBC News ran a piece about the state of human cryogenics. The reporter interviewed a man who is the co-founder of one the few (maybe only?) human cryogenic firms in the world. The man announced that cryogenics are no longer science fiction but science fact, and for the low, low price of $36,000, his firm will freeze your dead body (or, for a slightly lower price, just your head) in perpetuity, until such time as medicine and technology have advanced a way to cure your fatal disease, repair your fatal injuries, and reverse your death. The very excited and excitable Cryogenic Man spoke about all of this as inevitable — even the part where we will one day be able to re-attach frozen heads to live bodies (no word on where those headless bodies will come from), and achieve immortality.
I started the year, as many people do, with thoughts of New Year’s Resolutions. I must admit that, for a variety of reasons, I am not a fan of these lists. For one thing, life is constantly changing — things happen, priorities shift — and I don’t see how a list of resolutions made in January could possibly remain relevant past February. And for another thing, I think that our Inner Critics use these lists like a weapon to beat the self-esteem right out of us.
I’ve been engrossed in another project for several months now, and my absence from the blogosphere reflects that. I have not stepped back from this work, as the steady stream of psychic readings I’ve done can attest, but my attention has definitely been divided. To my surprise and delight, while I was looking the other way, I unexpectedly reached three milestones. First, my website has a ticker that counts every time someone views a page. Last week, that ticker rolled past the 15,000 views mark. While this doesn’t constitute going viral, it is certainly a big deal to me. I haven’t done any advertising, so new readers arrive most commonly as a result of a word-of-mouth recommendation, and less frequently, as a result of an online search. To reach this many views this way is very affirming to me. I know that the ticker doesn’t discriminate, and the 15,000 could be achieved by one overly obsessed person looking at my site 15,000 times, but I am pretty certain that it didn’t happen that way.
I did a psychic reading a few weeks ago that has troubled me ever since. I was doing the reading for the parents of a young woman who died of an accidental overdose. The reading seemed to be the mother’s idea, with the father casting himself in the role of skeptic and critic. In my work as a psychic medium, I encounter a lot of skepticism. I consider this healthy and actually encourage it, as I understand that what I do is a bit outside the mainstream.
I did a psychic reading recently for the wife of a man named Roger. Roger’s life was rich, interesting, and punctuated by this: in the late 1960’s, he was drafted into the Army and sent to the front lines in Vietnam. With a college degree and a good head on his shoulders, Roger was quickly put in charge of his platoon. He did not want to be there, did not believe war solved anything, and did not feel that those in charge of orchestrating the bloody mess understood the situation on the ground. His tour of duty was a mixed bag: he made life better for those around him by protecting the weaker guys in his platoon without singling them out or shaming them, and he did things like create an indoor gym and an outdoor obstacle course as a place for “the guys” to blow off steam. But the positives were far outweighed by the negatives: a variety of ill-conceived missions with heavy casualties, and a lot of days and nights spent wondering what on Earth he was doing there.
You all about broke my gmail account with your phenomenal response to my offer of FREE READINGS (read 
In my last blog post (see 