I’ll admit it: I’ve embraced my woo-woo New Age-y-ness. All right, maybe "embraced" isn’t exactly the right description. "Trying to accept" is probably more accurate.

You see, I’m a Gen-Xer, so I come with built-in skepticism, which was only deepened by years of working in my mother’s metaphysical shop. There, I saw the good, the bad, and the ugly of New Age spirituality and all things psychic and cryptic. But the thing was, in spite of all my doubts about all that space-brother-channeling, psycho-tantric kundalini-rolfing, shamanic-journeying, telepathic-communicating business, I wanted to believe ÔǪ at least in some of it.

All my life, I’ve had glimmers of psychic abilities. My mother tells me that when I was a little girl, I’d frequently finish her sentences or say the very thing that was on her mind. Then there was that fairly commonplace phenomenon (for me, at least) that I’d be thinking about somebody, and five minutes later that person would call me. I was driving to work one morning and a whisper in my ear warned me to check my brakes before starting down a steep hill that ended at a lake. That whisper probably saved my life: When I pressed the brake pedal, it went straight to the floor, but the warning gave me time to downshift and pump some pressure back into the brake lines. I couldn’t stop at the intersection, but I did slow down enough not to go for a swim.

In the mid-1990s, I had my first experience with animal communication. I was living at our family homestead at the time, and a large group of wild turkeys lived in a meadow about five acres from my house. One day I decided I wanted to find their nests, so I set out on a very circuitous route that I hoped would conceal me from the turkeys so I wouldn’t frighten them away.

Just as I was about to enter the woods that bordered the field, my cat, Iris, appeared out of nowhere. I tried to shoo her away, but she wouldn’t have it. Finally I said, "Okay, then. Lead on!"

And she did.

She took me to the turkeys’ nesting area.

Really. Honest to God.

At the time, I’d never even heard of animal communication, so I had no idea what to label what had just happened other than, "Wow, that was weird, but it was really cool!"

Several years later, a friend and I were talking about a missing cat who was found three weeks after she disappeared, based on information gathered by a woman who claimed she could communicate telepathically with animals.

My natural skepticism said, "Telepathic  animal communication? Really? WTF?"

But then I remembered my experience with Iris. There was no way I could explain what had happened: that she’d somehow figured out what I wanted to do and for reasons known only to her, decided to help.

I became intrigued. I got the phone number of the woman who had found the missing cat and set up an appointment for her to talk to my cats, Sin├®ad and Siouxsie.

We talked for an hour. She gave accurate details about their lives and their health, and my relationship with them. There was no way she could have known some of the things she told me. This was long before I was blogging publicly about my and my cats’ lives, and long before a Google search could reveal hundreds of results with your name attached. She didn’t know anyone in my family or circle of friends, so she couldn’t have learned anything about my cats from those sources.

I gained some amazing insights into my cats, some of which I never fully understood until months or even years later.

After a while, I began thinking, "I wonder if I could do that." When I heard about a workshop with a well-respected animal communicator. I registered for the class, and I found out that yes, I can do that!

I’d like to say that ever since then, I’ve been a confident communicator, gleaning amazing insights from animals all over the world. But, well, not so much. I’ve successfully located a missing cat; convinced my sweet Thomas to fight for his life when he was languishing in the shelter, critically ill from an upper respiratory infection; and helped a few people to figure out what’s driving their pets’ behavior problems, but most of the time I still think I’m talking out my ass rather than psychically connecting with animals.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be comfortable with my intuitive gifts. I want to be comfortable with them. I want to be confident that I know what I’m doing. And if I can ever find it within myself to believe in my abilities, I want to use them to make life better for animals.

So, yeah, I confess: I am a pet psychic. Sort of.

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