Ever wonder if a reoccurring dream meant something? Or brush off that serendipitous event as a coincidence? Chances are that these ‘everyday miracles’ are trying to speak to you, just as they have spoken to the likes of:
• Lucille Ball, whose long-passed friend encouraged her in a dream to do I Love Lucy
• Barbra Streisand, whose deceased father’s spirit advised her to pursue Yentl
• Ghandi, whose dream inspired him to lead followers to the sea to gather salt in defiance of British law
Author Ann Bolinger-McQuade calls these mysterious occurrences ‘personal oracles’. Her new book, Everyday Oracles – Decoding the Divine Messages That Are All Around Us – helps readers recognize and decipher their own personal signs.
Personal oracles have been playing a major role in Ann’s life for almost three decades. She fully recognized them after her diagnosis of breast cancer. They have guided and offered comfort to her as she dealt with the loss of her father, the passing of a close friend, and the death of a beloved animal companion. Before his death in 2009, Native American Elder Richard Deertrack of the Taos Pueblo honored Ann in a sacred ceremony. Deertrack supported her vision to expand the consciousness of an interconnected universe through the awareness of personal oracles.
In Everyday Oracles, Bolinger-McQuade connects the dots between everyday personal oracles, the oracles of ancient history, the wisdom of indigenous cultures, and the science of 21st century quantum physics. Real life stories, like those of Streisand, Ghandi, Forest Whitaker and Wayne Dyer, as well as many ‘everyday people’, illustrate how personal oracles help us heal from illness, avoid danger, assuage grief, reconnect with loved ones who’ve passed, and more.
We believe that Ann has a beautiful message to share with all of us and we really enjoyed speaking with her. Below you can read our interview.
Soul Love: For the past 20 years, your spiritual work has centred on personal oracles. How do you define an oracle?
Ann Bolinger-McQuade: Oracles can mean so many different things and they look like random experiences – mysterious events that occur like synchronicities, coincidences, conduits, like Annie Kagan’s brother coming back and getting messages to her, they’re not random, the universe is designed to respond to our needs. I studied this for years and put it all together and I realize that there is a formula, it’s like gravity, if you drop something, it will fall.
If there’s a need, the universe will respond to that need. The need is what engages the universal energy, then the universe connects to a delivery system and that delivery system works specifically for that person and that person will understand it and that’s what I call a personal oracle. So, it’s a need, delivered by a delivery system with a certain message. This is key to understand.
I remember a specific situation in one of my workshops – there was a Native American woman who was very psychic about many things in her life but when I put the formula out there she ‘just got it’. It was no longer mysterious messages floating up there, she realized that the universe is actually designed in a way.
SL: The title of your book is ‘Everyday Oracles’. Do we all have miracles that surround us on a daily basis?
Ann: All of us. Yes, everybody all the time. There are mysterious messages around us all the time that will speak to us and we just have to tune in to how the universe speaks to us individually.
SL: How can we tune into these messages?
Ann: Trust your gut or intuition which is located in your solar plexus. If you have an intuition that hits your mind and goes “look over here” or “I just heard something and that was significant” or “go here, do this”, listen to it and pay intention. That is your Divine connection with the universe nudging you in a certain direction.
One of they key elements is to trust your intuition, then when your monkey mind reacts like “that’s crazy, oh that’s impossible”, just quiet that down and go back to your intuition. Your intuition will guide you and it will guide you to look up at the sky and you might see a cloud that could be a conduit of a loved one that’s reaching out to you to connect, or listen to that song on the radio. Maybe that song played when something happened with another person and that could be a link to that person. And don’t beat yourself up when you miss it. You might also want to write things down. Write the things you pay attention to and the things you don’t and you will create your own body of evidence. You don’t have to share this with anybody of course.
SL: Why was it important for you to share these experiences with a larger audience?
Ann: I believe that I was given this as a life purpose. I have a Native American background and I have always recognized that the world was alive and interconnected but that all changed. I can tell you a real quick story to describe what happened.
In 1986 I had a gut feeling and this feeling said “you better get a mammogram” and that gut feeling just kept persisting. I called and made an appointment. I did get a mammogram. I did have breast cancer, it was minuscule but I didn’t realize that I had such a fear of death.
While I was waiting for all the tests to be run, my husband and I were at a shopping mall in California. He was some place else in the mall and I had a look at the birds in the pet shop and as I walked through the door I heard right next to the left side of my head “you know I am going home with you, don’t you.” It was a voice and I looked around and there was nobody there and nobody was in that part of the shop.
I looked at some Golden Retriever puppies later and I held one in my arms and the people I was with got my husband who said “let me get him for you for Christmas” but we were in a new marriage and I didn’t want to add a puppy to our life. But while I was doing something else, my husband went back and got this puppy (we named him Rusty) who ended up being my spirit guide and went with me through the breast cancer treatment, which was fortunately very mild.
Eleven years later, Rusty got sinus cancer and we had to put him to sleep. We went home that night and I was lying in bed and crying quietly and thinking “what am I going to do, I don’t even know what to do without him” and I heard that voice, only for the second time, and he said “I am still here and I could come back if you want me to”. And I said “you show me, I want you physically in my life, not just knowing that you are around me”.
I went on a journey to find him and I trusted my intuition and ended up reconnecting with him in February in another little puppy body. The world opened up and that’s when I realized “wait a minute this is what’s going on, these things are not random, the universe is responding to all of our needs”. This really opened the door for me and by then I knew that I needed to share this.
SL: Listening to your story, do you think that we need some kind of suffering before we start tuning in to our own innate, divine spirit?
Ann: What an interesting question! I don’t think that we all need it, but I do believe that suffering is a catalyst and I think that suffering can be a catalyst for when we go through our own ‘dark night of the soul’. This might be a loss of loved ones, alcoholism, you name it, that’s when we are maybe more raw or open to hear, feel or sense that the universe is really working hard to support us.
SL: In your book you explain the relationship between personal oracles and sharpening and expanding one’s intuition. Can you elaborate on that?
Ann: If you are interested to sharpen your intuition, it sometimes helps to be still. There are all kinds of ways to create stillness and to find a sacred space. You can start out going to one place in your house that you can always go back to, over and over again and just be quiet. You can try to meditate, which is trying to still your mind, and if your mind doesn’t want to still, just stay there and read things that are spiritually speaking to you and don’t fight with the mind.
You will notice that if you go back to that place, you can sense an energy that you have left there. You gather energy in that spot and that will help to bring you to that place over and over again without having to create it anew. You can also go out in nature and sit at the base of a tree and do that same thing – just be quiet and just let the energy of the universe come up to you through the earth.
One of the things that I like to do is placing my left hand on my forehead and my right hand on my belly – your belly is your solar plexus, which is your intuition, and your forehead which is your third eye, is known around the world to be the intuitive centre of your body where energy can come in. If you connect those two areas it will help connect the higher realms of your consciousness. In the back of my book are tips, tools and exercises for tuning into your personal oracles that help us raise our vibratory level.
SL: Can you share your favourite personal oracle with us?
Ann: Okay, I think that will be about Dr. Allan Hamilton and I love this story because it shows us that someone in a position of authority and who is very ‘left brain’ trained, makes a decision supported by his ‘right brain’.
In his book The Scalpel and the Soul: Encounters with Surgery, the Supernatural, and the Healing Power of Hope, Dr. Allan Hamilton, a Harvard-trained neurosurgeon shares the following personal oracle story.
Dr. Hamilton is with the UOFA Medical Center here in Tucson, which is where politician Gabrielle Giffords went to when she was shot.
Dr. Hamilton lives outside of Tucson and was driving to the hospital to do neurosurgery on one of his patients as he had to slam the brakes suddenly because three buzzards were standing in the middle of the road, shredding a carcass of a dead jackrabbit and he was bothered that the buzzards were feeding on it but he drove on of course and got to the hospital.
While the patient was being wheeled into the operating room, Dr. Hamilton saw his wife lean over him, kiss him on the forehead and refer to him as “my little bunny”. The warning of the buzzards was not a coincidence and Dr. Hamilton cancelled the surgery because the image of the dead rabbit with the buzzards feeding on it flashed into his mind. Four hours later, the man suffered a massive heart attack and went into cardiac arrest. It probably would have been a fatal one, had it occurred in the middle of the surgery – if he hadn’t heeded the warning from those buzzards.
Fortunately for the patient and his family, Dr. Hamilton trusted his inner wisdom and had the courage to act on it. It is so profound that this doctor cancelled his surgery because he was never taught in medical school to integrate conventional medicine with the Native American concept of spiritual medicine. He was able to see the supernatural just beneath the surface – it only took a small definite shift in his vantage point to see it.
To buy the book Everyday Oracles, visit our eStore here and click on the category
‘Oracles / Angles’ on the left.
Visit Ann’s website: Oraclesinthesky.com
INTERVIEW BY: DIRK TERPSTRA – SOUL LOVE FOUNDER
Enjoy this interview? Subscribe here so you don’t miss the next one.
