What do you do about it when you feel someone else's pain, and you begin to get sick because of it?

So Mrs. Parker, you wrote that you've been experiencing some bloating, massive weight gain and severe food cravings?

Mary called me for a reading. Mary is 44. When I first looked into Mary's life, I saw that she was very, very, very intuitive. I saw that she was picking up the pain of someone she had loved for over two decades. This poor man felt like he was depressed, anxious, and couldn't get out of his own way. I saw that Mary was really like Hamburger Helper for this person's life. She would run in lots of different directions, get jobs, get meals, make him feel better, and nothing ever, ever worked, and I saw that this man's life had gone from one catastrophe to another. I asked Mary if this was a situation in her life that could be affecting her, she said, "Oh my God, that's my husband, John. John has always been a train wreck, and I loved him because he has a good heart, but you're right. We've been married for sixteen years and it seems like his life is one disaster after another. He got out of the alcoholism, he got out of the old job, but now all he does is sit at home and is depressed." I said, "Mary, your life is plugged into John's because you love him and you are suffering from intuition sickness." I said to Mary, "I'm going to look at your body intuitively and I'm going to let you know what parts of your body are going to talk to you when John is suffering."

I looked at her head, her head wasn't the issue. Her eyes weren't the issue. Her neck wasn't the issue. Her heart and lungs - oh! When I got to her lungs, I saw dark stars. It looked like Mary had either inhaled something, smoke or something, that made her chest and her lungs look irritated and red. Her body felt swollen. It felt like Mary craved carbohydrates-pasta, rice, bread, sweets. Her body felt like a Bounty paper towel that absorbed too much emotional fluid, the emotions of those around her. She felt fat and bloated. When I looked at her pelvis, her kidneys, her uterus, her ovaries, they weren't the issue, but when I looked at her lower back, it felt red and tense. Mary also felt melancholy, sad, depressed and absolutely suffering virtually for the pain of someone else in someone else's life.

I said, "Mary, does this make sense?" She said, "I'm embarrassed to say, but I smoke. I've smoked for 25 years and you're right. I'm really worried about my lungs, because I'm starting to get smoker's cough." She also said she was embarrassed because several times when she tried to stop smoking, all she did was gain weight. Mary was very embarrassed about smoking and her weight problem, but more than anything, now she was incapacitated by lower back pain. I said, "Mary, your body is showing that you are suffering from intuition sickness. You are feeling your husband's pain and it is weighing you down, literally, by making you gain weight and you literally medicate the anxiety you feel for his life by smoking it away." I taught Mary how to get over her life problems with intuition sickness, and I can help you do the same.

Today, it's obvious that we are in an epidemic of weight problems. All across America, 60 percent of all people suffer from obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and so on, and we don't suffer from these problems from a lack of information. All you have to do is turn the TV on or look in a magazine, or listen to the radio, you'll hear commercial after commercial about products of how to lose weight. We have Slimfast, Quickfast, Rapidfast, Lofast, we have all these different ways of losing weight, but it's important for you to know that your weight, your eating, is actually part of your intuitive guidance system that lets you know when someone else in your life is suffering. Maybe it's not your weight. Maybe you have joint problems, you have lower back pain, or you have rashes. Maybe the area in your body that signals that someone in your life is in distress is your skin.

I have a friend, Chris, and Chris got a rash. She had a family member move home and this poor child's life started to get into trouble, and Chris began to watch the suffering of this relative, and it was very, very painful for her, and so she developed a rash, and it was on her wrists in a way that we know, I call this the "modern-day stigmata." Do you remember those ancient saints who used to feel Christ's pain and they would bleed from the wrists, and it was called "the stigmata?" They made all kinds of movies about it. It's clear that these people are very porous, very emotional people who could feel someone else's pain, which is why they called them saints. And there are modern-day saints. There are those of us who can feel for someone. You know, the kind of therapist that are in the movies or you actually may have seen one in your own office where they'll say, "Oh, I feel for you! Oh my God, that must have been terrible. Oh, I can feel your pain right here." And they'll always touch their chest, and these people, who are very empathic, tend to be a little heavy and very, very sensitive, and they tend to over time feel for someone to such a great degree that they tend to get heavy and they tend to get burnout, and they tend to get depressed.

These are what I call the "modern-day stigmata of overcaring." It's really about intuition, being too intuitively connected to someone else's pain. Chris was so connected to her relative's pain that she literally got a rash on her wrist. Well, spending time with Chris, we felt her pain as well, and after a while, we got the same rash. Another friend, Diane, got the rash. I have a picture of all of us suffering modern-day stigmata because we are all connected to this loved one's suffering.

You can turn on the TV today and you can see The Medium on NBC, you can see The Ghost Whisperer on CBS, you can go on court TV and see psychic detectives. I think they even have pet detectives. In every program we can see how a person can have an intuitive gift. I'm here to tell you that being intuitive is not some weird gift where you have to have beads around your neck, feathers, you have to have some kind of weird trailing eye, you know, live in a house where you have a neon sign with hand that goes "I Read Palms." Everyone, if you have a brain, if you have a body, and you sleep at night, by definition you have all the apparatus to be intuitive and most of the time, our bodies intuitively will let us know when somebody in our life is in pain.

So for Mary, I had to let Mary know that her repeated attempts to try to quit smoking or try to lose weight, or try to go to a chiropractor for her lower back pain, these things were going to fail unless she got in touch with the intuition behind her body symptoms. I let Mary know that like all caregivers, there is a downside to overcaring. It's well-known in the medical literature that people who have dementia, Alzheimer's disease, they may suffer for 10 years with this terrible dreaded illness, but the people who are going to suffer physical illness because of that are going to be the primary caregivers-the wife, the husband, people who take care of someone with Alzheimer's disease have a greater risk of coming down with a heart attack and cancer within 2 years of their loved ones' illness. So I told Mary, you have to be able to love your husband, but also know that his pain is not your pain. I told Mary that what my great-aunt Evie used to teach me. She is a wonderful lady, and she told me that everyone has one life to live, and just like that soap opera, we can only live our own life, even though we can learn to be intuitively connected to others.