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Healing miracles don’t only come in the medical variety. And they certainly don’t appear the way you may imagine they would. It was two years after my father’s passing and I was still upset and unsettled about the circumstances that did not allow me to be with him for his last days, as the anniversary of his death drew near. It was also happened to be the same time frame in which we were getting ready for our late summer road trip to Quebec. Our beloved Canadian territory was relatively inexpensive, not too far of a drive up the Eastern Corridor, and a repeat from the year before. We also chose it because I had a shaky car, because my boyfriend held a love of its cycling and rail trails, and it was an opportunity to immerse in a foreign (French) culture. Since I was in my yearly turmoil about my father’s death, though I tried not to let it influence my disposition, the pain still ran deep so even the idea of our lovely vacation was tainted by it.

Aside from packing, working full time, and cleaning the house, I needed to find a pet- sitter, and I was in no mood. All I could think of was the wonderful life I left behind before I moved east, reminded by the dreadful anniversary of my father’s death, of which one of the outcomes had been relocating across the country. Still not happy to be here, I longed for a chance to go back to the western desert states to regain some semblance of the life I thought I would be returning to shortly, but still hadn’t. A road trip west would have helped, but my boyfriend would have none of it, and my car and finances wouldn’t allow it anyway as I was still getting on my feet. But really, it was the actual situation around the death of my father that seemed to cloud and overwhelm most of my thoughts.

I had been with my father on and off for most of his last year, accompanying him alongside my stepmother to countless hospital and doctor’s visits and more and more tests where he kept getting worse and he knew something was very wrong, but doctor’s couldn’t find what was causing his condition past the prior year’s strokes. I was running out of money trying to settle into his town, and I couldn’t find a solid work situation to supplement the start-up business that I had created. I would have stuck it out longer but my father was getting more and more upset at my lack of gainful employment because he wanted his version of my being safe and settled as his health continued to decline. Somehow he had forgotten that I was perfectly able to make a living and take good care of myself for the past few decades.

After I gave up another opportunity I loved to take a better paying promised job of which my father approved, it fell away before I could even begin work and it was the last straw for him. I knew his brusque behavior was stemming only from his condition, but it stung, and I wanted him to be at peace. Most of all I didn’t want to cause him any more grief than he was already physically going through. I manifested the next job only because of his wishes.

Quickly a situation appeared not too far away from my 80-year-old mother’s city, far across the country, and though it was always in the back of my mind that I would return to help her when she was in need, I still didn’t think it would be so very soon. I took it without any thought about it only to give my father peace of mind as his condition worsened, because other opportunities locally weren’t manifesting. He would have his mind at ease and be able to focus only on his healing, knowing I was employed and close to family, rather than having to start over again somewhere else, though I really wanted to stay where I was to be of assistance, continue building my business, and live in a place I loved.

I packed a truck, moved my belongings that were in storage and just drove. The day I arrived to a storage unit in Pennsylvania was also the day we found out that my father had finally been diagnosed with an aggressive but likely treatable form of cancer. The next week I was called back to Santa Fe to pick up my dog that they had wanted to watch until I was settled in because my father liked to have her around for company, but now she was getting under my father’s feeble feet. I turned around and drove back across the country to pick her up, stayed a day and got ready to leave because I was soon to start work. I said my tearful goodbyes, never thinking it would be the last time I would see my father.

But something in me knew. It was the day before my birthday, for which I knew I would be spending in the car with my dog, somewhere in the middle of the country, alone and zoned out with a day of driving. But that didn’t bother me as much as whatever it was I couldn’t put my finger on. Although I left my father’s house the day before my birthday, I could NOT leave Santa Fe. I dawdled around the town and drove around some. I decided to stop to pick up some more groceries for the trip, even though I had already packed a couple of meals. I still couldn’t leave. I sat in a parking lot and cried. I decided to get coffee at my favorite breakfast spot. By 11:00, over an hour later I still couldn’t drive away and I wanted to go back to the house and give my father a huge bear hug and tell him how much I loved him. Knowing how he and my stepmother would react, instead I sat in more parking lots. I toured downtown again. I drove around some more. I drove halfway to my father’s house and turned back again. Every part of my body was in resistance and all I wanted to do was go back to the house to see my father one more time. Instead of following my instincts, I superseded with imaginations of what my stepmother and father would say if I showed up again. They wouldn’t have been happy at all. I finally overrode my instincts and drove away. I cried for hours. It was the last time I saw him.

He was scheduled to start chemotherapy the next week, and my sister was going to head out to visit him for an early Labor Day weekend. I had just arrived back on the East Coast at the beginning of the week, right before my sister arrived in New Mexico, right after the first and only half dose of chemotherapy had been administered and immediately started to take a toll on his body. He was put into a rehab instead of the hospital, and no one helped his painful failing body filled with toxic chemicals over the holiday weekend. After the weekend it was too late and he was immediately put into hospice. That entire week I wanted to return to be by his side but I had just started my job, and there wasn’t clear communication as to what was going on with him. I didn’t know if I would make it out to New Mexico in time before he passed, I was told I couldn’t speak to him, and I was absolutely out of money. He suffered painfully from the effects of chemo for most of a week and died not long after we had a phone call with him that Friday evening where he didn’t even have a voice left, and couldn’t talk. I hated myself and a lot of other people because I could have been with him if even one of multiple circumstances been just a little bit different.

So here I was, two years later, re-living every moment of this horrible event and how I should have done things differently, how I should have been told more, or known more, how I should have gone back to his house that last day when I didn’t but knew I should, only because of what I anticipated they would say to me, every painful and horrible detail of the whole thing was replaying in my head while I am trying to get ready for our trip. And now there’s this problem of the dog sitter. The son is the sitter, but I am told his father who I am speaking to will come to set up the paperwork, and it seems we can’t agree on a time for them to come meet the dog and learn the tricks of getting into my old house. He doesn’t come on Saturdays, and I work during the week. We settle on Thursday evening, but when that day comes along he changes it to Friday, and then again to Saturday.

“ Great! 10:00 AM. I’ll see you then.” I was glad we finally worked it out.

Saturday morning rolls along and I am upstairs getting ready for the arrival of my dog sitter. I’m interrupted at 9:40am with a really loud banging sound. Not imagining whom it could be since I look out the window and find no one at my front door, I pause thinking that whoever it was went away, or it was the neighbors. The banging happens again and as I come down the stairs I can tell it is coming from my kitchen and not the front door, so I am expecting the landlord or the neighbor whose property backs up to mine, because you would likely come through the back yard to arrive at the kitchen door, thanks to the tall fence around the property. My make-up is half on and my hair is half wet, and I head into the kitchen where I see my father through the glass door, with a younger man behind him to the side.

I freeze in my tracks and my mouth hangs open. I know that what I am seeing can’t possibly be real, yet my hallucination is motioning to me with the exact same impatient mannerisms I have seen my father do thousands of times, and he is wearing my father’s favorite shirt and shorts. This has to be my father, but how could it be? Am I dreaming? Did he maybe not die back when they say he did? I immediately, ridiculously and unrealistically become hopeful. Maybe it was all just a horrible mistake.  Maybe my eyes are making a massive mistake. Maybe this is what having mental health challenges feels like.

I can only stare, trying to figure it out because this hologram has the same build and moves like my father did with similar gestures and the same range of motion after his stroke. His hair is falling over his forehead, unmistakably my dad’s haircut, and his incisor that he displays when he mimics my father’s grimace is even the same! I can’t do anything but stand there completely immobile and stare, because I have no idea how this is possible. He sees me, and gestures at the doorknob.

“ Open the door,” he finally commands.

Even though I know this can’t be happening and my father is supposed to be dead, the first thing I feel is disappointment. There’s no British accent. That means it can’t be my father. So it’s my mind that is off. What is this apparition I am viewing or loss of cognitive function I am having? I seriously check myself because only once in my life did something even remotely similar to this happen where I knew I couldn’t be seeing what I was, and that was when I lived in a haunted house in Texas. That illusion soon dissipated, but this one wasn’t going away. The kitchen looks fine. My hands look OK. So why is it only my father that I am hallucinating? How can this be real? Am I asleep and this is a dream? How can I be seeing this man? How is my father here, at my door? Oh yeah, and who is this person he brought with him?

As I stand there speechless staring at him like he was a ghost, he says something about being the dog sitter. Oh! Wow! Ok. WHAT? A dog sitter? And I start to come back to reality. The dog sitter I was expecting. They’re early, and I have no idea why they came to the side door.

He turns to the side and I can see that his jawline is different than my father’s very angular and square jaw. When he turns forward again I see that the bottom of his face under his beard is pushed in closer to his neck, and because of that I start to regain my composure quicker and invite him in but I’m still having trouble, lost in the incredulity of his appearance.

I attempt to explain to him that he looks like the spitting image of my late father, but the pictures I have out on the shelf that I keep pulling out to show him are picture after picture of my father as a younger man, so he doesn’t see the resemblance. I was certain he thought of me as absolutely bonkers, and didn’t understand why I was acting like such a crazy person, especially when I asked if I could take his picture. He tells me he is of Scottish descent, a lineage of royalty. My father was from Liverpool, and we never knew too much about my grandfather’s heritage other than it was supposedly part Irish. Somehow when my father tried to trace it on Ancestry.com, it never got anywhere. Could they be related? I had absolutely no idea, but being that much of doppelgangers there had to be something going on there.

A short while later after we set up the dog sitting and he left, I emailed him some pictures of my father I had online – wearing the same shocking white hairstyle, same face, same teeth, eyes, and build, and at least one picture where my dad donned the same clothing he wore to my house, which was my father’s favorite and most common outfit. Other than my father’s weight at the time the photo was snapped, they could have been the same person, and at least could have been brothers. In person, the resemblance was even closer. He finally saw what I did, and his wife responded with a sweet message of both disbelief and blessings of healing for me. None of us could imagine this was any kind of coincidence.

The next day when I logged on to social media I was delivered a memory from the same day, two years earlier. There sat my dog, on my birthday, in the car next to me, for day two of a painful and teary two-day drive across the country when I had to pick her up because she kept getting under my increasingly immobile dad’s feet. The whole drive I mourned what I thought would be a massive step in the wrong direction, just to appease my father’s wishes for one last time in my life (though it ended up being much more purposeful and complex than this).

Only then does it dawn on me that my ghostly holographic – yet in the flesh – visitor showed up at exactly the same time, two years to the day that I said my last goodbye in person to my father, the same morning I wasn’t able to leave Santa Fe and drove around for almost 90 minutes until I finally had to force myself to go. I broke down and cried, finally able to release guilt, fault, anger, and sadness, finding the forgiveness to those that I blamed which was mostly myself for not being there, knowing this man, this stranger on my door step was a huge gift from Spirit.  I was to finally find closure.

Magnificent Miracles of Healing

Thanks to my spiritual practice I was well aware that I was out of alignment with the circumstances around my dad’s death and knew that I was absolutely was hanging instead of letting go. Every time I felt the pangs of anger, resentment, grief, and loss resurge, I’d wonder why I couldn’t heal and move past these feelings. I’d try to quell my mind and be in surrender to life’s perfection, even though it wasn’t perfect for how I had wanted it to be, because it wasn’t part of my spiritual process to heal through surrender. I would never allow myself to blame others or hang on to things for this long, but grief is a complex and difficult emotion that I’d never had to confront on this level before. Though I tried hard to heal through my spiritual practice, I was clearly failing. Something deeper in my subconscious was still out of alignment, and it was much harder to reach.

My biggest contribution to this miracle was my deep and willing intent for surrender and clarity. This very tangibly meant that I didn’t want to struggle and feel all of these horrible emotions that were pulling me away from my internal peace, therefore affecting my external world. My spiritual practice was to be in alignment and balance with whatever the world offered me whether my mind liked it or not, yet I could not get over the circumstances around my father’s death, and I judged myself and others because of it. And on top of that I judged myself again, because I wasn’t able to be aligned to my spiritual practice and just let it go (not repress it). It cascaded out into my external life, and affected both my mood, and those around me.

The forces of consciousness entangled in my life swooped in to push it forward and find resolve in a way I never could have. I had asked to let it go through my intentions and practice, but I was clearly still struggling. Two years was an incredibly long time for me to hang on to anything, and my boyfriend and I discussed it often whenever it would come up, so I’d also be urged to let it go with his gentle reminders. Of course I wanted to. But something in me was resisting, and I couldn’t find its root, though I could see it, taste it and feel it. There was something I hadn’t released, and it turns out that ultimately, it was forgiveness of myself, not necessarily the others I tried to blame.

“I should have done better, I should have found a way to get there. I shouldn’t have listened, and called the hospice myself. I could have demanded answers instead of being in shock. I could have gotten in my car and slept in my car once I was near him if I needed to. I should have delayed the start of work. I could have done it differently.”

So many shoulds and coulds. Because I couldn’t get past them, the Universe shared a message of love and caring by sending me a hologram of my father to tell me it was time to let go and heal, two years to the day and hour later, because I was still suffering. Healing happened once I got over the shock of my visitor, and then like clockwork after all of my other miracles, my analytical and critical mind took over.

“How do these crazy things keep happening to me? Who else gets visitations from their dead father? Why did I pick that dog sitter and not another from the dozens of selections on the website I chose? Why did he show up on Saturday morning when he insisted it had to be Thursday? Why did he show up 20 minutes early, which matched the time of day that I last saw my father? How could that possibly be orchestrated so accurately? Why did he come to my kitchen door so I wouldn’t be expecting the dog sitter, and I could see his movement and haircut and matching incisors and familiar motions and his clothing instead of my front door where I would have been expecting them? Out of all of the clothes in his closet, why did he pick my father’s favorite shirt and shorts?”

I had answers for none of it, except I picked the dog sitter that called to me the loudest out of about 10 or so with great reviews, without my having a long list of criteria that had to be met, and I let him decide when he would come over. I was open to the many choices I had been served, and open to being steered and guided by his wishes for time of his first visit.

  This Miracle Life

At this point in my life, I shouldn’t be so surprised, right?  Once you’ve embarked upon a path of surrender, you will become very accustomed to getting exactly what you need. Little miracles show up so very often. You know that a car will pull out exactly where and when you need a parking spot, almost every time. You are steered all of the time to find the exact thing you are looking for, and usually at a huge discount or delivered to your doorstep free of charge. Synchronicities happen all day long, which could be related to the tiny, every-day miracles, but most of the time they are the ongoing effects of our alignment to our Source. But something as big and unnerving and incredulous as your father’s clone showing up on your doorstep? We can’t imagine this stuff, and if we could, we should stop everything we are doing and go find employment as a high-paying science fiction writer!

We can’t always see what we need, nor can we ever determine when something is ripe for delivery. We also don’t know what it is that will help us heal in an instant otherwise we would have done it already. Yet consciousness, your higher self knows! Miracles certainly don’t only arrive when we think we need one, how we think we need one, or if we think we need one at all. They are on a precise delivery cycle for each and every one of us, as long as we stay open to receive.

The only two things that determine if we stay open are to understand how to do that, and to use our free will. We have the choice to engage with our fully conscious nature or keep going the way we have been which is the way that all or most of us have been taught. It’s the standard, human way to do things. This ‘human way’ has been passed down to us through millennia from all those that came before us, and we pick it up naturally through our families and our societies and our religions. We should remember that our ancestors had very different needs, usually focused towards basic survival skills during times that included wars and famine and few of the technological or medical advancements that we have today. In many ways, by passing down these skills and traits to our children without questioning, examining and realigning them, humanity is mostly still living in our collective mind’s past.

This miracle element of our birth, our Source Consciousness that holds full awareness, sees the bigger picture and can determine what the best solution is. Source knows and cares little about what our minds that think they know, so healing miracles happen not only when we are ripe for their perfect timing, but also when about a million different pieces can come together at once. Like I have said often, the force that delivers miracles is not just omniscient and intelligent, it is a badass multi-tasker! Some of us choose to call this force God, others think of it as matching quantum level frequencies, vibrations, and wave probabilities, and yet others speak of a self-learning, holographic universe. These could all be the different human ways we use to speak about the same thing, depending upon those that came before us, who passed their beliefs forward in time.

With exception to the big manifestation miracles, which we will learn more about in later chapters, there’s very little planning on our part involved at all. To align to miracles we simply choose to engage surrender as much as we can so we don’t block the mystical forces within consciousness, and strive for being the best version of ourselves that we can be. In the case of my father’s doppelganger miracle, I wanted to let the anger and pain about my father’s death release because I had worked on healing it often, yet I was struggling on my own. Something far grander than my self had to step in.

Intention For Internal Peace = Intention For Surrender

Healing miracles can happen on many levels, guided exclusively by what is personally needed for each one of us, physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. The healing miracles have been one of five kinds of consistent miracles that have helped my life move forward a few times. This one was employed in a manner to show me I don’t need to do everything on my own, including my own healing. I could have asked for help, but I had simply forgotten! I was so conditioned to try to solve every problem and situation, all of the time, I didn’t even think of it. With my physical healing miracle in India, I had to choice but to ask for help because when I couldn’t physically or mentally help my self, I was forced into it. This time the Universe had to understand my request through my attempts to solve this through my spiritual practice. So indirectly I asked for it repeatedly because of my intent to work through my discomfort of anger and grief and upset whenever it showed up. The peace and stillness and letting to that I sought, meant I was trying hard to surrender to life’s ups and downs and hang on to nothing, but was failing miserably on my own.

Living in internal peace, in surrender, means we don’t bring our past disappointments or upsets into the present, or into our future.  We let our situations simply be, and release their painful hold on us by making peace with their circumstances, whether we like them or not. Often we have to find faith in the understanding and acceptance of life’s perfection, even though we may think things are unfair, or mistakes, no matter how painful and imperfect they can seem. The pain is our mind, in resistance, telling us that this is bad. This means that more than anything, we don’t judge, and we don’t repress our emotions because then too we block the natural ebb and flow of the Tao.

Surrender to the Tao

If we can live in surrender we will stop our daily struggle, we stop resisting against the things we are trying so hard to resolve, and we release everything we are doing that blocks the flow of our conscious nature, which happens as we get wound up and involved in our minds’ stories and imaginations, including our deeper habits. By facilitating the release of our biggest attachments (that comes through our mind) we instantly stop carrying the vibration of these things that trouble us, so we become open to our deeper nature – which is and has always been there. This process frees the solutions we need the most, so they can arrive uninhibited.