Please, God, Can't I Keep My Baby?

By Echo Bodine

When I was a sophomore in college, I found out I was pregnant. When my boyfriend and I talked about getting married, my inner voice very adamantly said, No! But I pretended I didn’t hear it and kept on trying to make this really difficult situation more workable for me, my boyfriend, and our families. Our premarital counselor said that, even though we were both young, we could probably make it work. But all along, my intuition kept saying, No, no, no, this is not the way to go. And, deep down, I knew I had to listen to it.

So even though I wanted to get married and keep my baby, I said no to my boyfriend. It was very hard to explain to everyone that I was saying no because that’s what felt right to me. It made sense to my mom, who taught me how to live by my intuition, but it didn’t make sense to my boyfriend or anybody else.

In 1968, it was pretty shameful to be 19 and an unwed mother. So I went off to California and told everybody I had transferred to a different college. All throughout the pregnancy, whenever I would rebel and think, I’m going to keep this baby, my intuition kept saying, No, you’re not. And I would get the word adoption every time. Even though I had made arrangements with an adoption agency, in the back of my mind I kept thinking that when it came right down to it, I was going to take my baby home with me. Sometimes, out of desperation, I thought, Maybe the day my son is born, my intuition will tell me, Okay, now you can keep him.

My son was born on a gloomy day in San Francisco. I’ve never lived a harder day in my life. I laid in my hospital bed crying and pleading with my intuition, Can I please, please bring my baby home? but it very clearly said, No. Adoption. My boyfriend was still suggesting that we get married and raise our baby, and I had a strong desire and a strong will to do that, too. My parents had told me they would support me if I kept my baby, and the family friends I was living with in San Francisco even came to my hospital room and asked me to let them raise my son.

Yet, in spite of everything the world was saying, my inner voice was telling me to trust the guidance I was getting and that it would all work out some day. I knew I had to trust it but it was the most difficult thing I ever had to do. I cried, “Please, God, you have to talk to me, you have to tell me how this is going to turn out if I place him for adoption.” But all I heard was, It’s going to be okay.

I knew I couldn’t hold him. I knew that if I did, my will would take over. The last time they wheeled me to the nursery window to see him, the candy striper innocently said, “Oh, did you get your baby’s pictures?” I remember thinking, Oh, my God, will somebody please get me out of here! I can’t stand this kind of pain!

In the years since, there were many, many moments when I wondered if I should have kept my baby instead of listening to my intuition, especially since I never had any more children after that. And yet, my inner voice would always say, It will be okay. Someday, it will be okay.

Today, I’m thankful that I can say it did indeed turn out okay and that both his father and I no longer have any doubt that I did the right thing. In my book, A Still Small Voice, I write about finding my son 25 years later. He was raised in a wonderful family and we now have a wonderful relationship. I also still get along very well with his biological father. In fact, in September, the two of us went to our son’s wedding.

Our intuition doesn’t tell us why it’s telling us what to do. It just gives us a direction, which is why it’s so hard to follow. We humans want the path laid out for us, we want to see it clearly, and then we’ll make our decision. But that’s not how it works. It’s really about surrendering to God and to do what we came here to do, even though we don’t know at the time where our path is leading us.

I really struggled whether or not to share such a personal story, but then I realized that if someone reading this is faced with a difficult situation, and their inner voice is guiding them to do something that makes no sense to them, maybe my story will speak to them and tell them, Follow it anyway.
 

Echo Bodine first discovered she was born with psychic abilities and the gift of healing at the age of 17. Her abilities include clairvoyance (seeing), clairaudience (hearing), clairsentience (sensing), and clairgustance (smell). She took psychic classes for two years and practiced on friends and family for 12 years before beginning her full-time practice as a psychic, healer, and ghostbuster in 1979.

In 1981, Echo began teaching classes on psychic development and spiritual healing. She has appeared on numerous national television shows including Sally Jesse Raphael, Sightings, Beyond with James Van Praagh, NBC’s The Other Side, Unexplained Mysteries, NBC’s Today Show, A&E, and Encounters. Paranormal Borderline did a feature story on her family, calling them the “world’s most psychic family.”

Echo hosted her own cable TV show called New Age Perspectives for two years, and co-hosted The Edge TV. She also had her own radio show on FM107 in Minneapolis for three years called Intuitive Living, and Paramount Pictures solicited her services for the promotion of the movie Ghost.

Her many books include Look for the Good and You'll Find God: The Spiritual Journey of a Psychic and Healer... The Gift: Understand and Develop Your Psychic Abilities... A Still Small Voice: A Psychic’s Guide to Awakening Intuition… What Happens When We Die: A Psychic's Exploration of Death, Heaven, and the Soul's Journey After Death... and Echoes of the Soul: The Soul’s Journey Beyond the Light.”

From 2003 to the present, Echo has been the director of The Center for Spiritual Development, where she teaches numerous classes on spiritual development, living by intuition, ghostbusting, psychic development, and laying-on-hands healing classes. In 2010 she began doing on-line psychic development classes with instructor Leigh Hopkins of the Viva Institute in Brazil.

Click here to visit Echo’s website.
 

This story appears in Phil Bolsta’s book, Sixty Seconds: One Moment Changes Everything. To order your copy, click here.