Product Description

'For me, spirituality is the ability to be awed through your connection to creation, to know your purpose, and to be of service – all to find faith, hope, and inner peace. This is the very heart of what I call 'soul communion.' I knew that, on its face, this sounded esoteric and mystical, but it was already threaded into the fabric of most people's lives.

'After all, who hasn't prayed to a loved one who has died, talked to them, and asked them for emotional and spiritual guidance? Our stumbling block is that we talk, say a quick 'Amen,' and never wait around to listen.

'Soul communion is teaching ourselves how to wait around and listen. We believe in the spiritual realm, yet at the same time we shut ourselves off from it. We pray for help and then don't allow it to help us.'

-From Chapter 17

In God, the Universe, and Where I Fit In, Laurie Ann Levin, Psy.D., shares her extraordinary life story and illustrates how we can tap into the divine guidance that is always available to us.

As a child, Levin knew she was psychic. Still she stifled her gifts, dimming the divine aspects of herself in order to be accepted by conservative parents, her friends, and her husband. As a rising Hollywood agent, making connections with stars like Madonna and Michael Jackson took precedence over making connections with the other side.

When her career bubble burst—as many of them do—her mother was losing her battle with cancer. By calling on her intuitive gifts, Levin helped her mother transition to the other side and, in the process, experienced a psychic awakening. She embarked on a spiritual odyssey that blew apart everything she thought she knew about God, the universe, and where we all fit in—in this life and the next. Through her incredible journey she found true love in an unlikely way and pioneered a new approach of healing that bridges psychology with spirituality.

For those who feel like they are wandering through life aimlessly, or that events are random rather than related, Levin makes clear that the universe is full of connection and that a crisis or a change can be viewed as a cosmic wake-up call to a new way to live.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8455 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 245 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780757314407
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Dr. Laurie Ann Levin was an influential agent with CAA and a film producer before turning to a career and calling as a psychological and spiritual healer. Moonview Sanctuary, founded under her supervision and vision, is a pioneer in the research and practice of multi-disciplinary treatments for addiction, family trauma, spiritual crisis, and many other ailments. Her work at Moonview has been featured in Newsweek, Businessweek, and NY Magazine. Visit the blog at http://laurieannlevin.hcibooks.com

Gerald M. Levin will write the Foreword for God, the Universe, and Where I Fit In.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Dreams are true while they last,
and do we not live in dreams?
Lord Alfred Tennyson

Tennyson had a point. I spent most of my childhood alone, cavorting within the boundaries of my own imagination. The mind is not an unusual sandbox for a child to play in. Because both my mother and father drank and swallowed numerous colorful pills, I escaped more and more into the walled-up refuge of my silent thoughts.

My father, Stanley Perlman, was a huge bear of a man, six feet five inches, with hands as big as hams and a smile as bright and caressing as sunlight. I loved to climb up in his lap, put my arms around his tree trunk of a neck, and settle into the warm pillow of his cheek. His bulk and personality could fill any room, leaving that room more than empty when he was gone.

He was gone a lot.
Before my father decided to attach our financial fate to the quixotic Florida real estate market, he was a traveling salesman, constantly on the road peddling his family's line of housecoat dresses. As dads often do, he would promise to someday take me on the road with him, but then he would leave before I woke without so much as saying good-bye.

I would stand in the living room for hours on end, staring out the window hoping to see his car coming around the corner. My mother, Germaine, or as she called herself, Gerry, too young and ill-equipped to handle two babies and long periods of self-sufficiency, would finally become exasperated with my forlorn face and send me to my room. Why was I punished for exhibiting honest emotion, I couldn't fathom. Looking back, I'm quite certain that she watched me in such a rattled state of longing for my father that she suffered the very human daggers of jealousy.

My mother was nothing if not extremely human.
With the pressures piling on her shoulders over the years, my mother housed herself inside a brick exterior. In the eyes of a child, she was powerful and unrelenting, much like an armored tank. I took her deportment at face value, which, as we all come to learn as we grow older, has little to do with true value.

If anything, a tough outer shell is usually a sure sign that the soul inside is drowning in a whirlpool of pain and self-doubt. At a very tender age I figured out that what you see is half of what you get. In sharp contrast to my own emotional personality, I do remember that my mother allowed herself the luxury of tears one time, when her own mother died.

Most children who find themselves alone in that same situation would quickly conjure up an imaginary friend. Someone who, though invisible, would love them, understand them, and, best of all, never leave them suddenly for business trips out of town. Why I never bothered to whip up an imaginary friend I don't know. In retrospect, it would have been nice to have someone under the same roof that was always on my side. However, my root personality made that impossible. It always seemed that the apple dangling from the highest limb of the tallest tree is what I found the most tantalizing.

As I look back on it now, I feel that the core reason why I didn't fantasize about an invisible friend is because I felt so terribly invisible myself. Rather than play jacks in my room with a best friend who didn't exist, I spent those lonely hours believing that I was put on this earth with a mission: I was a messenger of God.

I'm more than a little embarrassed to admit that I don't remember exactly what that message was; I do know that I refused to write it down for fear someone else may find it and then that person would become the messenger of God.

Nevertheless, I do remember how believing that I was handpicked for this all-important task down here on Earth made me feel blessedly important. If only in the backstreets of my own imagination, I was a somebody.

When I was very young, my mother made me say my prayers before going to bed. 'Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.' It's questionable whether any prayer with the word 'die' in it should be the last thing on a child's lips before nodding off, but I don't remember feeling any shiver of panic as I snuggled my small frame beneath the thick covers. In fact, the opposite proved to be true. Long after my mother kissed me on the forehead and turned out the light, I would remain awake, and in my childlike way, I would ponder the meaning of death and the soul.

My parents tried to give their children formal religious training. My brother and I attended Jewish Sunday school. Even though they insisted that my brother have a bar mitzvah, neither their hearts nor their temperaments were suited to rigid theology. I had been raised Reform, which, in the Jewish faith, is considered barely being Jewish at all. The more Orthodox branches of my religion grudgingly admit that we believe in God, although they wonder if we have trouble remembering His name.

My religious training can best be summed up as hit-and-miss, and though we celebrated the holidays of my faith, God was treated just like an easygoing patriarch, without the customary obedience and reverence He was accorded in more Orthodox homes. My mother held firm to the belief that the soul was eternal and that you could reach God no matter where you were or what you'd done. My dad also believed that each individual had a direct line of prayer to God. Having been a prisoner of war (POW), my father had learned the importance of individuality and inner strength, and, added to his natural streak of rebellion, he had no interest in any religion that was organized and tidy. He was convinced that once the more base and basic of man's foibles got involved, religion and its dogma lost the fundamental foundation of love.

My parents' beliefs pushed open the doors to my own youthful exploration, which reached its pseudointellectual zenith when I was fourteen and pompously wrote a school paper that stated with certainty that religion is nothing more than an opiate for the masses (as Karl Marx called it), a crutch to avoid confronting the finality of death. With all the conviction of youth, I stated that 'true strength' was to face and acknowledge that this life is all there is, and that the universe is benignly indifferent to our little piping dreams, and that we all eventually become dust. At this age, I considered myself quite the expert on death, having devoured the works of heavyweights such as Elie Wiesel, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The result of all this was that, while my contemporaries busied themselves sniffing out a date for the prom, I poured my energies into waving a flag for existentialism.

I realize now that I was one of those annoying teenagers who figured that if a word had enough syllables in it, it had to be deep, and I grabbed a seat on that bandwagon. Soon I came around again, this time with Hermann Hesse. Growing up in a household where the Almighty was so malleable, fluid, and unboxed by doctrine, it didn't take any great leap of ­imagination on my part to assign myself the role of His assistant.

It was a safe and loving hole for me to climb into. I never believed that my parents ever really heard me. I felt I had to prove them wrong by justifying my existence. I couldn't conceive of a showier, more exalted position to land than being the messenger of God. I told no one of my new calling, realizing that my mission was best kept under wraps until the proper moment when God and I were ready to spring it on the world.

But like an envelope stamped and ready to mail—and then overlooked and forgotten—the moment my father would walk through the front door, all was right with the world. I wisely chose not to discuss my bedroom revelation with my parents, as they were too busy struggling their way through this life to pay much attention to whatever may come after.

My mother's concern was paying the grocer's bill, while my father spent sleepless nights wondering why women across America were suddenly no longer wanting to wear housecoat dresses. My father's business predicament wasn't that he always found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was more heartbreaking than that. He always seemed to land in the right place just as the right time was ending.

I would put down my bombastic revelation to a child's flight of fancy soaring out of a lagoon of loneliness if not for the emotions it stirred within me. Those emotions still exist, but no longer as shields to protect me from a reality too cold and harsh to deal with. Over the years, they've solidified into a belief system that encompasses all the realities that life has to offer.

What I had unknowingly unearthed was an innate belief system that there was a very real and definite connective tissue that binds us to the unseen world,where hearts and minds travel after their stay on this planet has been completed. This was my first connection with that gossamer thing we call the soul. Let's see an imaginary friend do that!

Perhaps all of the emotional contortions I put myself through could have been avoided had my mother scooped me up in her arms and given me warm kisses of understanding. Maybe if my father had not left so many times on business without saying good-bye. Perhaps he thought this silent departure would be easier on me, or, with his own ego in such a fragile state, maybe he thought I wouldn't notice. I don't know. Maybe it was all just to keep me in communion with heaven. When you are that lonely, you rely on what love there is—even if you cannot see it.

I do know, as the cliché so aptly puts it, you can't un-ring a bell. But there does come a time when we have to stop listening to the clanging in our ears. I don't blame any aftermath my emotions may have suffered on their actions or lack thereof. As I have learned since giving birth, parenthood is not an exact science, and no matter how pure and positive your intentions, the odds of actually hitting your mark are somewhere below that of bowling ...

Customer Reviews

A worthy read
Laurie Ann Levin's page turner of a memoir is at first a guilty pleasure read as she shares her life stories of working with the likes of Madonna and her own role as a Hollywood insider. As the book progresses, the true theme emerges - the importance of listening to the inner voice that makes itself heard whenever we come to a crossroads. We all have that intuition and Levin demonstrates that it can take different forms in different people - that of god, of dreams, of coincidences, of 'other worldly' occurrences. I agree with one of the earlier reviewers that the most memorable chapter is the one dealing with the death of the author's mother. It had a depth that will resonate with most people. This book will appeal to readers who want an 'inside' look at how the Hollywood inner circle really works and to those who are searching for what Levin ultimately discovers in her own life, a spiritual connection that lifts her out of life's past disappointments and places her firmly on the road she is meant to be on. A quick, fascinating, and ultimately worthy read that makes you think about your own choices in life and the road you are on.

A Truly Wonder-Full Book!
What a wonderful book! Dr. Levin's writing style is witty, engaging and most importantly authentic. I found myself relating to it on a very personal level as I've experienced my own struggles within male-dominated fields -- two of which were marriages! I thought her commitment to remain true to herself and her beliefs showed tremendous fortitude. And being able to remain strong and grounded while providing not only comfort to her dying mother, but imbuing her mother with a sense of calm and peace at what is usually the most frightening point in any person's life really resonated with me as an act of true bravery. I still think about that chapter a lot.

I've also seen mentions of Dr. Levin's book in various blogs, e.g. Media Decoder in the New York Times [...] and Company Town in the LA Times [...] and I agree that there are a couple of Hollywood folks who don't come off looking that great - but I did feel just a little guilty pleasure at being able to be a fly on the wall.

It was a very enjoyable read - I laughed, I cried, I wanted more!

PSYCHIC DOC MEETS HOLLYWOOD
Trust me, you're not going to find another book like this..the story of a powerful Hollywood insider, a PhD no less, that handled the careers of Madonna and Michael Jackson and, by the way, also talks to dead people!

Yes, big-time Hollywood agent in between premieres and back-room deals has a direct line to the unseen world which she regularly taps into for guidance and what guidance they give her. Without giving anything away, we could all use a few friends on the other side helping us make the right decisions especially when life seems the most baffling. In between her fast-paced narrative, Dr. Levin drops subliminal messages of profound but practical spiritual guidance that will benefit all of us.

Unlike most memoirs that are just pages of ME, ME, ME, Dr. Laurie Levin honestly and openly reveals all the joys and pain that her heart endured while finding her life's true mission. The book feels like one of those great Hollywood black and white movies where an invisible hand guides our heroine until destiny presents her with her great love and off they go into the sunset spreading happiness and wisdom. As we travel along Dr. Levin's path, the book allows us to reflect upon our own life and do a little soul searching along the way.

You want glamour, power, brains, beauty, heartbreak, love and the cosmos? Read this book. You'll love it.