Jenniffer Weigel of Evanston just wanted to have a chat with her dad. Only problem was, he had died six months earlier. Yet that didn’t stop her from getting in touch with him.
The Emmy-Award-winning former CBS broadcaster headed to Therese Rowley, Ph.D., a strategic business consultant by day and an intuitive by night. To prove she was the real deal, Rowley recounted an entire conversation that happened between Weigel and her father when no one else was present as well as everything that had happened to Weigel that day.
The experience launched the 39-year-old Evanston mom into a spiritual journey across the country, guest-starring gurus including James Van Praagh, Caroline Myss, Deepak Chopra and don Miguel Ruiz, and culminating in her book, “Stay Tuned: Conversations with Dad from the Other Side” (Hampton Roads, 2007), which has sold well and is now in paperback.
She turned the book into a highly successful one-woman show in Chicago, “I’m Spiritual, Damn It!” Clearly, she doesn’t take all the “woo-woo” business, as she calls it, too seriously.
Still a skeptic? You can question Weigel in person at a Girls Night Out event on Thursday, January 21, at 7:30 p.m. at the Wilmette Theatre. Weigel will tell stories from the intuitive people she’s met, which make up her forthcoming second book, a sort-of spiritual manual for normal people, and Rowley will be on-hand to do some on-the-spot readings.
Make It Better sat down with Weigel to get a sneak preview of her spiritual secrets.
MIB: How would you describe your approach to spirituality?
JW: Spirituality with a sense of humor, climbing the mountain of enlightenment with your martini in one hand and your pumps in the other.
MIB: Who should come to this event?
JW: Seekers with a sense of humor. Seekers with a martini in their hands. Seekers looking for Cliff’s Notes. This isn’t going to be a big, heavy Kumbaya experience.
MIB: Having talked to so many gurus, who do you recommend?
JW: That’s like asking for a doctor—well, what’s your ailment? Do you want to know future stuff, do you want to talk to dead people, do you want to know about past lives? Everyone has intuition, but at different levels, and what I found is that people have different skill sets.
Some mediums and psychics are kind of fishing. Therese didn’t ask me anything; she just talked for an hour and a half. Nobody I’ve sent to her has come back and said, “That wasn’t real.”
[For books, I recommend] “Many Lives, Many Master’s” by Dr. Brian Weiss and “Conversations with God” by Neil Donald Walsh.
MIB: Do you think it will be helpful to have Therese by your side for this event?
JW: People like to see that she looks normal—wearing an Ann Taylor suit, not any crystals or crosses, [not] reeking of patchouli oil. She doesn’t look like a wacky spiritual self-help bookstore.
MIB: Can you give me an example of a person you’ve met with “gifts”?
JW: I was doing my play, and in the front row was this man and his three kids [in their early 20s]. “All three of my kids have the gift,” he said. They looked as normal as any other 22-year-olds, and I looked at the one in the middle and she said, “Yeah, we all see dead people.”
MIB: So, are you saying we all should believe in psychics, dead people being able to communicate from the other side, etc.?
JW: Believe whatever you want, I’m just telling people what happened to me. I’m not advocating anything. I’m not making any of it up, and a lot of it’s making me scratch my head, so I thought I’d share.
