Here is a special treat for visitors to Light Hearts -- a sample of a wonderful book from Cassandra Eason, the prolific British author. The Mother Link is all about psychic bonds between mothers and children both before and after birth. Cassandra has graciously sent this article -- a generous sample of the pleasures in store for readers of her book. Further information follows the article.

The Mother Link

by Cassandra Eason

Annette should have been enjoying a rare evening at the cinema with her husband. Their baby daughter was safe at home with a friend but, Annette said: "We had not been in the cinema for more than a few minutes when a terrible uneasiness came over me. I could distinctly smell burning."

Her husband could smell nothing and there was no one smoking near them. Annette tried to calm her fears but the smell of smoke and sensation of dread became overpowering. "Eventually I told my husband I was leaving. He followed me reluctantly, muttering something derogatory about women." As the bus took them the six miles to their village in Surrey, she prayed for it to go faster. "At last we were sprinting down the lane leading to the cottage. The smell of burning was now very definite to me though my husband still could not smell anything. We reached the door. Dense smoke poured out and a chair burst into flames. I rushed through to the bedroom and got the baby out while my husband dragged out the unconscious babysitter. She had fallen asleep and dropped her lighted cigarette into the chair, which had been smouldering."

This is one of the more remarkable examples of a mother's instincts in operation that I discovered when I began my research into maternal intuition more than eight years ago. It happened in 1936 and is recorded in the archives of the Research Centre for Religious and Spiritual Experience in Oxford founded by the great biologist Sir Alister Hardy. He could not explain how a mother could have sensed her baby's danger over such a distance. Nor can I explain the hundreds of cases involving this maternal radar that I have encountered. The women claim no psychic powers and their telepathic abilities are largely confined to the children.

Take the story of Barbara who lives in Hull: "I was in the living room with my younger son Paul when I had an urgent feeling that my son Mark - then about three years old - was in great danger, although I could hear him playing happily in the spare bedroom. I took the stairs two at a time and reached the room, just as he was about to insert a hairpin into the electricity socket on the skirting board. How I knew he was in danger I will never know but I'm glad I did not question my intuition."

You could write this off as normal maternal anxiety. If this was so, considering the number of hazards children can find even in the safest homes, all mothers would be perpetual nervous wrecks. But Barbara and other mothers have told me that these sudden premonitions of real danger are totally different from anything else. And sometimes it makes them act in what appears to be a totally irrational way. For example, Alice, a Dutch journalist, abandoned a dinner date to rush to her brother's house - where her fifteen-month-old was being well cared for by an experienced mother - just in time to save her daughter from being crushed by a toppling mirror.

Laurel, who lives in Christchurch, New Zealand, had put her baby son at the other end of the kitchen while she made coffee. But as she went to plug in the electric kettle "it was as if my hand was pushed back by a powerful force, like someone else's hand pushing against mine. I put down the plug, moved the baby out of the kitchen and went back to the jug. The result was quite spectacular. The side of the jug exploded, peeling open like a sardine can. The protruding rim of a saucepan in front of the jug was melted and fell as a red-hot sizzling pellet on to the floor in the spot where my son had been sitting a minute earlier. The hole it burned into the linoleum was more than enough evidence for me of what it would have done to his head."

I am a mother of five but with my first two children I had no incidents of mother's intuition. This was possibly because I was so concerned with trying to do everything by the book. With the younger three I was far more relaxed (possibly because exhaustion had set in). The link seems to be particularly strong with my youngest son Bill. On one occasion I had a panic attack while in a supermarket and almost ran out without paying. I came home to discover that Bill had fallen into the local river at the time I felt I was suffocating next to the frozen food counter. Another time I seemingly irrationally refused to allow Bill to travel with me in the car and, a mile down the road, was involved in an accident in which Bill's seat was impaled with a metal pole.

The protective maternal power is, if anything, accelerated in the teenage years. While I was in Los Angeles three years ago researching the maternal bond for a TV documentary, I met Judy from Indiana who told me this story about her son Corey.

"It was in May 1989. Around noon as I was standing in my kitchen, I was suddenly filled with intense fear and immediately thought of Corey. This was ridiculous because I knew he was in school and just fine. But the feeling grew stronger and I began shaking and crying uncontrollably. Then my mind was filled with the words: 'Pray for Corey.' The feelings were so intense I could not ignore them and I stood there shaking and praying.

"Ten minutes later the telephone rang. Corey's best friend told me that he had skipped school and had borrowed a motorcycle. But he had skidded into the path of a truck which just missed him. There was nothing left of the motorcycle but the gas tank. Corey sustained minor injuries for what he had just gone through. As near as I can figure I was having my experience just as Corey was involved in the accident."

The majority of maternal intuitive experiences do not involve life and death situations. Mothers whether they breast or bottle feed, routinely wake seconds before an infant in the night, even if the child is in another room and has no regular waking pattern. Many sons and daughters telephone their mother on impulse to find that her number is engaged, because she is phoning them at precisely that moment.

Enid from Berkshire, England, is in her fifties and her son David, a sailor, is in his thirties. She always knows when he is going to telephone although during his long periods at sea, he cannot often get a shore line from one week to the next. She will suddenly say to her husband: "We can't go out. David is going to ring." Five minutes later David phones from the Falklands or Fiji. This does not surprise Enid. "Why shouldn't I know? David and I have always been close from when he was a baby."

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