PAC to welcome Theresa Caputo for 2 shows
Theresa Caputo, known for her long running cable TV show “The Long Island Medium” and now a new show called “Raising Spirits,” is bringing her live show “Theresa Caputo Live: The Experience” to the Kent State Performing Arts Center on April 22, a show which sold out so quickly a second has been added for the following evening, April 23.
Caputo’s show includes discerning messages from those who have passed on and bringing those messages to living relatives via a presence she simply calls “spirit.” She is a New York Times best-selling author and host of a podcast called “Hey Spirit” in addition to her television programs.
Caputo and spirit don’t necessarily carry on a conversation. The symbolic language used is unique to her and her experience.
“It’s my spirit library,” she said. “For example, if I am channeling someone’s dad, I might be shown a bowl of oatmeal, and I’ll say, ‘Did your dad like oatmeal?’ and they might recognize that. Then I might see someone pacing in the driveway, and that becomes my symbol for someone who has to do the same thing over and over again. That’s how I build my spirit library of symbols.”
In her work she finds herself bringing comfort to others.
“It’s exhausting, but it isn’t. I was born this way, so I truly believe God has built me to do this,” Caputo said. “For some reason I am able to remove my own thoughts, feelings and emotions as I channel. Of course, sometimes on the show, you see when I am breaking down at those times when I can’t handle it, but I know I have to be strong for the people I’m talking to. The hardest thing to do is to stand in front of someone, especially at a live show, and take thousands of people on this emotional roller coaster. That’s where we need the levity.
“That’s why I have spirit communicate with personality and also with laughter. It gives us permission to almost be happy in having that moment with a loved one. People feel guilty or sad and think they shouldn’t feel happy at that moment. Spirit is showing us that they’re not suffering, they’re not sick and they don’t want us to remember them in that way.”
Caputo said the transition to channeling on camera for “Long Island Medium” was not difficult. “It felt natural. It’s a bizarre thing, but it feels normal when cameras are following me. It has never felt odd. It felt like this is exactly what I am supposed to be doing,” she said.
She credits family support and her own search for greater spiritual awareness with helping to find ways to use her gifts in the early years.
“Thank God for my parents,” Caputo said. “If it wasn’t for them, I probably would have been diagnosed with a mental disorder. What I was going through was far from normal for other people, but it was normal for me. I come from a very spiritual family, a strong faith family, so I was able to talk about it with them.”
Caputo said while spirits come through for her, that doesn’t mean they are ever-present, spying on people’s lives.
“One of the reasons why spirit comes through is to communicate the fact that they’re sorry,” Caputo said. “I was struggling with this gift years ago, and I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to be a medium. And then 9/11 happened, and I was shown through a spiritual experience that when those thousands of people perished that day, nobody knew what happened to their loved ones.
“People need and deserve the gift of healing to know that there is an afterlife and that their loved ones are at peace. And this is when I kind of put my gift in God’s hands and said, ‘Look, if this is my soul’s journey, then you open the door, and I’ll walk through with my gift.’ So here I am. I choose to use my gift for healing purposes. Remember that when souls come through to say they’re sorry, that means they’ve had to relive their lives through our eyes. They’ve had to feel what it was like for us to feel disappointed or experience that feeling when they weren’t there for us at times. So they need us to know they’re sorry.”
She said she hopes people will enjoy the show even if they don’t get a reading. “People say after a live show that they personally did not get a reading but what they saw was life-changing,” Caputo said.
Tickets are available from the PAC box office or online at www.kent.edu/tuscpac.
