Archive for June, 2010

Thousands of Invisible Threads: Part Two

Let’s begin the story today with the proper pronouns. This is my story, not yours. Even so, there may be some common threads. And because it’s my story, I’ll tell you that I did go to bed on a good note, although the end is not yet in sight.

After hearing about her afternoon argument from my friend, I was strangely relieved, yet increasingly more perplexed. I’ve decided to take this into an inner journey to ask for more information. And before I tell you what I learned there in the other worlds, here’s a bit from a couple days before that will link the pieces of the story together for more poignancy.

I made an announcement to myself, as well as a couple friends, that I no longer wanted to identify myself as an angry person. In fact, I said to them, “I’ve been through the whole gamut at this point. I’ve experienced unconscious anger (in retrospect, of course); I’ve absorbed other people’s anger; I’ve avoided my anger; I’ve witnessed it’s hold on my family and I’ve often taken responsibility for all the anger in a given space or environment; I used to frequently react in anger; and, I’ve admitted I have a river of rage running through me. In fact, I’ve offered this information to the world, the Gods and the Goddesses. I’ve offered it to Jesus too, and I’ve asked over and over for help with this little rascal.

Or should I say, demon.

Generally speaking, I have taken on the world’s anger as my own, allowing what’s out there to reflect to me who I am. As ridiculous as that may seem to you, it’s true. And, there comes a point when the addict needs to awaken to the insidiousness of this definition and move on, recognizing that when we forever address ourselves by saying, “Hi, I’m an anger-holic,” or whatever, we not only hold ourselves in that place, we attract the same back to us, becoming and remaining enmeshed, until we stop. It’s one of those so-called vicious cycles.

It takes a lot of courage to say, “I’m done now.” What if I’m not done? What if I’m just fooling myself and I’m destined to be angry forever. What if I walk into a bar and immediately begin to drink in all that anger again. Really! What if I take this risk and end up looking like a fool, or worse, an anger-holic all over again?

For me, after several decades of life as this beast, I’m truly ready for a shift in how I interpret myself. I want this change more than anything and I’m willing to be a hard ass about it with myself if I need for some reason to fight off the projections and reminders of the past. I’m also willing to laugh it off, if that’s what works in the moment.

My awareness includes the fact that making this change doesn’t mean I won’t ever get angry again in my life. That would actually be pretty limiting. It simply means I will not hold this pre-conception over my head any longer. I’m creating some space for a different set of feelings, emotions, responses and attitudes to surface. This is an evolution in neurology!

To set the journey intention, I asked to be relieved of my preconceptions about who I am, who I was, and to replace them with the truth of who I am. Without telling you all the gory details, I’ll just say that this journey took me beyond the veils into another dimension.

Wearing gold bracelets and headbands, I was a powerful woman, surrounded by other equally powerful women. Someone betrayed us, sending a group of thugs to kill us off so they could re-establish a patriarchy of power in our place. I was put to death by snakes–massive snakes that choked and poisoned me simultaneously. I was so horrified, both in present time and whenever this crime took place, I hovered over my own dead body until it decayed; until the bones turned to dust. In that time, I couldn’t fathom the idea of such an end nor the fact that it was over. There was so much to do, so much I hadn’t yet accomplished. One of my guides who pulled me from the wreckage also identified the places in me that needed healing. There were black holes in my throat and my pelvis.

This is another beginning. I still have some healing to do on my Root, Sacral/Navel and Throat Chakra centers. This is one answer among many that will take me to yet another step in this process. Sure, I’ve seen many of my past lives before and I know about these links to voice, grounding and creativity. It’s just never come with the one crucial piece in place. It’s all so much more expansive because I’m now willing to become undefined by the old rage and even the hidden desire for vengeance that comes from such a death. I’m ready to be vulnerable in a different way.

In its wake, I’ve attracted many experiences related to death around speaking the truth in present time. It is the key reason for my rage, the incredible bursts of anger around, and feelings of oppression; the feelings of loneliness and being unheard, being soundless because of fearful self-suppression. Lately I’ve noticed there are times when I speak and although I can hear the words inside the tunnel of my own head, the sounds appear stuck and I cannot hear them coming out of my mouth.

Writing this blog, in the way I express and have been exposing myself these last several months, is my way of breaking through the armor and the fear; it’s been a vehicle for my personal evolution. And this story isn’t over yet. My old Irish sweater is slowly unraveling, yet still has a way to go. And I might need to knit it back together at least partially now and then to see the bigger picture.

Next Episode: the invisible connections between past and present, the outer and inner, me and everyone else I know. Why would I allow someone else’s anger toward me from miles away, infiltrate and seize my well-being to the degree it did yesterday?

Thousands of Invisible Threads: Part One

Today I am breaking down the threads of enmeshment in the light of the Summer sun. Go with me here; pretend this is you.

Suddenly, while in the middle of a telephone conversation with two business associates, you loose track of where you are. You continue the conversation, maybe listening a bit, maybe adding a few words, yet know there was a glitch and you reacted to what appeared to be a loss of time someplace along the way. It’s a good thing they can’t see your face because you are actually feeling angry!

You try to shake it off and reel yourself in because your presence is being pulled someplace else. You begin to feel oppressed, overwhelmed by an unknown source and your throat is swelling and inflamed. Now the people on the other end of the conference call become distracted, or maybe even disoriented, and do not fully grasp what you’re saying.

You know this because they’ve both answered your question with an emphatic “no,” then repeat what you’ve just asked them as their answer. You shake your head in disbelief, again thankful they can’t see your face. Unfortunately, your voice reacts and it’s obvious to everyone that something weird just happened. Even though you were conscious of the early warning signs, you disregarded them and this is now your first real clue. Something is amiss and there is nothing overtly apparent in the context of the specific point on the table, nor generally in this meeting. Something invisible has quietly shifted the energy and throws everything off course.

If you were sailing, it would be akin to a lull on the lake, the dreaded hole, and the almost unnatural quiet that becalms the boat and everyone on it. There is mystery in the air and everyone feels a bit etheric. Even though there are boats all around, it’s so quiet, you and your crew feel completely alone on that lake. Then you shiver as the hair on the back of your neck lifts, goosebumps spread across your skin as an invisible zephyr simultaneously brushes the surface of the water, coming from behind, and guides the boat off in an entirely different direction. You adjust the sails and go on your way, thankful for even the tiniest bit of movement. Even so, you are still true to the original course and eventually try your best to re-strategize and resume that goal.

Back in the meeting you adjust and move on as well, yet there is something off about the whole experience. Ever active, your mind re-enacts the situation over and over in a deeper compartment of your brain while you continue the necessary communications, listening to your associates at the same time. Not too long after, you realize you’d earlier forgotten to present part of the picture which is a crucial part of the communication process. You apologize, telling them of the missing link and go on about the meeting feeling reconciled with the fact that you made a mistake, admitted it and can now truly move forward.

Most of the symptoms have disappeared. There is no more anger, no more feelings of being in the Twilight zone. You are resolved about the emotions because they are familiar to you, emotions and resulting attitudes that have passed through your body frequently in your life. They must be yours because you’ve almost always taken full responsibility for them. They must be yours because the finger is so often pointed your way as the source, the reason for all this uncomfortable energy stirring about. It’s been an everlasting cycle through your life. Even the lingering sore throat and inflamed glands are consequences you’ve added to your list of regular dockside, after the storm clean ups. So, you stay your course to the end, hosing it all down later, while you are alone.

Today though, the grace of the Universe is obviously with you, suggesting you allow the ebbing currents to take you elsewhere. Later that evening, a friend comes to visit and admits to being angry with you for something someone else said to her during an argument between the two of them. Your name just happened to come up in the midst of it all, astonishingly, at the very same time you were abducted out of your meeting earlier in the day.

WOW! With this new information and level of honesty, your throat almost immediately calms down and you are relieved of the symptoms. The question now is this: do you stop the process here, accepting what happened, yet in effect, blaming those two people for the outcome? Do you stop here and go to bed with a happy ending? Yes, I’m asking you!

Next chapter tomorrow!

Pilgrimage with the Leprechauns

I adore Ireland; it’s in my heart, and my soul is just another tree, blade of grass, or one of the whispers of an Irish breeze. I long for that land’s misty climes, its green rolling landscapes and all its taunting and unseen inhabitants. I feel at home there and one day will mostly likely live there, at least part time. I loved Ireland even before I visited my first time, yet it wasn’t an easy relationship in the beginning, no sir-ree, not a bit! So when I read Tanis Helliwell’s new book, “Pilgrimage with the Leprechauns,” I laughed and cried and felt nothing but empathy for each of her true-life characters.

Imagine traveling to Ireland for the first time with great expectations that the country was filled only with love and a thousand welcomes. Isn’t that what slainte means? Imagine believing you would miraculously find yourself in some castle ruin and that this little stormy island would open it’s arms to embrace and carry you, like a long lost child of nature, beyond the veils of the otherworld, to a place of incredible beauty. Imagine expecting to find immediate work, to meet wonderful new friends and even a romantic soul mate.

Ha! Instead, you meet a bi-polar escapee from a mental hospital in the North. Turns out you are a total fool, setting yourself up as bait, good pickins’ for the little people’s antics. During the first week your fantasy turns into the rainiest, grumpiest, most confrontational inner journey you’ve ever taken, and until this moment, you had no interest in learning about your shadow either! Spirituality was only a lofty and serene place high above the clouds, beyond the galaxy we know.

The rental car company, without notice, deducts three times the price of the quoted rate from your teeny tiny available credit card balance; you have crazy dreams and feel lonelier than you’ve ever been; you are fearful and lost, blaming the locals for giving bad directions and generally resenting their bright-eyed snickers as you drive away in some unknown direction. There are parking tickets, stolen hubcaps, and fights with the authorities about all of it. You are in a constant state of complaint as there is no internet connection; the truth is, you plain and simply just wanted to experience something fantastical, staying home and reading about someone else’s travels.

With what little money remains on your already bulging plastic ticket to a faeryland adventure, you eat potatoes, cabbage and carrots for five weeks straight, wandering around like a victim of the famine, at the effect of almost everything Irish. The brogue is so alien, it might as well have been Russian or Japanese. You look sheepishly and obviously, very American. Then one day the sun peeks out from behind the clouds and you finally find your inner Craic, your flow and your ability to meet the energies of this land which exist in a constant state of time warp and novelty.

This is my story, and now, almost 15 years later, I’ve been to Ireland many times, expecting nothing and coming home with everything. You get the picture. My own story, like many others, is similar to the tale Tanis Helliwell tells in her recently released, “Pilgrimage with the Leprechauns.” Different people, same sites. Different experiences, same lessons.

Eleven days on a bus with 30 people from varying levels of spiritual knowledge and even religious backgrounds; a matching number of journeyers who came specifically for the elemental experience, and those who doubted almost completely; at least 30 taunting elementals including goblins, trolls, brownies, faeries and leprechauns, all laughing while stirring the cauldron of inner growth; a stubborn bus driver who refuses access to the on-board toilet; a grumpy tour guide who is a self-touted expert and author writing about faeries yet doesn’t want to meet them, ever; and three different versions of a sacred site tour itinerary, planned 18 months in advance, all magnified by the tensions running between the three leaders who were attached to them!

Yet, as dramatic as this seems, this is quite like a typical trip to Ireland, filled with trip-ups and misfires, when tourists meet up with the local Craic.The superficial definition of Craic is a joke, an adventure, or a good time, an identifier known as something quintessentially Irish. And while it’s all done in good fun, the Craic these tourists in “Pilgrimage with the Leprechauns” experienced together was much more than a visit to a local pub and a sharp poke in the ribs.

At the very least, the Craic challenged everyone’s attachments and expectations. Some had physical manifestations, others more emotional and psychological experiences as a result of their own tightly held patterns and states of mind. The elementals were there “to help” each one of the participants get over themselves! In the end of course, some did and some didn’t learn to laugh at the inevitable reflections.

In “Pilgrimage with the Leprechauns,” Tanis Helliwell describes the Craic as akin to the Tao, or The Way.

The Tao is a life path; it is the meridians and other energy channels inside us that also weave through the planet and all its creations. Because it is nature, the Craic, like the Tao, offers a constant growth stimulus demanding surrender or else! Naturally occurring, there is darkness and light, balance and chaos living within each human and every little blade of green Irish grass. It’s all about the little streams and gentle currents, yet it is also the rushing rivers of change within every living being; that which we see and that we don’t see quite so easily.

Unless we drop our roles, surrendering to the ebb and flows of something much grander than we are, we get caught up in the whirlpools, knocking about underneath the surface and only coming up for air when the water spins around a rock or bubbles up, just because. We are choking, bruised and battered by our own resistance to this thing we see outside ourselves called nature.

In a time when the news is all pretty discouraging at best, “Pilgrimage with the Leprechauns” inspires us to be trusting and accepting without blinders. It’s an adventure story, a story of humans co-habitating with elementals; it’s about life lessons. It is told with humility and grace, a nod and a twinkle, and absolutely filled with Craic. Entertaining, insightful and provocative, I read it in an evening lying on the couch and am now working on my psychic transport skills. I’d like to smell the peat fires burning, to feel the wind and soak up the dew on my skin. I’d like to walk on that dark rich soil of Ireland again soon.

“Pilgrimage with the Leprechauns” is available at Tanis Helliwell’s website or at Amazon.com.

Inner World: White Coat Syndrome

I used to be paranoid of men in white coats. I thought they were coming to get me, and there is still something hidden deep in the catacombs of my subconscious holding that fear in place. As a young child I often awakened crying and filled with fear because I saw giant faces laughing, threatening and hovering over me.

A long time ago when I was a freshman in high school, I ran around all over campus like a spy, covertly pulling my friends out of class because the men in white coats were “coming to take them away, ha ha he he ho ho, to the funny farm where life is beautiful all the time…” I still remember the first verse of that 1960′s song. How very bizarre!

Doctors are not in my inner circle. In fact, with a few familial exceptions, there are no M.D.’s in my address book at any level and when I do pay a visit to the allopathic, modern medical cubicle, I rely on visualization and really deep breathing to keep me grounded and present. My woman’s doctor is a psychic faery! Until this very moment in time while writing today, I’d never associated the white coat syndrome nor the childhood dreams and subconscious hallucinations of my early teens with a near death and related hospital experience in the first few months of life.

An inner journey earlier this week connected the dots.

Standing on a path at the edge of a forest I was flagged by a cougar, a hawk and a really tall Indian man in full headdress. In the distance was a doctor in a white coat standing amidst the tools of his trade in that time: silver trays on wheels, cold steel surgical tools, big dirty looking tile floors and a weird metal breathing machine. I watched as the doctor moved around the room, making demands and generally commanding attention from several others dressed in white, mostly nurses in funny nun-like hats.

My guides sent me into that frame and I immediately merged with a baby body lying in what appeared to be an incubator and felt like a stone cold metal coffin. Turns out, it was me. I was 7 weeks old. The first thing I noticed was that I wasn’t really in that body and I watched everything from above, from a place near the door.

All those faces looking down at me. It was horrifying to watch and as I came back to my body I was filled with fear and distrust. Even now, as I write this, my head involuntarily shakes “NO!”

The people in white treated me like an object. At least that’s how I translated this experience in my baby body. I was a little tiny 10-pound, 2-foot-long object, whose head was barely bigger than a grapefruit. Even my very empathic adult body felt the rush of emotion as my baby body tried to fight for life and protect itself to no avail. There was something not right about this situation and my undeveloped brain couldn’t understand the intrusion of it all. My baby emotional body, its mammalian consciousness, my soul and spirit did not know how to integrate this experience. I hadn’t even really grasped the fact that I was human yet.

They were all thinking and diagnosing, talking and nodding to each other, putting tubes in me and down my throat. On of those silver-gray metal trays had been rolled over my body. It covered my torso up to my throat and part of my face. I reached out screaming and hit the barrier with one of my fits. Suddenly I stopped crying, feeling protected and somehow safe. What a relief! I loved that tray and began kicking my feet in joy and amusement.
I’ve managed to carry that metal tray ever since and it has served me well over my lifetime, protecting me from the world out there. Like a human organism, it’s grown with me in length, width and thickness; like a big metal plate of armor, it has stopped many an arrow over the years.

I now wonder if people who are abducted by aliens and used as science experiments feel this way too?

Because I was bi-located during the journey, my present-time self put a few of the pieces together and I realized in that moment of no time, no space, that these people weren’t trying to harm me in any way and were actually doing this for my benefit, to keep me alive! So I relaxed and within a flash was walking back to the edge of the forest where I stood watching the scene again.

The Indian man asked me if I forgave them. I transmitted a ‘yes, I forgive them.’ Once out of the trance-like journey space I realized that I’d held a grudge–if that’s even possible to create and carry forward from infancy. It seems as though what was once an overwhelming anxiety and long held fear morphed into anger and control. As I grew up and made sense of what, to a baby, might feel like a tsunami of emotion, I reconciled it from a very different part of my brain than the part that originally experienced it.

Like a life raft bobbing lost and alone in the middle of the sea during a hurricane, I did everything a baby, turned child into teenager, possibly could to survive those early fears and emotions. And I was constantly bailing because avoidance and compartmentalization were not only key coping tools all along the way, they often leaked toxicity. Forgiveness for a non-event, an emotional blur and un-cognated experience is impossible unless it is somehow recapitulated. So back I traveled into the journey space. There’s more to come.

The Indian sent me back into a new frame at the time when my biological mother was at the hospital in labor with me. More white coats, more faces staring down at human objects. As my body was born, before it started breathing, I dove in again and reversed time. We, meaning my current consciousness inside that baby body of mine, moved back through the birth canal into the womb again. It all happened very fast, there was no pain, no thoughts nor fear in this instance, and we visited several stages of my own personal gestation.

Like a drug, at one point I remember feeling injected with her (birth mother’s) sadness. As my purity transformed, I watched from inside what was happening out there. In another moment she pounded on my belly and cried; so filled with grief. It was really her belly on the outside, yet it was all mine inside of her womb and whatever she felt echoed ten-fold in my little world. She blamed everyone and it all came rushing in through the umbilical cord, into me, my lungs, my blood and my growing little organs. I breathed it, ate it, and my heart beat because of it.

I fed on her anxiety, her fear and her blame. There were no decisions, yet I felt the shift in consciousness inside my little self,. I knew the precise moment I chose to suck it all in so I wouldn’t have to see it floating in my amniotic stew, nor to feel compressed and surrounded by so many emotions and negative mind sets. She didn’t know how to manage it, how to feel okay in the midst of it. Her mind conflicted with her emotions and her training conflicted with everything she inherently knew and felt. So there it all sat, stagnating deep inside her unknown places, inside my belly.

As I experienced all this, I could also see from inside this time weft what occurred out there in journey land. The Indian was watching closely, interjecting and transmitting a command, “Forgive her. You can forgive her.” It all came at appropriately timed moments when I was on the precipice of the illusion, ready to run, or at least ready to fold it up nicely and tuck it all into a drawer once again. Instead, I turned toward him nodding my head and dropped it on the floor. I began to forgive my birth mother.

I’ve met her you know, in this world, and she’s a lovely woman. A strong, courageous and sometimes brash little woman who stands defiantly with her hands on her hips and has seen much sorrow in her 74 years. She was barely 20 when I was born and although it was 1956 at the time, she almost kept me. When I first met her she cried in the doorway as I drove up to her house. When I got out of the car, I could tell my presence there had healed several decades of remorse, guilt and self-flagellation. For me, on the other hand, it only stirred the same old angst and revulsion I’d always felt around women who wanted to be close to me. It’s different now, yet I’ve got some more work to do and am grateful for the opportunity to be in contact with my biological family.

The Indian was nodding now, approving of my willingness to go back in and correct the elements of the past that I’ve held for so long. Thank God my time line is tied into the Mayan calendar. Thank Goddess I have at least another 50 years of life to live as an adult in my new form, free of the emotions and erroneous beliefs about the world. He telepathically mentioned as an aside, like an ‘oh by the way,’ “you still have a lot more forgiveness to practice before you are complete. Don’t forget it.”

And then it was time to come home to present time. With me through the ethers came a re-membering of this Ho’oponopono prayer:
Please forgive me,
Thank you.
I love you,
I’m sorry.

I highly recommend Joe Vitale’s book about Ho’oponopono called “Zero Limits.”

The Energetic Connection offers online courses in feminine spirituality, a newsletter about self mastery and weekly podcasts featuring Sacred Space breathing and visualization practices, Spiritual Freedom interviews, movements to open the body to spiritual energy, and Wheel of the Year invocations. Please pay us a visit sometime.

Conversations with the Goddess

Carved into the Biblical mountains near Moab, sits an ancient Jordanian city named Petra. From the depths of one woman’s soul and the soft red stone of the middle east, emerges an energetic link to the past and many future conversations with the Goddess.

Little did Dorothy Atalla know when she first visited this mystical place while on a family vacation in the 1970′s, that her travels had only just begun. Seven years after returning home from that trip, she experienced her first encounter with the Goddess while meditating, beginning an inner journey that transformed her life and empowered her both physically and spiritually.

Recently released, Conversations with the Goddess: Encounter at Petra, Place of Power, is the first in a series of books about Dorothy’s dialogues as well as the connection every woman has with the divine feminine. Moving between present day and ancient times, we are launched on a spiritual journey to seek answers that potentially free us all from inner conflict, encouraging awakening women the world over to embrace the prominent roles they will play in the evolution of humankind.

As the story unfolds, Dorothy evolves, and her interpretations about being female shift rather dramatically. She embraces the fact that her body is not separate from spirit and recognizes that her place within the spiritual intentions of our planet are vast, spanning the expansive time line of Earth’s evolution. With this re-membering, she invites readers to understand what it means to be part of the universal story of the divine feminine which continues to weave through us all in our daily lives.

“There will be a new global spirituality in which great numbers of people will experience me directly. Peoples’ thinking will change. When thinking changes, society changes,” says the Goddess in Dorothy’s journey. This is what we have known, what we have been awaiting for thousands of years. It is a time of balancing the masculine and feminine archetypes by honoring the divine feminine in all human beings.

And Dorothy herself says, “My hope for the readers of Conversations with the Goddess: Encounter at Petra, Place of Power is that they feel they are experiencing the voice of the Goddess. Every woman is part of Her Story, emerging in our times, a story which includes affirmation of women’s wisdom and the spiritual power of the feminine.”

Conversations with the Goddess: Encounter at Petra, Place of Power is available at Amazon.com.

Feel free to visit Dorothy Atalla’s website too for more information on her programs and writings.