Archive for August, 2010

Inner Journey: Heart in Hand

August 21st, 2010 by Michele

“Not so fast,” he said it like my Dad when I was jumping out of my skin trying to get onto the next carnival ride. I always stood at attention back then, looking up at him with my ‘hurry-up’ face and eyes.

In this moment, I was diving into a glimmering pool of water. I was trying to dive, anyway, and then he held me back, placing his hand over my heart, palm on my skin.

“Remember, this is heaven’s heart,” and suddenly I grew into my adult body. “Your soul belongs not only to you but to all here on Earth and in the Heavens.”

I was patient with this for only a moment, then I dove. And then I came flying, no bouncing, out of the water right back onto the shore. I was incredulous, looking around for an answer. No one was there, so I strode right back into the water, stiff armed, taught and tall, though this time entering aware enough to realize there was a beat, a rhythm to this fluid. It pulsed and contracted, expanded and bubbled.

For a short time I swam with it. Then because I am who I am, I ignored that beat and began to work by my own will, scrubbing the outer surfaces of what I soon recognized was my heart. It was all planned; I wanted to clean the valves, scrape and polish the pericardium, clear out some of the larger veins and arteries, and just when I started to put plan into action, I was pulsed out again.

“What, the heck?” The hyper-vigilant part of me that wants to complete a lot of things, to always be surfing the crests, was a bit indignant about this distraction.

“You must learn to embrace and love your heart first,” said the Indian guide who’d appeared on the shore. “You’re in such a hurry to make it all different.” His hand was on my breastbone again, and he reached in cradling my heart, feeling and sensing the pumping with his eyes closed. “Now it’s your turn.”

I don’t know how, yet in a flash I was cradling my heart in the crook of both my hands. Like a rosebud on it’s hips, it nestled into the heels of my palms. He instructed me to be with it for a while, so I became quiet, eyes closed, holding my heart. As it lay resting there, I could feel through the tissue, and with my intention, I breathed away the sludge of the past.

Once it cleared, I slid into the glimmering pool of water again, lay on my back enjoying the rhythms of my heartbeat. I was surrounded by the soft responses of the waves to my heart’s rhythm. While floating there in the middle of my inner world, I saw some of my ancestors-I believe I saw six different bodies standing there. The eyes on their faces looked softly into my own. They had been waiting for me to come into center so they could send messages to people they’d left on the other side.

“Please don’t resist us anymore,” they said it in unison, as though they were one voice.

Tags: , ,
Posted in The Mysteries | No Comments »

Inner Journey: Clearing Away the Dross

August 20th, 2010 by Michele

“More than anything, I want to clear away everything that blocks me from accepting who I am and all that is,” I announced it like I usually do, loudly, to God and anyone else within earshot.

Then my tiny naked body backed down the viney trellis of roots, slowly making my way down the rope into the underworld of my subconscious mind. Finally after what seemed like a really long time in that little body, I made it to the floor of the forest.

Three guides met me there, three I’d never seen before, three who spoke no words, though the vibration told me my journey was once again deep into the inner world. This time I was an observer as we made our way around my central energy system.

At the first stop I watched in wonder and surprise as my first chakra gave birth to a round, black, leaded object, like a canon ball. I knew that with the birthing of that ball, I had released self-doubt along with the envy projected onto me by others because I was a visionary. I’d had many visions from which I’d birthed many ideas during my courses. I’d held onto the energy of competition for many lifetimes.

My second chakra was cleared of judgment from those who disdained me because I’d never procreated, not in this life and, as it seemed, many others. Because I didn’t fit into the mother’s club, I was an outcast, so along with the disdain came shame and guilt, and fear of abandonment by my global sisters.

The underbody of my third chakra was covered in cement that I had laid. I watched as the old crusty plaque was scraped off the surface of my diaphragm. My inhalation loosened. Empathically breathing deeply and freely, I knew I’d long suppressed my connection to the winds of inspiration for fear of being criticized, or worse, cast out for being free.

There was a set of gray metal plates lying horizontally over my fourth chakra, between them a small gap. Like a winking slit, it slid to create an opening. For a brief moment, I saw the light seeping through and then it closed again, so we moved on to the fifth chakra.

My Throat Chakra was huge in comparison to the others. A tiger’s head was framed inside, big and bold. I stared at that tiger, believing for a moment that all was well in there, nothing to clear. Then shivers spread across the surface of my body as a massive snake’s head fell out. It’s mouth was open, attack ready, and it was dead. As soon as we noticed, it fell, crumbling into a thick greasy dust.

When it was time to look at the sixth chakra, we boarded an elevator, rising into the center of my head. Never stepping out, we looked into the space and watched as feathers turned to wings, wings to a crane and the crane into a visionary’s perch. I pulled on the bars of that cagey elevator trying to pry myself out so I could stand on that perch, next to that crane. And then we went up, through a glass ceiling between the Third Eye into the seventh seal.

All I saw was a dust bowl, wide open to the crazy world just above my head; I turned away gasping for breath and relief in my sleeve. Swirling, gritty, chunky sand was funneling into my Crown Chakra filling it up to the brim. There was no room for me in there, much less anything divine, so I reached in tentatively and closed down the hatch.

“Go to the fourth chakra and feel the fear you have for your void, your emptiness,” the booming voice came from someplace unknown. I knew it wasn’t my guides and I knew it wasn’t my own inner voice. It was incredibly commanding, so I went back to my heart covered in gray metal plates.

The slit between them had opened just enough for me to enter. Still though, I had to crawl, sliding between the two metal sheets into a space that widened gradually with a view to a slim night sky. I lay between the metal plates, my head hanging out looking around at the stars, the planets, darkness and space. Suddenly I became dizzy and pulled my head back between the metal like a frightened turtle, squeezing my eyes closed, filled with anxiety. I felt trapped in there and the only way out was through space, through the dark, empty void. I knew what I was required to do and yet I allowed my mind to pull me deeper into panic.

I thought I was safe in my little huddled up, anxious world until something grabbed my arms, pulling me out and tossed me into the dark night sky. I couldn’t look and I wouldn’t unfold. Curled up like a ball in fear, I dropped quickly through what felt like a gravitational field of sorts, falling and sinking into nothingness.

Then I remembered the crane living inside my sixth chakra. My wings unfolded, opening and expanding, spreading wide like the night. I glided gracefully and easily, swooping downward only when I saw a fish under the surface of the shimmering starlit sky.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in The Mysteries | No Comments »

Inner Journey: Forgiveness

August 18th, 2010 by Michele

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…

…until I traveled inward.

Standing on a path at the edge of a forest I was flagged by a cougar and a hawk. There was also a really tall Indian man in full headdress there; this may have been our first encounter. 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 because I was watching everything from above, from a place near the door.

All those faces looking down at me. It was horrifying to see, and as I came back to my baby 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 back then. I was a little tiny 10-pound, 2-foot-long object, whose head was barely bigger than a grapefruit. Even my very empathic adult journey 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. One 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 strangely 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 had 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, expressing her overflowing sense of 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 me and my biological father for her plight, and it all came rushing in through the umbilical cord, into me, my lungs, my blood, bones 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 waves of incredible negativity. 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 all up nicely and tuck it all into a drawer once again. Instead, I turned toward him nodding my head and dropped those haunting, cellular memories right 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 13 years ago, 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, I’ve focused on healing that piece since that meeting, yet I’ve got some more work to do and am grateful for the opportunity to be in continuous 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. Even though I cannot change the facts, or the events, I can change my interpretation of them. 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.”

With a nod, up the roots I rose. Into the light of present time.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in The Mysteries | No Comments »

Inner Journey: Inner Knowing

August 17th, 2010 by Michele

“Relax. Listen to your body. Open your heart,” I wondered if my mind was talking to me or if I’d picked up something in the ethers.

Lying on my mat in a restorative yoga class is like floating on a cloud or on a raft in the middle of a quiet lake, fully conscious and aware. My breathing softens and regulates; my bones get heavy; my muscles melt like butter on a warm afternoon; my organs, especially digestive, are grateful for the opportunity to work optimally; and my mind, after a good release, a little focus and encouragement, becomes still.

Like an antidote, restorative yoga counteracts the effects of stress in the moment. More important though, it entrains the body-mind to find a different response, physiologically, emotionally and mentally. It inspires neurological shifts, breaking down the stronghold of ingrained patterns, and plants seeds for new responses.

Here, the word stress is a blanket identification and source for all maladies, be they emotional, mental or physical. No matter what its origins, stress creates acidity, which creates inflammation, which is the foundation for all illness and disease. Each level of health or dis-ease can be a precursor for the next and begins with stress of some sort. They all link, like the cycle of fire, wind, water, earth and metal in Five Element Theory used by acupuncturists and herbalists.

The instability of one sets the tone for imbalance in another. And, the stability of one creates health in the next part of the cycle. If we want to create or sustain overall health, we can begin with the body and the body will communicate to the other levels of beingness that it’s time to shift gears and relax. We can also begin with the mind, which tells the emotional body, which tells the physical body to surrender to this moment.

It’s really pretty simple; we just have to choose someplace to begin.

I learned how to ground my body and release energy over 20 years ago. That’s when my panic attacks stopped. Still prone to picking up garbage and flying through the ethers though, I often find myself back at the beginning, grounding and releasing, starting from scratch and loving this simple tool. I learned how to anchor myself in my body much more recently. That’s when I learned about ownership. Still prone to pulling up anchor, I find myself tapping my lower abdomen as a daily practice or when I lack presence in any moment.

A result or benefit of being connected to the Earth and anchored in my body, I am much more centered, relaxed and able to find calm within. My nervous system has remembered an alternative to fight or flight and survival. By connecting my body to the center of the Earth, I create a safe space to anchor my energy in my physical container. By anchoring myself in this worldly vessel, I set the tone for autonomic nervous system balance.

Did you know that both the central and autonomic nervous systems link the brainstem at the sixth chakra to the sacrum and pelvic floor at the first chakra? Did you know that the cerebral spinal fluid flowing between these two physical points is also the energy we call kundalini, chi or life force? One night some time back I took a journey into my subconscious during a restorative yoga class when this connection was entirely uninhibited. A simple, yet crucial piece of information came to light about balance and relaxation.

“When you restore yourself, you relax. When you relax, your autonomic nervous system finds balance. When you are balanced in that way, your Sun and Moon energies run freely through your body, both subtly and physically,” the voice definitely came from within me.

I wondered why this almost mundane bit of information was so important in that moment and why was I talking to myself again? I already knew that, yet in those moments of relaxation and presence, more information poured in. Part from the center of my head and part from under my breastbone, the voice spoke up again.

“When your masculine sun energy overpowers you, there is too much fire running upwards into your upper energy centers. With all this heat, you feel irritable, even angry and explosive, perpetuating the fire moving up into your head. This goes against the flow of warming energy to and from your heart, making it almost impossible to sustain a compassionate state.”

Back on the mat I am fully rested, my body restoring itself as I breathe and watch the day’s thoughts and emotions channeling downward out of my head and heart. There is nothing wrong, and there is nothing right. All is accepted, all is neutral. My mind is mostly quiet, save the intermittent thoughts of gratitude and “why don’t I do this every single day?” passing through. In this emptiness, I begin a conversation with my soul who effortlessly encourages my heart to open more and more with each breath I take.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in The Mysteries | No Comments »

Inner Journey: The Foggy Terrain of Oneness

August 16th, 2010 by Michele

Walking along what felt like the foggy Northern California coast, I had a moment of extreme disorientation, even panic. I ran back to my entry point immediately, stopping short the hike I was barely beginning with my favorite guide.

My heart beat right out of my chest, heavy with a fear so deep I was trapped in my body’s responses to what felt a lot like loneliness. My breathing became shallow and very labored; I was dizzy with overwhelmingly hot energy surging in my head like a storm wave. Disorientation turned to dissolution. Soon, I couldn’t force in any more air and I was loathe to let go of what I’d already accumulated in what I experienced as collapsing, yet was most likely bursting, lungs.

How can this fullness feel so empty?

My arms and legs tingled–first with nervy numbness, then heaviness that turned into a complete loss of sensation, maybe circulation–as though they weren’t even there.

Then I wasn’t there.

In elevators or in traffic on bridges, panic used to feel like a heart attack; here, in nature, it felt more like I was stroking out…whatever that feels like. Then I became lost inside a place so deep inside myself I couldn’t talk and my legs were like jello; even writing about it brings back the tiniest bit of those feelings again. Like a novice shape-shifter, I struggled and fought to sustain my form, to keep from disintegrating.

These symptoms worsened with thoughts of doom and death. Because I’d had these sensations before, I could re-create them easily, pulling on memories that led to obsessive thinking. Long, deep breath to change the context.

What triggered such an event? I think it was the fog.

Walking into the thick mist, the vanishing point ahead, I felt lost in the unknown; like driving in a blizzard, the drops of water were fast moving around us as we walked toward the one point we never reached. Even if we had continued on as planned, we would never reach that place; it would remain out in front, some elusive point in the sea of similarity, massive drops of fog that held the Universe inside.

Disorientation, fear, panic, and then non-existence. As soon as doubt rolled into my mind like the fog blankets the coastline, non-existence never really had a chance in this body as I clung to my many forms, anything that would keep me separated from the discomfort of not being me. My mind was tortured with pictures of vast expanses of ocean, lost at sea, with a thousand thoughts of loosing myself, of never being “this” again.

My ego desperately needed acknowledgment; even more, it needed to know and see familiar things. It needed to see the sky, the hills around us, my skin and even the ground, would have been a welcome sight to my ego that needed to be defined in that very demanding moment.

So I ran. I ran until I could see the light coming back through the flat monotones of grayish mist; I ran until I could see the trail markings, the signs and even the muddled lines that delineated it from the wild grasses, rocks and unmarked territory on either side. I knew the difference, however hazy the delineation, and I welcomed its strength in me.

When I returned, I remembered the way this same scenario repeated over and over in my waking life the next several years. Flying to Denver from Albuquerque or St. Louis, in the middle of hundreds of people chatting away, I was lonely and filled with panic. While sailing peacefully over the gentle seas of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California , I was lost and alone out there with no land in sight, even on a clear, fog-less day.

While working at a hiking retreat in the Redwoods just south of San Francisco, I was introduced to a forest of God-like sentries that stand looking down at the shores of Half Moon Bay below. Their old souls are discrete, hiding something dear in the dank darkness up there on the ridge. I love those Redwoods and long for them now, almost daily. They are the keepers and incredible protectors of a mostly unknown ecosystem deep underneath the canopy of their forestation. They are certainly unmet by those who drive past at 50 miles an hour on the way to some populated and comfortable place; they are mostly unseen to those who sail by sea looking up at their fortress, and even unknown to those who walk among them, between their spaces on the soft paths that wind through their middle world. Even to those who live nearby breathing the same air inspired by this mystical prana, their inner world is mostly undiscovered.

Over the years I’ve been lost in those trees as they too provoke my ego’s comfort zone. Even on paths I’ve walked hundred’s of times before, I am lost, because there is another level of awareness that pervades and ignores the known senses. In there, I am senseless.

Because I visit this inner terrain often, I can re-create the panic of being lonely inside the expanse, within the oneness, in the midst of so much freedom. It’s really quite frightening.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in The Mysteries | No Comments »
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »