Category: Spiritual

Rainbow Child

In my last blog post, I wrote about reliving my physical birth during a meditation in Panache Desai’s “Awakening Your Authentic Soul Signature” at Omega. My other “birth” that week occurred during an individual breakthrough session, separate from the rest of the program. At least I thought it was separate, but with Panache, all separation has a tendency to dissolve. This was my second breakthrough session with him (see previous blog post “Infinity” for a description of my first session in Costa Rica). I felt that I still had some blocks that I wanted help with releasing. Well, my mind’s idea of why I was there didn’t align with Panache’s perception of why I was there.

First, I should say that Panache sees people energetically. He sees their infinite potential and sees where there are blocks to that potential. And he pulls no punches in telling you what he sees. After a few minutes of addressing the issue I presented to him, he said, “When are you going to come out to yourself?” My background, which he knows, is that I have been out in the world as a lesbian for many years (35) and have been with my partner for 29 years. I came out within the feminist movement of the 1970s and have marched in the streets for women’s and gay rights in the years since then. So I wasn’t buying this comment from him; I thought, “What does he know about being a lesbian? He’s a straight man.” Still, I remembered that he had more than once said that lesbians and gay men are some of the most courageous people on the planet because they are living their truth. So, my resistance gradually faded, and our hour together became a mutually expansive dialogue and an extraordinary emotional inner journey for me. His perception was that I had come out to the world, but part of me had not integrated it on an emotional level (this is what he saw energetically).

And damn if he wasn’t right. Looking back, I realized that my decision to come out in the 1970s had been a political one (deliberately choosing equal relationships without male/female roles). I chose with my head, and only partially my heart. In the course of the hour, I moved through memories of coming out (the disapproval and hatred as well as the acceptance and love) and also came face to face with my own judgments about bisexuality and heterosexuality (betrayal of your sisters), which I had formed at that time in my life. I thought I had moved to a more accepting, inclusive mindset, but surprisingly, I had old opinions stuck inside me. Through tears, laughter, and vibrational transformation (I was shaking all over), I released old judgments and separations and stepped into my own soul signature truth: “I am all of the labels, and I am none of the labels. I am a whole energy-being of light. I am divine consciousness expressing itself as a lesbian.” And Panache was right there, experiencing it with me (crying too). He was instigator and participant (getting in touch with his “inner lesbian”), as well as trusted friend. A completely integrated rainbow lesbian birth after all these years—who knew?!

The other part of the story is that I decided to share my breakthrough experience in the larger group of more than 60 people, and other individuals also spoke of separations/fears/judgments about sexual identity and roles that they carried within them. It became an ongoing part of our evolution during the week. On the last morning of the program, Panache had us all, as one soul family (himself included), repeat out loud together, over and over: “I am a lesbian. I am gay. I am bisexual. I am straight.” Very powerful and very healing. Our soul selves are indeed all of those labels and none of them—that’s oneness. Some of us have come into this life to stand in the truth of being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender—identities that expand the wider experience of what it means to be human on Planet Earth. Sometimes that’s terribly challenging or frightening. Other times, as we all evolve into a greater love, it feels like the greatest blessing in the world.

“That which you’ve gone through in your life has served to bring you into the fullness of who you are here to be for yourself, for your friends, for your families, and for an entire planet.”—Panache Desai

Birth Day

“Welcome Home!” a friend emailed me after I returned from a week’s retreat with Panache Desai at Omega in Rhinebeck, New York, last month. Little did she know how appropriate those words were. In the deepest possible sense, I came home to my self over the course of the two programs (“Receiving Boundless Abundance” and “Awakening Your Authentic Soul Signature”). The weekend Abundance program laid intense groundwork for the second Soul Signature one, and it was during those latter five days that I experienced not one, but two “births,” one taking place on my actual birthday. Along with so many others who were present, I stepped into being more myself (the soul self that I came to this planet to be) than I had ever been in my life.

Panache’s gatherings, more accurately called vibrational transformations, always pack a punch, but this one was off the charts (see previous blog post “The Silence Within” for a description of the avatar presence that Panache embodies which shifts those around him). Most of it was so experiential as to be almost beyond language, but I want to at least try to share one particular morning’s meditation journey in which I relived my birth at the very same clock time that I had been born. Throughout the meditation, Panache played a CD of mantras designed to help us move through any emotional blocks that were keeping us from living our full unlimited potential. We were encouraged to access any past fear- or survival-based experiences so that we could feel them through to completion (and thus free up the flow of life energy within us). He walked quietly among us, speaking occasionally, touching occasionally.

After a short time of not really feeling anything, suddenly I was catapulted into my own traumatic birth experience, in which both my mother and I almost died. She was hemorrhaging, and I broke her tailbone as I came through the birth canal. Reliving it, I experienced the neck and head pain associated with pushing to be born. Survival for me was linked to straining, struggle. My default mode has always been trying, never surrender. Completely letting go has been difficult for me because I always try to do it. As I emotionally felt the source of this within my own birth, something in me finally relaxed and surrendered to the experience of being born, on a physical and energetic level. My whole body began to vibrate, internally and externally, and my root chakra (linked to survival) was pulsing so strongly that it felt like energy was radiating out a foot or more from my lower abdomen. Simultaneously, I felt pressure and tingling at my crown chakra on the top of my head. It was if my energetic life support system was being blasted wide open for the first time since my birth.

The experience was powerfully liberating, and I cried tears of both release and gratitude. In the process of letting go completely and flowing with my rebirth, I also began to feel as if I were being gently touched by Spirit at different points all over my body, particularly my hands, which seemed as if they were being held by strong reassuring spirit hands. I truly felt surrounded by a deeply loving eternal energy, unlike anything I had ever experienced. I was completely beyond the mind and within my heart/soul, trusting the infinite universe that held me. It was amazing. Afterward, in the hours and days that followed, I felt lighter, quite literally—filled with light and spaciousness. Welcome home, indeed!

Midpoint 2012: Evolving at the Speed of Light

My experience of the long-prophesied and much-talked-about year 2012 has thus far been beyond anything I could have imagined even six months ago. The prevailing feeling has been of infinite possibility and limitless expansion. I have a heightened sense of my own ongoing transformation, day to day, even minute to minute. What I once considered impossible or unlikely (learning how to dissolve pain or fear) has flowed easily into the realm of my own experience. I am evolving, and it’s happening so fast that I am aware that I am evolving. And I’m not alone.

Forget Charles Darwin—this is super-evolution, 2012 style, and no one gets left behind! It is a collective evolution wherein we are all expanding into the improbable and impossible—into our wildest dreams materializing in physical form. The magnificence of our own divine potential is flowering right before our very eyes. As we evolve, labels, roles, belief systems, and separations of all kinds are falling away. We are becoming our own teachers, healers, and gurus—our own luminous pieces of God consciousness on Earth. We truly are “the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

Recently, I took part in an online interactive chat session and live streaming video with Panache Desai and hundreds of people around the world (many got up in the middle of the night or before dawn to participate). The oneness and love shared, and then transmitted outward from participants to all beings everywhere, was phenomenal. The energetic shift was palpable. During his weekly webcasts, Panache often guides listeners to create these expansive circles of energy and light. Many spiritual groups use healing, prayer, or intention circles on a regular basis, and with the Internet, these kinds of circles grow and their effects increase exponentially. Using technology combined with psychic connection to share/send the energy of love and light brings more and more people into conscious awareness of oneness. Increasingly, individuals are sensing that something greater is possible—a fifth-dimension world based in compassion, sharing, and loving-kindness for all beings. We are beginning to live that truth in our daily lives.

In the midst of tumultuous changes on the planet, we are alchemists, working miracles, one by one and ten thousand by ten thousand. Metaphoric metal is turning to gold. People are throwing aside crutches of all kinds, physical or nonphysical, and walking unassisted into the manifestation of their own visions. Imagination is the magic wand we wave, and spiritual energy creates the new world before us. The mind alone cannot conceive of the wonders yet to come. It is the heart that leads the way. From a place of love, anything is possible. All it takes is belief—in ourselves, individually and collectively, and in the infinite guiding wisdom that holds us in oneness in the cosmos.

Earth is on track for spontaneous evolution into higher consciousness; together, we are creating an en-Light-ened present unlike any time-bound past that has preceded it. We are stepping into magnificence, into living our soul selves in every moment. I feel the truth of this deep in my own heart because I experience it every day. The miraculous is everywhere. Finally, we are one with those miracles, eyes wide open, hearts wide open. It is a time for celebration!

“We are one heart, one love, and one spirit. We are one consciousness expressing itself in 7 billion different ways.”—Panache Desai

Fear Less

In Jan Frazier’s book When Fear Falls Away, she describes a sudden falling away of fear, just before having a repeat mammogram. The subsequent awakening she experienced changed her life. It is something we all dream of: to live with unshakable trust in the universe. I believe that we are now entering a period in the Earth’s evolution in which that is possible, not just for yogis or shamans, but for every person on the planet. Individual processes may not be as instantaneous as Jan Frazier’s, but I think the ultimate experience of trust in something greater will be very similar. I believe this because I feel it happening to me.

Recently, after intentionally stepping away from external busyness in the “real” world (see blog post “Unplugged and Reconnected”), I found that a door opened within me through which life poured through in boundless exuberance. The perfect books and spiritual workshops presented themselves to me with free-flowing synchronicity. In addition to these, the time that I sat alone in silent meditation and contemplation in my backyard was deeply transformative. I spent hours there each day, sometimes working in my garden, sometimes meditating, sometimes just breathing in the beauty all around me—the flowers, the trees, the sky, the clouds, the birds. A tiger swallowtail butterfly floating into the yard would make my heart catch in my throat at the miracle of its very existence. A single ray of sun penetrating the dense green shrubbery to form a patch of shimmering golden light on the grass would fill my eyes with tears. It was if I were absorbing the magnificence of the world through my very pores.

Gradually, as these magic moments continued, a deep loving connection to something larger than my own life became my prevailing experience. I have had such moments frequently in recent years, but something new was beginning to shift within me now. The connection to Source or Spirit was less fleeting, more a part of me. As the external world continued to be rocked by the changes inherent in 2012 and the Great Shift, I found that, within me, everything that was not trust in the presence of Spirit in all things began to dissolve. Old rigid ways of perceiving the world fell away. As did fear. I was not completely fearless (impossible—I am human), but I feared less.

Months later, after continued inner journeying on my own and at various spiritual gatherings, I find that this opening/shedding process has continued. I am no longer run by fear. Instead, at any given moment, I can connect to a spacious silent place within where peace and a trusting calm exist (see previous post “Infinity”). And I truly believe that now is the time when we all can find that inner space and open our hearts to a greater trust, a greater love.

 

Unplugged and Reconnected

Not long ago, I decided to unplug myself from technology for a month. I took a mini-sabbatical from computers (including all email and editorial work), TV, and radio (I don’t own a cell phone). It was with a huge sigh of relief that I did this. My days had begun to be filled with such constant busyness that even finding time to meditate or take long walks seemed difficult. When I stopped sitting for hours in front of the computer, my life opened up all around me.

At the same time that I closed the technology door, I opened another door—to the natural world outdoors and the world of spirit present everywhere. Outside in my backyard, I gardened, read, meditated, or just gazed at passing clouds in the sky or the sun on the flowers in my garden. I often felt transported to another dimension where only infinite variations of light were real. Life seemed as fragile and precious as a flower petal or an inhaled breath. There were moments when all I felt was gratitude for the gift of being alive.

In my journal I wrote: “We have this one lifetime to live in a human body, to look through human eyes and see the beauty of the world. I just want to drink in the wonders all around me, to feel in my heart each exquisite detail of flower, leaf, and cloud. I could look at the sky forever and never come to the end of its magnificence. Every bird and butterfly and bee is a tiny miracle. In the swirling center of each flower is a sacred universe. I am so blessed to have this life on Earth. I don’t want to miss a thing. I don’t want to lose a second looking at a computer or TV when the world and all its breathtaking beauty is just outside the door.”

Along with the wonder and awe came a deep connection to the living spirit that existed in the natural world all around me. The spirit within me embraced the spirit everywhere outside of me, and I stepped into a profound experience of oneness that expanded with each passing day. I found that within each exquisite detail of the universe that I perceived with my physical eyes was an invisible thread that led to the infinite Source of all things. William Blake described this perfectly: “To See a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wildflower/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/And Eternity in an hour.”

So did I renounce all technology for the rest of my life after discovering “God in the details”? No, of course not. We live in a human world that has manifested global communication via the Internet. If it doesn’t overtake your life, it can be a wonderful vehicle for experiencing worldwide interconnections. The key is balance, as in all things. I still check my email, visit favorite websites, and even listen to spiritual webcasts, but I’m now more in touch with when it’s time to turn off the computer and walk out the door into nature’s paradise.