I’ve been silent in this space for a long while, partly because I’m in the middle of moving from NYC to upstate New York. In this time I’ve been grounding myself. I’ve stopped going to fly class and I’ve returned to gardening. I really needed to get my hands and Read more…
Late last November I was sitting in meditation and had the distinct feeling that I should drop everything I was working on and clear the decks. For what, I had no idea. This had been a growing sense at the margins of my awareness for a some weeks prior, but it hit me with a sudden force while I was meditating, and when I felt more consciously into it, my body felt an immediate sense of relief even though my mind was protesting. The message to wind down Dreamers & Schemers was clear, though for no good “reason” and with nothing to fill its place. (more…)
Sometimes in that twilight space between sleep and wakefulness a voice speaks to me of things I need to learn. Recently it transmitted a word I haven’t used since my days in academia.
“Interstial! Pay attention to the stillness and silence between words and sounds, to the spaces between the grains of rice.” I was pleasantly lulled by the initial abstraction, but that last bit about the rice roused my mind, which then began to fiddle at the edges of the metaphor.
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Yesterday I began to write about the initiatory experience I had with a tree in my neighborhood park. Today I’d like to share a bit of how I communicate with it, because it doesn’t look anything like how I’d imagined it would be. To me it still feels extraordinary, but I happen to know a lot of folks who talk to trees and have trees talk right back to them quite matter-of-factly. This may happen spontaneously on a hike, or a friendship might form over a period of years in someone’s backyard, and there are even cases when communication takes place over a great distance with a tree whom the person knows from memory or even just a photograph. My communication with this tree, by contrast, is wordless. Let me be clear. It’s not that we speak to each other telepathically; we don’t “talk” at all. To better explain this wordless communication, I have to rewind a bit and share a bit of backstory not just with trees, but my intuitive development in general. (more…)
At the end of January and early this month my sleep schedule went out of whack. I’d either find myself sleepless until 3:00 or 4:00am, or if I managed to fall asleep at a reasonable hour, I’d inevitably wake up around those times. During that period I had been feeling a lot of unfamiliar energies coming in and they were keeping me up at night. I wasn’t alarmed because I had been working with an intention to open to new energies since the beginning of the year, but I did want to figure out how to make the process a little more comfortable.
I checked with my Akashic Records and they suggested I stop trying to understand the energies, because I was giving myself headaches attempting to analyze every little bit coming through. Ah, my mind was up to its old tricks! My Records recommended surrendering to the flow and trusting that I would be aware of whatever I need to when the timing’s right. (more…)
Last night I had the puzzling feeling that I shouldn’t sign up for my usual Tuesday trapeze class. This morning, my intuition hadn’t changed, but I decided to check the class schedule anyway, and found that the last remaining spots had been taken between the time I went to bed Read more…
I repeatedly tell my clients that an Akashic Record reading—at least the way that I offer it—is not predictive. The readings I offer call for your own engagement in the process, and to have any real effect on your life you will have to walk your path consciously, by making your own decisions rather than taking marching orders from on high. That said, sometimes it looks like a reading “predicted” something accurately. I’d like to share a story to look more closely into that phenomenon to show that it is actually the client’s doing, and not mine, when something the Records said “comes true.” (more…)
Here is the audio of the extended version of my call to the four directions. (9:55)
You may want to strip it down to the essence and/or build upon this framework, swapping out aspects of it (e.g., using a different set of power animals, adding sacred plants, assigning different symbolism to each direction, etc.), or changing the starting point and/or the direction you move through each point. (more…)
Upon returning from my trip to Peru, I started a practice of calling to the four directions because doing so engaged my heart, got me immediately grounded and centered, and made me feel embraced in a very supportive atmosphere. I got really curious about it because I noticed that the way my shaman opened sacred space seemed a little different from the method attributed to the Q’ero (here in Spanish and in English). This makes sense considering that practice is rooted in various indigenous communities around the Americas, so there isn’t one consistent way of going about this. I noticed that where people started their circle (some in the East, others in the South), and also what they called in (animals, plants, elements, attributes) differed depending on how a tradition constructs its medicine wheel. Aside from the First Nations of North America, versions of this prayer practice is also found in among Andean, Mayan, Nordic, Siberian, and Celtic communities, as well.
Faced with all this variety, I got a little overwhelmed. When I asked my Akashic Records about the best way for me to go about doing this for myself, they responded that I should keep doing what I was doing: letting my curiosity lead me to different versions of the prayer, trying each one out, and noticing what portions of each prayer seem to connect to my heart. They said that eventually I would find my very own way of doing it. (more…)
I recently came across an article by mindfulness and meditation teacher and author Jon Kabat-Zinn that really resonated with me as I started looking back on the two years of sharing a whole variety of meditation techniques and mindfulness tools via Dreamers & Schemers. My tendency is to try anything Read more…