Rising Spirit

Contrariwise, I'm Sure!

2015-07-06T09:31:00.001-07:00

Opposites are one of the most useful concepts Spirit has given us. Think about the heyoka, the sacred clown who wears his clothes inside out and says all the things everyone else is afraid to say aloud. The heyoka makes us listen to ideas we may not want to acknowledge, because in order to understand what he really means we have to listen between the lines.

In the past 24 hours, Heyoka has come to me twice. My friend Fox is playing a game about signs this month, in which everything that happens is considered to be a sign or an omen. I am usually not fond of games and there are events happening all around me that make game playing problematic -- but since this is such a striking one, I will play it today.

What is Heyoka trying to tell me, by showing up in a book and in a television program? It is only his appearance that has come, there have been no spoken communications. So, it must be the concept of contrarianism that Heyoka is bringing to my attention.

Is he saying that I am not enough of a contrarian? That I am too much of a contrarian? Or he may be simply reminding me that life doesn’t always go smoothly when Mercury is retrograde as it is now. He may be reminding me to cut other people some slack during this time. Or to cut myself some slack.

Heyoka is forcing me to ponder, and I am not in the mood to slow down to ponder anything right now. I’d hoped to be able to float (or at least dog paddle) through the backwards flowing river of Mercury this month. Alas.

Life is tossing me irreverently into white-water rapids. I am trying to remember that Lewis Carroll wrote the best line about Heyoka that has ever been conceived: “Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t.” (Tweedledum and Tweedledee)

And that is the point of Heyoka medicine: whatever you think you know is going on, isn’t.

a little more about Dream Work

2015-07-06T09:24:00.002-07:00

One of the hats I wear is called “dreamworker”. My friend Fox asked me yesterday if I would blog in more detail about the difference between what I term medicine dreams and dreams that are important but are not medicine/spiritual power dreams.

I’ll try. Keep in mind that this information comes from my own experiences between the worlds. Your experiences, or that of your teachers, will be similar but different.

“Power” or “Medicine” dreams come when Spirit has something to tell you but cannot get through to you during meditation or oracles.The definition of these dreams is that they come from your own Higher Power and communicate important soul life information to your personal power center. It is very similar to “medicine” work done by tribal shamans, who frequently travel the bridge between the natural world and the spiritual world in order to retrieve information that would otherwise not be available to them. I use the term “medicine dream” when speaking to people who are familiar with my work.

In a Power Dream, your personal “medicine” will allow your spiritual mind to speak to you in the language and symbols it deems best for your current evolution. In this way, you receive undeniable guidance from Creator, spirit guides, higher self or whatever you interpret as your Higher Power. There is no question, when you awake from a dream like this, that you have been communicating with God.

When this occurs in the dream state, it can release your body’s endorphins to creates balance and harmony in your power center. The dream vision coupled with this energy is one of utmost clarity. You just know that the entire dream experience was a message from Spirit, and you know to act in waking life exactly as the dream told you to act.

This kind of dream “work” is very different from when you have a dream that you know is important. In dreamwork, Higher Intelligence is communicating directly with your own intelligence. In other types of dreams, your subconscious mind is communicating with your waking mind.

I Like What You've Done With The Old Place

2015-07-06T09:22:00.001-07:00

I did a psychic reading today for an acquaintance who was concerned about a ghost face she had seen peering into the windows of her old house. Sometimes, the figure of a woman wearing a long dress can be seen flitting quickly down a hallway.

When I arrived at the home I sat in my car for several minutes, admiring its setting. The entire yard has been exactingly and lovingly designed after the manner of an old Southern flower garden, with winding paths and comfortable scattered seating.

The house is an old one, also patiently and carefully renovated. As soon as I sat down in the front porch wicker chair, the spirit lady made her presence known. She was a very polite, pleasant but stand-offish lady. Well aware that she is on the other side but doesn't want to be crossed over or rescued, she doesn't feel she needs help. The house is where she grew up, circa 1910s, and she is content with what the current owners have done with it. She tries to be unobtrusive but she does enjoy living with them. Her name is either Lydia or something like Lisha or something that sounds like that. The "Ly" sound was very clear. Her hair was long, reddish blond and she wore it up in a bun. She died of something chest related, not cancer but heart or lung congestion. It felt like she was probably in her late twenties or early thirties, and I didn’t sense any particular regret or longing for a husband or children. We exchanged mental pleasantries and she went on about her business.

The woman who owns the house now was relieved that this is not a threatening haunting, but a gentle ghost that she catches reflections of in the old, wavy glass windows. She is going to try to do some research on families that lived there so long ago.

Without evidence, it's just a story but it's a nice one. I had a good time visiting.

Seeing

2015-07-06T09:01:00.003-07:00

Two days into a new meditation and study routine and I've experienced two different kinds of spirit contact. The first was a teasing encounter with my mother's spirit; the second was the appearance of a red spirit light hovering near the ceiling.

I wasn't consciously thinking of her. I was meditating. A strong sense of recognition caused me to open my eyes and she (an apparition) was right in front of me. She was smiling. Then she stepped forward and did a kind of quick movement that looked like she was losing her balance and was about to fall on top of me. I reacted as though it was a physical body that was about to hit me: I jerked to one side. My mother laughed and disappeared. What a great encounter!

This morning I saw a tiny red light hovering near the ceiling. (Note: it was not a laser light, I promise.) Almost as soon as I became aware of it, it disappeared. I had the sense that it didn't really want to be seen. Most interesting. And slightly humorous.

The only other time I've seen a red light like this was about ten years ago at a very old cemetery that Fox and I were investigating. It was darting around over the top of a grave that dated back to the early 1800s.

I'm grateful to my spirit guides and teachers from the other side for helping me in my work to expand my knowledge and skill. I'm also happy that we have this blog for me to record these things. I hope you are benefiting from them, also.

The Right Time

2015-07-06T08:57:00.001-07:00

Mediums don’t summon ghosts. What we do is expand our senses to receive subtle vibrations from the World of Spirit, interpret them as information, and share them with people who come to us hoping for a message from a loved one. We can’t guarantee that a specific loved one will come forward but we can guarantee that if you receive a message from Spirit, it is because you need to hear that particular message, because your candle needed the light that another flame had to offer at that moment.

You see psychic mediums on television shows all the time, running around and seemingly delivering impromptu spirit messages in public to strangers who have not sought this information. I am grateful that this hasn’t happened to me. I’m not sure what I would do. I suppose if the spirit person was insistent enough and relentless enough, I would deliver the message to a stranger. However, I think I would always be concerned about the possibility of causing more grief to someone even in presenting what I would consider an act of compassion. It’s a tough decision.

A couple of days ago, I received an email that a dear friend of mine was concerned about husband’s brother, who had been incommunicado for several days. His residence was several hours away from theirs and they were considering having the police check on him. Yesterday while I was working, I felt a young man come into my space, and take up a position behind me and to the left.

His complexion was fair and he was dark blond, and of average height and build. I knew it was the missing brother-in-law but he did not literally identify himself. His overall aura was muddled and his mental state was bewildered. I asked him if he wanted to give me his name or any other information about himself and he didn’t answer. He just stood there, confused, like someone who has had a stroke or is suffering from a dementia and doesn’t understand where they are or how they got there. So I sent him a mental image of my friend and asked if there was anything he wanted to tell his family.

The haze around him cleared a little and I heard the word, “Accident.” I repeated the word to him and said, “Okay, it was an accident. I have that. Is there anything else?” The word, “Sorry” came. I repeated that word and then told him that it was okay with me if he wanted to stick around for a while, and that he could look for angels and family members. That they were waiting for him and would help him see and understand God. He did hang around for a bit and gradually faded away. Or perhaps I got busy with work and that’s what ended the contact.

At that time, I had not heard anything from my friend except that they were going to send the police to check on her brother-in-law. I decided to sit tight, because the timing wasn’t right for the message I had just received. It’s not something you want to tell a family that hasn’t asked for information, a family that is hoping their loved one is safe and alive.

In the afternoon, the email came that the police had investigated and informed the family that the brother-in-law had been found deceased and it was initially thought that there was a drug overdose. This was particularly difficult for the family because only a month earlier, another sibling had committed suicide. Now was the time for the message to be delivered. Their grief was already strong enough about the first death and they didn’t need to be traumatized by thinking the brother had done the same thing.

So I emailed my friend and told her what had happened. I had never told her before that I am a medium. We have a long distance social media relationship that is based on strong mutual interests and we love each other dearly. But I told her about myself and gave the message. I apologized if this added any more grief to the situation. Then I waited for her reply.

Late last night she responded and said that my email had really helped them. They are devastated by his death because he was very young, but they felt it was not intentional and now they know for sure that it was an accident. I feel blessed to have been able to help a little bit.

Written In The Sky

2015-07-06T08:53:00.001-07:00

Indigenous peoples spent a lot of time looking at the sky for signs and information on how to live their lives the way Creator wanted them to do. When I was a child and a young adult, I searched the skies, too. It was easy to fall up into the trance of cloud-watching, looking for cloud images and making up stories about them.

This week, I find that I am looking upward more than usual. Every time I do, Spirit shows me a cloud picture that has great power. Sometimes it takes me awhile to understand what Spirit is telling me, but eventually my waking mind slows down enough to let feeling mind explain things.

Lately, I have seen incredibly strong messages in clouds. Buffalo, and a Thunder Brother appeared earlier in the week. My psychic development group is very keen on symbols and spirit messages. We keep our own symbol journals so that we can learn the personal language our spirit guides are speaking.

Last night I looked at the underside of my green turquoise stone and was interested to see a picture in the stresses and striations of the stone. It was a natural pictograph of a Thunderbird with a Snake in its mouth.

On the way home from work today, I saw a Thunderbird cloud in the southern sky. The bird was facing left and a snake cloud was right in front of the beak. A little farther down the road, Wolf appeared in the south, one eye was glinting and his mouth was open as though he was in pursuit of something. I wasn't able to get a photo of Wolf because I was driving, but his image was clear in the sky for several minutes. I am hopeful that my dream time tonight will reveal the meaning of these powerful animals appearing in my waking life today.

Spirit sends us messages every day. If we want to receive them, we need only open our eyes.

What Goes Around Comes Around

2015-07-06T08:51:00.000-07:00

Many spiritual leaders teach that we move through life in a sort of spiral—but not linear—walk. What this means is that sometimes in your process, you may find yourself encountering the same kinds of puzzles and choices you did a long time ago.

Often, I hear people ask, "Why am I facing the same karma? I already learned this lesson!"

Yes, you probably did. This time, however, you are in a different place on the spiral path. Our journey in Life is multi-dimensional and multi-layered. The experience this time may be similar but it is vibrating on a different level than it did the last time you met it. And it brings a different viewpoint.

Becoming reacquainted with the experience, you are given the opportunity to make different choices or to express the same choice in a different way. Spirit is offering you the chance to expand your knowledge and grow your wisdom. If you don't want to accept the gift right now, it's okay. The spiral path returns, returns, returns: always the same, yet different. And with each return, your spiritual wisdom expands.

Sage Dreams

2015-07-06T08:38:00.002-07:00

I was going to start this by telling you when I began keeping my dream journal, but I honestly can’t remember when it was. Most of the other woo-woo stuff in my life started around 1967, when I was fourteen years old, so that’s probably a reasonable starting point. As I am writing this in 2013, it’s obvious I’ve been doing dream work for quite awhile.

Sometimes my dreams are simply (!) dreams. They either reflect what is going on in my waking life or they offer a means of escape from the mundane by soaring off into fantastic, Neverland-ish types of adventures. Recording the former is useful because the reflections of daily life show me repeating patterns that I may need to eliminate. Writing down the latter is just lovely fun.

Journaling my dreams has taught me about my outer and my inner lives, and made me very well acquainted with the language my subconscious mind uses to convey important messages. Lucid dreaming was a goal from the very first, and it’s become a common part of my dreamwork.

For the sake of brevity in this blog, I’m going to assume the reader is familiar with the concept of lucid dreaming: knowing you are dreaming while you are dreaming. You can search for it on the web and find an infinite number of references.

Experienced lucid dreamers can learn to control their dreams (up to a point). I’ve done this many times, usually when I feel that the dream is taking far too long to get to its point. I love dream flying, so when one of my dreams is just meandering along aimlessly sometimes I’ll throw in a segment of flying over my hometown. Sometimes this turns into astral projection – which is a whole other topic to blog about, so I won’t. Not now, anyway.

With all my years of dreamworking and my experiences in lucid dreaming and astral projection, something new has come into the picture within the last few months. My development group places high value on meditation, visualization and shamanic journeying. We practice these daily. Seriously practice them. So it’s not surprising that we are frequently able to observe ourselves within the dreams and even take note during the dream that we will remember the entire working the next day when we (a) drink a glass of water , or (b) make a circle with thumb and forefinger.

What’s new, at least for me, is that I’ve started interacting with my dreams by asking questions of them and commenting on what they are showing me. That may sound psychotic. If you have a regular meditation practice though, you’ll find the idea completely reasonable.

Here is an example: a few nights ago I was dreaming about driving on a narrow road that wound up the side of a very steep mountain with scary drop-offs on the side. That’s not an unusual dream for anyone to have, but the road kept going and going and the drive was getting more and more dangerous, and at last I said, “C’mon, what’s going on here? What are you trying to tell me?”

Immediately, the terrain of the dreamscape changed and I saw a parking lot up ahead. I drove the car into the lot and parked, got out of it and went into a huge hotel where I soon spotted some deceased family members. That was when the point of the dream became clear to me. (No, I’m not going to tell you what the point was, that’s private.)

In the dream, I put my thumb and forefinger together and said, “I’ll remember all this tomorrow when I make this circle again.” And it was so. Very useful, to be able to direct your dream.

Last night, as is always the case when Moon is almost full, I had such active dreams that I didn’t feel at all rested when they were finished. My Guides were working overtime with me on several subjects, and there was one in particular that Crystal was discussing and trying to make me understand the infinitesimal edge that I kept missing – she picked up a large (head sized) light green leaf on a long green stalk and was showing it to me and I said, “Hurry up, Crystal, we don’t have much time left.”

She waved the leaf in a circle around her head and told me it was a plant from Africa and then she waited expectantly for me to intuit the message.

“You took too long,” I told her. The next second, my alarm clock was going off beside my head. I turned off the alarm and sat up on the side of the bed. Crystal poofed out and it was time to start my work day.

I said a thank you to Crystal and the guys. They are working hard to help me consciously be aware of my subconscious mind and I’m working hard to make it easier for them. We seem to be a pretty good team.

Now I just need to identify that African plant.

The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of

2015-07-06T08:29:00.001-07:00

Early this morning I had a power dream. These are also sometimes referred to as “medicine” dreams. Different in texture and feeling from ordinary dreams, power dreams come from deep inside our highest spiritual nature. They reach unerringly through the snags and snarls of everyday life to tap us solidly and squarely on the third eye.

You know it was a power dream when you wake with strong, sure insight about issues that heretofore were a challenge or puzzle to you. And later, when the steps you intuitively take to solve that puzzle lead you to the exact place the dream did – you know the medicine power was a true sending.

Who sends medicine dreams to us? Our spirit guides, perhaps. Unseen teachers and allies who are interested in our spiritual growth; God, maybe? Or do these visions come from our own minds, which have been systematically working on a problem and then use images and symbols to reveal the information necessary for us to succeed.

I don’t know who sends medicine/power dreams to me. But I always say, “Thank you.”