Shift Your Spirits

Review of Automatic Intuition

Slade Roberson — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 15:29:44 +0000

I would like to introduce you to Alex Wu, an up-and-coming (and coming up fast!) intuitive counselor I have had the pleasure of mentoring this year.

Alex has given me a great gift of his time and attention — a very thorough and thoughtful Review of the Automatic Intuition Professional Training Program.

Last month, I received an excellent Reading from Alex. (Trust me, it takes a lot of courage to offer a reading to another professional intuitive… Alex totally rocked it.) Not only was it a pleasure to be on the Other End of a Reading, Alex gave me some very specific and powerful support in the areas of my life purpose and career.

I’d like to return the favor of Alex’s efforts by inviting you all to go visit his site and see what he has to offer:
Alex Wu –- Intuitive Guidance for Heart, Soul and the Left Side of the Brain.

Spiritual Counselors I Recommend
It is truly satisfying to work one-on-one with all the students of my Automatic Intuition Professional course — some of whom you will find listed on the Directory page. They represent a unique and highly diverse group of healers I am proud to recommend.

I encourage you to check them out and discover some other voices and faces to add to your network: http://automaticintuition.com/directory

© 2004-2010, Slade Roberson. Communicating with Spirit
Shift Your Spirits | Slade on Blogging

Free Downloads for Subscribers:
Contacting Your Spirit Guides 101

You may need to Right-Click or Ctrl-Click and Save As...

Spirit Guide Readings:
Who are your spirit guides and what messages do they have for you?
Click here to schedule your Spirit Guide Reading

Become a Professional Intuitive
Training, Certification, and Mentoring Program.
Automatic Intuition

Shift your relationship with Money in one month
Release negative beliefs that are blocking your true connection to abundance -- The Money Shift

You Can Be Such A Fool

Slade Roberson — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 22:19:03 +0000

Open up the Fool archetype within you and run the program of pure Potential.

Right now you have a chance to recognize that you are surrounded by limitless possibilities. Right now is the time to take a chance. Keep redefining your life and what it means to be open to experience — come with enthusiasm, wonder, and the stupid smile on your face that celebrates the bliss in your moments of ignorance.

You don’t know what you don’t know.

Do you hear the discouraging, doubting Voices saying:

“It’ll never work.”
“Who are you to even try?”

Where are those Voices coming from? Are they actually playing within you? How did they get there? Who put them there?

When and Where and from Whom did you originally download the Voices that say “You Cannot”?

When did you choose to do their dirty work for them? To berate, to undermine, to sabotage your own sense of hope and optimism?

Right now is the time to take a completely fresh look at what you believe to be your options.

You say you know [or don't know] what your options truly are… look again.

Are you sure you’ve considered everything?
Are you sure you haven’t dismissed a choice too early?
Are you sure that door has closed?

What about the options that may have spontaneously appeared since the last time you looked?

What about that Dream that meant more to you than any other, at one time? What about that Thing that you used to be so excited about? What did you have to deny, cover over, bury, stuff, in order to be “okay” with telling yourself “That will never happen.”

Really? Are you just that scared — so afraid you can’t even risk it?

The Fool within you doesn’t know any better.

The Fool is the kid with the towel around his neck, perched on the edge of a wall, who has observed that the birds all seem to start their flight with a giant jump off something…

If the word “Fool” disturbs you substitute “Divine Child”

Dorothy, singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” before the Twister lands her in Oz
Harry Potter, living under the stairs, before the letter from Hogwarts arrives
Buffy, before she bears the burden of the Slayer
The Halliwell Sisters, before they discover the Book of Shadows in the attic
The American Idol contestant, in those painfully foolish audition rounds
The Author staring at the blank page
The Student who thinks “That class sounds cool…”

Personally…

I’m totally going out on a limb.

I’m starting Something — a course of actions, a venture filled with new projects and new approaches — and I have no idea where it will lead.

I have no guarantee that I will be “successful.”

You know, come to think of it, looking back at everything I started or tried, every big idea I ran after wide-eyed and convinced… Whether they Bombed or Rocked — at a certain stage, they all resemble one another.

At the beginning. When I am always playing the Fool.

When was the last time I really started at Zero? And felt excited about it?

You know, it’s honestly been about seven years since I really started with nothing — with only a hint of a direction, no knowledge of where I was going to end up, how I was going to get there… just that I was going to Go. It wasn’t a physical journey, it was a virtual one.

In 2003, I was advised to build an audience by publishing my non-fiction, spiritualist material — perhaps in a syndicated column of some sort. Well, I ultimately turned down this absolutely shitty disappointing old school out-dated publishing deal, and proclaimed to my agent and everyone who was close enough to me to care (it was part wroth; part froth) that I intended to Do-It-Myself.

“These people [big house NYC publishing companies] are so stuck in the past; they’re not even looking for the future, they’re walking with their heads pointed at their feet. I bet I can find the future faster on my own.”

I can’t say I consciously knew it at the time, but I had some inkling — that to find the future we want, we have to create it.

When was the last time you started from scratch?

For me, back in 2003, with no job and no tolerance left for giving my creative energy to people who did not value it, with $35 in my checking account, I bought my first domain and set out to learn how to Put Things On It.

I didn’t know anything — but I had such a blast blundering through the source code of the Internet and learning. I would spend entire sleepless nights surfing the web developer’s web, reading blogs on the emerging language of CSS, teaching myself HTML through trial and error… There seemed to be no end to the amount of material that appeared before me — I could not absorb it fast enough. I would start at one site at supper and it was a magic carpet ride until dawn…

God, what a maniacal Fool I was indeed. Everyone who cared about me told me to “get a job” and to “give it up.” I got T/here. It was messy, it was bloody, it was uncertain, it was not guaranteed.

For me, that (finally!) felt like living.

I desire — I’d say in normal speech “I want” or “I need” but those words imply lack, so I’ll state them as conscious affirmations — I desire to be a Fool like that again. I desire to try something I probably should not. I desire to just head out and see where I end up. I desire to start something that I can’t even describe. I desire to really learn something I don’t know.

Last week, I found myself There again, on the Fool’s Journey. I haven’t really surfed the Web and devoured entire blogs on an entirely New Topic in a looong time. I’d forgotten how delicious that is.

You’ll be the first to hear about it when I Arrive anywhere worth sending you a post(card). The basic premise of my career, my business, my web presence is quite simple — I leave breadcrumb trails for others who want to follow me…

Have you been feeling it too?

I like that I can absolutely ignore astrology and still discover after the fact that I felt it.

I felt Uranus shifting into Aries — the sign of the Fool Archetype, the Hero at the Beginning of the Journey. (For me, approaching my forty-first birthday, this is also my Uranus Opposition, or what we call the “Mid-Life Crisis.”)

You may be interested in reading about how Uranus has been affecting you recently — I advise you to look into not only your Sun, but also (if you know them) your Ascendant and your natal Uranus — check it out: Uranus in Aries

Image credit josh.liba via Creative Commons on Flickr

Adam’s Task - The Ascension

Slade Roberson — Sat, 29 May 2010 21:31:03 +0000

Language & Co-Creation in the Ascension of Mankind

Genesis Creation Myth

“And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”
–The Book of Genesis 2:19

Information technology is not new. Man’s God-given task in co-creating the Universe is to name everything. Names are the basis of human language, and language is the basis of all technology.

There can be little doubt that the Ascension of Man will include technology. Barring an absolute, unforeseen miracle, it would be impossible at this point in human history to even imagine a world — whether better or worse — that will not feature human technology. It’s inevitable that such a miracle may actually be the result of our technology.

We are fast approaching the Technological Singularity — the point at which human intelligence will transcend the boundaries of biology. The Singularity is not a “New Age” theory — it is a scientific fact that has no basis in spirituality.

Yet the Singularity has profound spiritual implications.

Even within the most conservative predictions, we are only a few decades away from the point in human history that will represent an irreversible paradigm shift. Some half-jokingly refer to this as the Rapture of The Nerds, but it is hard to dismiss the time-frame that includes the end of the Mayan Calendar, and the beginning of the New Age, the Age of Aquarius.

The Ascension of Mankind will be powered by our own technology, and from our humblest task at the beginning, extending to infinity, is our first and primary creative power — language.

The Language of the Creator
God deferred to the language of man as His own. The Language of God, the Source Code of All Creation — The Word — is Man’s word.

Adam’s Task was not discontinued as a result of Original Sin — eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil — it was merely complicated. Rather than continuing in the Garden, simply calling forth the abundance of all life on Earth, man’s godlike new knowledge represented the greater burden — the responsibility — of understanding.

Condemned to toil and labor in order to continue accessing the abundance of the Garden, man developed agriculture. Agriculture and domestication of livestock directly led to the development of human society, which led to the Industrial Revolution, the Atomic Age, and now, ultimately, to the Information Revolution.

Along the way, we’ve made a mess of Nature, pulling apart Creation in our attempts to unravel, decode, and understand the Language of God. We’ve successfully split the atom, we’ve mapped the human genome, we’ve discovered and given names to the alphabet of all matter in the Universe. We are now fast approaching a fluency that will allow us to put Nature back together again, according to our will.

We are about to transcend the limitations of biology and the boundaries of the physical world. And we are going to accomplish this with Ideas and the Words which are their forms.

Made of dust, infused with the breath of life, conscious
We are made of dust — the matter of the stars — ordered into consciousness and living complexity.

Emerging and imminent nanotechnology represents a similar godlike power in the hands of man. Adam has named the very particles of the physical world — we are fluent in the vocabulary of chemistry; we can communicate with the order of Creation at the smallest level of construction.

There is a second wave of the Industrial Revolution approaching, when the bulk of manufacturing might shrinks from the smog-belching factories, with its back-breaking human labor and robotic slaves, to laboratory test-tubes.

Adam, ascended, will remake the New Earth and beyond, at the tiniest — and greatest — imaginable scales.

The Trees — Source Code and Holograms
Why was it necessary to even place the Tree of Life, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, in the Garden at all?

Like the alphabets of chemistry and DNA, the instructional information of the physical world is a hologram: the whole blueprint is contained within any individual part; from one cell we may extrapolate, engineer, re-create.

The Trees are Seeds.

The Greatest of Tools
How did we get here? What has allowed us to evolve to this point?

Our ability not only to communicate our knowledge and experience, but to record it. The earliest forms of written language gave immortality to the wisdom of our collective Mind, if not our bodies.

The Book persists as the greatest tool ever developed.

The Book itself has evolved from an expensive, difficult to produce (and re-produce), rare treasure that allows the sharing of information across time and human life-times. Once only the rarest vessel of the most precious information, the Book is now everywhere.

The Book itself has transcended matter — information now resides in a virtual space with almost limitless reach. Freed of its expensive, fragile, still temporary physical format, human wisdom is accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime, instantly.

Information can be produced, preserved, shared, manipulated, and improved upon in a direct communication from one individual author to billions. With access to the Internet, we each now have the potential to share any piece of our minds with everyone, at very little cost and labor.

If you go to your web browser and view the source code, or if you peer into the internal mechanisms of the programs that run your computer, what you will find there is not “math and science” — you’ll find words. Human language.

No matter what the discipline, field, area of study — whether it’s spiritual, artistic, scientific, medical — the one common denominator of All that we know — all the wisdom and knowledge we’ve accumulated across all human history — is our language.

We are the means by which the Universe experiences itself.
It is the goal of the Universe for consciousness — information; knowledge of itself — to pervade every wave and particle of creation.

There is nothing you can name without naming it. You cannot even think a Thing without its name. Thoughts are things, and words are their handles.

Magic & Technology

“I discovered that unlike mere tricks, technology does not lose its transcendent power when its secrets are revealed. I am often reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s third law, that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’”
–Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near

Indeed, the power that our technology affords us is increasingly invisible. The wisdom of our language no longer even requires wires.

Electricity is not visible.

“Where” is the Web? Without a browser window to display it, virtual space is not visible either — it’s everywhere and nowhere.

Most of us use cell phones to communicate with each other on a daily basis.

We email and chat with disembodied, non-present voices.

We engage in financial transactions that are increasingly less required to exist in physical form.

We speak to spirits we cannot see.

The very word angel means “messenger” — it’s the messages — the Word — that shapes all conscious reality.

Whether the lowliest infrared remote control, the everyday commonplace modes of communication, the workings of the global economy, or the wishes of our hearts and the dreams of our souls, what we would have called magical and miraculous for the majority of human history is now called technology.

At the root of all spells are incantations — the words, strung together in the right sequence, to call forth change in our physical reality.

Thoughts are Things — Words are Wands
The Internet can be viewed as the fruition — at least the most current iteration — of Adam’s Task. It has grown, evolved, changed — it will continue — but it is still the god-given assignment of co-creation that it was in Eden.
Really, very little has changed: the Creator still presents to us everything under the sun, and we provide names for the pieces. We break the pieces down, smaller and smaller, and we keep naming as we go — specifying, identifying, tagging.

There seems no limit to our task.

The scope, breadth, and depth of Adam’s Task grows in multiple directions and dimensions — inward/outward, larger/smaller, physical/virtual…

The Ascension of Mankind is a Gospel — a god spell, a Story, the unraveling and re-weaving of the Web.

We have always been making history. His story is our story.

Image credit VerseVend via Creative Commons on Flickr

Soulbonding - Channeling in Fiction

Slade Roberson — Sun, 16 May 2010 14:36:38 +0000

I receive a lot of questions from creative writers of fiction (as well as actors) who would like to know my thoughts on the difference between channeling spirit guides and channeling character voices.

What is Soulbonding?
It’s probably not what you think. (It’s not what it sounds like it should be, anyway. Sounds like some kind of romantic phenomenon…) I’d never heard this word before, but I am familiar with the concept.

Laura writes to me:

I have a friend who recently introduced me to the concept of “soulbonding.” I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, and in fact I would be a little surprised if you had. You may be familiar with the concept, though, if not the term.

Souldbonding is a sort of link between an author and his or her characters. Like when you start writing a novel, or even a short story, and the characters start to take on a life of their own. You are no longer the one writing the story, you are just transcribing it. Soulbonding goes a bit deeper than that, though. Many soulbonders have conversations with their ‘bonds, even going so far as to…I guess “channel” would be a good word, though I don’t think it’s quite accurate. ‘Bonders sometimes take on certain personality traits or behavioral quirks that are typical of their ‘bonds (but not of the ‘bonder), usually for only a short time.

I have experienced this connection myself (though not the “channeling”, at least not to my knowledge and not intentionally), and I find that I can connect with my ‘bonds in the same way that I connect with my spirit guides. I wonder sometimes if there’s not some deeper connection there between my ‘bonds and my Guides and I’m just not seeing it. Or perhaps the ‘bonds are just another way of my Guides contacting me, in a way that is easier for me to understand and accept because my ‘bonds, being characters that I’ve written about for years now, are more familiar to me and I’m more likely to listen to them. (I’ve only been talking to my Spirit Guides for a relatively short time, and I find it is easier for me to talk to my ‘bonds than to my Guides for some reason.)

I am interested in your views on the subject of soulbonding.

I’ve decided to prioritize writing fiction again. It seems that part of my shifting path, part of my life purpose, has required that I take a detour of several years — stepping beyond just a veiled and decorated kind of storytelling to publicly sharing, in a non-fiction format, my own personal experiences. I was originally motivated to learn all this code and blogging and marketing by the intentions to experiment with self-publishing hyperfiction. And, I’ve recently attempted to “bridge” some of these different creative writing assignments (stretch my muscles in a different direction) with a few series of memoirs.

(Parenthetical aside: the memoirs were probably the most difficult type of writing I’ve ever attempted. Instructional tutorials are by far the easiest.)

I’ve had this topic on a back burner for quite a while, but as I’ve recently shifted my writing focus to working on stories and novels again, I’ve been able to observe my processes with an external, intellectual detachment. In the past I was not necessarily conscious of when I was relaying information from a spirit entity versus a character of my own willful creation, so perhaps doing both has allowed me to learn and grow in both pursuits.

Why do people speak of discovering your authentic voice in the singular? Is there just one? (Hey, if my ego seems big sometimes, it’s just trying to accommodate a highly-trafficked, over-active, very crowded Fifth Chakra…)

Think about it — how many authentic voices do you employ?

I’m working with (to list a few):

Self-talk
Private Journals
Conversation (personal)
Conversation (professional)
Correspondence (personal)
Correspondence (professional)
Teaching (non-fiction, instruction, tutorials)
Motivational
Coaching | Mirroring
Channeling My Guides
Channeling Other People’s Guides
Spoken Word | Guided Narration
Neurolinguistic Programming | Hypnosis
Third-person and Omniscient Fictional Narration
First-person Fictional Characters (unlimited)
Fictional Dialoguing
Divine Dialoguing
Shining Sentences
Titling | Naming
Memoirs
Marketing

Hey, does code count? Formatting and rich text styling? (Those of us who write enough — or edit enough, especially in different formats from digital to print — reveal uniquely personal qualities…)

I’m trying really hard to organize, to simplify, here — there are so many subsets, blendings, overlaps, and filters that can come into play… From my perspective, these are all identifiable as technically different; from where you’re sitting, listening to it come out of my mouth or with my signature on a page, it may all seem to be Just Me. But it doesn’t really feel like I’m creating anything so much as allowing a bit of everything (yet nowhere close to Prolific).

If you’re scanning your own interior satellite radio dial, you may start to feel schizophrenic — don’t worry. The voices of those who suffer from multiple personality disorders are generally not consciously aware of the others. My last therapist assured me that a high-functioning self-awareness of how you manage all your voices would seem to be the exact opposite of a “disorder.”

Wow — stop and ponder with me for a moment how amazing our minds are, how powerful language is…

Other than the Intended Purpose…
I feel that Creativity and Divinity are so closely related as to be nearly identical. I also feel that intuition and imagination are relatively intertwined, like different fingers on the same metaphorical hand.

While the actions or state of mind often feel very similar, if I had to succinctly identify the differences between these modes of divinely inspired information gathering — beyond the obvious intentions — I would say they are the following:

Channeling Spirit Voices vs. Channeling Fictional Characters

Fictional characters speak the truth about their lives (Life, in general); spirit guides speak the truth about your life.
Editing, rewriting, and intellectual decision-making nearly always improve the end product of fiction; editing and intellectual analysis nearly always detract from (and sometimes destroy) the important details of a reading.

Just your imagination?
The word “just” always kills me here in the context of intuition. Are they separate? Is one less powerful than the other? Should we even attempt to separate them?

The last person I did a reading for emailed me later and wrote:

“I’m still flabbergasted that you could know those details about me and my life. I mean, I’m half-way across the world, on another continent, a virtual stranger… How do you do that?”

You know what? I don’t know how I do that. I know how to do it — how to access it, plug into it, tap in — but I don’t understand how it happens or how it works or why. You can do it too, if you want to. It is a Mystery. I’m not sure if I believe it’s magic or the most common thing in the world that we have the ability to channel. Is it coming from the Collective Unconscious? The Akashic Records? I’ve often wondered if all character voices (even when we think we’re writing a fictional story) aren’t actually always the spirits of “real” people.

When I was pursuing my undergraduate degree twenty years ago, my creative writing professor Coleman Barks (arguably the most successful contemporary translator of the Sufi mystic and poet Rumi) told us that the goal of the novelist or fictional storyteller is to

“Lie the Truth.”

The concept has stuck with me — that the truth exists in stories as well as in data (and that they are not necessarily the same thing). You need only consider the difference between the way you process news versus the way you experience the same basic information conveyed in a true dramatic story (a novel or film) based on those facts.

In my humble observations, factual information — data — is processed through the mind, while the truth of a fictional story is processed through the heart. Maybe this explains why, in this Age of Information, dramatic movies and books still have such power and impact — often in a way that just the facts can never infiltrate our wisdom. I have to be honest with you, I read very little non-fiction (and when I do, I study it, which is a slightly different form of consumption), while reading novels remains my greatest consistent life-long passion.

This post (yes, an indulgent navel-gazing experience that probably only other writers can appreciate contemplating with me) is really intended to answer to questions about the role of the writer/ the channel, not the role of the audience. In my classes on Automatic Writing and Dialoguing, I point out that the techniques I use for retrieving intuitive information are literally based on — were discovered during — the practice of specific exercises designed to enhance the productivity of creative writers.

One of the interesting intersections between performing readings and (other forms of writing) is that the Automatic Intuitive Response techniques produce results in any kind of practice.

Image via Creative Commons on Flickr

Memory, Metaphor & Active Imagination

Slade Roberson — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 21:59:17 +0000

This is Part 3 of Tales of a Fourth Grade Haunting, which begins with To Sleepwalk in the Past Tense and continues in The Plural Form of Vortex

I was alone in the house after school, sitting in the vortex watching Guiding Light and eating a bowl of Lucky Charms, when I heard noises coming from the garage.

This wasn’t a mysterious tapping or a distant ka-chink-ka-chink — it wasn’t a ghostly racket — it was physical; it was loud enough to make me drop my spoon with a clatter and splatter milk on my face. I made one of those involuntary, nonverbal, animal sounds where your first conscious thought beyond surprise is embarrassed relief that no one heard it come out of you. A cross between the yelp and the moan that a fitful sleeper utters in an attempt to cry out in a bad dream.

The White Cat had not yet made its appearance; therefore, the vortex was not activated. I wasn’t nearly as afraid of ghost activity as I was of a home invasion. In that moment I was merely a latch key kid about to surprise a potential burglar. (An all-too-real — completely un-supernatural — experience that had happened before.)

The year we moved into the Green House was when my mother “went back to work” after years of being a stay-at-home mom. My brother was in kindergarten and an after-school day care where Mama would pick him up on her way home; I was old enough to ride the bus, let myself in with a key hidden behind a gutter, and occupy myself for an hour or two with light chores like unloading the dishwasher or watching television.

I Indian-walked to the bottom of the stairs to investigate the noises in the garage. Now, at this point, most narrators would simply say “I crept to the foot of the stairs” and be done with it — but how often do you use the word “crept” really? When do you really say “I crept to the foot of the stairs” except if you’re trying to sound like a bedtime- ghost- storyteller? The action — the way that I moved — was much more complicated, specific, and conscious than a creep in past tense. I moved like an Indian, in a manner we practiced out in the Trails all the time — on the balls of the feet, preferably barefoot or in soft-soled moccasins, knees bent in a half-crouch, shifting your weight in slow motion from one foot to another, so that you can avoid snapping twigs or scuffing dirt or kicking gravel — the goal is to creep up on an enemy in total silence.

So, I Indian-walked down the stairs to squat in the same position and spot where I knew myself to have previously sleepwalked. I was aware that I occupied an uncomfortable proximity to the dark room with its creepy crawl-space and mysterious skeleton key, to the den with its carpet-eating monster and the single-fanged ghost biter by the sliding-glass door… and now there was Someone in the garage dragging around my Daddy’s tool boxes.

A very real Someone; a thief.

Here is an opportunity for me to insert another of the admittedly forced half-assed grammar lessons which seem to want to serve as some kind of stylistic theme running through this series of posts. A simile is a specific kind of metaphor where you use the word like. The noise I heard in the garage was not like the sound of heavy metal tool boxes being dragged across a concrete floor; it was that sound, quite literally and without question. No simile or metaphor required.

My bedroom was above the garage, and I recognized the gritty slither of the tool boxes sliding across concrete. Daddy often referred to the irreplaceable material investment these tool boxes housed — he would not leave them at job sites or in the bed of his truck, but would load and unload them daily, depending on which ones he needed. They were enormous, three- or four-foot long red metal caskets, weighing hundreds of pounds each. A grown man could not lift and carry them on his own. Each morning while I was still in bed, just waking up, I would hear (and feel) the garage door roll up beneath me, the coughing purr of the truck engine backed up close to the house, the dented squeak of the tail gate letting down, and then that scratchy heavy metal sliding across smooth cement as he pushed the tool boxes one at a time, stood them up on their ends and let them fall into the truck bed, partially assisted by their own weight.

Maybe my Dad had come home early and the noises came from his familiar routine. But I hesitated, unable to throw open the door, because the dragging tool boxes were not accompanied by the sounds of the truck or the garage door rattling up along the ceiling. Maybe I just could not have heard the full sequence of events watching TV on the other end of the house.

I ran back up to my room to look out the window, expecting to find the white truck, expecting to feel foolish but relieved.

There was no vehicle in the driveway.

It was one of those moments when the brain trips, unable to justify or connect the reality of the data it’s receiving with the explanation it has chosen only seconds before — here’s a simile: like when you go to drink a glass of what you know to be water and there’s that half-beat of confusion when you realize you’ve swallowed a mouthful of Coke.

The noises in the garage had suddenly stopped. I froze, listening, realizing I had forgotten my stealth and I was directly above the intruder — only inches of creaking floorboards separating my un-Indian footsteps from his head.

As I listened I felt him listening back.

Beyond the ringing in my ears was the manic opening music of cartoons coming from the TV that had been on all along, that anyone in the house could hear.

I had to get to the phone.

There was the White Cat, scrambling to get out of my bedroom doorway. As I passed my parents’ room I heard that sotto voce — that loud stage whisper — “Don’t look in there!” (That voice never felt like a warning intended to protect me; it was a hateful, annoyed, put out, snappish command — it was protecting itself.)

I held my hands up to hide my face in a posture of compliance and ran to the kitchen. My mother’s number at work was posted by the almond phone, on an index card that lined up with the stripes and clusters of the mushroom images on the wallpaper.

The kitchen door was at the top of the main stairs, and in those pre-cordless days I was dangerously tethered to a relatively fixed position. As I waited through the dial tones, I stretched the cord as far as it would go to look and listen for activity coming from below.

When Mama answered I walked back deep into the kitchen and turned my back on the stairs, trying not to speak too loudly.

“There’s someone in the house!” I tried to explain while whispering and not crying. (A memory like this — can you imagine? your child calling you at work hysterical about an imminent home invasion? — makes me aware of at least two things: 1) that my mother has nerves of steel; and 2) just how completely fragile and psychologically unfit for parenthood I am by comparison.)

As quickly and quietly as possible, I told Mama about the tool boxes in the garage, and she told me to stay calm, that she was going to have to hang up and call someone, to send someone over to me. I panicked that she couldn’t stay on the phone with me, but the sound of the door leading from the garage into the house opening and shutting made staying in the kitchen to greet the invader coming up the stairs an impossible prospect. There wasn’t a locked door knob jiggling; there wasn’t any forced entry — someone had simply opened the door, slammed it shut, and there were heavy footsteps already on the stairs.

“They’re in the house! They’re coming up here!”

The last thing Mama said to me was “Hang up and HIDE!”

One more second and I’d be face-to-face with the intruder, as he rounded the split-level landing. Even as I ran back down the hall I could feel his eyes on the spot where I’d just been standing. I should have gone the other way, through the kitchen and out onto the deck, outside the house entirely, because in the moment I headed for the bedrooms I was blocked from leaving without a direct encounter.

With no other top level exit available, my impulse was to flee to the greatest distance that the floor plan allowed — through my parents’ bedroom and into the master bath. I saw a flash of that old man on the bed, and the German Shepherd on the floor, watching me dash past them with surprised expressions on their faces.

I shut and locked the bathroom door and got into the tub. I suffered the rain-stick racket of the ball bearings in the frosted glass door giving away my choice of hiding place as I slid it open; I didn’t want to take a chance repeating the noise, so I didn’t close it behind me. I laid down flat in the tub, hoping that if someone opened the door, maybe the room would at least look empty on first glance. (Much about my decisions was pitifully lacking in planning… I beg you to consider the circumstances.)

Except for the soft echo of my breath off the tiles, the house was silent. I peeked over the edge of the tub, expecting at any moment to see the door knob shift as someone tried it and found it locked. There was a strip of light in the gap along the threshold between the carpet edge and the bottom of the door.

As I watched, a section of that strip darkened. A slice of shadow moved from side to side. I heard the most subtle thing — audible evidence so faint it must have been supplemented by vision: the sound that carpet makes when someone shifts their weight from one foot to another.

Someone was standing outside the door, listening for me.

The front door bell went off in rapid succession, machine-gun fire of ding-ding-ding-ding-ding and then an alternate frantic hammering knock. I could hear an unrecognizable man’s voice yelling my name, muffled by all the doors and walls between us.

The slice of shadow slid along the gap at the carpet’s edge and disappeared.

When I worked up the courage to come out and go to the front door and look through the peephole, I saw a frazzled and desperate looking man on the front stoop, barefoot, in disheveled pajamas, bed-head hair standing out in mad spikes, wielding a claw hammer.

He was a neighborhood Dad from across the street, one who worked third-shift and slept during the day. Mama had sent him to rescue me, and he was barely even awake yet when I let him in. I followed him through the house as he checked under beds and opened all the closets, eventually making his way to the garage.

He kept muttering “There’s nobody here” and glancing back at me with restrained annoyance. I felt an increasing sense of embarrassment and shame — especially when I saw the big red toolbox in the garage, perfectly aligned with its assigned corner.

When Mama’s burgundy Monte Carlo finally careened into the driveway and screeched to a halt, I was most grateful to let her take over apologizing for me. I overheard my active imagination referenced more than once — a character flaw I’m still working hard to justify to the world, three decades later.

Flashforward to 2003

My brother and I are living together again in another haunted house in another city, this time as grown men.

Soon after moving in to the house on Daniel in the Kirkwood section of Atlanta, I noticed the frequent paranormal activity, more than I normally experience. It even crossed my mind (a potential theory?) that somehow the combination or synergy of our energies, together, worked as some kind of “magnet.” (In high school, my friend Catherine and I had light bulbs constantly blowing out in our combined presence.) I didn’t mention the phenomena to my brother — although I have long suspected that he is one of the most sensitive empaths I’ve ever known, the subject is extremely uncomfortable to him. He does not like to talk about it; he avoids it out of a sense of self-protection.

One morning, after my brother’s girlfriend had spent the night, I discovered them talking about the activity that had woken them up. She was excited by it, eager to tell me about what they’d experienced. Maybe her attitude was infectious, or he picked up on an opportunity to impress her, but I was shocked when my brother very bluntly declared “We lived in a haunted house for a while when we were kids.”

“The Green House,” I said.

I had never heard him speak of it. Until that moment, over twenty years later, I wasn’t even sure that he consciously remembered. Beyond remembering and acknowledging that he remembered, he recalled details that I had forgotten, and it some cases seemed to have picked up on even more than I did.

“There was a man that died in that house,” he said. “Remember, a man with a dog?”

It had never occurred to me before he said it, but the second it came out of his mouth, I knew it was true.

I jumped at the opportunity (one I thought I’d never have) to compare notes with him, having believed I would always be alone in my memories and impressions. “Wait, before you say anything else…” I grabbed two empty yellow legal pads from the office, a couple of pens, and he agreed to an exercise.

I told him to list every detail of what he remembered about the man who died in that house. I did the same, prompting us both from time to time with specific questions, like “How old was he? Where did you see him? What was he wearing? What kind of dog was it?” etc.

When we both finally stopped writing and couldn’t think of anything further, I gave both pads to his girlfriend and asked her to compare them. “You’ll just have to trust me that we have never talked about this until this day.”

The details were all there, identical — everything that I’ve related in this series of posts; indeed much of what I’ve been able to reconstruct came from my brother’s recollection. Even our subjective impressions coincided, like what the man in the bedroom with the German Shepherd might have died from (we both wrote that “he couldn’t breathe”).

The End of Shift Your Spirits?

See, the motivation for asking you to indulge me in these memories is not so much the haunting in the Green House of my childhood, but a series of events that began while living with my brother in 2003. As Shift Your Spirits approaches its four year anniversary, I’ve been considering how this blog, this recent period in my life, might be “resolved.” Does it continue indefinitely, or do I allow it to end? And if I’m going to end it, what do I have left to share about how I became an intuitive?

Much of what has been left unpublished is about how and why Shift Your Spirits began — the turning point in my life that occurred over a span between 2003 and 2006, when I launched this blog. Living with my brother and remembering the Green House together — acknowledging it for the first time — marks the Psychic Closet Doors beginning to creak open. This is when my guides “became loud,” when I could no longer repress the messages I was receiving, when I was presented with an ultimatum from Spirit to use this part of my life, and when I began to informally perform my earliest readings.

What’s “missing” from Shift Your Spirits are these prologues — circles within circles of “plot” that “go together” because hindsight allows the pieces to form a bigger picture. Living with my brother again in 2003 brings us back to the significant time in my life immediately following my encounters with Jesse and other stranger angels.

Memoir is not the same as autobiography — memoirs are non-linear; they are the fragments strung together by your life viewed through a topical filter. They are the moments in your life that come together by association, that end up side by side, even over great leaps of time and place.

What are ghosts if not the memories we carry? Hauntings are the echoes held in place by — or bouncing around within — the spaces that they occupy. Psychic events, so emotionally charged, that they transcend time.

image credit emilyd10 via Creative Commons on Flickr

The Plural Form of Vortex

Slade Roberson — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 22:49:44 +0000

This is Part 2 of Tales of a Fourth Grade Haunting, which begins with To Sleepwalk in the Past Tense

I learned to spell vortices before I knew what they were or before I suspected that we might be living with a paranormal version in our house.

From the third grade through the sixth, I was obsessed with participating in spelling bees. I realize now I didn’t make it as far up the ladder of success in the Bee World as my class-level and school-level wins might have encouraged me to dream. I got up to the municipal level a couple of times before bombing. The words that I slaughtered are the ones I ultimately retained. Inertia comes to mind as one of my most humiliating Language Arts moments. (Having never seen or heard the word before, it sounded to me like a severely unfortunate girl’s name. I’ll use it in a sentence: “Enursha Jolene, you get your ass back in this house right this minute!” No doubt Enursha grew up insisting that friends call her “Jo.”)

I would study those special preparatory books of challenging Bee words for weeks on end, creating shoe boxes full of home made flash cards and constantly pestering my parents to “quiz me.”

“What’s a vor-TIE-sus?” I asked my Daddy as he made us breakfast one morning.

“A what? Let me see it,” he said, leaning away from the stove with a spatula in his hand to squint quickly at the spelling bee book I’d brought to the table. “Oh. Vor-tuh-SEEZ. That’s the plural form of vortex. You know what a vortex is?”

He explained a vortex to me as a kind of whirlpool within liquids or fluids, or the visible, spiraling column of air in a tornado — but then went on to elaborate about the temporal vortices in science fiction that were more likely to engage both our imaginations.

I’m afraid I may have grown up confusing vortices and portals — the tub-drain special effects you find in television time-travel, violent iris openings between dimensions and worlds.

Did you know that according to Merriam-Webster vortices and vortexes are both correct plural forms of vortex? Vortexes sounds like the State in which Right Wing militia men who want to secede from the Union might one day reside. Vortexes is probably separated from Mexico and Reality by the Rio Mocha Grande… Anyway…

Whether my fourth-grade vocabulary was technically correct or not, you’ll just have to accept that my brother, my friends, and I all knew what we were talking about whenever we’d spy certain phenomena and cry out “Vortex!” in great excitement — the subtle depressions that appeared on the surface of empty swimming pools — “Vortex!”; or the dust-devils that whip up leaves in the Fall and magically spin down a driveway for several feet before losing power, never quite manifesting to true Oz-worthy vehicles, but still — “Vortex!”

Potentially, there were vortices (or portals; wormholes) all over the Green House, but the one that I most liked to point out to other kids was remarkably easy to spot, located at the end of the hall between the living and dining rooms. It was a test of sorts (of clairvoyance, maybe?) “Can you see it?” You had to stand in my bedroom doorway and squint down the longest sight line that the house’s floor plan allowed… and there it was — ever so faint — a column of transparent, barely-visible, just-a-little-bit-sparkly dust particles suspended between floor and ceiling… about the girth of an adult, only taller, not unlike the first and last traces of the transporter effects in Star Trek.

I didn’t know what it was or why it was there, but I wasn’t the only one who could see it. We knew one thing for certain — if you sat in the vortex, you would see the White Cat.

Now, the White Cat is not to be confused with shadow cats — shadow cats are small, vague, smudgy forms that you may see inside or outdoors, out of the corner of your eye, darting furtively away from you, low to the ground like a wary feline slinking away, tail down, trying to make itself invisible.

You may see them dash under a parked car, dart into a line of shrubbery or tree shade, slip back into your closet or under your bed when you surprise them by entering a room or turning on a light. Shadow cats are spiritual in nature, but they don’t necessarily have anything to do with the souls of house cats, other than the relative size, shape, and the fluid way that they move. They could be any kind of closet monster or under-bed troll.

Shadow Cats are all over the place; I see them constantly, everywhere. The White Cat was a place- and time- specific manifestation; the ghost of an actual, individual kitty that dwelt in the Green House (an earthbound pet or psychic echo, I suppose; it must have lived there at one time).

Because the entire downstairs was either an enormous vortex (or a set of interlocking vortices) no one much liked to watch television down there except my dad — my Mama, my brother and I preferred to suffer a smaller black-and-white set on a rolling cart that we kept in a corner of the dining room upstairs and would pull out a few feet toward the end of the sofa in the adjoining living room. We’d drag a rust-colored crushed-velvet cushion off the sofa and prop it against the floor and the door jamb and settle in to watch after-school cartoons right smack in the sparkle-column vortex. I would look up into the air above me, uncomfortable, knowing that something should be raining down on me, but the phenomenon was only visible from a distance.

At a slight angle to the TV, we had a straight view down the full length of the upstairs hallway into my bedroom at the other end of the house. It was during these moments that we’d see the White Cat sneak from my brother’s bedroom doorway to mine, and back again. It avoided my parents’ room. I’d call “White Cat!” or my brother would yelp “There it is! Did you see it?”

I don’t remember this being at all frightening — actually, there was a pervasive tension that hung over us until the White Cat appeared. The anticipation was distracting when you’d first settle in, hard to pay attention to the TV until he arrived. I think we both felt… relieved that it continued to happen. It was a little bite-size thrill of experience; the recurrence was an insistent reality. While some of the moves in this on-going haunting were truly disturbing, the White Cat was the game’s harmless and amusing mascot.

I never suspected the White Cat of being the invisible critter that viciously bit me downstairs in the den.

When we first moved into the Green House, there was a period where we played and explored the lower level, until events finally drove us permanently upstairs.

The first floor was partially underground — the two-car garage opened onto the driveway on one end; inside was a laundry room, an office, a large closet under the stairwell, and an L-shaped den with a sliding-glass door that led out onto a back patio. The den was thinly carpeted over the concrete foundation, with no padding or sub-floor. The carpet was an indoor-outdoor variety — dark blue mottled with black — the nubby kind; not the bristly kind you’d find, say, in the bottom of our ski boat. I’ve already mentioned the mystery spot in the carpet that slowly and steadily unraveled itself. My brother and I got in so much trouble with my mother because neither of us would confess to being responsible for this on-going destruction, or rat the other one out. It proved to be the source of a momentous disciplinary injustice that I may have forgiven but have clearly not forgotten.

The hearth and the fireplace surround were covered in dark-gray slate, with jagged edges that portended of bloody falls, emergency room visits, and inevitable stitches. Hung on the slate wall were two manhole cover-sized, sun-shaped ceramic plaques painted in burnished “aged” bronze — one depicting some faux Aztec or Mayan calendar; the other, the astrological Wheel of the Zodiac. (If you’re over thirty or shop in thrift stores you’ve probably seen a set of these.) I can’t tell you how many hours of my childhood were spent trying to riddle the connection between the two and how they might transmit “useful” information. Something about the grinning mask-face in the center of one of them screamed “Vortex!”

The large closet under the stairs had a red light bulb — Daddy said someone must have used it as a darkroom for developing photographs. There was a kind of hatch that opened into a deep crawl space of raw concrete and roughly plastered walls. I don’t remember how he first spotted it, but my brother picked at a crumbling bump in the wall and a skeleton key fell out. The mystery of its being entombed in such a fashion implied great significance; my brother kept the key in a small metal munitions case he called his Treasure Box. I guarantee that the box and its contents, including the key, are still in the back of the closet of his old room at my mother’s house.

This was still several years before The Amityville Horror or Poltergeist came out, but later on in junior high school, while spending the night with a friend who had HBO, I saw these movies with their awful closets and immediately thought of the Green House.

At first the most notable discomfort in watching the big color television downstairs in the den was trying to hear over the maddening noises. There was a constant chink-ka-chink-ka-chink — a sound of metal-meeting-stone, like the tapping of a trowel on bricks or a hammer and chisel on a stone tablet. Even my dad, whether he realized it or not, would slowly and steadily keep turning up the TV volume, and wind up getting yelled at. My mother would call down the stairs, clearly exasperated “Can you not hear that? Well, can’t you turn it down some. Jeez.”

Daddy attempted to debunk the incessant hammering: he theorized that the concrete block retaining wall that held the earth back from the patio just off the den was catching the sound of distant construction; that it was carrying across the neighborhood and echoing through the glass patio doors like a giant ear drum. I couldn’t believe he was comfortable with this explanation; I became shrill-bordering-on-hysterical the third or fourth time he insisted this was the cause of the hammering sound. “But if you go outside you don’t hear it anymore!” I would stand out on the patio or in the driveway by the garage doors and scan across the Trails to the all the other houses in the neighborhood — none of which were under construction or visible repair. There was nothing to account for the sound.

Similarly, my dad tried to convince me that the sound of the basketball bouncing outside my bedroom window was actually the globe on my bookshelf bumping against the wall. Okay, so problems with this theory: a) the globe made a dull cardboard thud when you banged it into the wall, while the sound I was hearing at night while I tried to go to sleep had that distinct, stretched, hollow, elastic ring that sounds like absolutely nothing but a basketball; and b) what the hell kind of invisible creature was standing in my bedroom, all the way across the room, rocking my bookshelf with the globe on top into the wall over and over again?!

Couldn’t he see the holes in these theories? And why wasn’t he more disturbed by these holes — or, better yet, the hands reaching through portals between the dimensions of Hell and Suburbia and hammering things, bouncing things? Dribbling ghost hands that came through these gaping holes, these awful maddening mysterious terrible swirling invisible holes that made me want to cry out — what? Yes — “Vortexes!”

The last time I watched television downstairs — alone — was when Peter Pan came on. It wasn’t the Disney animated feature, but one of those mid-Century Cathy-Rigby-on-a-wire versions that was basically a camera aimed at a stage musical and then rebroadcast on TV throughout the 60’s and 70’s.

I tended to create full-on, audience-participation, immersive productions of children’s fantasy television events, whether or not it was ever intended or called for. For example, I religiously watched The Wizard of Oz in a black cloak, pointed hat, and green face-paint. Yes, I most identified with Elphaba and Nessa Rose long before Wicked enriched their identities and revealed their names to us. The only thing that kept me out of a pair of Pippi Longstocking hose and red-sequined slippers was the sad fact of not owning them.

Although I found the Peter Pan television musical a bit lame, it allowed for multiple dress-up options. I possessed an Elf costume from some school Christmas play (green tights, green felt tunic, and pointy green felt slippers — without the stocking cap, I probably looked as much like Sprout in a Green Giant commercial as I did Peter Pan); and I also had a Pirate costume from a recent Halloween (head kerchief, eye-patch, single large hoop earring, white peasant blouse, wide black belt/sword-holster, black pants stuffed in tall black boots — I was silently pleased and a bit envious when Adam Ant made this look acceptable to wear in public several years later).

Not only were both of these costumes appropriate, they allowed for costume changes, transformations I would affect during commercial breaks with the speed of a backstage Cher or Stevie Nicks during a long, teasing instrumental bridge.

I did the Peter Pan look for the first few segments, practicing flight from the sofa arms and the ottoman, but I was relieved when we reached the Captain Hook portion of the tale, which was my cue to shift to the preferred Pirate gear (green synthetic tights are insufferable). I dashed upstairs to my bedroom, donned the majority of the costume, and then appealed to my mother to tie the bandana on for me as she watched a program on the black-and-white set in the vortex.

“You’re changing again?” she asked rhetorically.

“It’s time for the pirates. Will you do my beard?” I offered her the eyebrow pencil I’d already snatched from her bathroom. One of my favorite parts of this look was the drawn-on facial hair.

“No, let’s not do the beard tonight. It’s too much trouble to get off, and the show’s going to come back on. You’ll miss it.”

Okay, so I scrapped the beard, even though I never felt so much Myself in the mirror than when I wore an eyebrow pencil goatee. I’d just have to grow the real thing one day. [wink]

“And turn the volume down!” Mama called out as I went back to the den below.

“I already did!” I believe she just insisted on telling us to turn down the volume as a default refrain, regardless of how loud it actually ever was. I guess she figured there was always the potential for more quiet.

I had committed to certainly not turning the television up, and that infernal tapping sound began — chink-ka-chink-ka-chink — with it there were male voices yelling to one another, as if over their own hammering racket. As always, it seemed to come from the patio outside the den, yet very far away at the same time. The sliding glass door itself might be… a “Vortex!”

I got up from the couch to investigate yet once again, with a frustrating lack of expectation at discovering anything new about the source of the noises. It was getting dark outside and the sliding glass door had become a semi-transparent mirror. A small beardless pirate confronted me. Behind me, the TV invited us to save Tinkerbell and the little pirate clapped as I did as a testament to his belief in fairies.

I approached the glass door to peer out at the patio, cupping my hands around my eyes to block the inside light’s reflection. A man’s voice said “Don’t look in there!” It was a loud whisper, a hiss, that came close in my ear, from everywhere around me all at once. Close behind it a woman called my name “Slade!” with a tone to pull me back from crossing a busy street, from the edge of a cliff, from the mouth of a vortex. It sounded like the Big One, the Pink Lady, my guardian angel. I jerked around to look behind me, hoping to find her standing in the room… but there was no one there; only the television glowed.

In that moment, something… bit me. Something stung my leg. I slapped frantically at my pants, shook them to loose whatever bee or spider had invaded my costume. I dropped to the floor and yanked off my left boot, rolling the pant leg up to find the burning spot. There was a white-edged, flapping triangle of skin on the tender inside of my calf, just below my knee. The wound was the exact size and shape of the puncture hole made by a can opener. My first thought was of a talon, a claw — the Captain’s hook — the beak of a bird of prey, a fang (not fangs, plural, but a hideously large singular pointed tooth).

As I reached to touch it, a dark pearl of blood surfaced, covering the hole, a gem in the setting of torn skin. It grew until it broke under my finger and ran to the cuff of my pants, soaking and disappearing into the dark fabric even as the flow began to pulse slightly like an elementary school hallway drinking fountain with lousy water pressure. I held the rolled edge of the cloth against the flow and hobbled to the stairs, screaming for my parents. (It did cross my mind that, had I not changed costumes, my green tights would have been ruined…)

In the car, on the way to receive potential stitches and a tetanus shot, Mama kept asking me “What did you do?” and Daddy engaged his Spock-like debunking procedure, trying to eliminate the possibilities. “There wasn’t any broken glass…” He kept coming back to the conclusion that I had fallen on my toy sword while trying to fly about the den.

This logic was infuriatingly weak. I explained (petulantly, I am sure) that flying practice belonged with the Peter Pan costume, not the Pirate. And how could the sword (the dullest, rubbery gray plastic, mind you) have punched through my pants without making a hole in the fabric?

I said nothing about the voices I’d heard, but I insisted that I’d been bitten. It was a bite. I could only imagine how large a creature would have to be to wield such a fang. It was a small blessing that, whatever it was, it was invisible.

Tales of a Fourth Grade Haunting is continued here…

image credit Shaggy359 via Creative Commons on Flickr

To Sleepwalk in the Past Tense

Slade Roberson — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 14:52:56 +0000

I began profoundly Hearing Voices in 1978, in the fourth grade, when my family moved into a house that was… well, haunted.

Tales of a Fourth Grade Haunting

To this day, my brother and I need only say three words — “The Green House” — and they speak of a very specific time and place of paranormal phenomena we experienced together as children:

the feline ghost we called the White Cat that constantly darted across the hallway between our bedrooms
the chilling subterranean den where the carpets mysteriously unraveled themselves in an ever-growing hole that revealed the concrete floor
the closet under the stairs leading to a crawl space where we discovered an ancient skeleton key plastered into the wall
the sound of a basketball bounced off the exterior wall above the garage doors right outside my bedroom window
the inexplicable bite or bloody stab wound I received from no apparent source on the inside of my left calf just below the knee (the scar is still one of the most obvious anywhere on my body)
the residual noise of metal dragging and banging around the garage
the loud disembodied voice that would shout “Don’t look in there!” when you walked past the door to the master bedroom
and, most disturbing of all, the puffy middle-aged man in a wife-beater tank top and sweat pants that appeared from time to time lying panting from illness on my parents’ bed with a German Shepherd guarding his feet (a vision that was accompanied by the brief but over-powering stench of urine)

The Green House managed to appear older and shabbier than any of its neighbors in a late-Brady-Bunch-era subdivision called “Spanish Trails” where all the houses were relatively the same age and the same (or variations on four or five) designs.

The Green House was guilty of aesthetic violations more than any other abnormal energy — it was supernaturally ugly. Scary ugly. A previous owner had gone to serious trouble to introduce fuglier than necessary elements into this split-level collision of styles and space.

The exterior siding was nominally olive-drab, while the lawn was gravel-encrusted sun-baked terra cotta with stubbly clumps of crab grass and one spindly Charley Brown Christmas Tree pine, its lower limbs amputated and black with resin above naked varicose roots and a smattering of bleached-orange needle straw.

The interior theme followed a jarring concept of garish, clashing wall-to-wall carpets — an extremely different “decorating decision” from one room to the next; an over-commitment to the complete anti-thesis of “flow” that alluded even to the Crayola sensibilities of children as nothing short of mental illness… Each room was floored in the hides of various slain species of Muppet — my little brother’s bedroom was Cookie Monster blue shag; my parents padded around between furniture whose wooden ankles were buried in rust-brown Jim Henson Studios mastodon; while I was expected to achieve restful slumber on a red more likely to be associated with a Satanic church than with Elmo.

Which came first: the insanity of prior inhabitants or the bad juju invoked by their decor? One might expect Goth furnishings or Victorian architecture to hold on to traumatized energies, but, trust me, that cliche is picturesque compared with an angry, cheap, badly-executed 1960’s reno crying out for an update and a truckload of sage smudge bundles.

My parents did not choose to renovate or invest in redecorating because the Green House was meant to be a temporary home for us; it was a rental. My father had started his own company building homes in new developments across town, and he wanted to shift his credit and mortgages into the houses he intended to sell. We had already lived in another home in this same neighborhood, the house on Barcelona Drive, the site of my previous memoir Send in the Skywalkers.

Visiting the construction sites of the beautiful new houses Daddy was building — with their smell of new lumber, their ample light through new window glass, their hush of fresh virgin carpeting in tasteful neutral colors — made a cruel contrast to the dank, gloomy, mildewy house we actually lived in. I hoped we could eventually move into one of his houses; but that was most likely to happen only if he failed to sell one (which was not desirable) or if he successfully sold so many so quickly that he could build a masterpiece just for us.

While my brother and I call it “the Green House” my parents refer to the places we lived by their street names (incidentally, the only thing noticeably Spanish about “Spanish Trails”). We sold the house on Barcelona and moved to the Green House on Granada, the last house at the end of a small cul de sac that reached into the center of the neighborhood. On a map (or viewed from space) the subdivision was oriented as a sketchy capital letter Q, with the long end of the tail corresponding with the street at the entrance, and the small end of the tail, that reached into the round center, was the street we moved to.

The Trails

This donut-hole center formed a scrubby, undeveloped park of woods surrounded on all sides by the backyards of houses along the loop of the main street. It was the In Between space left over once the lots had been carved out and cleared, a small suburban forest of mostly uncut pines and enormous patches of blackberry brambles. The kids in the neighborhood called this wood “The Trails” — a more aptly named area that had nothing at all to do with the conceptual urban planning and cutesy street-naming of the developers.

The Trails were an unofficial communal play space claimed and ruled in a Lord of the Flies political climate by the children and dogs that were naturally drawn to this No-Man’s Land. The Trails were exempt from all claims and battles over Property Lines. The Trails were a pagan gathering ground for elementary school tribes, whose rituals were enacted in complex, unruly games of BB Gun War, tree climbing and fort building, dirt bike racing and ramp jumping, impromptu gang fights, and all other forms of relatively innocent and elementary human violence.

The Trails were just large enough and wild enough to get lost in (and hurt in) once in awhile… just wild enough for Adventure.

The neighborhood developers had originally intended the area we called the Trails to be a formal residential park, with an enormous swimming pool and basketball courts and baseball diamonds and such; but word on the street was that they’d run out of money to manifest that vision to completion. The only archaeological evidence of this grand design was the bulldozed pit of the abandoned pool, which had evolved into a semi-man-made, nature-eroded earthen half-pipe of dirt bike ramps. Two-wheeled rights of passage revolved around having the stones to dive down one side of this boxy pool-shaped canyon and across the bottom with enough speed to send your bike up and out the opposite side and through the air in a gravity-free wheelie (clearly, a collective reference to all witnesses that evoked Evel Knievel).

The Tunnels
One of the most magical features of the Trails was actually underground — a network of concrete culverts and storm-drains that converged in a nexus of tunnels large enough for children to travel through upright and deliciously unseen to any far-reaching corner of the neighborhood and beyond. There were some tunnels that allowed safe passage beneath a highway into a foreign subdivision remarkably far outside the realm of where our parents would even imagine we might venture.

Indian arrowheads were a plentiful treasure consistently pulled from the few inches of sludge that remained in the center of these pipes. Additional motivation to play in these tunnels was the unintended consequence of our fathers’ lectures on flash floods and how quickly these drains might fill with a rush of whitewater, trapping and drowning us all. We could only hope to escape while still witnessing the Atlantean destruction of our enemies — some older, larger, dangerous kids stooped by their hulking growth spurts and therefore unable to effectively pursue us.

If I could identify any benefit to living in the wretched, haunted Green House, it was the proximity to the Trails that designated our yard as a Gateway — all trails branched from a well-worn path across our driveway, through the corner of our yard, and into the trees (the high-traffic children’s highway most likely responsible for the sorry inability of the lawn to produce actual grass). The location was strategic in monitoring the comings and goings of hostile tribes and in attracting friendly participants for the endless games of H-O-R-S-E that took place at the basketball goal above our garage. Inevitably, turf wars began, ended, or at least passed through this Gateway. My mother could simply hang out my bedroom window to referee the verbal skirmishes that frequently devolved into fist fights.

I led the only small tribe that was a refuge for tomboys, the few little brave Amazons who ventured into the wilderness overpowered by lost boys. In addition to myself, my brother, a fantasy bookworm named Darren, and an egg-head named Jeff who spoke obsessively of his plans to be a doctor when he grew up, there was an older fifth-grade girl named Kathy who reluctantly haunted The Trails on a mission from her mother to chase after, monitor, and report on the activities of her thuggish little brothers (and eventually corral and drag them home each evening). The other member of my tribe (and my closest companion) was a third-grade girl named Andrea, infamous for riding a boy’s bicycle, wearing boy’s sneakers, and generally looking and behaving outside the socially acceptable forms of her biological gender. Our canine mascot was Andrea’s black cocker spaniel Petey, well-loved for his propensity to viciously snap and bark at anyone he identified as outside our tribe.

When bad weather drove us indoors, we spent hours in Andrea’s family rec room playing the same 45 records on her dad’s cabinet stereo — on heavy rotation were Juice Newton’s “Queen of Hearts” and Queen’s “We Will Rock You” backed by the arguably more brilliant and anthemic b-side track “We Are the Champions.”

Indoors or out, our plans inevitably turned to the ultimate expression of Tribal power among the Trails — building, securing, and maintaining an enviable Treehouse of unprecedented height.

The Tree

There was an enormous pine that towered over all others on a hill in the wooded section of the Trails. Its first branches met the bole at least ten feet above the ground; we had never known anyone to successfully scramble up into the lowest part of it, let alone scaled the top. Nailing a ladder of scrap two-by-fours onto the base of the trunk was undesirable as it would give access not only to us but to anyone who came along and wanted to claim it. Darren and Jeff suggested a method of secure access we came to call “squirrel style” — going out along the lower horizontal branches to the ends that drooped under their own weight, we could swing a jump rope to catch and pull the needly tip all the way to the ground, then use the branch as a ramp to scoot up and across to the bole.

Once able to climb the Tree, we still spent days (a few of us weeks; some never managed at all) working up the courage to achieve the elbow of the top-most branches. The incredible view came with a terrifying exposure — no overhead handholds to cling to, it was like sitting on a horse or a nightmarish unicycle — and the slow, undulating sway you could feel was greatly exaggerated at the Tree’s crown.

Sleepwalking and Speaking in Tongues

At this time, and only during the two years we lived in the Green House, I began to sleepwalk.

(Writing this I’m confronted with a linguistic quandary — what is the past tense of the verb to sleepwalk? Is it sleepwalked or slept-walked? Is it hyphenated or separate words or run together? A little online research finds people arguing for slept walked or to avoid the awkwardness entirely with somnambulated.)

The sleepwalking marked the beginning of the later (escalating) paranormal activity. I don’t remember how I first became aware that this was happening — I had no way of knowing until my parents told me.

I was anxious to find out every detail about my behavior while unconscious. The possibilities of what I might do disturbed me. I quizzed my parents about it every morning “Did I do it last night? What did I do? What did I say?”

My parents calmly described the episodes from their perspective — which sounded terrifying! Like scenes out of some Omen-child or Exorcist horror film. My mother said that she would wake up in the night to find me standing over her bed, trying to communicate in the choked fragmented speech of bad dreams.

“What did you do?” I would demand.

“Oh, I just told you to go pee and go back to bed. And you did,” she said, clearly untroubled or unwilling to feed my anxiety.

My dad reported that while up late watching television in the downstairs den, he discovered me sitting at the bottom of the stairs “speaking in tongues.”

“What does that mean?” I was horrified.

My dad was typically intellectual and philosophical about the episode, and amused at my panic. He explained to me that I was speaking in a language that he could not understand; that it was an altered state of consciousness associated with religious experience and possession.

Possession?!

He chuckled at the expression on my face.

I imagined myself in their position — waking up in the night with one of them, or my brother, wandering about in the dark like a zombie, eyes open but unseeing, gurgling nonsense… Why weren’t they concerned — alarmed — as I knew I would be?

Perhaps my parents’ Earth-sign-heavy astrological charts explain their reactions — they have always been unflappable in the face of my strangeness and tendency toward hysteria. To their credit, they’ve always acknowledged my magical perceptions with unemotional detachment and just enough curiosity… They never insisted that “It’s just your imagination” or “There’s no such thing as…”

My parents are consistently potential Believers — somewhat agnostic; with an appropriate dash of delight and wonder, if and when it’s called for. When I was younger, I was more incredulous and demanding about their responses — needing them to match my drama; as I’ve matured, I’ve come to appreciate their open-minded yet even-keeled resolution to having given life to this Alien Mystic. They are neither disturbed by or invested in my strangeness.

“Why is this happening? What if I go outside? What if I wander off and no one can find me? Shouldn’t you wake me up? Shouldn’t you make me stop?”

They seemed to share a conventional wisdom that you don’t awaken sleepwalkers. They waved away my fears in soothing reassurances. “You’re not going to wander off and get lost…” they insisted.

My brother was not so convinced. With the hall light on and his door cracked, he witnessed my night-time wanderings and could not help but associate the behavior with all the other scary things that he sensed in that house after dark.

He knew that I was in potential danger of traveling somewhere undesirable. He saw me wake up one morning in the bathtub; another morning I was curled up under the coffee table in the living room. We shuddered at the thought that I might visit the den in my altered state — alone, at night — it was a space we religiously avoided in broad daylight.

One morning I awoke from a vivid dream of climbing the Tree out in the Trails in my pajamas, without shoes; the bark scraped my toes. The Moon had seemed close enough to reach out and pet, but I was afraid to release my hands from their grip on the branch beneath me.

When I made my bed the next morning, I shook needles out of the sheets all over the crimson carpet. My mother made me vacuum. My brother agreed that the sticky pine tar tracks on my hands and feet were undeniable evidence.

Tales of a Fourth Grade Haunting is continued here…

image credit gnackgnackgnack via Creative Commons on Flickr

Messages from Your Spirit Guides

Slade Roberson — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 02:54:52 +0000

A new guided meditation — Messages from Your Spirit Guides — is now available for instant download in mp3 format.

The #1 Most Requested Meditation for my on-going “Tower” Meditation Series is a guided visualization to assist you in performing your own spirit guide readings.

The intentions of this visualization are to communicate with your personal team of spirit guides and receive the messages you most need from them right now…

Listen to it again and again — regarding any topic, challenge, or decision
Access information from your guides on any day, about any situation — ask a different question; and receive answers and instructions
Meet the specific guide(s) assigned to assist you with a given area of your life
Learn Where exactly to go when you “go within”
Assume the position of your Higher Self and hold meetings with your guide team

Here’s the link to get the Messages from Your Spirit Guides download.

I hope you enjoy it!

Jesse : Stranger Angels - Part 4

Slade Roberson — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 22:26:20 +0000

I spent a total of four Sunday evenings and Mondays in a row at Jesse’s house unearthing memories of possible angel sightings, paranormal experiences, and encounters with supernatural beings.

I wasn’t called in beyond a second interview — I didn’t even get that job, although my dearest friend at the time, Tricia, helped me find another position at that same University not long after… The truth is, I kept going back to stay at Jesse’s with an entirely different motivation.

The second time I encountered Jesse, he came to the cafe where we had originally met, just as I was leaving. The third time, I paged him, while at Lenox Mall, miles away in another part of town, and fifteen minutes later he walked right up to me in a Pottery Barn. The fourth and final time, I dropped by his house without paging him at all. His car wasn’t there, but I peeked through the window in his back kitchen door; and then, just as I was putting my car in reverse, he pulled up behind me in the driveway.

I didn’t even consciously realize how much I had locked away and forgotten about until I started sharing these stories with him — the more of them I recalled, the more they began to surface. There were so many experiences that I had never talked about or even remotely considered telling anyone. If you’ve followed the hundreds of articles that I’ve written in the last three-and-a-half years it may be difficult for you to realize how relatively recent it has been that I discuss these subjects publicly at all. You must understand that at the point I met Jesse, in 2002, I was still deeply guarded (and relatively ignorant) about the existence of spirit guides or angels. For the first thirty-five years of my life I carried on under a profound anxiety that I might be mentally ill, or, more importantly, that other people would diagnose me as clinically insane — that if I talked about this, I could be institutionalized, locked away, lose my freedom, or maybe even my life over it.

I could never recall or transcribe our conversations word-for-word, but, if this was a movie, I would simply show you a montage of those hours spent in the armchairs that were the only substantial furniture in the house talking over take-out food and coffee. Much of these talks felt like some kind of intensive therapy sessions — maybe, as in the symbolic logic of dreams, Jesse’s uniform blue medical scrubs implied healing.

Jesse never talked about himself, his work, his family, his life. At first I would ask questions, according to social protocol, but they were always vaguely deflected. He interviewed me, with very precisely chosen prompts that I was sometimes surprised to realize how much I could answer, at great length. He wanted to dig into the details of strange memories that I had not thought about for years. I’ve never felt “listened to” so completely.

After pulling the stories from me, he would take a turn theoretically “diagnosing” or identifying the themes from a spiritualist perspective, as if he were writing a thesis paper on my childhood. Sometimes, the dialogue felt like a psychic reading, as he seemed to know more about me than I did.

And — always — he related the context and the parameters of what we discussed to the existence of angels.

I eventually moved from feeling “embarrassed” by the direct way he lectured about this topic to warming to the possibilities. The more I shared, and the more he explained to me, the more I felt something click into place that made more sense than I might have initially wanted to admit. I began to feel lighter, intrigued, even relieved that there were things that had never made sense to me before that suddenly had this magical, retroactive filter through which I could reconsider them. Viewed through the prism of Jesse’s beliefs, the very things that I had uncomfortably ignored and repressed because they were disturbing or confusing began to have a purpose, a cohesion that would at least make sense in the realm of Stories.

Skeletons in my closet, of which I was mostly ashamed, were recast as powerful, meaningful, benevolent characters. The ingredients of my “insanity” became the components of a mystical narrative where I was a hero, not a victim. (It’s very much the current model for my client readings — to reinterpret a person’s Story such that the seemingly random threads emerge as a pattern in a tapestry; the painful pieces become gifts of the spirit; the tragedies become tests of the will; the failures become the acquisition of wisdom… Any life story can be willfully romanced through an intentional shift in perspective.)

Much of what Jesse shared about angelic entities was biblically arcane to the point of being obtuse: The Book of Enoch who was essentially abducted by ancient aliens (angels) and later returned to record the names we historically know them by; and archaic categorizations of the angelic hierarchies — the Four Choirs, and the subset phyla (species) of angelics like Supernals, Celestials, Illuminations, Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominations, Virtues, Powers… and those of the Orders of the Fourth Choir who are the most likely to closely interact with humanity — Principalities, Archangels, (plain old) Angels.

Among the “lowest” order were the personal guardian angels who work with each of us, usually in pairs: our Ashers and Silver Cord Technicians.

Spirit Guides or Angels?
Recently, one of the students I’m mentoring through the Automatic Intuition Professional Program told me that she believed one of her spirit guides had shown up, unannounced, on her doorstep one day. An unusually small woman who claimed to have a “message” and was invited in. After a conversation in which she made predictions for this student concerning her future life purpose, she left and was never seen or heard from again.

I didn’t say so at the time, but I wondered that this might not technically be an entity of much higher vibration than a guide. I doubt the ability of a spirit guide (a formerly human soul) to manifest a corporeal body — to assume living form. But of course it depends on whether or not anyone else witnessed this little woman — was my student the only person to see, hear, and interact with her? If so, then I suppose it may well have been a spirit guide in full-body apparition, not unlike a ghost; or able to be perceived by interior psychic senses.

Astral Sleepwalkers | Ladies in Nightgowns
Jesse suggested that many of the beings we might perceive as brief, full-body apparitions with very limited interaction — and assume to be ghosts or shadows or angels — might actually be astral travelers: real, living, flesh-and-blood human beings asleep in some other part of the world whose souls leave their bodies and wander around. This might explain why so many of the women commonly seen in such circumstances often seem to be wearing nightgowns, are unaware of their surroundings, and are unresponsive, like sleepwalkers.

Corporeal Angels

While many spirit entities of all types are most commonly perceived by intuitively sensitive people, who experience them regularly or intermittently through the subtler psychic senses, Jesse told me that there are beings who literally manifest physical bodies that all of us — absolutely anyone — can see and interact with.

It takes enormous power and ability to assume a corporeal form, even temporarily, and it is unlikely that ghosts, earthbound spirits, or dis-incarnate human souls acting in the roles of guides can pull this off.

Beyond just being around us everywhere in some “ethereal” way or in some “other dimension,” corporeal angels walk around among us. Even though we see them and speak to them, we mostly dismiss them as random strangers; it may never occur to us that they are not human.

Roles of Corporeal Angels
Jesse said that angels who take the physical form of human strangers commonly appear to be doctors, nurses, EMT’s, police officers, firefighters. You may have brief and meaningful interactions with people in these roles whom you never see again, and others of their kind can’t account for them and will likely not know to whom you are referring if you ask about them.

Many corporeal angels will assume the guise of homeless people. Jesse pointed out that many panhandlers are quite aware of this lore, regardless of their personal beliefs, and may strategically exploit the perception for their own ends. He advised that the best means of discernment is simply your gut — that you know or at least suspect on an intuitive level; their vibration is usually quite high, the feeling that you get in their presence should never be threatening, though it could be uncomfortable or intense.

Some Qualities that Might “Give Away” the Incarnated Angel

they seem “rooted” to a particular spot — able to interact with you, although they may remain standing or seated in one place
they move around normally, but are limited to a specific physical location or time
their clothing may be “anachronistic” — the style of the clothing is oddly out of fashion, yet appears “too new,” without normal wear and tear
their clothing may appear unusually put together or hastily chosen
there is an anonymous quality to their overall appearance — they blend easily into crowds
they may be unusually tall or the opposite, extremely diminutive in size
they may appear to be of an indeterminate age — whether they are young or old, it seems almost impossible to guess
they are “plainly beautiful” in an unremarkable way that has more to do with “newness” than the handsomeness of features — “beautiful” in the way that all infant creatures are beautiful; even though their features are not interesting or necessarily sexually attractive, their skin is often colorless or without variation or blemish
their smell may be unusually strong or noticeable; pleasant but pervasive
they speak without recognizable accent or dialect
they are emotionally even-keel or undemonstrative in their expression — perhaps even “robot like”
even though other people may be able to see them as well as you can, they have no known connection or relationship to anyone else
you feel their presence before you notice them; they are always aware of you first; by the time you make eye contact you realize that they have already been staring at you

Significance of Their Names
They are not quick to introduce themselves or to volunteer their names; if you ask, they will provide you with a single first name.

The names they claim will often be of recognizable significance to you — a name that you particularly like; that you have known many people to share; that appears often in your family; one that corresponds with a figure of importance to you.

Even when their names don’t seem to be coincidental or meaningful, they nevertheless correspond to some pattern. (Have you noticed the commonality among the names of the characters I have shared in this series of memoirs, not to mention the names of some of my guides that I’ve talked about in others? It’s the only thing “curious” or noteworthy that stands out, by the way… Although it is a very simple pattern, it is a constant.)

More important than the “type” of entity or the details of their physical appearance are the roles they play or the circumstances in which they may interact with the living in a corporeal form.

Circumstances Where Angels Tend to Intervene

Miracles
Transitions of Birth/ Death
Physical Danger
Direction Regarding Life Path and Purpose
While Traveling

I specifically recall that “while traveling” was the last thing that Jesse mentioned; combined with the list of odd physical attributes, it was The Trigger that finally made me say “Okay — wait a minute…” This is how and why this series of memories I’ve been sharing with you connects. Before that day, I had never related to another person the mystery of the stranger who had followed me from London to Paris to Amsterdam. I believe it had confounded me and defied logical explanation for so long — and to such a degree that I feared speaking about it would only make me sound paranoid — that I had uncomfortably and successfully semi-forgotten it. Tucked it away with no expectation of ever understanding how it could be…

“Why now?” I asked Jesse, after he pronounced his judgment that the experience was a perfect example of what he alluded to as evidence of Their existence. “Why am I just becoming aware of this, here and now, at this point?”

“At whatever point in time, your awareness can change your awareness in all directions — backwards into the past, forward into the future. You’ve definitely — admittedly — been wandering around in the woods in the dark, purposefully hiding. Maybe now you’ve stumbled upon a path that leads Somewhere you should go.” (Jesse’s speech tended to be spiked with these Yoda-like answers.)

“So, what do I do with that?”

“Reconsider… Everything…” And then he said something to me that I would hear repeated, from a variety of sources, in remarkably similar wording and form, over the next few years — I refer to it as The Ultimatum from My Guides:

“Why would you keep what you believe to yourself?”

(Perhaps those incidents landmark the next obvious series of stories I should share here… I wish I could say that meeting Jesse set me on a clearly defined, purposeful, peaceful path out of those proverbial woods I was wandering in. “Reconsidering Everything” was not a pretty process — it was not all “angel hugs and angel wings” — the Universe had already stripped me of so many basic structures in my life, and then it sent a Wrecking Ball through my world, and deconstructed my belief system and my understanding of reality. Although my personal paranormal experiences certainly increased a hundred-fold, the next few years was more like a tornado tearing through those woods, and if I’d ever feared that I might lose my mind… Well, I finally did. I lost it. And it took me about three or four years to crawl up and out to a place of lucidity and control that has allowed me to produce the writing on this web site and to begin counseling others and providing readings.)

That last day with Jesse, after he challenged me regarding my reasons to continue in secrecy, he did something that was completely out of character with the relaxed, timeless nature of the routine we’d established, or the synchronicity of my comings and goings — he suddenly announced that he had to go. (Which I translated as a polite way of saying it was time for me to go.)

He was urgent, fixed, and final in showing me out the door; it felt like he had heard a silent alarm sound and knew my car was about to turn back into a pumpkin.

From the small back porch near his driveway, Jesse watched me throw my bag into the trunk. Before I sat down in the driver’s seat, I took my last chance to speak to him over the hood of the car:

“You know, don’t think that I’m not unaware that, if everything you claim is true, you are highly suspect.” I accused him with a smile, teasing. “You meet more of the criteria than Stalker John did. If anyone I’ve ever met is One of Them, you must be.”

Jesse gave me a grin and a little shrug of the shoulders — not a confirmation, but certainly not a denial.

I never saw him again.

About a month later, when I had finally landed a job and relocated, I wanted to at least talk to him and let him know how everything had worked out. When I called his pager, I received a wrong number message.

Although I never ran into him again, there were three occasions when I discovered books mysteriously left for me — one for each of the places where I lived between 2003 and 2006: Messages from Mother Mary in my mailbox; Quantum Spirituality on the windshield of my car when I came out of a Kroger grocery store at 2 am; and Conscious Evolution (the book by Barbara Marx Hubbard that Jesse had been reading when I first met him) which I found one morning (impossibly) outside on the balcony of my top floor loft.

Not only did Jesse disappear on me — even his home vanished.

The few times that I drove by the small white house right after moving to Atlanta, I saw a realtor’s For Sale sign by the mailbox and it looked emptier than ever. Whenever I found myself on that street, I would slow down as I passed the house, looking for signs of occupancy. On one occasion, about a year later, during a particularly rough patch of difficult psychological transition, I actually went there with every intention and hope of stopping to visit him again.

I carefully tracked the landmark speed humps — just past the last bump before you get to the traffic light — and pulled into the driveway. Before me was a green house, and, more disorienting, the driveway and the sidewalk were on the wrong side of the house. I got out and looked to the neighbors on either side — it had to be one of those; I only could’ve missed it by one, in either direction…

The house simply was not there. As if it existed according to a magical law of physics like Platform 9 and 3/4 where one catches the Hogwarts Express, or the safe house in The Order of the Phoenix that can slide into and out of a crack in space time…

Over the next couple of years, I scoured that street, expecting to locate it at last and realize my previous error, even if Jesse wouldn’t be found there. When I eventually moved back to Tennessee in 2006, the last thing I did on my way out of town, my car packed to the roof with my belongings, was take one final slow (fruitless) creep down Woodland Hills.

This is the closest I’ve come to finding it — or making it “real” — again.

Jesse : Stranger Angels - Part 3

Slade Roberson — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 13:37:48 +0000

Jesse was the first person to suggest to me that some of these benevolent strangers we encounter are not even human, but incarnated guardians.

Although I had experiences as a child that involved angel sightings, spirit guides, spirit animals, ghosts, and elementals, I would never have included the episodes with the man John, who had followed me on my trip to Europe, in a similar paranormal category. Over the years, I even found myself relating the story of the almost-mugging — but, for some reason, excluding the part about John entirely.

Until my conversations with Jesse, I would have lumped these strangers into quirky, serendipitous stumpers of curious environmental synchronicities.

Environmental Synchronicity (Aside)
I’ll give you a few very recent examples of what I mean by these patterns that I observe seeming to emerge from random chaos, but that feel “less personal” somehow — just glitches or glimpses of cosmic machinery at work that don’t feel “targeted” toward me in a significant, meaningful way.

A few months ago, just before Christmas, I was standing in the checkout line at the supermarket behind some random stranger. Nothing noteworthy about that, except that, the very next day, in a completely different part of the city, I was waiting to place an order at the cafe, and the same person got in line behind me. Never saw him before; never saw him again…

Last month, January, I was out running errands. I stopped to get gas and a car pulled up at the pump next to mine. I noticed it because it was the exact same make, model, year, and color as my own car. (You always notice when you see “your” car on the road, right?) So, I went all over town that day — the bank, the post office, the bookstore, the cafe, and eventually criss-crossed my way to an enormous shopping mall a few hours later (which I generally avoid and only visit about once a year if I absolutely have to — I needed to exchange a Christmas present). I found a group of empty parking spaces and pulled into one. As I was getting my bag out of the trunk, a car pulled into the space next to mine — the same exact car and driver. In that asphalt sea of parking options, not to mention in a medium-size city, what are the chances?

No biggie — just things that make you go “Hmm… What was that all about it?” Never saw them before; never saw them after. Some fairly irrelevant mathematical remainder in the clockwork of divine timing, I suppose.

Anyway, that’s the kind of compartment in my mind where I might have placed the story about John, tagged with a greater-than-average significance and a Big Mystery stamp.

I met Jesse in 2002, exactly ten years after that trip to Europe. I was thirty-two years old. I had lived through a really shitty (shittier-than-most) Saturn Return that nuked all the structure in my world and left me in a ditch that I would spend most of my thirties crawling out of. At the time, I was recovering from a serious illness and working on rebuilding the basics of third-dimensional existence — job, place to live — I had no way of knowing that I was about a year away from a major Trip Down the Rabbit Hole that would deliver me to some different level of identity and I suppose a reorientation to my spiritual path — events that climaxed with an intervention by my guides, an ultimatum regarding my sense of purpose, and ultimately the creation of Shift Your Spirits and the work for which you know me.

In 2002, I was not operating from even so much as the intention of a “higher vibration” — I was just surviving. (Barely.)

I was working in Chattanooga at a temporary, low-paying job while searching for a full-time position with medical benefits, preferably in a counseling environment, where I could also work toward a Master’s degree. I decided to move back out of state, to Atlanta, a large city where I had lived before and where there were more opportunities. Fortunately, my temporary job gave me Mondays off, so I could arrange to do interviews on at least that one weekday, and travel down on the Sundays before.

All the back-and-forth was expensive, with most of my funds eaten up by gasoline. The weeks of job hunting were turning into months. Many of my friends and contacts in Atlanta had moved away; even more of them were estranged. I had one girlfriend from college who was generous with her hospitality, whom I felt I could impose on to some degree, but I was going to rely on her heavily for a place to stay at a longer duration of time once I’d actually secured a position and could then start the second stage process of relocating to a place of my own.

I’d already worn out my welcome with more than one person. I told everyone, including my parents, that I was spending those Sunday nights in motels; more often than not, armed with pre-ironed interview clothes, a lint-roller, resumes, and my cell phone, I slept in my car so I’d have enough gas money to return home. (I could sometimes simply get up before dawn in Chattanooga and drive down but the morning rush hours and unpredictable gridlock of getting into Atlanta on Monday mornings was actually more stressful and difficult to effectively schedule.)

I passed most of those earlier Sunday evening hours killing time hanging out in cafes. I tend to haunt cafes — I’ve discovered more than one magical vortex in a favorite cafe. If I decided to plot them on a map I wouldn’t be surprised to discover evidence of ley lines or the network of some personal power nexus.

I met Jesse at a Starbucks in Ansley. He politely asked if I minded if he sat in a leather armchair next to mine that shared the small table between them. He was dressed in scrubs; a doctor or perhaps a nurse. He was handsome in a bland, super clean-cut way — he obviously had some seriously Nordic DNA that results in superior height, blond hair, blue eyes, and an airbrushed complexion. I remember thinking he looked less like a nurse than a model for a medical uniforms catalogue, or maybe an extra in a hospital scene on a television show.

I don’t remember how we initially began chatting, but the conversation started over the books we were reading. I was reading Jung and Tarot; he was reading Conscious Evolution by Barbara Marx Hubbard.

Jesse talked at great length about the concepts of Hubbard’s work — he was a bit dull and emotionless in his delivery, professorial, yet the information itself was interesting and he seemed intent on instructing me about it.

He eventually asked me what “my story” was, and I told him about my process of finding work and relocating. “You’re inhabiting the Wanderer archetype,” he said, pointing to my book.

“Ah, yes, or you could call me a Fool, as the Tarot would,” I chuckled.

“That is the beginning of all Journeys,” he kindly assured me.

When the baristas began to make the obvious motions of closing the cafe, Jesse asked me where I was staying. I told him truthfully that I wasn’t sure yet, but lied when I said I would go find a cheap hotel — I mentioned a notoriously shady possibility nearby.

Jesse looked troubled by this. “No, no no,” he shook his head. “I live alone, nearby, just blocks from the University where you’re going tomorrow. I have a guest room, I’m not working tomorrow, and I insist that you come stay with me.”

I was not looking forward to finding a safe place to sleep in my car, and after going through the motions of being assured that the invitation was sincere, not just a friendly but empty offer, I accepted with grateful relief.

Jesse’s House

I was to follow his car to his place, but he also gave me back-up directions in case we were separated, not an address but simplified landmark-based. The house was on Woodland Hills, the first driveway on the left after the last speed hump as you approached the traffic light at the end of the street.

Jesse drove some vaguely forgettable car — something white, fairly late model, like a Ford Taurus — it looked like a rental.

I’d driven past his house thousands of times over the years.

I realized just how tall he was when he actually stooped going through the back door into his kitchen.

The strangest thing about Jesse’s house was that it was almost entirely empty — there were no appliances except a coffee maker, nothing but water and milk and a bag of coffee in the refrigerator, paper plates and cups in the cabinets; there was nothing but a lonely chandelier in the dining room; two leather armchairs, a large television and a lamp, both sitting on the floor in the living room; there was no art work on the walls; blinds were the only window treatments; in one bedroom was a mattress and an alarm clock on the floor, an open closet with a row of scrubs and a few pairs of jeans and t-shirts; the bathroom had a toothbrush, toothpaste, a razor, and shaving cream in medicine cabinet, a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo in the shower…

It looked like a house that had been immaculately upgraded and remodeled — for sale, but badly in need of staging.

“Did you just move in?” I asked.

“Uh, yes,” was all he said. (The same cryptic and succinct answer he’d given me when I asked if he was a doctor or a nurse.)

The whole house smelled like saffron incense.

When he showed me to his second bedroom, apologizing that it was his “meditation room slash library,” I discovered where Jesse kept all his possessions (or at least a good ninety-five percent of them).

Books. Books — everywhere. (It was a bit… eccentric; or possibly insane.)

The books weren’t shelved, but in stacks on the floor; a few feet high, and two or three stacks deep around the entire perimeter of the room. The twin mattress on the floor, well-made with crunchy new pillows, made the whole room look like some kind of gigantic crib with book-stacks instead of bars. Had the stacks been any closer to the bed or any taller I would have feared that they might topple over on me and bury me alive while I slept between them.

I had once worked in a small metaphysical book store, so I immediately recognized the spiritual subject matter of his collection; he seemed to have at least every title we’d carried in stock, and then some. The books were in several languages — English, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Afrikaans…

In addition to the most popular best-sellers on a range of subjects, as I explored the spines more carefully I realized that the one over-arching theme, the one topic that was represented more than any other was: Angels. And, I mean, this guy was clearly obsessed.

Angels?

Really?!

Our earlier conversation had established Jesse (in my mind, at least) as intellectual, sober, and serious. He just didn’t seem to fit the profile of the customers I remembered coming into the book store and purchasing material about angels. I must admit, at most periods in my life, I negatively judged people with an interest in angelology as being vapid. With the exception of those who approached the subject of angels from an academic, scholarly, or comparatively religious angle, I assumed the audience for contemporary angelology to be simplistically fundamentalist or spiritually immature.

Weren’t angels a bit — I don’t know — fluffy, naive, benign yet decidedly un-powerful?

Although I would have had a hard time describing sightings of beings such as the one I wrote about in The Ones Who Glow as anything but some type of guardian angel, at the time that I met Jesse I still held to some arrogance that my experience (or at least my perspective) was uniquely profound.

The truth is, at this moment, I accept that the word “angel” describes a type of entity that I very much believe in — a vocabulary that transcends the boundaries of human culture and faith — yet some part of me wishes there was a footnote every time I use the word that screams

“The angels I see do not look a damned thing like Barbie dolls in nightgowns with wings, people! Their energy is comforting not because they are ‘huggable’ but because they are powerful.”

In response to Jesse’s semi-apology about my having to sleep in a makeshift library, I told him that I always needed to read before falling asleep anyway. It was already incredibly late in the evening and I had to get up early; he left me to the books and retired to his own room.

A person’s books provide an irresistible insight into his private self, so I stayed up for awhile exploring them. I was intrigued to discover how many of the books had been autographed — all the Doreen Virtue titles were inscribed to Jesse by name; Sophy Burnham, Angela McGerr, Sylvia Browne… they were all signed. In addition to the modern, popular titles you would find in any well-stocked New Age section in a bookstore, there were also very old books I’d never seen before and still have not run across again — volumes filled with Kaballah; encyclopedias of angel names; invocations, prayers, and spells for calling in the Archangels and banishing demons…

Of all the uniformly blank white walls in Jesse’s house, there was one exception — opposite the bed was a print of William Blake’s Angel of Revelation (which I have included above as the illustration to this post). When I opened the closet to hang up the suit bag containing my interview clothes I found the floor covered with more poster prints, rolled up like scrolls with rubber bands around them. More reproductions of angel paintings and facsimiles of illuminated manuscripts.

I fell asleep that night staring at the Angel of Revelation, with that little coif of golden curls that clashes absurdly with the intensity of his expression and purpose, frozen in his bold-postured pronouncement.

Jesse served me coffee the next morning when I came out of the bathroom, dressed and ready to leave for my interview. He formally inquired how I had slept.

“Angels, angels, everywhere,” I said, hoping it came across as only a slightly teasing prompt.

“Indeed they are,” he said.

“I’ve liked William Blake since I was a little kid,” I told him, trying to at least communicate to him that I was more open to the topic than I really felt. I’ve always had a tendency to want to adopt another person’s language in an attempt to connect with him. “When I was in elementary school, a librarian found me looking at a book of Blake’s paintings and poems and she told me that Blake saw angels in trees when he was a boy. I remember resisting the urge to confess Me too!.”

“Maybe that’s exactly what she was inviting you to do,” Jesse said. “I’ll give you another opportunity to now. I’d like to hear about that.”

So I told Jesse about The Ones Who Glow, the same story I told you about my first encounter with a guardian angel when I was six years old.

“That was your asher,” Jesse told me. It was the first time I’d ever heard that term. He explained to me that the asher is the word for the “classic guardian angel,” and is merely one of many different types (or phyla) of the highest vibration spirit entities we call angels.

“Will you come back next week? I want to tell you more, and I have a feeling you have other stories. You are welcome to stay here again, when you go to your second interview.”

“Provided I get called back for another interview,” I said. “Are you making a prediction?”

“Oh yes, I absolutely believe you will,” Jesse said. “You’ve just called your asher to you, after a very long time.”

“I have?”

“By talking about her, right now. You will notice the effects of having done so.”

As I gathered my things to leave, and thanked him for his hospitality, he wrote a pager number down on a piece of paper and gave it to me. “Please let me know when you’re back in town. I insist. I’m always off on Sunday nights and Mondays. Promise me that you will come back and continue this conversation.”

I said that I would, although I’m not sure how much I meant it.

My first interview was a success, and I did get called back for another the following week… and the truth was, this time it was scheduled late in the afternoon on Monday — I really had no good reason to drive down on Sunday and stay the night. It was totally unnecessary, other than to visit Jesse again. Of course, I went.

I found myself wondering if I should call him. I was worried that I might be imposing on a stranger who was only being polite. But then, he had given me an explicit way to contact him… Then, it occurred to me that the number might even be a fake.

I decided that I would page him, and if he called back I would thank him again for letting me stay and let him know that his prediction came true. That would give him the opportunity to invite me to meet again if he really wanted to. The page went through okay, but quite a bit of time passed and my cell phone never rang.

I eventually went back to the same cafe where I had met him. Hours passed, and closing time came with no call. I was very disappointed, and feeling foolish that I would now have to spend money on a hotel or find a safe place to sleep in my car and kill another entire day until it was time for my interview.

As I was getting in my car to leave, Jesse pulled up next to me in the parking lot and jumped out. He was clearly in a rush — flushed in the face, and almost out of breath when he spoke.

“Oh, good, I caught you!” he said. “Follow me back to my house.”

Stranger Angels — Part 4 concludes this serial here.

Stranger Angels - Part 2

Slade Roberson — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 15:24:46 +0000

I did not see the strange man who had been following me again until a few weeks later, on the day that I was mugged in Amsterdam.

My time in Paris was… difficult. I felt stressed, distracted, uneasy, but also mute and invisible. I’m someone who talks a lot, but because my roommate Allison was fluent in French, she did all my talking for me. Her friend Natalie was a French national, and though I’m sure they didn’t purposefully exclude me, they chattered away with me along as a silent third wheel, just listening, catching only about fifty percent of what they said.

They dragged me through two full days of the Louvre… Madonna-and-Child, Madonna-and-Child, Madonna-and-Child — “Oh, look, the Mona Lisa; neato” — Madonna-and-Child, Madonna-and-Child… Endless palatial corridors of Madonna-and-Child. I hate to admit that I felt like I was stuck in some virtual reality walk-through of a really tedious Art History textbook. I told Allison “If I don’t see something painted after 1890, I’m going to go blind.” I ducked out and went for some amazing (much needed) inspiration from the modern art collection at the Pompidou Centre — without the girls.

When Allison and I were finally alone in our room each night and she switched back to English, my voice would come out thick from lack of use.

And when we spoke, we bickered.

“What are you looking at?” Allison asked, beyond irritated. I stood by the window, peering out through a gap in the curtains, not really conscious of what I was doing or that it was even noticeable until she pointed it out.

“Nothing,” I said, knee-jerk defensive.

She accused me of acting paranoid, day after day — constantly looking back behind us when we were walking, checking and re-checking the lock on the door, and lurking near the window watching the street.

“You’re making me nervous. It’s like we’re being followed.”

I didn’t feel like I could explain myself without proving she was right about my behavior — not to mention, possibly sounding like I was losing my mind. So I let her believe I was simply being a pill; that I was indeed miserable being in Paris with her.

I announced I was going to cut my stay short and go to Amsterdam alone. She didn’t protest; I’m sure she was relieved to spend her remaining days with Natalie without having to be my translator. (Hey, everyone deserves to have the optimal experience, and I was admittedly a very different person twenty years ago. The person I was then would have had little appreciation for what I write about these days…)

Amsterdam

Maybe France simply did not agree with me. Arriving in Amsterdam I immediately regained the better mood and sense of comfort I’d had when I began my trip in the UK. I met a couple my age from San Francisco, Marty and David, who were staying in my hotel. They had been in Amsterdam for most of the previous week, their last three days coincided with my first three; they were able to show me around to all the “best” places they’d discovered to hang out and eat. We went out to some great clubs every night and, best of all, I could participate fully in conversation again. I had exactly the kind of traveling experience I would have most hoped to have.

I became attached to Marty and David very quickly, and when they departed, their absence was palpable. I had little expectation of achieving the same sense of joy or meeting strangers with whom I could click so effortlessly. Truly, my intuition said “Might as well go ahead and leave” — but there were a few sights I wanted to see while I had the chance and they seemed appropriate for that lonely, invisible state I had fallen back into.

The first day on my own, I went to the Anne Frank House (a profound adventure that deserves its own story sometime) and then I came back to my hotel room and watched the flocks of thousands of birds that would wheel out into the sky each evening at dusk above the Centraal Station just across the canal from my window, moving together like an enormous tornado or a computer-animated coming swarm in a killer bee movie. They would hover in a shifting cloud for close to half an hour, as if they knew they were performing for an audience.

The next day I chose to walk across town to the Van Gogh Museum. It was a fortunate serendipity on some levels — there was a special temporary traveling exhibit on Mackintosh Art Nouveau, perhaps the most resonant historical design era in which I could possibly find myself immersed. The entire upstairs of the museum was converted into complete rooms that replicated Art Nouveau interiors, and there was a small movie theater playing a documentary on the period. Although there were a half-dozen other people in the theater with me, I felt like the installation existed at that time and place just for me — like I had successfully manifested it… and I had more of those intense past-life memories that had made my time in England so electric.

When the credits scrolled across the screen and the lights came on, I pulled myself up with a satisfied sigh and headed reluctantly toward the exit.

I’m sure you would have seen the smile on my face melt when I saw John sitting in the back row.

Impossible. Are you kidding me?

I fled the museum.

The wind that channeled between the buildings was the only thing that kept me from running back to my hotel — I would round a corner and find the signs and traffic lights swinging wildly, and have to lean into the force of the wind as if I was hiking uphill. It created that horrible sensation you find when you are hunted in dreams, your body stuck in slow motion, your limbs lagging behind the directions of your mind.

It’s easy for me now to look back and wonder about the questions that should have been going through my mind — Who is this guy? Why would he be following me? Is he a stalker, a serial killer — or maybe he’s some kind of cop who mistakenly thinks I’m a serial killer? Why would anyone want to follow me? How is it possible that he can keep up with me from one city to the next?

At the time — honestly — I did not care. I wasn’t thinking anything except I want to go home. I hurried from the museum as if my home in the United States was just a few miles away, and if I could move fast enough and push myself, I could reach it before collapsing. I was having a serious Dorothy Moment, but I was all out of patience for befriending scarecrows or lions or taking in sights along the road — can we just cut to the part where I click those ruby heels together?

I’d been abroad for about a month at that point — maybe I just wasn’t as “worldly” as I would’ve fancied myself to be; maybe all these enormous gray winter cities were sloughing away the edges of my personality… maybe I was incredibly homesick and this was what that felt like?

More than anything, I felt threatened. I felt unsafe. I felt I was in danger… and the stranger behind me, whom I couldn’t seem to shake, corresponded with this atmosphere of fear.

Fear often turns into anger (especially for me) and the anger gets directed at the person you blame for making you feel afraid.

I wasn’t just running away, I was fuming, and at some point I knew it would build up (God help him if he actually caught up to me) – I may have looked like I was moving away from him, but I was really marching toward the break where I would turn around and rage.

I heard a voice in my head (a man’s voice, not my own): You are powerful.

I AM powerful, I answered back.

You are protected, the voice said. That slowed me.

You are fine, it promised.

I was out of breath. There was a stitch in my side. I’d dropped into that slower pace of determined, sustainable endurance, the words rearranged in a sing-song affirmation in time to my foot falls:

I am powerful, I’m protected, I am fine /
I am powerful, I’m protected, I am fine /

It became a mantra, a chant that helped me maintain my speed, it pulled me along.

Dread Lock

I came upon a man with dreadlocks who stood right in my path. I ducked to the side to go around him and he matched the movement it what seemed like one of those awkward anticipatory dances whose steps are meant to avoid collision without losing momentum, and inevitably end up in a face-to-face stop, a pause, and a polite “Excuse me, after you.”

Dreadlocks wasn’t trying to pass me, he was shadowing my movements, “guarding” me in the posture of a sporting opponent. When I stopped, he walked into me as if he was going to embrace me with one arm and shake my hand with the other.

He held me against him and shoved a gun against my belly. At least, a pocket full of something meant to feel like the butt of a handgun.

“Money,” he said to me in English. “Come on.”

Two things flip my fire switch:

being assaulted or bullied
being in the presence of someone I care about who is assaulted or bullied

When I was in my twenties, I had virtually no ability to manage defensive anger and my temper turned on and up in one direction – full-on, unbridled, absolutely ape shit. No warning, no ratcheting up by degrees… And it came with a loud, hateful, free-style narration. My Daddy used to say that I had The Kind of Lip That Will Get You Killed in The Wrong Circumstances. My friends in college were amused by my tongue-lashings and called this aspect of my personality “Julia Sugarbaker.”

I doubt Dreadlocks would have ever predicted the manner in which I responded. He had no way of knowing just how pumped up on anger and fear I already was. I probably looked like someone running away, which his instincts identified as prey – what he ran right into was Royally Pissed.

When my words came out, I screamed them, to berate the passive pedestrians calmly walking by as much as my mugger, and more than anything, loud enough for stalker John’s benefit.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me. You’re going to mug me, in broad daylight, two o’clock in the afternoon, in the middle of the damn street? And you expect me to believe you’ve got a gun and you’re going to shoot me with it in front of all these people for spare change? You know, it’s no shock to me that every fucking piece of shit would-be thug in America actually does carry a gun because our whole society prides itself on the fact, but in the Netherlands, man, really? That’s a pretty big deal for you to be carrying here, isn’t it? I mean, you’re either a serious hard core criminal or you’re faking it. You’re obviously small time, because why else would you be hitting me up for a handful of change that won’t even buy you a cup of coffee? Therefore, logically, you’re a petty thief and the hard on in your pocket is probably – what? — a plastic cigarette lighter?”

Dreadlocks glanced around nervously at the potential crowd I was drawing and said under his breath “Man, cool down. Just give me some money, that’s all I want.”

I shoved my hand into my jeans pocket and pulled out some Dutch coins and the crumpled, sweaty French bill that John had given me that night at the Gare du Nord. I’d never spent it. I had continued to carry it like a talisman. At that moment I was even a little grieved to be giving up what I’d come to think of as a souvenir.

Dreadlocks held out his hand between us and I slammed the money onto his palm, slapping it hard enough that the coins leapt and pinged off a grate in the sidewalk. He held onto the French bill, looked at it quickly, shook his head slowly, and pulled a clearly disappointed sour face.

“Man, come on,” he said, like he was trying to reason with me “I can’t do anything with this…”

“No? Cause you said all you wanted was money; that’s all I got; that’s all you’re getting. Would you rather have some traveler’s checks you can’t possibly exchange without an ID and a really good forgery? If so, you’ll still need to walk me back to my hotel and let me get them out of my room safe for you, wanna do that?”

Dreadlocks looked at the French bill again like he was trying to decide whether or not to just give it back to me. “Come on,“ he pleaded one more time.

I saw him look over my shoulder and his eyes focused. I knew exactly who he was looking at.

In a much lower, confidential, almost-whisper I said to him. “You see that man behind me, the one in the long coat? …Yeah, I can see that you do… You’ll notice I also don’t even need to look because I know he’s there. He’s been following me for two weeks. He’s some kind of cop, or some kind of detective, I don’t know who or what he is, but he’s watching me, and now he’s watching you too. You want him for a witness?”

It really wasn’t a bluff; maybe the authenticity of my confession gave it power. At any rate, the doubt and confusion played out quickly. He backed away slowly at first, clearly keeping his eyes on John, and then he turned and ran.

I was so jacked up on the adrenalin of the situation, I swiveled around with the full intention of finally laying into this “stranger” John who was following me. I was mad enough to punch him. Of course he was there, just as I knew he would be, keeping to his minimum fifty-foot distance.

John made a gesture, opening his hands and briefly holding out his palms, slightly shaking his head. He grinned a with a kind of lop-side, regretful smile. He looked, more than anything, sad and… apologetic. As if to say, “Sorry that it had to be like this.”

He hung his head and walked back in the other direction.

Supernatural never entered my mind
I’ve attempted to relate this story without interpretation, because at the time it happened, and for many years after, it was just an odd mystery and an “I was held up at gun point” story. Knowing what I discuss here today, it’s impossible for you not to infer that there is some paranormal or spiritual significance to this memoir.

Ten Years Later
It may not even compare very well to more significant, profound, or “poetic” spiritual intervention stories — it just happens to be one that happened to me. I’m sharing this with you because it’s an event that I recalled ten years later.

This is just a Prologue.

The circumstances of my learning What This Was All About form the “real” story of a stranger angel encounter, and mark a transition in my awareness of spirit entities.

See, in 2002, I met a man named Jesse — who somehow already knew that this had happened to me and prompted me to recall it. Then, he revealed to me What It Meant.

And that, Dear Reader, is another even Stranger Angel story I hope you’ll stick around for…

(To Be Continued would be an appropriate name for a blog…)

image credit lambertwm via Creative Commons on Flickr

Stranger Angels - Part 1

Slade Roberson — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:40:19 +0000

Have you ever encountered strangers in stressful or dangerous circumstances whose interventions or assistance seemed supernaturally timed or miraculously unlikely?

Helpers who magically step in, deftly orchestrated by fate, then just as quickly and mysteriously disappear?

Maybe you felt that the Universe had used someone as a vessel or messenger or assigned him or her a divine walk-in part in your story…

Has this phenomenon ever occurred in such a way that you were left wondering if they were even human at all?

I alluded to this as an awareness that might possibly present itself as a result of doing the Soul Counting exercise.

Strangers who may not be human
I’ve had a variety of encounters over the course of my lifetime with all kinds of entities — but I didn’t always realize who was who, what was what, which ones were which. In a few cases, I was clued in much, much later. (Of course, in many cases I simply don’t know — I may suspect — but I have no way of knowing.)

Paranormal Memoir

Here comes another one of my (many) little personal paranormal episodes…

In January 1992, when I was twenty-two years old, I traveled to Europe. I flew to London with a small group of friends and stayed for a few days before splitting off from them to go meet up with my friend Allison who was waiting for me in Paris. We had arranged to connect at a specific hotel between the Latin Quarter of the 5th Arrondissement and the 13th Arrondissement on a Saturday morning — but the only trains I could take required that I arrive either half a day early or half a day late. I opted to travel in the wee hours of Friday night/ way too early Saturday morning and arrive in Paris at 1 am.

I figured I could check in to my own room for one night at the same hotel and sleep for awhile until Allison woke up.

I had only a little bit of British cash when I left London, but I wasn’t concerned — I could go to a money exchange when I arrived in Paris and turn in some American traveler’s checks for francs. Even in the middle of the night, all the train stations I’d ever been to in large cities like New York and London were bustling with activity at all hours.

The J’s
After the Channel crossing, there were only four other people in the car on the train with me — two girls from New Jersey who were traveling together, Joanna and Julie, an Australian guy who eventually introduced himself as James, and a nondescript man in a khaki-colored trench coat who remained several rows away, never joined in our conversation, but nevertheless seemed to always be staring and closely watching us whenever I glanced over at him and made eye contact.

The Jersey girls made entertaining companions, they were chatty and fun to talk to; James from Australia was very shy and although he moved closer to sit near us, he mostly just listened to the conversation.

A Guardian at the Gare du Nord
I was unprepared when I arrived at the Gare du Nord train station in Paris and found it to be an absolute ghost town — every kiosk, cafe, ticket booth, and bank was dark, locked up with those roll-down gates like you see on the front of mall stores when they’re closed.

The Jersey girls snatched one of the only waiting taxis, and James melted away into the streets with the small crowd who exited our train from other cars.

I wandered around in an awkward circle, looking for any sign of activity that I knew I wasn’t going to find. This was a really ill-planned arrival. I had been so comfortable in London — I was traveling with friends from the US; staying in the apartment of British natives; there was no language barrier; not to mention a kind of “past-life” familiarity that was at least partially practically supported by recognizable landmarks from years of studying English literature. Now I was alone in an abandoned metropolis with just enough high school French vocabulary to read signs and grunt nouns and adjectives and to possibly grammatically butcher verb conjugations in a pinch. I was an obvious tourist carrying everything I had in an enormous pack; an easy target for a mugging.

I was actually thankful there was a freezing fog everywhere to ensure the streets were emptier than they might otherwise have been.

There was only one other person anywhere nearby that I could appeal to for direction.

It was then that I realized I was being watched.

The man in the khaki-colored trench coat, who had been staring at me on the train, was lingering, lurking around at a casual distance.

At least he was a familiar face, and if he had just arrived from England too then chances were very good that I would not have to pull out a classroom foreign language that hadn’t been tested in real world circumstances.

Feeling like a child who’d lost his mom in the mall, I walked up to him and began babbling about my circumstances — where I was trying to get to in the city, where I might find a money exchange…

I felt no sense of danger from him. Honestly, I suspected he might be cruising me, and I was more than willing to play the damsel in distress in exchange for crucial information, confident that I could politely fend off any sexual invitations, if that was his motive.

Preternaturally Normal

As I talked to him, I realized there was something vaguely off about him, and in the back of my mind I was cataloguing the details of his manner and appearance.

He introduced himself simply as “Uh… John” and something about the way he spoke the name sounded like a white lie made up on the spot.

When he spoke, his voice was soft and polite, yet he made no facial expressions. He was absolutely emotionless. He spoke English, yet I could detect no traceable accent — it wasn’t British, or American, or Australian — and traveling always heightens my awareness of dialects, even within my own country.

I can see his face clearly even today and would recognize him immediately if he walked in a room — but I can not describe much about him that might be identifiable or unique.

His eyes were an unusual icy blue, but other than that…
He could have been thirty… or he could have been forty or even fifty.
His hair might have been a dirty blond… or maybe a light brown, or even silvery-gray.
He was dressed from head to toe in monochrome — his pants and shirt were the same colorless beige. Only his shoes were a different color (and I noticed that, despite the cold, he was not wearing socks).
His clothes had creases in them, as if they had been taken directly out of packages. I felt like if I could have checked inside his collar I’d find price tags still attached. It reminded me of the way body forms we would dress for window displays in retail stores appeared before the clothes had been steamed.

That was it — he looked like a living mannequin.

He looked too new, too perfect — yet totally unremarkable.
He had absolutely no (zero) body hair — no stubble, no shadow, no hair on his wrists — not even the faint down that a woman or a child might have.
He gave off an overwhelming yet anonymous perfume that smelled exactly like… dryer sheets. Even his breath was like a warm load of clean towels.

John was… supernaturally ordinary.

He offered to informally exchange the small handful of British pocket money I had on me — I handed him what amounted to less than five bucks, and turning away from me for a moment (perhaps to protect from my seeing into his wallet, I suppose) he produced a bill that, although still a modest amount, was at least double the value of what I’d given him.

“But it’s not enough for a taxi all the way from here,” he warned me. “You’ll need to walk quite a way first, as far as you can.”

Using a rail map posted on a wall for reference, he showed me where I was and where I was headed. “Once you are in view of Notre Dame, or come to the Seine, you should be close enough to hail a driver to take you the rest of the way to your exact destination… Would you like me to walk with you?”

I told him that wouldn’t be necessary — I appreciated his kindness but I anticipated it might be more difficult to get rid of him later if I needed to. Before we parted ways outside the station he warned me about the dangers of walking through this part of Paris in the middle of the night.

“Be invisible,” he ominously advised.

As far as ensuring that my path was relatively deserted, the weather was probably a blessing; but the grace of the cover it provided me came at a price — it was miserably freezing cold. The moisture in the air was just light enough to remain a dense fog, but it soaked me as well as any steady drizzle might have…

It was a long, harrowing (shitty) night
I would need another thousand words here to itemize the petty trials of that night’s walk. My feet were blistered and swollen for days… I could not get warm the entire week that I spent in Paris… To simplify the story and focus the events, I can’t recall many times that I have felt that physically vulnerable.

Had I been a crow, I could’ve kept moving directly south, but the streets were a crooked, uncooperative labyrinth that required constant course correction.

I expended a lot of energy “being invisible” as I had been instructed. I encountered very few people — several prostitutes propositioned me from the caves of doorways and shopfront awnings; I constantly crossed and recrossed streets to avoid anyone on the sidewalk; I ducked into phone booths from time to time to collect myself and maintain my bubble of cloaked energy.

It did not take me long to realize that John was following me. He remained a block or two behind me, and stopped when I stopped. Who has nowhere to be and nothing better to do than to follow me through the streets of Paris at 3 am in the middle of January? A serial killer? But I think maybe I was comforted a bit by his strange yet at least somewhat familiar presence over the alternative.

Hours later I spotted the recognizable architecture of Notre Dame. Soon after I was across the Seine and in the Latin Quarter. Thinking surely I was close enough to afford a cab the rest of the way, I stopped a driver and sputtered my destination. He laughed and pointed to the street I was seeking, only a few hundred feet away.

I walked up and down that street for another hour — not only was the hotel not there, the very street number itself did not exist. After pacing back and forth and carefully tracking the building numbers to convince myself I wasn’t hallucinating, I was literally in tears. In frustration, I sat on a bus bench and surrendered to having arrived at being finally and totally lost.

That’s when I saw John again, across a square formed by a jumbled intersection of streets. I was just pissed off enough and desperate enough at this point to walk right up to him and demand to know why in the Hell he was stalking me.

He disappeared down a side street that looked like an alley and I followed. It was an improbable, completely eccentric continuation of the street I had been pacing up and down. The numbers picked up and continued. No sign of John, but there was the hotel.

That Monday, a few days later, I was with my traveling companion Allison and her friend Natalie. We were walking from the Champs-Elysees headed to the Eiffel Tower when someone waved at us from the window of a restaurant.

It was Jersey Joanna and Julie, smiling brightly and waving excitedly at me. I felt the quick joy of such a synchronicity, of the most unlikely familiar friendly faces. There were two males sitting with the girls who turned around to see who they were waving at. One of them was James the Australian guy — Wow! They ran into him again too? That’s kind of cool. What are the chances? And then I made eye contact with the Other.

It was John.

Why would he be with them? They never spoke on the train…

“Do you know those people?” Allison asked me, her eyebrows together in a subtext of How is that possible that you would just run into someone Here?

I was too overwhelmed in that moment of processing to offer much of an explanation. “They came over with me on the train from London.”

And that was not the last time I saw the stranger John.

It was over ten years before someone even clued me in to who (what?) my experiences with this stranger might have been about. And that Someone was even more questionably a “real person.”

…to be continued…

image credit mdezemery via Creative Commons on Flickr

Guns, Money and Prayers

Slade Roberson — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 16:56:37 +0000

Spiritual contemplation, the work of self-improvement, the opportunity to create are all luxuries of abundance.

If you are even here, reading my posts, interested in pursuing your life purpose and following your spiritual path, you are by default experiencing great wealth of opportunity. When your basic, third-dimensional needs for survival (shelter, food, money) are not being met it’s nearly impossible to graduate toward the concerns of the soul.

While this awareness has been running through my mind for months (years, now), the dire situation in Haiti this week has underlined this acknowledgment with exclamation points, turned up this Message to an almost excruciating decibel.

Do you not feel the noise of it in the Collective Mind? Even if you think you might shield yourself by turning the channel on the news coverage, can you really attempt to be plugged in and not be inevitably aware?

Perhaps you feel “guilty” about the impact you can make, that your challenges and concerns for business-as-usual seem petty by comparison. Your having less, denying your abundance, dialing down your vibration to match the lowest common denominator does not make the world a better place. The most likely expression of your power is to expand that which you have, which you know — it’s the basic significance of gratitude.

One of the ways you can make the world a better place, ensure the steady atrophy of misery, is by choosing consciously NOT to be miserable.

Don’t shun the fortune that you have, don’t send it away in shame or guilt — celebrate it; share it. Acknowledge it, call out to it, for more of it… For whatever blessings you would pray come to you, pray for all to know them.

The Duality of Heroism
There are basically two archetypal stories of the Hero:

The Hero who fights evil; slays the dragon; vanquishes the demon.
The Hero who intervenes; lends power; rescues; saves.

I believe there is a potential tipping point of human beings, at soul level, who will choose Heroism given the opportunity — and I believe that a significant number of us in “first-world” countries would also prefer to enact the second myth of the Hero Who Saves.

Isn’t a bit of a no-brainer when we compare what the physical power of the United States and our allies might use to conquer, versus to rescue? I’m struck by what our soldiers can accomplish, and how obvious the two-handed choice is…

Even with the strongest urge to Save, we feel helpless — what can we do but pray and send money (and our guns)?

Don’t knock these options — prayers and money have profound impacts, in multiple dimensions.

Like you, I’ve already texted those $10 donations and contributed my healing energy and my prayers. For the last couple of years now I have tithed 10% of the money I make from doing readings and selling courses to a variety of charities. I don’t “jump up and down” about it — and I do this partly from a sense of duty, but even more because I believe it generates great karma and contributes to my own material success.

Just wanted you to know that for the month of January, I’m pledging 10% of all my readings and products directly to Haiti relief efforts.

Momentum Before Inspiration

Slade Roberson — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 21:51:59 +0000

A body at rest tends to stay at rest.

God knows, after a month of recovering from surgery, Holiday downtime, and a post-Baby Jesus/Baby New Year sinus infection…

…My eyes are bleeding from all the HGTV… I’ve traveled Middle Earth for the umpteenth time on TNT… I’ve come away with the conclusion that I will choose from:

House #1 — a spacious open floor plan almost entirely made up of porches supported by Elvish pillars in Rivendell
House #2 — a Candace Olson renovation of a condo with a view in a transitional cliff-side neighborhood just beneath the Citadel in Gondor where I can walk up to visit that pretty gnarly Tree
House #3 — a rambling, single-story underground mansion in a nice tree-topped brugh between the Bucklebury Ferry and Hobbiton

I’ve discovered that I am not at all dependent on the granite countertops, cherry-wood cabinetry, and stainless steel appliances that 99.9% of the human population seems to require — where are the kitchen-witch kitchens with bricks and twig furniture and sprigs of herbs drying everywhere and wildflower-sod shingles, and those lovely round doorways?

Dear Suzanne Whang, let me know when they send you to the Shire…

Super digression…
Where was I?

I’m really tired of resting.
I’m a little bit sick of healing.

Wait for Inspiration?

Okay, Universe! Feel free to move me at any time! No, make that sooner than later. Now would be peachy.

Wouldn’t it be fabulous to return to my work with some luscious big bang of pageantry and pomp? I’d love to show up in your in-box or feed reader today, soaker-guns pumped, horns a-blaring, fires blazing, and hit you with a new-decade-worthy whammy of content…

Are you waiting for Inspiration to create your Momentum?

It’s nice when inspiration comes first and drives the repetitive actions that build momentum — and it often does — but what do you do when it does not?

Do you keep waiting for inspiration before you proceed? Inspiration is ephemeral, intellectual, intangible. Inspiration has very little to do with action, form, or function. Inspiration is a ghost without a body, a wisp of a soul with no vessel to move through or make an impact on the third-dimensional world.

I find that I can still be quite productive without initial inspiration — I define the necessary actions that create momentum and just go through those motions… Inspiration usually catches up with me down the road.

Inspiration seems to favor speed, action, momentum, and high vibrations. I seek the Flow, the Groove first — even when I’m not feeling it (yet).

A body in motion tends to stay in motion.

Shift Your Vibration First

Remember when we talked about how simple, repetitive actions can be all that is required to effectively shift your vibration?

It’s called getting in gear. You can’t start out in second or third gear — you’ve got to move through first gear for a bit. And if your parking brake is on and you’re waiting for fifth gear to happen before you start rolling… What kind of sense — what kind of crazy expectation — is that?

Start Out in First Gear

Your intentions probably feature visions of cruising along in fourth or fifth gear, right?
What are the required first-gear actions?

Depending on your intentions, goals, resolutions, first-gear actions be something like:

Clearing last year’s clutter from your workspace
Going to the gym and signing up for a trial membership
Printing out some new recipes you found on the internet to support your new eating habits
Downloading and installing the new software that will power your creative project
Getting a tutorial to walk you through launching that blog you’ve kept in the planning stages for too long

The question to ask yourself:
Can someone else witness my actions?
If so, then you are in gear.

My first- and second-gear actions are pretty simple:
(I’ve been doing them for years — you are witnessing one at this very moment.)

I listen in to the Collective, compare the energy patterns I find among all of us to my own, then I simply share my observations through the filter of my personal experience. It’s a fairly simple weekly action called a post, and not all of them need to be “brilliant,” nor can I predict who they will find or to whom they will effectively speak.
I focus my observations on the spirit guides of individuals who ask me to listen in and translate messages just for them.
I talk shop with other professional intuitives and we pick each other’s brains about our practice. I offer my advice and experiences to those who want to learn from me.

All my simple, “low-gear” actions are essentially simple acts of connecting and communicating.

The inspiration often comes after and/or because of these simple acts. If I wait on Inspiration before initiating the simple acts that lead to Momentum, we may both remain lost in our private vacuums of inertia.

What actions do you know you can take, right now — with or without hardcore inspiration — to induce the movement that will carry you forward?

Become a Professional Intuitive

Due to popular demand, I am now offering an optional Monthly Payment Plan for the Automatic Intuition Professional training program.

Do It Again

Slade Roberson — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 21:17:57 +0000

Microcosmic Energy Shifts
This time of year, more than at any other, you’re probably considering making an energy shift that will allow you to accomplish some quantifiable goal.

Completion is not required
The “big secret” about — or perhaps we’ll call it an often-overlooked aspect of — creating an effective energy shift is that completion is not required.

Completion often comes after a series of similar — smaller — actions.

As you fuel your initial commitment, keep in mind that:

Just starting the path is being on the path.
Just taking the first action creates the energy that propels all the other “steps”

Small, sustainable, serial actions
Most long-term goals and intentions for conscious, willful, creative change can be broken down into a series of repetitive actions.

These action steps are:

small choices in thought and behavior
simple behaviors, repeated concurrently
a bread-crumb trail of multiple potential successes

Many small successes reinforce Self-esteem, which energizes all positive changes and life (spirit) -style choices.

The momentum of the Beginning levels quickly to a plateau of daily practices.

Concrete examples:
Let’s say you want to lose thirty pounds — you shift into the frequency of that long-term success the very first time you take actions on your new intentions.

Let’s say the required repetitive action is something like exercising thirty minutes a day — the vibration you need to tune into is reached the first day you show up for that exercise.

You experience the same energy losing thirty pounds as you do when you lose one pound.

Let’s say you want to write a 250 page book — you accumulate those pages by showing up and filling them one at a time. You also begin collecting and using your power from the very first paragraph you put into form.

Let’s say the chosen repetitive action is writing a page a day — you know what it feels like to write pages from the first day to the last.

It’s the same tool — you just apply it X-number of times.

Completion is not required to shift that vibration — a (single) willful, (intentional) earthly action will call in the proper vibe.

One small success in a day carries the same energy as thirty of them in a month, or three hundred sixty-five in a year.

Why wait until you’re Perfect and Totally Done before you affirm the power shift you’re calling in?

You called it — it’s as here — as in effect — as it will ever be.

Use that initial achievement to propel you forward.

You do it once?

You’ve done it.

Do it again.

Image credit jared via Creative Commons on Flickr

Life Renovations

Slade Roberson — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 16:56:25 +0000

Send me some healing energy!

I will be having a minor outpatient surgery tomorrow, Monday December 7.

To all you energy healers and Reiki masters out there, here’s the scoop on where you can direct your healing zaps:

I’m having a hernia repaired; right side of my groin. (Graphic? Too much information? Sorry, all the healers I’ve told have asked for some specifics to work with, so there you go!)

I may be slow to respond to emails for the next few days:

Readings

I am currently scheduling readings for the week of December 14.
Go here to book a reading.

Professional Training Applicants

Please feel free to keep sending in your applications, I will process these later in the week.
I still have six (6) openings at the current discount price.

Check out Automatic Intuition Professional page for details.

Renovation and Repair

I’m really excited about this medical procedure!

I know that may surprise you to hear, but here’s why:

I feel that if I have any kind of medical issue that can be healed, managed, fixed, repaired — then I’m blessed. There are so many out there who face health challenges that have no simple, obvious, third-dimensional course of action.

Energetically speaking, a hernia is likely a physical manifestation of a frustrated, misplaced creative expression. (Or a ruptured relationship — in my case, it’s definitely the misdirected creative power.) About six years ago, when this physical problem first occurred, I was at a very “low” point in my life and was faced with the ultimatum that it was time for me to reinvent myself — my life, my path, my career — in a more authentic way. It took me a few years to process that decision and take the actions that ultimately led me to where I am now and how you came to know me. At the time I developed the hernia, I was “in the closet” regarding my spirituality and misusing (perhaps even wasting) my creative and intuitive power — hiding it, keeping it to myself, fearful of being judged…

I’ve spent the last four or five years emerging from that dark space, and you’ve witnessed much of that journey as I began publishing Shift Your Spirits. Last month, during all the 11-11 energy we experienced, I reached the conclusion of a phase of my life and the beginning of a new era. For me, much of that has been amazing and positive completion/ launches — having fulfilled a goal to teach others to develop their intuition and relationships with spirit guides on a professional level.

Coinciding with that creative abundance has also been the opportunity to heal lingering health/physical issues. As a self-employed person, it took a lot of bureaucratic acrobatics to acquire the health coverage I needed to have surgery, so to me this is one major, outstanding loose-end finally being tied up.

You know what I’m most excited about? Being able to freaking WORK OUT again! My body has been in a comparatively fragile state the last few years as I worked on the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual levels. I’m really looking forward to moving forward again in all dimensions.

These third-dimensional issues (weaknesses) no longer align with my expansion in other areas of my life. They are all “old” junk, baggage… it makes a lot of sense that these “negative” energies are up for review at a time when everything else is flowing so well.

I know that some of you may be able to relate to this — you may wonder “Why would bad things emerge as a result of a lot of positive, conscious, intentional personal growth?”

You may think “I’ve initiated all this great positive change — why am I getting sick now? Why are relationships breaking up now? Why are my circumstances breaking down now?”

Retreat into Intellectual Curiosity — take Emotional Response out of the equation and re-examine what you see as “challenging” or “scary” or “bad” — a major, necessary phase in any Renovation is Demolition.

It may feel like the Universe has a Wrecking Ball aimed at your life, but this may actually be an answer to your prayers for change — a blessing. Your guides are tagging and flagging that which no longer works for you or can remain in harmony with your shift in vibration.

Thank you in advance for prayers and packets of healing energy — I’ll keep everyone posted via Facebook about my progress in the next few days.

The Discomfort Zone

Slade Roberson — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:13:22 +0000

In the body — your most powerful, portable divination tool — it can be difficult to distinguish between the discomfort of fear versus excitement. In order to grow, to expand, to develop, to pursue a higher calling or to manifest great change, feeling some discomfort is inevitable. Especially in the context of taking on a Big Goal, being nudged outside your Comfort Zone is more the spirit of Ally than Warning.

How can you tell the difference between fear and butterflies?

When you start to doubt and wonder:

“What if this isn’t intuition…?”
“What if the fearful feelings are actually warnings that I should NOT go forward in this direction…?”

Fear, anxiety, warnings, and excitement can feel emotionally and physically similar.

Ask yourself this:

“Assuming that I can totally and fully pull [this] off, will my life be better because of it?”

If the answer is most likely “Yes,” then the butterflies are your allies. That’s not fear — that’s excitement and the Call to stretch yourself.
If the answer is likely “No, this action is not in alignment with where I ultimately want to go” then indeed your gut may be communicating an alarm bell, a warning, a flashing yellow light that says “Reconsider.”

The path you are most meant to take will generally unfold for you, as you engage the Next Obvious Step, but that doesn’t automatically mean it’s effortless. If you are well into your mission — if you are too far in to go back, and going forward is just as likely to be a Way Out — before you assume that you have encountered a true block that equals a dead end, stop and re-evaluate.

Restrictions and limitations can often be very effective prompts for innovation and creative thinking.

“If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced. Vincent Van Gogh

Archers and Fletchers

Slade Roberson — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 16:30:40 +0000

You know, all those Archery metaphors…
In the archetypal actions of setting intentions, filling your quiver, prepping your missiles, target practice, reaching goals, hitting your marks — do you tend to focus your efforts on engaging your inner Archer, or do you emphasize — even get stuck in — the role of the Fletcher?

The Archer can’t shoot without the work of the Fletcher; the Fletcher’s work languishes in obscurity without the actions of the Archer.

Ready

You can spend an infinite amount of time and energy in the “Ready” stage, and never achieve the goals that you set. I personally love the “Ready” stage or the beginning of a project. The inspiration phase of a new idea is seductively full of potential, with no danger of being “ruined” by your attempt to give it form.

I’m a sucker for the Air element. I have mostly Water and Fire in my chart — Air interacts with Fire and/or Water in dramatic ways — you get tornadoes, thunderstorms, and raging blazes. I like to start things. I like to study, I like to muse upon, to contemplate, to receive the communication from spirit, to engage the creative intellect.

Fletcher
The English surname Fletcher originates in Middle English and describes the occupation of an arrowsmith — a manufacturer and seller of bows and arrows; one who fletches or feathers arrows.

Feathers are a third-dimensional symbol and a literal grounding of the intersection between the intangible, divine, heavenly element of Air and the element/materials of Earth. A fletcher manifests the physical form by preparing feathers, stone, bone, wood and metal.

I was talking with my friend Andrea Hess yesterday about the intersection of the various elements and dimensions that come together in the synergy we refer to as manifesting. My words tend to wax and bluster about in the archetypal and metaphorical… Andrea impresses me with her ability to say something very brilliantly succinct:

“Your intention is successfully grounded when someone else can see it.”

Your ideas require a physical form that another person can access — see it, hear it, feel it, receive it, download it, hold it…

As a writer, you engage the Fletcher archetype by outlining, writing, typing, drafting, formatting, and editing your ideas into a publishable form. The most challenging aspect of the Fletcher is Perfectionism. The degree to which you suffer from perfectionism (and either fear of failure or fear of success) can greatly impact the scope and creep of your project goals.

Sure, the form itself will affect how well the project “flies” and whether or not it hits its target — but no matter how close to perfect your Fletcher can take your project’s form, it goes nowhere without the Archer.

Aim

Having just spent the last few months deep in the Fletcher mode of my Automatic Intuition Professional Training Program, I’m struck by how brief the “Aim, Fire, and Release” actions of the Archer — the actual launching or publication of the physical form — can seem when compared to all the work that went before.

All physical form being relatively equal, the Archer becomes an expert from quantity, repetition, and practice.
I believe it’s one of the main reasons writers find blogging so satisfying and useful in our development — it provides access to the full cycle of Ready, Aim, Fire, and Release, over and over again.

The challenging aspect of the Archer is hesitation, over-thinking, over-analyzing, and extending the moment of taking Aim into an unnatural, awkward, non-intuitive action.

Anyone you know who does anything well — who has established a successful process; who does anything relatively quickly — has developed this ability not through perfect preparation but through repetition. Trying, trying again, adapting… and above all else, having the courage to miss — to blow the shot — once in awhile.

Fire and Release

It’s so easy to over-emphasize the Aiming and the Firing.

The most important thing I know at least I tend to forget about the Fire, the Launch, the pull of the trigger, is the immediate and inevitable, unavoidable Release.

Once your arrow leaves the bow, you’ve cannot hang on to the feathers without ruining the shot. A singer-songwriter friend of mine, Pam Howe, said something very wise regarding creative work that has stuck with me:

“Once your song is out there, it’s really not yours anymore. It belongs to the audience, and how they receive it and respond to it is out of your control.”

If you think of your intentions as letters to the Universe, once you drop it in the mailbox, you’ve done all you can do. You can’t continue holding on to it and expect it to travel and arrive at its destination. In the abstract, worrying about or continuing to rehearse or to direct with your thoughts is not a proper Release.

Have faith that your best efforts are heat-seeking missiles that know exactly where to go — let them.

Automatic Intuition

The Professional Intuitive Training, Certification, and Mentoring program has officially been released!
http://automaticintuition.com/

Subscribe to the new blog — I’m preparing lots of articles dedicated to intuitive development and communicating with Spirit.

Image credit Mark Rutter via Creative Commons on Flickr

Professional Intuitive Training

Slade Roberson — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:57:13 +0000

I’m very excited to announce my new Professional Intuitive Training, Certification and Mentoring program!

I’m relaunching the Automatic Intuition site with:

My existing Personal Courses in Automatic Intuitive Response™
A Professional Training and Mentoring Program
A new Automatic Intuition blog

Over the past year, the group of Shift Your Spirits readers, intuitive counseling clients, and marketing/business clients who are also professional intuitives and healing arts practitioners has grown very fast. I wanted to create a separate website specifically dedicated to this topic.

In addition to training and providing marketing consultation for fellow intuitives, I’m also going to be posting free articles and resources focused on developing intuitive abilities and communicating with spirit.

I hope you’ll check out the training programs, download the application to work with me, and subscribe to the new blog at
Automatic Intuition

11-11-11

Slade Roberson — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 15:52:31 +0000

Last week, we talked about entering a powerful new creative period. This month, November 2009, there is an auspicious energy from the stand-point of numerology — elevens everywhere.

2009 can be reduced (2+0+0+9) to 11, rendering the entire month of November an 1111 — a master manifestation number that indicates doorways opening, a creative portal for setting new intentions, and particularly a time of inspiration and illumination.

What new ideas are coming in for you right now?
What are you inspired to begin?
What potential first, decisive, action steps are you being called to take?

This month, you have an opportunity to begin a new phase assisted by Source.

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear this?
Do you already know what you could use this portal energy for?

If you aren’t sure what this may mean for you yet know that it’s the perfect time to watch your thoughts and expect incoming inspiration.

I wanted to give you a head’s up about this Wednesday, November 11, 2009 — a triple-eleven numerologically; also look at the possibilities for the New Moon on November 16, 2009 — a perfect day to plant seeds and begin something big within this month of creative doorways.

I’ll be back this week with a special announcement about my own Big New Something. Stay tuned!

The New Way Forward

Slade Roberson — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 13:37:21 +0000

It seems we’ve reached the Edge of Something Big and New.

Do you feel like:

You’ve outgrown your life?
Those Things you’ve been semi-successfully repressing or ignoring in recent years have gone from uncomfortable to unbearable?
You’re literally being forced to confront your baggage, once and for all?
Some clarity of purpose is required — it’s increasingly urgent, yet elusive?
The Clock has run out on your old perceptions?
You’ve come to the End of a Chapter in your Story?
Change is no longer about just contemplation and theory, but is emerging in a very physical way?

We’ve reached the Edge of our Maps and Blueprints — the way forward is an entirely blank canvas. Old rules and structures which we’ve been able to recycle and reinvent and reuse have become obsolete. What we might have expected to Come Back or to Return… those options have evaporated. The way forward is unwritten.

Do you feel like:

Something’s on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t find the word for it?
You’ve reached a plateau?
Your guides have been giving you very explicit sets of directions, and now suddenly you’ve lost the station, the transmission, the channel?
You’ve had the urge to withdraw into a cocoon and not emerge until some transformation is completed?
You feel especially confused or thwarted right now, like all the “tools” you’ve acquired just aren’t working as well as they used to?

2012? What about 2009?

I “know” that we’re supposed to be anticipating some major shift in the human collective within the next few years — but I’ve got to tell you, I feel profoundly that It has already started, and it’s noticeably escalated within the past three months. I’ve never felt That Big Shift was going to be an “Event” or a single point in time, but a graduated spectrum, a spiral, a curve. An Age. We’ll be able to look back on a Period in our history, an Era; that hindsight is going to reveal to us how far into it we already are. Right. Now.

I honestly can’t put it into words — it’s a Collective Experience that’s manifesting in very individualized ways. The energy is similar; the details are unique.

Nearly all of my peers and colleagues are radically altering their businesses, their missions, their brands. (I’ll have a big announcement of my new project on 11/11 — stay tuned.)
Nearly all of my clients are “launching” something, preparing to take enormous creative leaps.
Nearly all of my friends and family describe feeling “impatient” about their futures and ready to be “over” their pasts.

No More “Business as Usual”

The one theme or pattern that seems to be Universally True, across all these lives, and in all these various contexts: The old processes — the paths you’ve pursued that seemed to at least “make sense” — and even the processes and strategies and creative tactics that used to work great — are just not working anymore.

Not only are you being called to create the life you want to live — you’re being called to do it in a way that literally does not exist yet.

The most important questions to ask yourself right now are:

How flexible are you?
Are you stubbornly clinging to something?
How willing are you to let go?

Does this new level of creative requirement for being in the world scare the hell out of you… or are you excited about it?

Image credit brunkfordbraun via Creative Commons on Flickr

Premonitions and Predictions

Slade Roberson — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 15:15:09 +0000

What do you do with your premonitions? Have you ever wished you had somewhere practical, something useful, someway to apply your premonitions in a meaningful way?

I’ve recently learned about a tool I want to share with you. (I’m actually so excited about having this outlet, I’ve become a bit addicted to submitting my backlog of premonitions.) I’ve withheld some of my premonitions, as I felt that publicly posting about them would create a bit of a Chicken Little climate around here — which I would definitely like to avoid. I really, really don’t want to stoke the flames of the 2012 : End of the World hype. (The “End of the World…” should always come with a hopeful “… as we know it” tacked on, in my opinion.)

Futurism

If you’ve been with me for awhile, then you’ve run across a few references here and there to my interest in Futurism. I’ve shared links to a few of my favorites before, such as:

Ray Kurzweil’s work regarding The Technological Singularity
Barbara Marx Hubbard’s Foundation for Conscious Evolution

I’m definitely more of an “armchair” Futurism geek — so much of it is extremely academic, can be a bit over-my-head (let’s call it challenging). Most Futurists would probably not identify themselves as being very mystical (the subject matter tends to fall in the realms of social science and technology). For me, personally, futurism is extremely spiritual — a golden intersection of science and spirit.

I believe that our spiritual path as a species — our Ascension — is interwoven with our Collective Creativity and our Technology.

Premonitions versus Predictions

From my perspective, premonitions are an entirely different species of experience from, say, psychic prediction.

Premonitions seem to take the hard-to-translate-into-language forms of intuitive impulse — claircognizance and clairsentience. If we get something more specific than the just knowing/ just feeling, all-over-the-body, or in-the-gut meta-sensory input, it tends toward the clairvoyant — the visual — dreams and visions.

For years, I was so focused on developing my clairaudient intuition, my magic-in-words, that I inadvertently dismissed many opportunities to develop in other areas. Even as I sought to reinforce and affirm my clairaudience, there was a subtext to my self-speak that said “I’m not clairvoyant.”

That clairvoyant insecurity or insufficiency shifted for me in a major way about a year ago, after specifically studying with intuitives who are more visually adept. I believe we can kind of absorb the techniques, perspective, and skills of others.

Time Frames

I first started to receive clairvoyant hits in the form of aura colors — which opened my mind to my visual potential and ultimately led to my receiving time frames.

I started catching myself using the phrase “I see” during readings.

What, exactly, I started to see with my clients were a lot of graphic depictions of calendar-like symbols. As with many aspects of doing readings, just putting it out there is the best on-going intuitive learning experience and confidence builder — until you go out on a limb a bit, hold your nose, shut your eyes, and take a leap of faith you really have no idea what you’re capable of receiving. Without feedback, you’re really only projecting your hits into a vacuum. The feedback I’ve received from clients about the accuracy of the time-frames I’ve been sharing in the past year or so has definitely been encouraging and has made me more confident that I should include them.

The time-frames and their accuracy seems to be the number one reason why “repeat” clients come back for additional readings — predictions are ultimately “testable.”

I experience Three Main contexts regarding prescience, precognition, premonitions, predictions, etc:

Permission / Projective — these are the tidbits that come out specifically in response to client requests during readings. I only get these if someone asks. They come from the client’s guides. They are very specific and entirely clairvoyant. They tend to be mostly “positive” or “practical.”
Personal / Passive — a feeling or knowingness or vision that impacts me personally, or someone within my personal circle of friends and family. I regard these as “passive” because they come unbidden and I can’t invite them “on cue.” They tend to be a bit more vague and can be either positive or extremely worrisome. They don’t always feel like they come from my guides. They are mostly clairsentient or “emotional” in nature.
Premonition Proper — these are also passive and are entirely uncontrollable. They involve humanity as a whole. They really don’t seem to come from guides at all, though I do try to “dig” for follow-up details from my guides. These Premonitions with a capital P are overwhelmingly clairsentient, claircognizant, and clairvoyant at the same time — only they are devoid of specific time-frames. The images are like scenes from a movie… And I hate to say it, but they are often disturbing.

I don’t want to be a tease, so I’ll just spit it out — Since December, 2008, I’ve been having premonitions involving a telecommunications blackout. It’s NOT an “End of the World” scenario anywhere as devastating as McCarthy’s The Road or Butler’s Parable of the Sower | Parable of the Talents — it’s NOT some kind of 2012 Fright Fest, okay?

BUT, I have to admit — I have been feeling an increasing sense of “guilt” about not mentioning this publicly.

I feel some strange sense of responsibility or obligation to mention that I’m seeing a temporary period in our near future where our telecommunications satellites don’t work (for several months). [gulp] No cell phones, no internet. I don’t know how or why.

Have you had a similar premonition, by any chance?

But enough about me… because the striking component of premonition is how much we share this capacity.

Premonitions, the Collective, and Technology

Last weekend, I listened to New Dimensions. The show was an interview with Dr. Larry Dossey, author of

The Power of Premonitions: How Knowing the Future Can Shape our Lives

You can still listen to the show for free online until October 28

The Arlington Institute WhetherMap Project

I learned about a fascinating, technology-driven project that we can all participate in.

Arlington Institute WhetherMap

The Arlington Institute’s project “WHETHERMAP” is predicated on the idea that before catastrophic, world changing events people have intuitional dreams that anticipate those events. While there have been a number of famous people throughout history who have accurately predicted the future, it also appears that almost everyone has premonitions from time to time in the form of dreams, visions, or simple gut feelings.

I’ve been submitting entries about my premonitions to their database.

Check it out — add your own — and please leave a comment if you know of other similar projects!

Submit Your Money Shift Stories

Slade Roberson — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 15:02:30 +0000

1,000 people have now downloaded The Money Shift — making it the hands-down most popular project I’ve ever created!

Only six months after its launch in March 2009, this program has officially surpassed the number of personal readings I’ve done in three years, as well as all the tutorials, classes, workshops, and meditations I’ve offered in the six years I’ve been working online.

I’m a little stunned — the original nudge from Spirit to put this out there was relatively “quiet.” (There’s a lesson in acting on even the tiniest of creative whispers.)

The Money Shift Book Project

I’ve pitched a proposal for a book based on the program to a mainstream publisher who has expressed interest in seeing a manuscript. (I’m envisioning the accompanying audio clearing meditation, of course, as well as an appendix with negative and positive belief lists, and perhaps even a full-fledged affirmation/card deck divination system?)

Right now, this means I need to [gulp] write (the rest of) the book!

And I’d like your help with part of this project.

Submit your personal stories

I’m requesting contributions of personal stories from those who have worked with The Money Shift with the intention of including them in a future incarnation of a Money Shift Book.

I’m particularly interested in receiving input about the following:

What negative beliefs about money/abundance have you discovered are the most challenging to shake?
What are some of the positive affirmations you’ve written that have been the most effective?
Have you experienced any “magical results” while working with the program?
Have you discovered surprising new sources of abundance beyond the obvious dollars-for-hours paradigm?
What messages have you received from your Money Archetype?

These are just suggestions — I’m open to hearing anything you’d like to share.

Leading Money Shift Workshops

Are you interested in becoming a licensed facilitator?
Would you like to teach/lead Money Shift Groups or Classes?

Let me know if you already have an audience/personal development brand that would be a good “fit” for this type of program.

How to send me your stories:

You may send in an email or attach as a Word document
You can reply to this post if you receive it via email or email me directly
contact [at] sladeroberson.com
Please include a line or two at the end of your story giving permission to excerpt or include your submission.

For example:
“I grant the author Slade Roberson and/or the publisher permission to include, edit, or excerpt my personal story.”
[Your name and email address.]

*I will most likely include only first names; if you wish me to change your name to further protect your anonymity, please indicate your wishes.

If I require some more “formal” release down the road, I can follow up later… cross that bridge when we come to it.

Thank you for making this project such a success (and thank you to those who have already written to me about their experiences).

For full details / to download The Money Shift, go to
http://sladeroberson.com/classes/money-meditation

The Book of Faded Green

Slade Roberson — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 16:26:36 +0000

I believe the most life-changing — practical — personal development skill you may ever acquire and learn to use is the conscious management of Negative Self-Talk.

This is the Voice that corrupts all others — self-defeating, self-sabotaging. It’s the Channel where the mind viruses of the Collective are stored and replayed on heavy rotation.

It’s the inconsiderate person in the theater who talks over a film. It’s the chatterbox who won’t let you enjoy your favorite song. It’s the unruly child that won’t let you read or concentrate.

A Career based on journaling?
From the time I was old enough to read, I knew I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. During my elementary school years, I assumed that career would look something like a cross between C.S. Lewis and Judy Blume.

Yet, when I was thirteen years old my guides started insisting on the word “diarist” — not “journalist” (I asked, all the time). Really? A diarist? Who makes money keeping journals? I started to read a lot of famous diarists — Anne Frank, Virginia Woolf… I was confused about how this could be a key to my future writing career — maybe disturbed is a better word — most well-known diaries emerged only after the authors were deceased. Or they were personal records of people whose lives were significant for other reasons.

Of course, this was decades before the invention of blogs… So, what do you know? Now, writing journals (blogging) is indeed a type of writing career.

My Colored Journal Concepts
In my teens and twenties, most of the journals I wrote in were precious objects — the people close to me regularly gave me gorgeous designer blank books as gifts, of all different materials and colors.

Rather than keeping purely chronological journals, I began to simultaneously maintain multiple “topical” personal writing projects — the concept for each journal was defined by a metaphor based on the book’s physical appearance — usually this was a “literary” color-filter device.

The various diaries/topics had evocative, dramatic names like:

The Book of Blood, Wine, and Roses — a dark-red silk cover, with an on-going diatribe of passion and anger
The Book of Gray Skies — a smoky velvet cover like a rainy Sunday, chock full of gag-inducing melancholy teen angst co-authored by Eeyore
The Book of Leaves — a pulpy Japanese rice-paper affair bound in actual dried leaves and held closed with a twig-and-hemp clasp, minimally marked with brief, haiku-ish, Zen-wannabe observations of the natural world

You get the idea… Oh, the drama! I chuckle at young Slade.

In my thirties, I began to keep identical “standardized” hardcover black sketchbooks — since then, it’s been serious, intentional, utilitarian, and ultimately digital. The End of the Rainbow on my bookshelf is marked by a major turning point.

The Book of Faded Green
The last colored diary I wrote was bound in mossy suede and was called The Book of Faded Green. At that time, I began working with the concept of Gratitude journaling and Morning Pages (as in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way). I realized something painfully horrible about all the diaries up to that point — they were all so G-D Whiny, Pathetic, and Negative. Who would ever want to read that? I didn’t even want to read it.

The healing green energy of my heart chakra, the life force of my spirit, had faded — and I needed desperately to change the channel.

When my guides say “Faded Green”
When I do private readings for clients who are suffering from a severe case of Heavy-Rotation Negative Self-Talk, my guides will simply say “Faded Green” — it’s a kind of clairaudient short-hand, a personal frame of reference for a very specific prescription that the individual requires.

The form of the “assignment” our guides will suggest will vary slightly from one client to the next, but it generally means they require an exercise to consciously identify, shift, and re-train their word-choice.

Your Re-greening Exercise

I am speaking from a place of personal experience — I have so much compassion for this psychic dis-ease — and I know that the only way I shifted these voices of negative self-talk is by becoming very strict about allowing them.

Often, I read your background emails for private consultations and all the focus is on what’s wrong, what you don’t like, what you can’t, why you can’t…

I reached a real breaking point with this madness when I was twenty-nine years old. To some degree it was an epiphany, where I detached from my years of journaling enough to read them objectively — and I found that they were pages and pages and pages of What Was Wrong.

It’s not realistic to think that you won’t encounter challenges or respond to them emotionally or feel daunted, but you can put in place and practice some rules regarding negativity.

At that time, I started that new faded-green journal to train these thought patterns (whether you actually write/journal or simply think, the word choices you make have power and it takes practice to re-train your habitual thinking patterns).

I made a simple, overarching rule that I was NOT ALLOWED to state or list what was wrong without also presenting some potential solution. For example “I keep bouncing checks. I suck.” Can’t stop there — it must be transmuted through taking it one more step. “I keep bouncing checks. It sucks. For the next month I am going to write down every expense I have and balance my check book and account every day if necessary to keep this behavior from continuing.”

“I’m depressed. I need to go to my therapist but I don’t like the one I have.” Can’t stop there — if I’m going to list such a statement, it needs to have a potential solution attached — something — an Action — I can at least TRY. “I’m depressed, and I’m not happy about the therapist I have. I am going to make some calls and find some other counselors I can interview.”

Yeah, all these types of actions are a bit of “extra work” — but they are the only thing that will create change. And whether or not the actions themselves “work,” the most important component is training your mind to recognize the limited, self-defeating thoughts when you have them and carry the thought process forward, at least one step.

So, make a similar rule with yourself: You are not allowed to list an excuse, a dislike, a fear, and simply leave it at that. If you stop there, you will stay there.

The inertia will be reinforced and it will eventually become paralyzing. Momentum can also be reinforced and increased… Just like the “little negative thoughts” are not One Big Bad Bomb, yet are small, cumulative negative self-speak sprinkled throughout your inner dialogue, the Potential Positives work in the same way — not One Big Magic Solution, yet a mosaic of small hopes and visions of something better, brick by brick, word by word.

I’ll give you an assignment, to start changing this right now. You don’t need to start an entire journal — you can try a one-off writing exercise:

Write yourself a letter or an email and let your Negative Voice have total control over the microphone — invite it to do its pissy, complaining, pathetic best. How ugly can it really get? Go for it!
Then, read back over it. Copy and paste it into a new document or email.
Go through this letter line by line, sentence by sentence…
For every negative statement, I want you to present a solution. “I really hate looking for a job BUT I’m… going to do it anyway.” “I hate making calls or putting in applications BUT I’m… going to put in 3 applications this week… BUT I’m… going to send out one resume each day.”

A Phenomenal Sign
Something really bizarre and physical happened to me and my Book of Faded Green. I don’t know if it was the oils on my fingertips, the wear on the nap of the suede from being handled, or some combination… over the course of the months that I worked with that journal, the color began to darken and the surface became worn, bright, and slick. By the time I filled it, the cover of that journal had become bright and shiny green… like a new leaf.

The cool key-journal pictured above was created by Moxylyn

Who Might You Become?

Slade Roberson — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 14:41:33 +0000

What if you woke up tomorrow blessed with an amnesia concerning voluntary suffering? If, through some science fiction plot-line, you could step into — take over — your life as if it were new to you, what might you do with it? If you had no intellectual memory of who you have been, what you’ve done or haven’t done, what’s been done to you, or who you believe you are “supposed” to be, how might you proceed?

Look in the mirror, look around you, and take stock of what you really and truly have to work with. It’s a Serenity Prayer Breakdown:

The things you cannot change
The things you choose to continue
The wisdom and insight to get real about the difference

What might you change if you didn’t know any better? What stories no longer serve you?

What part of Who You Are do you put on every day like clothes, like the same pair of jeans you wore yesterday?

What if you didn’t know what’s “comfortable” and you could choose without history, rut, or just because?
What if you could totally make it up?
Which things about yourself could you reinvent?

What goes in the list that’s not set in stone?

Baggage
There’s a spaceship coming right now to take you to your new life, and you can bring three suitcases. You sort and pack:

The things you cannot change
The things you don’t want to change
The things you really could change

At the last minute, before boarding, you’re told you can only bring two of your suitcases.

One we know you must.
The other is your choice — isn’t it an obvious one?

Would it help to be told you must leave the other — the choice is taken from you? You must take the things you cannot change and the things that you can — the things you don’t like about your life but must accept and the things you really like about yourself and choose to continue. Those you really could change but choose not to (or to choose to tell yourself you can’t), those that you don’t desire yet continue to bring forward — are taken out of the equation.

You do have a choice. Your old life is on fire — what are you going to grab?

Yesterday literally doesn’t exist. So, who might you choose to be today and tomorrow?

The Pieces of Your Purpose

Slade Roberson — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 16:15:51 +0000

If you could go back in time, what would you teach your younger self? What does that reveal to you about your sense of purpose?

Your Past
Identify any turning points — events, circumstances, or challenges — where the wisdom of what you would teach your younger self might have made all the difference in the world. These moments — these forks in the road — might come when you complete the statements:

“If I’d only known …”
“I wish someone had told me…”

Careful now — this is not about judgment and it’s not at all about regret — it’s simply to identify what you came here to learn. We tend to learn the “hard way” — but I don’t believe we came here to suffer; I believe we came here to learn how to transcend suffering.

Your Present
You’re already doing it. You are already everything you’ve ever wanted to become. You live your purpose with every breath you take.

I’m very careful these days to discuss a “sense of purpose” — too many people hear the term “life purpose” and equate that with a job. Your sense of purpose is not a job — you can bring your sense of purpose to just about any job. Your sense of purpose has a way of emerging, of potentially coming to the surface, within any environment or relationship. Your sense of purpose is a theme that finds a way to express itself through you, whether you are consciously aware of it or not. Other people are drawn to you because of the sense of purpose for which you are a vessel or conduit.

One very effective way you can become conscious of your purpose is to look for recurring themes or patterns in what other people request of you. This energy radiates out from you and behaves like a sign on your forehead — the people around you (even strangers) can often “read” this sign more effectively than you can. You need a mirror to read this sign — and relationships are mirrors.

What are some of the questions that people always seem to ask you?
What topics do others always seem to want your input on?
What service are you called on to provide?
What message do you find yourself delivering over and over again?
How might this message be related to what you most need to hear?

Ask your closest friends and family members what they believe your purpose is.

Awareness is powerful — even if you are currently in a job you’d hardly call a “dream,” look again at the opportunities you have every day to align with your sense of purpose. This may be very informal — it may not be an “official” duty, but a message you deliver or an energy you project through your interactions with those with whom you come into contact.

This awareness can work wonders in transforming how you feel about your everyday life. Working with that energy in a conscious way is like turning on a light that will reveal potential new paths and directions for you.

Your Future
Obviously, some careers provide more opportunities than others for you to engage your sense of purpose. Know that The Perfect Career for you may never be found in a Classified Ad or a Job Board Posting — it may not exist until you create it.

Look again at your answer to the initial question — what you wish you could go back in time and teach your younger self.

How might you deliver that lesson?
A message, an insight, a piece of wisdom requires form and function (action) to move through you and out into the world.

What would the message sound like?
How might the lesson be packaged in such a way that it can be received?

Maybe your wisdom can be conveyed through some ethereal, creative experience:

Is there a story that reveals the truth?
Is there an image (or images) that illustrate the crucial details?
Is there a melody that evokes the emotional state?
Is there a joke that wraps the truth in the elevated energy of laughter?
Is there something that could be witnessed?

Maybe your wisdom can be conveyed through entirely practical, down-to-earth information:

Is there a specific skill that can be acquired?
Is there a technique that can be taught and practiced?
Is there a source of data and facts that can be shared?

Working with my clients on creating careers, I often see that the most unique and potentially valuable concepts combine some of all the above — an intersection between:

A Message
A Creative Vehicle for the Message
A Practical Skill or Technique in the Take-away

…all coming together in a package that is as quirky and unique as you are.

My personal answers to the initial question — what I would teach my younger self — is the truth that my creativity is my divinity. That I am already everything I’ve ever wanted to become. That what I most want to do with my life is something that I must invent, fully-customized to me (and for others who are my mirrors, who see themselves in me and me in them).

This must be why I have boundless energy for counseling other creative people in the areas of Work and Process. I deeply know what it’s like to have shitty jobs, tons of talent, and yet be lost in putting it all together. Nothing is more satisfying to me than assisting other people with these puzzles that are all too familiar. My intention is that the articles here provide the insight and inspiration, and that even my marketing tutorials leave behind a practical “bread-crumb trail” you can follow.

We have all been “broken” at some point in our lives — that’s where the materials come from, the pieces with which we build. Simple joys are the mortar and glue.

image credit Miss Blackbutterfly via Creative Commons on Flickr

Your Ego is an Awful DJ

Slade Roberson — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 15:14:25 +0000

Jung believed that a precise diagnosis could, in and of itself, spontaneously launch the healing process. Clearly, Jung investigated, worked with, and wrote about healing in a psychological context (although there is much to suggest the potential connection of the mind and spirit to the wellness of the physical body as well).

Your psycho-spiritual wellness is very much dependent upon the messages playing in your interior dialogues and communicated through your relationships with others. The whole point of psychoanalysis and talk therapy is to identify (to become conscious of ) what messages are playing within you, how they got there, who authored them, where they came from, and when you either chose to adopt them or had them forced upon you.

You were not born with any of the messages that are currently playing in your mind. Absolutely everything you say (to yourself, about yourself) was written by someone else. Your words are not original, they are always repeated. (Even if you have an “original” thought, it must be expressed through or translated into language, and language can be broken down into basic parts which you did not invent. Even if your ordering of words or your unique literary devices have never been expressed in quite the same way before by anyone on earth, the building blocks of the language itself — the vocabulary, the words, the letters, the phonemes — are inherited from an enormous collective culture that has traveled to you across thousands of generations.)

Where do these Voices come from?
You downloaded these messages, you absorbed them, you parrot them — you either consciously hear them and take them within you or you unconsciously become infected with them — a concept called mind viruses.

These messages and fragments of everyone else’s opinions and beliefs become a part of your own database, your own collection, your own interior library.

These messages have the capacity to organize around archetypal energy patterns and become Voices — personae with whom you develop on-going, persistent relationships. If you’ve worked with The Money Shift then you are already familiar with how this phenomenon plays out regarding the Voice of your Money (Abundance) archetype. Similar relationships are taking place with any number of archetypes, beliefs, issues — your Self-esteem, your Inner Child, your Saboteur, your Rebel, your Artist, etc.

You can investigate absolutely any relationship you have with any template or archetypal energetic pattern within your psyche and begin to make conscious choices about the conversations you are choosing or allowing to play. This is quite literally the basis for much of the private intuitive counseling sessions I offer — helping you identify and consciously shift these interior dialogues to more empowered, spiritually “healthy” channels.

“Your” Songs
Think of the music (mp3) library on your computer. Although you call these songs “yours” — they are very representative of who you are as a person — of course you are aware that you did not write, sing, play, or record these songs. You have the ability to identify these songs and their artists as separate from you, even as you employ them to assist you in expressing your thoughts and emotions.

When you listen to your music collection, you have no problem behaving as an active director — even a highly-discerning, music-snob tyrant — in choosing what you want to hear in that moment.

You repeat your favorites obsessively.
You will skip a song that you don’t want to hear.
You may even delete one that you never wish to hear again.
You make choices according to present energetic requirements — to chill out, to get yourself revved up and moving, to have a good cry or to dance around the room…
You adjust the volume to appropriate levels for specific circumstances.
You can even shut the whole thing off.

It’s relatively easy for you to identify the Songs, Messages, Voices that you love, in the context of your literal music collection — you know who’s singing, you know the lyrics by heart, you know when the song was released… You can recall the first time you heard it, where you were, what you were doing, who you were with… You can do the same with the songs that get on your nerves, drive you nuts; and you have no problem avoiding them or ignoring them.

Now, approach this metaphor as it relates to your Self-Talk — the inner dialogue of Voices, Messages, and Beliefs that you allow to play in your mind every day of your life.

Isn’t it interesting how you unconsciously assume you don’t have the same power of choice? Notice how the negative Voices seem to get so much more airplay. Why is that?

You were not born hearing and believing and identifying with these words — fag, fat, lazy, slut, stupid, ugly, ungrateful — every single one of them came from somewhere outside of you.

What are some of the messages/voices you have downloaded that cause you pain or hold you back?
Who are the original authors?
Who introduced you to these messages?
Where were you when you first heard them?
What are some of these Stories that No Longer Serve You?

Your internal mind chatter feels much more like some god-awful musak channel you are forced to listen to and have little control over. The gentle, supportive, loving Voices of your spirit are out-numbered, drowned out… Are you just waiting and hoping one of those “nice” songs will come on sooner or later? Who says you cannot delete the ones that aren’t serving you, or at least skip over them when you hear their opening strains, replace them with one that brings you joy and power?

Hang the DJ

Your Ego is an obnoxious DJ — it has taken over the playlist, endlessly spinning a heavy rotation of fear-based tunes.

Observe this station more carefully, more consciously. Diagnosis in this context means identifying where these Voices and their Messages came from — that they were never originally yours; they came from somewhere, externally, and you internalized them.

This Identification is the first powerful step in consciously separating from the Voices that are not you — were never you — and do not serve you.

image credit flyzipper via Creative Commons on Flickr

Writing Your Next Five Years

Slade Roberson — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 15:50:03 +0000

“Where do you see yourself in five years?”

The question is ubiquitous, but how often have you explored it beyond the canned job interview context? Have you ever sat down and drilled into this as an exercise in setting intentions and creating your future?

In August 2004, a spiritual coach gave me a writing assignment. Simple in its rules and parameters, the exercise took the better part of a single day to initiate, but I’ve waited five years to assess the results.

The Assignment

Materials

A pen — not a pencil; there is no editing or refinement — no “perfectionism” allowed — the ink is for a sacred, binding, contractual commitment.
A new, one-subject spiral notebook. You use a single-subject spiral notebook for a couple of reasons — it’s generally the least expensive, easiest to find — it’s “disposable”; you don’t want a “precious” journal here — and the spiral represents Time on a conceptual, magical level.

Rules of Execution

Imagine your life as it will be (as you desire it to be) five years from now, in as much detail as possible.
List every detail of your future life you can possibly think of — no matter how fantastic or mundane.
List each item / detail in the present tense.
Start each item on a new line with an empty line in between — this is a huge list, not paragraphs of prose.
Use only the front side of each page.
Fill as much of the notebook as you can, preferably in one sitting and no longer than a single day. (I wrote most of my list in an afternoon and part of that evening, leaving the book open and coming back to it throughout the day as I thought of new items to add.)
When the day is over, your notebook is full, or you run out of new details to list, whichever happens first, you seal the pages in an envelope. (You can tear the pages out and put them in a regular letter-sized envelope, or you can put the entire notebook in a large, brown magazine-sized envelope.)
Address the envelope to yourself and date it exactly five years into the future. (Be sure and put your name on it, so that if someone else were to run across it, or you forget what’s inside, at least it’s understood who’s supposed to open it.)
Put it somewhere safe, somewhere you can both forget about it for awhile and eventually find it again.
Do not open it until that date five years into the future!

At the time I did this exercise, I had not started writing about or teaching intention manifestation, but today I feel that the premise is obviously built around some basic concepts:

Focus on manifesting the What, not the How
Once you get clear about the What and commit it to words, your Order to the Universe has been delivered
Constantly re-stating the What keeps unnecessarily restarting/ rebooting the Intention
Once your Mind has seen/ witnessed/ experienced the detail, even if you consciously forget, it is stored forever at a sub-conscious level

My Experience
Five years ago, I was NOT in a good place — it was absolutely one of the lowest I hope to ever know — my basic health and survival were in crisis; I was financially destitute; I had lost two jobs in a row; I lost my cat, Cera, who had been my companion for fifteen years, my entire adult life at that point…many of my long-term friendships had evaporated… I was quite literally suicidal.

I wrote my future in desperation, with some faint remaining crumb of hope that I still had a future at all…

Finally opening up the envelope this week to assess the fruition of the intentions I had set all those years ago was like unlocking a time capsule from someone else’s life. The most revelatory part of this experiment was seeing not just What wishes had “come true” for me, but the unpredictable, unimaginable ways in which they have manifested. I’m blown away by how the things that might have seemed the most far-fetched — the biggest Long Shots — have indeed become this better reality of my Today. Had I revisited the list I had written in the interim — say one, two, or even three years in — I would not have thought I could possibly have been on the right path.

There are very few of the items I envisioned that have NOT come to pass, actually. I have a new found faith in my power to create profound, positive change. How might another round of this exercise benefit from an infusion of that life-altering perspective? It’s time to write my next five years.

Image credit theilr via Creative Commons on Flickr

Send in the Skywalkers

Slade Roberson — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 15:27:36 +0000

When I was a kid, I associated spirit guide and angel sightings exclusively with danger and disaster.

It wasn’t like they showed themselves at Vacation Bible School because the yarn-wrapped popsicle-stick gods-eyes provided an irresistible invocation. May have felt them ganging up in the church basement — and don’t get me wrong, I love a glue-stick craft activity — but as for hard-core apparition, pretty disappointing stuff, really. I was way oversold on the potential of suburban Protestant churches as paranormal environments.

Looking over this rough list I’ve made of my “spirit sightings,” I have to attest that guardians were most likely to “physically” appear if the sky started falling. I can count on my hands the number of times I’ve literally seen my Big Lady, occasions like when:

we surprised thieves breaking into our house
I stepped into an enormous nest of yellow jackets
our school bus swerved off the shoulder of the road and rolled upside down
I woke up one morning to find my face and shoulder paralyzed
the really one and only time I ever sat down to seriously work out the details of suicide
an intervention and an ultimatum regarding the launching of this web site three and a half years ago

“Danger, Slade Roberson!”
Had it only been the presence of my own guides that I perceived, I would have probably remained within the mindset of imagination and imaginary friends (and, later in life, mental illness)… but, by the time I was ten, I had witnessed the manifestation of my danger-prone little brother’s guardian more times than I have fingers to represent:

when he had his finger chopped off in the hinges of a door
when he almost choked to death on a life-saver candy in a mall parking lot (this was before they began making them with the “holes filled in”)
when he slid down a dirt hillside mosaic of brown broken bottle glass
when he climbed up on the side of the bathtub and got his arm wedged in the ceramic hand grip of the wall mounted soap dish
when he raced his hell-bent Big Wheel down a steep driveway and out into street traffic, with the front bumper of a copper-colored 1976 Chevrolet Monte Carlo Landau serving as some kind of moving, perpendicular “finish line”

…These are just the highlights from his first five years on the planet… Many times, I was the only one with him. I never had stitches or even fractured a bone until I was twenty years old; but I always played supporting actor to my little brother’s starring role in a series of his own ’70s Disaster Films. Think Superfudge meets The Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno, Airport ‘77 and ‘79 with a touch of classic Star Wars.

The Yellow Haired Guardian Jedi

These incidents were always attended by an entity of similar substance to my Glowing Lady — only my brother’s guardian presented as a “masculine” version, with bright, golden yellow hair. He reminds me to this day of a vintage, super-sized Luke Skywalker action figure. (You have to remember that there is something about angels that reminds me of living statues.)

I feel that the way we play as children provides a lot of clues into the archetypal patterns we work with — and they probably exist in a purer, uneducated, unsocialized, unmolested form. It’s a common assumption among spiritualists that children may retain pre-life memories and also have access to more authentic, unguarded extra sensory perception than adults. I don’t have children of my own, but I hope those of you who do will engage them in conversations about their “imaginary friends,” guardian angels, even the monsters they complain about. I wouldn’t recommend initiating the conversations, so much as interviewing your kids for details when they introduce the subject themselves. If they bring it up to you, listen with all the “seriousness” and depth that you bring to your own spiritual exploration. (Why am I even telling you this? I’m totally preaching to the choir here, huh? Shift Your Spirits parents are no doubt raising some fairy fantastic humans.)

My brother and I were both very much into Fisher-Price Adventure People and Star Wars action figures. As long as my brother got to play with the X-wing Fighter and the Millenium Falcon — and had a skeletal crew of at least one pilot per spaceship — and it had to be Skywalker — he was content to let me have the entire remaining collection of action figures for my on-going, large-cast dramas.

My action figure play was much more like improvisational space opera — I was less interested in portraying aerial dogfights than in living out these quasi-Biblical political chess games. Think The West Wing meets Dune crossed with the life of Joan of Arc, all taking place in some kind of ancient civilization like Atlantis or Pompei as the waves are coming in a matter or hours or the ash from volcanoes is raining down.

My Fisher Price Adventure people were cast in the human roles — but here’s the part of these memories that I find most relevant to the work I do today — the Star Wars action figures were slightly too large in scale to mix with your Adventure people. If Adventure people were people, then the Star Wars dudes would be like eight or nine feet tall; not to mention, their wardrobe indicated they were indeed from another planet…

It was my little brother’s observation that they were like the Big Ones, the Ones Who Glow. It was the perfect narrative “explanation” — when my Adventure people were stuck on the edge of a crumbling cliff or their boat was embraced by the multi-tentacled arms of a sea monster, the Big Ones would arrive to save them. I would bring in a Star Wars figure and back-light or spot-light them with a flashlight to represent their heavenly origin.

Are you sure you want to literally see these Big Ones for real?
In response to my post about The Ones Who Glow, people have written me expressing a desire to “see” their spirit guides and guardians. It hit me how many (most) of these stories you hear about angelic interventions involve really unpleasant circumstances — have you noticed this?

Get Your Guidance On
I believe the point to keep in mind is, if you already have a sense that you are guarded and watched over, it’s not necessary to wait for some tragic event to engage your guides. A lot of us arrive at these relationships with spirit because life circumstances have “forced” us to — but it’s not the only way to get your guidance on.

They will help you with absolutely anything if you ask — it’s just that you don’t ask until you think your plane is going down or your biopsy results are going to show malignant cells… It’s the old “Dear God, I know we haven’t talked in a while…” occasion. Don’t wait for that — start asking right now, today, and request that you are given signs that are easy to process and understand.

The most unsettling thing about the life-saving godsend of the “real” Skywalker’s walk-on’s (where my brother is concerned) was the fact that he always beamed in about thirty-seconds before a suburban summer afternoon flipped into an angel-assisted, adrenalin-shot, slow-motion play date in hell-on-earth.

The only nightmares I’ve ever woken from feature a spot-lit nine-foot-tall Skywalker. His appearance was a cruel cue — just enough warning to locate my brother in the panicked instant preceding his next Evel Knievel impersonation, start screaming for my parents, and calling 911.

A couple of days ago I was talking to my mother and she had just gotten off the phone with my brother. He was going kayaking, and, of course, thirty years later she is still freaked out every time he mentions something like this. Neither my mother or my brother knows — and I’m not sure under what circumstances I might bring it up — but I still have my brother’s Luke Skywalker action figure. It hangs out on my altar.

When I hear that my brother is on the river learning to roll his new kayak without drowning — I send in his Skywalker.

The Ones Who Watch

Slade Roberson — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 14:29:16 +0000

“You’ve always felt like you’re being watched, huh?”

I’m listening to an ancient cassette tape recording of a session I had on my fourteenth birthday with an intuitive | astrologer | psychotherapist.

I can remember the mischievous smile she gave me when she asked me this — stated it, really — one of those classic knowing, penetrating looks that implied we were both “in” on something secretive and thrilling. The astrologer’s voice is louder on the tape, closer to the microphone, but you can hear me faintly shuffle and squirm and mumble a confession — a “Yeah” that’s part nervous chuckle.

You can hear the rustle the piece of paper printed with my natal chart as she shows it to me. “Your Sun is in Leo, but both your Moon and your Ascendant are in Scorpio. You know how the sun looks reflected on the surface of a lake or an ocean? The sun’s light and shape becomes… shattered, and all the pieces move… Or think of what it looks like to go underwater, to the bottom of a pool, and look back up at the sun in the sky. That’s what all this Water in your chart does to your Sun — it’s the reason why that Leo horoscope you read in the newspaper is never going to seem like it’s talking about you. Don’t even bother, okay? A double-water-sign like this indicates significant psychic sensitivity — and that’s why you know you’re not alone.

“Nearly everyone has some intuition, and it takes different forms, but it’s especially hard to avoid for those with a lot of Water. Now, when the Water is Pisces, you just know, the presence of Spirit is a part of your entire experience, as normal to you as breathing, so ordinary that you don’t feel a need to talk about it; when it’s Cancer, you may know but you probably don’t even feel comfortable thinking about it much, let alone talking about it; but when it’s Scorpio — as it is with you — you know that there is Spirit around you — you either think about Spirit constantly — or you are aware of it on some level — but you also feel you’re not supposed to talk about it. Do you understand the difference?

“For you, the spirits around you feel like an Enormous Secret. It feels like something you should keep to yourself. You’re not afraid of the spirits at all — but you’re very afraid of people who would not understand… I’m not saying you should not talk about this ever — there will come a time in your life when you must — just that it feels like you have to be careful about who you trust.

“There are two ways you will likely know when you can trust that someone else needs you to talk about the spirits — they will ask you to tell them, or they will see it within you as if they are looking into a mirror and they will bring it up first, as I am doing right now. And when the circumstances are right for you to speak to one another, the spirits around you will greet one another as well. You can literally feel it when that happens — it feels like this…”

There is a pause on the tape, but just listening to that empty moment is a trigger — my entire body remembers how the shadows and the very air itself seemed to press in around us. The physical space, the desktop with my chart between us, seemed to shrink. My sense of vision, of depth and perspective, shifted. The room felt suddenly full, enclosed, with a presence like people stepping up behind me to breathe on the back of my neck…

“Like that…” Her voice on the tape is soft. “Do you feel how they encircled us?”

I must have only been able to nod.

“Great. That feeling is both an invitation and a confirmation. We are protected. We can talk with Them; we can talk about Them. Okay? Think we should?”

You can hear me say “Yes” — clearly and firmly. My voice sounds different somehow… mature.

She takes a deep breath and sighs before she continues.

“You feel like you’re always being followed. Actually, you feel like there are hidden cameras following everyone, but it doesn’t seem like anyone else is noticing, or is paying attention. It’s not unpleasant for you — some people would find it unnerving, but you kind of like it… It makes you feel safe… powerful… doesn’t it?”

She pauses. There is a break in the mood of her voice. “Uh oh, what’s that look on your face about? Is it freaking you out because this is news to you, or are you just shocked because it’s true and I’m saying it loud?”

“No, I’m… um… You know the scene in The Wizard of Oz — ‘Pay no attention to the Man behind the Curtain’…?”

You hear her laugh and clap her hands together “Ha! Yes! Excellent! I have exposed you as a Great and Terrible wizard, huh? We work behind the curtain, from the shadows, with the Mysteries, within the Mysteries. We are here to part the Veils.”

I mumble something unintelligible — I sound embarrassed, but you can hear that I’m smiling. I remember thinking at the time “Wow! She used the word We.” She implied — acknowledged — that I was somehow like her. I was so impressed by that; I felt so validated.

I looked at her degrees on the wall behind her desk. One of the reasons my mother chose to let me have a session with her was because she was a licensed psychotherapist who happened to incorporate psychic ability and astrology into her practice. Something about that appealed to me very deeply. I believe that, in the back of my mind, all along my path, I have held that model, that combination, that intellect as an example. Something to set aside the “Neon Hands in the Window” that my ego just could not bear to be associated with. I admit, for many years I needed to believe in the concept of a “respectable,” intelligent intuitive. Sure, it’s a base concern — judgmental and small-minded — but I had to hope that I might one day be taken seriously.

“So, tell me — how long have you known They are with you?”

“Since… Kind of as long as I can remember, really. The first time I actually saw One of Them was when I was six years old.” At this point, I tell her a version of the story I told you last week, about The Ones Who Glow. “I don’t see Them very often. I’m not sure that I want to, because They seem to physically show up under extremely stressful or unpleasant circumstances. But you’re right — I do feel Them with me almost all the time. It’s a very comforting sensation.”

Try the Invitation Yourself, Right Now
There’s no great magic involved.

Simply be still for a moment.
Close your eyes if you wish — it helps you curl the fingers of your attention inward.
Invite the guardians who are watching over you to step closer.
Tell them you want to feel their presence.
Pay attention to how your body responds.
Notice any subtle air pressure changes — your skin and hair are like millions of tiny antennae.

You may feel Someone standing at your back; it may feel like Someone has laid a cloak around your shoulders; you may feel faintly held or “spooned”… This feeling may be physical or emotional or both.

What do you feel?
Leave a comment and tell me what you feel when you try this.

image credit greekadman via Creative Commons on Flickr

The Ones Who Glow

Slade Roberson — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 14:17:24 +0000

I first became aware that I wasn’t “alone” in 1975, when I was six years old. As is common to many people’s experiences with the entities we call personal guardian angels, the contact was triggered by an event involving physical danger.

We lived in a suburb of Knoxville, Tennessee, but our house wasn’t in a neighborhood, it was isolated in the woods — our “driveway” was really its own quarter-mile-long gravel road, with a mailbox out on Sands Lane. We would travel by car just to go get the mail, and usually, especially if the weather was bad, my Mama would pick me up where the school bus dropped me off and drive me back home.

If she’d merely left the house to quickly run and get me, then the front door was unlocked. Leaving her behind to pull my two-year-old little brother from the backseat, I would race inside to the television. Elementary school seriously interrupted my soap operas, but if I hurried I could catch the end of The Young & The Restless, As The World Turns, or Another World — honestly, I can’t remember what the schedule was at that time, but I was such a little soap fag at that age! How funny is that? If nothing else, I always got to the screen in plenty of time for afternoon double reruns of Batman.

I didn’t know until later that the front door should not have been open that day — this was one of those times when my mother had been away from the house running errands and had waited in the car until I got off the school bus before continuing on home — no one had been at the house for several hours.

I bolted through the front door and was immediately frozen by an oppressive chill. If you’ve ever had your house or your car broken into, you know this sensation — a split-second instinct or intuition that you respond to in a very physical, animal way. It’s like the paralyzing fear you wake up into from a nightmare, with your ears ringing. Before your eyes or your thinking mind can process the broken glass or the missing objects or the disturbed furniture, your body knows that the space has been violated. Maybe it’s literally the air currents through a smashed window that create some of that unexpected drop in temperature, maybe some part of our primal sense of smell picks up on the pheromones and adrenaline left behind by an invader — but most of it is pure vibration. The integrity of the environment has been compromised. You immediately feel watched — something is there that shouldn’t be. There’s a touch of … nausea… grief.

A commanding voice stopped me on the black slate of the entryway — nothing still or small about this voice — it was unnaturally amplified, seeming to come from every direction all at once. I was suspended within the sound.

“Don’t go any further into the house,” it said. It was a female voice, very formal and authoritative. Intimidating — not mean or evil — but scary in the way a teacher might be.

I turned around to find an impossibly tall woman standing behind me, just inside the door; her head almost touched the ceiling. She was like the inverse of a silhouette — instead of being lost in shadow, her features were obscured by an internal light. She was eerily monochromatic — her skin, her hair, her clothes were all the same bleached, glowing color, like white marble or translucent quartz lit from inside. She wore some tight-fitting garment like a body stocking — my association at that age was the suit Catwoman wore, only cream-colored instead of black, and without the hip belt and built-in-claw gloves — it was woven through with a metallic thread that was the only quality which distinguished it from her skin. She also had another layer of clothing worn over this, like a satin night robe that went from neck to floor.

She wasn’t transparent or wispy or vague; she appeared to be solid and really there. Already a C.S. Lewis fanatic who identified with Edmund, I thought she could be the sweeter sister of Jadis, Queen of Charn, White Witch of Narnia.

I knew she wasn’t a “ghost” — I saw those kinds of spirits throughout my childhood — she didn’t feel like a ghost. She looked more than anything like a living statue. I felt she wasn’t exactly human, but I must admit the concept of “angel” didn’t occur to me. It wasn’t until I was a teenager and first exposed to the artwork of William Blake that I recognized what she must be. During my childhood I privately referred to these types of entities as The Big Ones or The Big Ones That Glow.

Her hands were slightly lifted from her sides, her palms open to me, not like she was reaching out to pick me up, but to hold me in place by some invisible force. She spoke again, but her lips didn’t move. Again, the sound came from everywhere — I felt it pressing my heart and lungs like the way you feel the bass on a jacked-up stereo.

“Wait right here for your mother.” (Remember the scene in Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring where Cate Blanchett as Galadriel speaks telepathically to Frodo? Well, it would a few decades before I came across that association; but yeah — exactly like that.) Maybe I’ve just always been such an Anglophile, but for me personally, my angels speak with a “Shakespearean” vibe that I associate with a British accent. Spirit guides (human souls) vary in their “ethnic” presentation.

I simply obeyed her without conscious thought or question — she made me feel… overwhelming safe and calm.

There were sounds from the back of the house, like a screen door slamming and then feet running through the dry leaves in the woods. We had surprised the intruders; they were probably still in the house, heard the car in the gravel, and fled through the kitchen even as I came in the front. When I turned back around, the Lady was gone and my mother was there. All this happened in a matter of seconds.

We quickly saw as we moved through the rooms downstairs that the windows were broken out of the back door, shards of glass lay all over the kitchen. Things were moved; draws and cabinets and closet doors were open. The hi-fi stereo components my Daddy kept in his study were the only items of significance that were gone — the thieves stole his prize reel-to-reel tape recording equipment.

The reason I’m reflecting on this event now is that for years I’ve heard my parents talk about the recordings they made of me when I was child — audio interviews of me from the time I could talk until I was about four or five years old. They always referred to “when we were robbed” and I was under the impression that the recordings themselves had been stolen. It was only a few years ago that my father told me “No, they didn’t take the recordings — they just took the equipment. I still have the tapes, I just don’t have anyway to play them.” I had suggested that perhaps he could have them transferred to digital media.

Last month, for my 40th birthday, Daddy surprised me with a set of mp3 files burned on CD. I have been revisiting that time from so many angles…

You may want to try this exercise too:
Over the past nine months or so, I’ve been slowly making notes of all the “supernatural” or “paranormal” turning points in my life and trying to reconstruct a chronology. You walk around thinking you remember — how could you forget — but it’s wild to see how the memories surface, like they are attached to one another… even moments that are buried start to emerge as you pull on the threads…

To be continued…
These memoirs tend to be a bit longer than most blog pieces, so in my next post, I’ll tell you more about my on-going relationship with this entity, how I came to discover who (or what) she is exactly, why she’s with me — and how I learned to identify others like her — including those who are with you.

These paranormal experiences did not teach me to “do readings” and they didn’t “make me more intuitive” — they motivated me to learn.

Counter-intuitive: Test Your Intuition

Slade Roberson — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 14:52:18 +0000

One of the most effective ways to learn to trust your intuition is to fail to do so.

Intuition with Action
Think of times throughout your life when you have trusted an intuitive hit. There’s usually a child-like feeling of delight that goes along with this: “I did it! I did it!”

Intuition without Action
Think of a time when you clearly received an intuitive impulse, but kept it to yourself, not acting on or even speaking about it until after it was confirmed. There’s still a very strong sense of satisfaction, relief, emotional well-being — but also a very clear and obvious sense of where/when you failed to follow through: “Man, I knew that was coming! I KNEW it…”

Intuition with Willful Failure
Now, think of a time (or times) when you failed to act on an intuitive impulse. The impulse was clear, and the failure to act was actually a choice — to logically override it or let your thinking mind unravel it. Maybe there’s a sense of duty or responsibility that you hope to escape…

You never get that same sense of resolution, or transmutation from nagging worry to peace and equilibrium. Sure, you may quickly dismiss it and it may fade into your subconscious, but that’s not identifying it and processing it. You stuff it down, it lingers in some form of background anxiety until it resurfaces when the situation manifests, comes to pass.

Just as clearly, you see where you tuned it out — and there is a sense of mild regret, a target missed, an important file lost and forgotten: “Damn! SO close!” You should’ve known that one.

You honor your intuition by greeting it, by acknowledging the individual messages as they come through. Tell them to someone, or speak them out loud to an empty room.

Can you hear me? Are you listening?
We generally hesitate to keep sending messages to an email address that may not be live and functioning. When someone replies to your message, it’s the perfect proof that you have found him, you have the right address, and you don’t have to keep questioning its accuracy.

Why would the Voices of your Source behave any differently? Maybe they’re more patient and willing to keep trying. Maybe it’s best if you hit the re: button and say “Yeah, Hey! Good to hear from you — Keep em coming!”

Act on a bit of intuitive guidance, even if you don’t understand what it means or where it might lead.

Testing the validity of the Voices you hear

You can test your intuition by employing deliberate, willful counter-intuition.

Acknowledge the Message received — and choose to purposefully go against it. Don’t just ignore it — decide to defy it. Think of an action that is exactly opposite, totally in the wrong direction — and set the intention to do it anyway. As a test.

It’s a bold test. (This is really a Dare.)

Discomfort is a powerful clue.

What do your first instincts tell you about that course?
What do you notice or feel first?
If you felt a stab of panic, a sense of dread, doubt, hesitation — what does that tell you?

Doesn’t it indicate to you that on a deeper level you know what to trust? Actually you feel it, and start calling it “know” later on.

Your body is an excellent divination tool. Let it taste your truth for you.

If your body gasps “How could you?” It’s probably saying “Don’t.”

If you find it challenging to trust your intuition, hopefully what you’ll discover by trying to go against it is that it may be a hell of a lot easier to trust it than to not.

Care to share an example of how you learned to trust your intuition the hard way?

Image credit Kevin Labianco via Creative Commons on Flickr

Divine and Perfect Order in the Wild

Slade Roberson — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 14:46:15 +0000

Do you really feel that “divine and perfect order” is synonymous with Fate, predetermination, or scripted reality?

I don’t.

I respect that you may — you certainly would not be alone — but would you like to try and convince me? I’m curious to hear some original arguments that aren’t pat and parroted from the Somebody Said So bin of wisdom.

Two Sources of Belief

I actually believe we can experience wildly different truths and all be Right. All we choose to believe arrives by two avenues of knowing:

learned wisdom — somebody else’s truth; tribal/social collectively-held beliefs; borrowed; inherited; read somewhere; heard somewhere
channeled wisdom — personal truth; based on your own unique experience; original/rebellious; invented; revealed

These Two Basic Sources of what you believe to be true may be in opposition, or they may be identical, or they may partially overlap in some features — your personal experience may reinforce what is collectively held to be true.

Back to this notion of Divine and Perfect Order:
I run across this concept in so many places — I accept that my feelings fall in a minority. I’ve been willing to consider aspects of what other people describe as “perfect” — try them on like fashions, hold them up in comparison with my own experiences, observe my reactions…

My idea of Divine and Perfect is just too mind-boggling to use the word “order.” It’s probably the limitation of my human brain stuck in the third-dimension, unable to contemplate an order so advanced that fate, linear time-lines, and pre-scripted paths just don’t quite compute. There’s no complexity in that, there’s no synergy, there are no multiple dimensions — it feels too simple-minded.

Do those who speak of the Divine and the Perfect in the context of order merely reference something that I mistake for “simple,” yet they really only intend it as a kind of shorthand for something vast and complex? Am I misunderstanding, or is this meant to be strictly interpreted?

The word Order doesn’t match the amazing chaotic choreography I witness with such wonder and awe.

Is Divine and Perfect Order linear, planned, knowable, obvious — did we really create every last condition of our realities in advance?

For me, the words Divine and Perfect point to something much bigger than that — scarier, thrilling, unfolding, unpredictable, exciting, yet to be determined. I just don’t feel we are actors in God’s latest cable series; I do feel that we are co-creators.

Poor Gods up there, watching never-ending marathons of a gazillion reality shows with no surprises. Really? Do you think so?

Whatever. This doesn’t feel magical to me. It doesn’t feel wonderful. It feels like Wanting to believe that everything happens for a reason.

There are reasons all over the place. You’re not likely to live without stepping in some meaningful reason every time you turn around, every step you take, with every breath.

Do you need to feel those breaths are preordained in order to feel safe — or are you willing to engage the Divine and the Perfect in the Wild?

I don’t even WANT the Universe to be boxwood hedges manicured to perform the hard-edged geometry of something inorganic — wildflowers turn me on. I admire weeds — that they need not be cultivated and hand-held to be insidious, pervasive… survivors.

Divine and Perfect Order to me is a dance with Chaos, so complex that we begin to question where the design must (might ever) emerge.

Do you really need to believe that before you came here you scripted every last day, line of dialog, and petty detail? Or is your life a live improvisational masterpiece?

Can you not be thrilled by the prospect that you jumped into this incarnation like leaping from a plane with little more than adrenaline, faith, and a parachute/last-minute exit strategy?

I don’t need to feel in control in order to experience power. It’s just the opposite for me.

I think Spirit is a hell of lot more bold than that.

Feel Free to Disagree

I believe we’re all right. That what you believe is your reality, and what I believe is mine, and that those things need not be One and the Same.

What do you believe — specifically about the whole Fate, Predetermination, Divine Order thing? Keep in mind that believing and knowing are not the same thing.
And before you answer, take a moment to listen to your own truth before you simply repeat something you were told.

Can you trace the voice of your belief back to someone else? When you test that against your interior truth, the still small voice within you, your Higher Self, does it happen to resemble a tradition, to concur? Or does your truth require you to remake and reinvent?

I feel that the most authentic answers to the questions of what you believe and feel may well be the answers that have no traceable origin — that you never heard, never read somewhere, never absorbed — the most authentic answer may also be the one that makes you either excited or uncomfortable because it has no obvious source.

If you come up with an answer that disagrees with what you intellectually know to be true, you may be onto something real.

Magically Free Energy

Slade Roberson — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 18:30:29 +0000

Do you place all-or-most of your emphasis on the spaces in your life you want to FILL?

How much energy do you really devote to creating space?

It’s something I’ve been contemplating a lot lately — I’m feeling my pending 40th birthday as an impulse to de-clutter — the physical exercise component of a compulsion to engage in “Life Review”…

Those voices wear me out… I’m not who I used to be, and I’m not going to become who I used to be in the future. So, I really don’t care to listen to those recordings anymore. They’re like an old bunch of cracked CDs, that have long been burned to digital, anyway — if I decide I need to drag one out.

I’m going to become the New Me in my future, and for that I am evaluating the past, as I clear it out and donate it to the Universe — I’m looking through an old box of memories and realizing what I really need most is The Box.

I’m compressing some energetic archives — I’m defragmenting my soul computer — and I’m expressing it in a very real way.

I’m making my first tomorrow — by making room for it.

Clearing a patch and turning the dirt over.

Creating Space.

So, yeah, maybe we do have access to infinite metaphysical space for our experiences — it’s not like there’s a cosmic penalty or update nag screen that pops up on our souls — the Flow is a stream and we’re the hoses… Sure it’s possible. It’s abundantly clear.

But the energy shift you feel when you remove physical clutter is not only “possible” — it’s obvious. It’s not just “hope” — it happens!

It feels Really Good to breathe in a room where desktops are empty, and bookcases are strictly maintained (tackling those shelves was like shoving a spiny paper glacier back into the side of a miniature mountain wall). The floors are bare of office stacks… and that constant trickle of commercial flotsam you bring in with you every time you go outdoors has simply vanished (into the shredder or the folders where it all belongs — but it feels like it disappeared into thin air).

Now, as I look through a doorway or walk across a room, my floors and flat surfaces SIGH with me — WHILE smiling and singing. The carpets remind me of the Pixel People in those new Prius “Harmony” commercials.

Wow. There is No Energy Source quite like Empty Space in your daily habitrail. There is no course you can tap into quicker in the physical world than making space for energy to run right around your ankles without obstruction.

To wade through your own light-ness. Light version You. (Might even make you dance a little, if you get high off of Organizational Productivity.)

Liberate Your Floors!

Conquer Your Closets! Save Your Drawers!

Can you see your bedroom floor? How much of it could you — might you — see that you can’t at the moment? What about the floor of your office? (… your car floorboards?)

OhMyGod — Listen:
If you want to upgrade the design of your lifestyle Today, then you must go uncover some clear floors immediately! The doors to other worlds really ARE under our beds and at the backs of our wardrobes after all! Can you believe it? All this time — right under our noses.

We’re old enough to see that the Monster Energy lurking around our rooms is called Stuff — plain and simple — Junk. And we don’t like confronting it. (Who feels like filing an obscenely fat little stack of debit card receipts from your wallet when there’s email to check or a favorite show on TV?)

The good news, kids, about the Magic Spell of Decluttering — the Monsters that hide in the margins of your shadows are not invisible — they’re better than spiritually apparent — they’re in 3-D! They’re Real. They’re totally easy to spot and set free.

Look around — you can’t miss them. (Yeah, they’re camped out in all those physical things you literally trip over, yet continue to ignore or pretend you don’t see. You’ve got a little low vibrational shanty town cropping up in the corner.)

And you can’t imagine just how much you’re going to enjoy All That when it is gone.
I am here to testify!

What’s left in the place of creating a sense of space is my new drug of choice.

image credit: Simon Pais-Thomas via Creative Commons on Flickr

Rebel

Slade Roberson — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 14:24:15 +0000

Just about anything we can name as an example of social progress begins as rebellion. What we call conscious evolution is revolution. All true (spiritual) leaders emerge as heretics. Intentional collective change (no matter how positive the end result) is renovation — renovation begins with demolition.

There seems to be little historical evidence to support an argument that we can simply and effectively kum-ba-yah our way forward.

The Rebel archetype is more than emotional reaction, without context — it’s not just angry, just pissed, just outraged — the Rebel has a Vision.

What about the Ego?

Does it make you uncomfortable to engage your Rebel archetype? Here in the personal and spiritual development community, we talk a lot about the dangers of the interior voices that originate with the Ego. Indeed there are many circumstances where operating from fear is unhealthy — we don’t want the Ego directly running everything — but the positive aspects of the Ego are self-preservation and protection. Sometimes the most healthy expression of the Ego is to rebel against the fear itself.

Unhealthy ego-driven voices are self-deprecating and abusive — insulting and punishing you for your weaknesses, failures, and passivity — they put you down. The “healthy” Ego Rebel stands up for you — and forgives you for not changing sooner.

As a spiritually-motivated person, maybe you struggle with the idea that you should ever be anything other than “nice.” Non-violent, passive resistance is ideal and incredibly powerful — it still pisses people off. Great moments of (r)evolution are rarely “peaceful” and are often responded to with violence — change is threatening. The greater its significance, the greater its populist support, the greater its importance…

Who are Your Heroes?

How many of them are (or at least began as) rebels, heretics, martyrs?

I constantly hear the term “leaders” loosely thrown around in the media as a basic label for individuals in positions of governmental and religious authority — our “leaders in Washington,” our “leaders within the Church” — the vast majority of whom are actually “managers.” Social organizations with centuries of consistent structure must be maintained — very rarely do true leaders occupy these management positions.

Personal Rebellion

Rebellion doesn’t always have to be political or social — maybe the areas you most need to engage your rebel angels (the divine messengers of self-esteem, innovation/renovation, and will) are entirely personal.

If you work with archetypal energy patterns (such as those found in Jungian psychology and the Tarot) you will find them represented by Swords — ideas combined with action.

The voices of your inner rebels are motivated by the need for positive, personal change. You are guided to resist the maintenance of your personal status quo:

“Wait just a minute…”
“Hold on, now…”
“I beg to differ…”
“Says who?”
“That ain’t right!”
“So what?”
“WTF?”
“Who DOES that?”

Your Rebel is the Voice That’s Had Enough

The Rebel is the watchdog, the whistle-blower, the reminder — conscience and consciousness:

I am exhausted from carrying around this guilt, pain, and anger…
I’m not going to take this anymore.
I will not allow this abuse, neglect to continue any longer.
I deserve better than this.
I am capable of more than this.

The Rebel is a Creative Prophet

I borrow liberally from Erin Ganther’s interpretation of the Prince of Swords in The Cosmic Tribe — The Rebel voice as the harbinger of innovation and invention:

the fresh perspective you’ve been waiting for
a new outlook on life that moves above and beyond jaded weariness, apathy, and cynicism
an impulse to shake off the pretty comforts of self-delusion
the aspiration to translate the ideas of the mind/ the intellect into actions that you are convinced can make the world a better place
a call to chase higher truths, to find them and bring them back for everyone
the impulse to ascend above the clouds of confusion to a position of clarity where universal messages can be received and then transformed into active behavior

The Rebel is not ignorant and does not blindly oppose for the sake of controversy or destruction — the Rebel is fluent in the language of tradition, knowledgeable enough to see where the holes are, where improvements can be made. The Rebel has the vantage point to spot a new direction, to plot a potentially more direct path to where we all want to be.

Honor and Engage Your Rebel

Define your ideals
Break with your “traditional,” entrenched behavior patterns
Open yourself to the Messages of Possibility that the Collective Universal Intelligence has chosen you to receive
Give yourself Permission to find and speak your own truth while respecting and blessing the rights of everyone to do the same

Feed Your Rebel Rock n Roll

The most enjoyable way for me to most feel my Rebel, to let him out to dance, sing, preach, and perform, is by playing his favorite songs. You know how to plug into this — it’s the special bad ass brand of joy that surges through you when you listen to the harder edge of your music collection — the songs that demand volume, that make you feel young, powerful, hopeful… a little bit dangerous. A force to be reckoned with.

Interview Your Rebel

This week, listen to your Rebel — what is he telling you? In what area of your life is he demanding that you change? He may sound angry to you at first — mad at where you’ve been, how things are currently — ask him about the Vision of where you’re going and who you will become. He’s mad at your past because he’s a bit impatient — he sees your future.

image credit David Paul Ohmer via Creative Commons on Flickr

The Evolution of Superstition & Sin 2.0

Slade Roberson — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 15:10:00 +0000

Are the purveyors of master manifestation messages starting to get on your nerves yet? I personally feel there’s a dangerous new form of quasi-religious superstition running rampant in our collective “wisdom.”

“Don’t you know your thoughts create 100% of your reality?!”

*implied fine-print: If your reality doesn’t mirror your aspirations, then you must just not be spiritual enough. You’re missing something. There’s something wrong with you. You must not be worthy of creating the life you want to lead…

Sin & Superstition — 21st Century Upgrade

Just when we thought we were finally free of centuries of immaturely-imagined, cruel, anthropomorphized gods who micromanage our thoughts and dole out smack downs with scattershot efficiency, here comes the Law of Attraction Wagon with Sin 2.0 (with optional Superstition plug-in).

Old Bearded White Dude & The Fat Lady in the Sky Become The Gotcha Universe
Now, it’s “the Universe” who hears your every thought and orders up a reality accordingly. Never mind that the most sweet-intentioned wishcraft gets trapped by Heaven’s spam filters while the shittiest micro-thoughts slip out to fertilize and water a garden of weeds.

“Oh, no! I had a negative thought. I just accidentally thought about what I don’t want instead of what I do. Take it back, take it back! I’m doomed!”
[wail]

Where’s the evidence of that kind/degree of power? If our thoughts were that fast and that total:

Five-year-old girls would be riding to kindergarten on unicorn ponies with hot pink manes
Asshole drivers and their vehicles would be raptured from the highways
Mid-level managers on power trips would turn to dust under florescent tube lights between drab gray cubicles
Theocratic dictators would voluntarily crawl back in their holes after being shamed off the world stage by laugh riots
No one’s son would grow up to be a wife-beater and nobody’s daughter would marry one
Pharmaceutical companies would produce cures as rapidly as they produce expensive never-ending treatments
Your one-and-only romantic soul mate would have a tattoo that lights up in neon when he says hello to you the first time
Your ATM balance would resemble the storage space in your Gmail account

Do your thoughts create 100% of your reality?

Do you believe that your thoughts create 100% of your reality?

What do you really think? Be honest.

Do your thoughts affect your reality in a powerful way?
Absolutely. Keyword Affect — not create.

Do we have a collective ability over time to pool our intentions and affect our shared reality in amazingly orchestrated improvements?
Absolutely. Yes, we can.

But there are tons of variables.

Don’t ever let any self-appointed guru convince you that you “contracted” to have cancer in this lifetime; that you were sitting up there in the ether thinking “Hmm — a debilitating physical defect would really be the way to do it this time around;” that your soul chose to be born into an environment of sexual abuse “so you could learn the hard way.”

The whole earth experience is The Hard Way. Maybe you did choose from a spiritual perspective to come to this world in spite of the dangers and hardships, the organic, ever-changing, dynamic obstacle course.

To the Glassy-eyed Delusion-hocking Unicorn-jockey LofA Magic Carpet Co-pilots who keep bleating and tweeting your endless stream of Barbie Dream World Bumper-stickers:

Who are you really trying to convince?
Will saying it enough make it so?
How much affiliate commission do you make off selling the message?

Soul Counting

Slade Roberson — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:40:47 +0000

Image by the albino via Creative Commons on Flickr

If you’re working to connect with your spirit guides, keep in mind that spirit entities — guides, angels, ascended masters, power animals, elementals, loved ones who have crossed over — overwhelmingly outnumber presently incarnated souls.

Spirit entities also exist at different levels of vibration — at different frequencies — than incarnated souls.

Why would you be able to successfully tune in to spirit in other dimensions if you are not adept at tuning into the spirits in the same dimension? Does it make sense to strive to tune in non-physical spirits while tuning out the souls that are most available to you?

If you’re struggling to expand your intuitive abilities and your psychic sensitivity and you feel like you’re “missing something” it could be a matter of attempting to run before you can walk.

Here’s one of the most challenging exercises I know of to shift your awareness of spirit and of the spirit in others — I’ve previously shared this with workshop participants and in the audio course Talking to Your Spirit Guides.

Counting Souls

Indulge me — Try this:
(Yes, this time I’m intentionally using the word “try”.)

Pick a day, or even just a part of a day, and keep a running tally of every single human being you encounter.

Every person you actually speak to and every person you do not speak to
Every person you make eye contact with as well as those who avoid such contact
Every individual human being you lay eyes on
Every stranger you smile at in passing
Every person you (are normally inclined to) ignore

Imagine that all that is required for someone’s energy to connect with yours is to physically be within one another’s line of sight.

I mean EVERYONE. If they are physically walking about drawing breath and you are close enough to see the whites of their eyes — count them.

If you wish, keep a scrap of paper in your pocket and jot down subtotals as you go. You go to the grocery store… 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… When you come out, write down the total. You stop to get gas… count everyone you see and before you pull away, write down that number. (I do not recommend that you engage in this exercise while driving — just skip that environment for now, cars are generally insulated bubbles anyway…) Count silently as you walk your normal routes of sidewalks and hallways…

Just TRY this, for even a few hours, and see how high this number goes before you lose count.

How long can you sustain it?
Can you even really go all day?

Later in the day, see how many of these people you can remember. Just make a list and include any detail you can recall about as many of them as possible. If you want to keep this up for several days in a row and journal your observations… more power to you — it only takes a crumb of this activity to get the Aha out of it.

Even if you just half-ass attempt this exercise, you’ll discover something very important intellectually (mentally even more than intuitively).

This is a test with no right or wrong answer — only observations.

Care to share any of your epiphanies or some of your wisdom in the comments?

Your insights probably seem pretty “obvious.” But, later, I’m going to come back and tell you a few things about some of these souls that may not be obvious to you at all. Might even blow your mind a little…

Grounding Your Analyzer

Slade Roberson — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 15:09:03 +0000

Do you suffer from Analysis Paralysis?

Over-thinking, over-analyzing, and engaging obsessive thoughts in a vicious cycle that keeps you from taking action?
Do you experience logical override — your Thinking Mind unravels and undermines your Intuitive Mind?
Do you weigh your options to a point that seems to take you further away from making a decision and following through?
Do you choose a course of action only to find that its opposite calls you back to think again, think some more, think too much?

It’s like a CD or a record skipping — a mental stutter — or maybe it feels like you’re spinning…

OCD — obsessive-compulsive disorder — is an extreme, constant, chronic, crippling manifestation of this behavior pattern that should be explored as a clinical therapeutic issue. If you are experiencing this to the degree that it interferes with your ability to function or complete simple, common, everyday tasks then please seek diagnosis and treatment with a clinical professional.

But everyone experiences a milder form of analysis paralysis from time to time and there are spiritual, meditative techniques to address it.

An Abundance of Air
Those with charts that are dominated by multiple Air signs seem to suffer from analysis paralysis more than any other.

Air and Information Technology
The Air element is now more prevalent in the Collective Human Mind than at any time in our history. The spiritual element of Air manifests as information, intellect, data, and communication. The virtual dimension is a bridge between inspiration consciousness and the physical. Our inter- (hyper-) connectivity is the most powerful technological component of the modern world.

Your Analyzer
The Analyzer is a spiritual energy center (like a chakra) located at the front of the forehead (in front of and slightly below the Third Eye). Imagine that when you frown you hold a grape or a marble between your eyebrows. That’s the Analyzer.

When you are suffering from over-thinking and over-analyzing (always a component of anxiety and worry) you are leading with the Analyzer.

Leading with the Analyzer
The Analyzer is like the “hood ornament” of the Mind — out in front as you drive the body through everyday experience. Your body posture is often the most obvious physical clue that you are leading with the Analyzer:

you hunch forward when you drive in stressful traffic conditions
you study with your nose in a book
you lean in toward your computer monitor when you concentrate

This logical processor can be beneficial in many circumstances and certain activities, but like everything, there should be a balance — with the Emotional Mind, the Intuitive Mind, the Physical Senses…

Grounding the Analyzer

You are familiar with my guided meditations and the universal concept of grounding yourself with a silver cord that extends into the earth from the base of your spine, your first chakra…

But did you know that you don’t have to ground everything through the root chakra?

You can ground any energy center in the body directly — the shortest external path out of your energy and into the earth.

Rather than grounding the energy down through the chakras — where it may get “stuck” along the way in other energy centers or leave residual energy in other parts of the body — simply ground the Analyzer directly from its physical position.

Meditation | Visualization Exercise
I credit intuitive teacher Angie Arkin with teaching me this technique.

Picture yourself with a horn like a Unicorn, extending out in a spiraling line from between your eyebrows. Point this cord at the ground out in front of you. See it extending out several feet and drilling into the ground toward the center of the earth at a slight declining slope.
Assess the size of your Analyzer — how big or swollen is it? Is it the size of a pea, a raisin, a grape, or larger like an egg or a plum?
As you breathe deeply and fully, inhaling and exhaling with a steady rhythm, visualize the energy draining out and down this direct cord away from you and into the earth.
See the Analyzer shrinking… Set the intention that it return to a more manageable size… How small can you make it?

*Try this direct external grounding technique with the other chakras — you can establish a cord from any point in the body.

Bet you never thought you’d see a unicorn around here, huh? Me neither.
Image credit Gabe Gross via Creative Commons on Flickr

Hey, look for me on Twitter!
I’d really like to start using Twitter to offer daily oracle messages and mini-readings to my followers — like I’ve seen other cool professional intuitives doing — but I want to make sure you’re out there, tuning in, and interested…

Are Your Dreams Big Enough?

Slade Roberson — Sun, 31 May 2009 13:58:22 +0000

Check in with the size and scope of what you currently call your Big Dreams:
(You know, not the sleepy-time-astral-cinema kind of dreams — we’re talking about goals and aspirations.)

Secondary Dreams Pretending to be Priorities
Is the Dream you’re currently working with The Dream or have you dialed it down a notch or two?
Is what you now call your Dream actually a Plan B masquerading as a greater goal?
Have you down-sized your Dream?

Lowered Expectations
Have you lowered your expectations?
…because you think you need to be more practical?
…because you think this one will be a bit easier?
…because you don’t want to be disappointed?
…because someone told you to be realistic?

Allowing yourself to be side-tracked
When did your Dream change?
How far back do you have to go to find the original version?
Why did you change it?

Tangents intended to be temporary
What happened that sent you on a detour?
At what point did you decide this detour, this Plan B, this tangent would be a “better” course?

Procrastination
Are you preserving your “Real” Dream in an abstract state because you can’t afford to fail? So maybe you’ll work on one that’s safer, second best, not too big to lose?

Beyond hope into action
What is the difference between a Dream and an Intention?
Does your Dream have a specific end result that you can envision, or is it just a vague hope?
Is your Dream a real Goal or Intention with action steps you can take to make it reality?

Playing too small
Have you settled?
Have you compromised?
Are you currently telling yourself that newer, smaller, less grand version is Enough?

“Just” is a dangerous word
What limitations have you placed on your power to manifest without consciously realizing it?

Look for signs of self-imposed limitation in the word just:

“I just don’t want to be alone” is not the same as having the relationship of your dreams.
“I just want to be able to pay the bills” is not having a fulfilling career that fills you with a sense of purpose and provides you with more material abundance than you need.
“I just want to lose twenty pounds so I can wear a bathing suit” is not having a fully holistically healthy lifestyle.

Time deferral and Conditional language
Has your ego — your fear of failure or success — been feeding you messages about conditions and/or time-deferral?

Look for the red-flags in your self-talk — expressions like if/then, as soon as, once, after, when:

“If I can X then I will allow myself to pursue Y…”
“As soon as my kids go off to college…”
“Once I meet the right person…”
“After I save some more money…”
“When I get this one project completed…”

Are you really doing a number on yourself with those multi-faceted dream-killers that sound like: “If I can just… then…”

Diminished Power
Are your intentions taking three times as long to manifest?
Are your goals coming in at the half-way mark?
Are you getting only partial results?

Smaller doesn’t equal easier
Are you working too small?
Are you living too quietly?
Are you just getting by with less and telling yourself that’s okay?

Who said dreams should be grounded?
You say you’re being realistic.
You say you’re being practical.

Are you actually saying…?

“I’m not capable.”
“I don’t deserve more.”
“I’m not good enough.”

Maybe the answer is NOT dialing down, lowering your expectations, settling, compromising. THAT’s why you’re feeling drained, unmotivated, unexcited, lacking passion and drive… You’re lowering your vibration to maintain, to be okay, to get by.

Congratulations — you’re succeeding at what you’ve settled for.

Maybe what you’re “missing” is a Bigger Picture. Maybe the way to raise your vibration and to (re)gain a sense of empowerment is to go really, REALLY B-I-G.

Check in with your dreams this week and investigate. If you find evidence of down-sizing or down-grading you can always course correct.

To reinstate the bigger vision for life, start asking yourself “What if I could…?”

Be Your Own Medium

Slade Roberson — Sun, 24 May 2009 14:09:06 +0000

What are spirits if not the memories of the living?

The part of those you’ve known that you carry within you, like a program you’ve downloaded into your own body (mind | heart | soul) which you can open or run at any present moment… or play like a song.

A client named Lisa expressed her regret to me that she lives too far away from where her parents are buried to visit the cemetery and put flowers on their graves for Memorial Day. Lisa said that every May, year after year, she feels she is “failing” to properly honor the spirits of her family members. She does technically remember them, but with a deep sadness and guilt, picturing their markers bare except for weeds. She worries that they wonder why she is not connecting with them.

Memory and Mediumship

I assured her that the physical location of their remains aren’t nearly as relevant to that connection as she has chosen to believe. Contrary to the popular teenage creep factor of ghost hunting in graveyards, spirits don’t hang out around the spot where their bodies are interred — indeed they may never have visited that location in life.

Spirits visit the places where they have lived — and even more so they are drawn to the souls of those who love and remember them, wherever the living may be.

There are powerful alternatives to putting flowers on a grave in order to connect with departed loved ones:

Look at photographs
Get together or call those who have known them and revisit shared memories
Tell stories about them — especially to your children or others who did not know them in life
Write (journal or blog) about them
Wear a piece of jewelry or clothing that you’ve inherited from them
Hold or touch a beloved treasure that belonged to them
Read their letters, diaries, or books you know they loved
Cook a dish they used to prepare for you
Listen to their favorite music
Go to a special location or a view they loved to visit
Rent their favorite movies and watch them with someone who’s never seen them before
Research your family tree and give copies to younger generations
Throw a party and create new wakes now — more thankfully distant from immediate grief
Buy flowers for them and place them in your own house
Sit in someone’s favorite chair and see the room as he must have seen it
Take a nap with a quilt that they made
Display their artwork
Make scrapbooks or publish your own book about them
Plant trees in your own yard that can be continual reminders

My parents planted a weeping willow tree in the yard of the house where I grew up. My mother told me that it was my grandmother’s favorite tree, and although it’s hundreds of miles from her grave or anywhere that she ever lived, it makes me think of my grandmother every time I see it.

“How long should you wait after people pass away before trying to connect with their spirits?” Lisa asked me.

I’ve always been told it takes 45 days for a soul to cross over, review their lives, travel through the bardo (the “intermediate state” of the soul), and establish themselves on the Other Side before they return in visitation.

Assuming they are not earthbound… I would not recommend trying to contact the recently dead prematurely as it may inhibit their transition or keep them here.

Be Your Own Medium

Just like your computer can open a document or an image or a file that was created on someone else’s machine, your heart (mind | body | soul) is a medium for spirit — your own and anyone else’s. The key to opening that spiritual file in this moment, to running that program of another persona, to playing the music of someone else’s voice or laughter, is not just any memory but a specifically a joyful one.

Who wants to come around so they can revisit only painful moments from their lives or witness your grief, sadness, regrets?

If you want to connect with your departed loved ones, the magic password — the secret URL that pulls their spirits up on the browser of your soul — is laughter-through-tears:

When you recall that memory that makes you laugh out loud or at least smile — even if it follows those painful thoughts and emotions — THAT’s the frequency, the vibration, the signal, that reconnects the eternal, the timeless, with the present.

What simple, creative ways do you choose to call on — to honor, to remember — the spirits of your loved ones? Please share in the comments.

Image credit Gabriela Camerotti via Creative Commons on Flickr

Running Underwater

Slade Roberson — Sun, 17 May 2009 14:21:02 +0000

image credit misselisabeth via Creative Commons on Flickr

Last weekend, for Mother’s Day, I sat with Mama through a sleepless, emotionally-torturous, two-and-a-half day vigil as she held her baby, her twenty-year-old Siamese cat Sophie, in her arms. After a month-long ordeal of medical tests and surgery to remove a tumor from her stomach, a week in the hospital, another week at home recovering, my mother had to then put her beloved kitty to sleep on Monday, May 11.

For those of you who know — deeply — the very unique bond we have with our animal familiars, you can understand that losing a pet that’s been the center of our family home for half my lifetime was actually relatively “worse” — more emotionally painful — than the string of challenging events we’ve been through in the past several weeks.

Hurdles?

Mama kept referring to Sophie’s passing as “one more hurdle.” That metaphor wasn’t working for me. A successfully cleared hurdle implies something that you never really came into contact with, that you skipped over, without being touched, that there was velocity involved… running, jumping… speed.

To me, it felt more like trying to run underwater. What others might call a hurdle is for me a part of the flow that’s so slow it makes me more hyper-aware of motion than flying ever could.

This isn’t about leaping and it’s certainly not still.

It’s a waiting with such great volume… It surrounds — permeates, saturates — everything.

I’m most comfortable with — addicted to? — motion, to action, even when it’s all virtual and nothing but words. I don’t normally like to try and write about things I’m still processing… It’s ironic that when I’m living the most — experiencing — I’m least likely to be writing about it. But, I’m calling the waters back in with keystrokes, like a tide that’s been out, re-establishing some momentum.

If I had a well-composed lesson to share, I’m sure it would have something to do with patience. (I’m painfully aware that it sounds like I’m about to spit when I say that word.) Maybe one day soon I’ll have a sequel to the Art of Surrender.

If I had the necessary words to harvest, I’d tell you about the amazing, undeniably visible angels and spirits I’ve been wading through — the living rooms of my childhood filmed with underwater cameras. Translucent ceilings, with Heaven right upstairs. Like someone threw glitter in the air. Like the clouds literally descended around my head and shoulders, or else all the prayers (yours and mine) managed to raise my world higher.

Totally Humble, Super Holy

Slade Roberson — Sun, 03 May 2009 16:10:47 +0000

photo of the author by Jeffrey Peck

I had told my mother that while she was in surgery I was going to perform a full-on Lifetime movie moment — visiting the hospital chapel, crossing myself with holy water, lighting a candle… really pack in all the the cinematic cliches.

Or attempt to. These real life scenes are astonishing in both the ways that they can’t help but resemble a dramatization and the ways that they are surprisingly — anticlimactically — different. For me these moments tend to be shocking versions of the magic in the mundane.

In the rare event that I visit a place with any religious or spiritual significance, I am nearly always a tourist. I am most likely to set foot in a church precisely because I am traveling. To me, must-see holy places are usually more haunted by their histories of voyeuristic foot traffic than anything. I think we always go to feel that original power — to immerse ourselves in the distant past moment that justifies the significance — and often it’s the accumulation of pilgrims’ expectations that defines the energy.

Actually, I sense this energy field as much in hotel rooms as just about anywhere. There seems to be a disconnect sometimes between history and spiritual significance. A new construction can be more actively charged than an ancient one. We want the old architecture to deliver — to be the kind of place the Travel Channel would feature in a paranormal investigation.

The last time I was in a church was when I visited the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona. That day was filled with hiking through the famous vortices, the cliff village at Montezuma’s Castle, the haunted mining town of Jerome.

Although those places were magical and mystical and all that goodness — I was blown away by the power in the plain little chapel in the middle of our local Catholic hospital. It was smaller than a hotel conference room, decorated with the same vanilla construction materials you might find in an office building — hushed by popcorn acoustic tiles in a low aluminum drop-ceiling grid; sheetrock walls and dim can lights; sequestered by vertical blinds in an interior window wall; some carpeting so forgettable I literally can’t describe what it looked like, just that it had the ability to mute any foot step made by any kind of shoe.

Not so much as a panel of plastic stained “glass.” The holy water fount was a tiny glass candy dish on a shelf near the door that looked like it had held chalky after-dinner mints on a hostess station at an Outback Steakhouse in a recent former life.

No old-school soap opera organs piped in via musak tape. Compared to the public spaces where the families wait on their loved ones in surgery — rooms where you feel the announcement that your flight is boarding is imminent — the oatmeal- and cream-colored chapel was so devoid of physical sound it was like a sensory deprivation chamber. Your clairaudient sense combines with the near dog-whistle-level vibration of the florescent tubes… My ears haven’t rang like that in years. It’s the sound of so many residual thoughts and prayers layered on top of one another that it becomes one clouded hum.

And these sounds did not originate from a variety of intentions or prayerful content — they were the cumulative sound of everyone projecting the exact same note — person after person after person praying for the healing of someone they love. The sheer quantity of the similar collected in the densest spiritual energy I’ve ever walked into.

I was a little disappointed by the lowest common denominator of spiritual iconography — respectfully and tastefully non-denominational, I understand — just a wooden cruciform in heavy lacquer on the wall with a big brown bible on a lectern beneath it… You know, I was hoping for another set of life-size Jesus and Mary statues like the ones in the lobby, where I felt self-conscious about stopping to contemplate them as people rushed by to the cafeteria and the elevator banks.

I must admit, I was dying to whip out my iPhone and take pictures of this blast from the pastel mid-twentieth century past. The aesthetic reminded me of 1980’s television sets — if Memorial Hospital was a space ship, then this chapel hummed in its belly like the main engineering room next door to the fusion reactor chamber.

The density of the spiritual energy there was a womb — thick more than heavy; simply infinitely multiplied more than high.

I experienced there an intense lesson — a perspective — in how any space can be infused with power. My assumptions about holy, reverent, and history are forever changed — pinned that much more solidly down to earth. Accessible.

After four days in the hospital, my mother is home and healing, as well as — really much better than — anyone could have hoped. Thank you for all the prayers you sent our way. I literally felt them all.

One More Moment

Slade Roberson — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 14:45:05 +0000

It’s very easy to think that all these personal and spiritual development practices and master manifesting techniques are “supposed” to produce an existence that is free from all undesirable scenarios and hardships. Almost as if you can achieve some state where nothing bad ever happens.

While conscious recognition of your behavior patterns may certainly assist you in avoiding many unnecessarily re-occurring “negative” life experiences, I believe it would be totally unrealistic — and even delusional — to think that you won’t encounter any undesirable challenges ever again.

A healthier “goal” is of course the perspective that allows you to view the hurdles as lessons — opportunities to grow and to learn as you came here to do — as opposed to disasters meant to undermine or destroy you.

Isn’t equipping yourself to better handle a new challenge a desirable evolution beyond the over-reaction and sloppy muddling through of the past?

You likely have themes among your karmic life lessons — repeating scenarios —

You date the same kind of loser over and over again
You make the same mistakes
You start strong but fall off before the follow through
You drag your baggage from one period of your life to the next

You know — that wonderful definition of madness as “doing the same thing and expecting a different result.”

I don’t believe that just because you’ve solved a certain problem one time that you will never encounter it again — actually, I believe it’s often like you’re playing a video game, where each level you successfully reach can bring bigger badder faster uglier versions of the monsters.

Don’t be disappointed that you can’t always eradicate the problems once and for all — there’s great peace and power to be had by simply becoming more adept at recognizing a graduated version of a lesson you’ve already learned and applying your wisdom to change current and future experiences:

You can avoid another round all together
You can decrease the duration of the lesson
You can move through it with fewer interruptions or lesser disruptions
You can reduce the effects that may have been devastating in the past to only mildly annoying

“This can’t be happening!”
Oh, if only saying it was enough to make it so…
You can handle anything thrown at you and still be okay.

I love Meryl Streep’s portrayal of author Isak Denisen, Karen von Blixen in the film version of Out of Africa — it’s a gorgeous study in the perseverance of the present moment — how to be transcendentally existentially OK, in spite of the trials and tribulations that just keep coming…

There’s a wonderful moment near the end of the film — after Karen has survived decades of gender discrimination and feminist humiliation, financial devastation, infidelity and syphilis, the coffee plantation has burned to the ground, and she’s finally surrendered to being driven — literally — out of Africa. She sits in her empty home, having sold off all her possessions, quietly smoking and looking through those last few books waiting to be boxed up, and probably thinking What could possibly go wrong now? What could be left?

The Baron comes to tell her the news that the love of her life has just been killed in a plane crash.

There’s a bit of dialogue that I can (almost) quote verbatim:

Karen says “When it gets so bad, that I think I can’t go one moment more… I do. And then I know I can do anything.”

To me, this is one of those moments when you are so reduced to surviving in the extreme present — the next tick of the second hand on the clock, the next breath — that just breathing is all that is required of you to “succeed.”

No thinking, no problem solving, no traveling into past or future, but simply taking that next breath. And when you make it through that one, you take another. And another.

The Common Denominator of All Living Moments

If all you can do in this moment is breathe — just breathe.

Love and Money

Slade Roberson — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:12:01 +0000

Recent emails from Shift Your Spirits readers:

Slade,
Thanks for posting your previous entries about Money. I’ve done some dialoguing with my Money archetype and it’s really been helpful; it seems we have a good working relationship.

I wonder if there was something parallel to Money in personal relationships — something like Love, for instance? I sense that there is, but I’m not sure if that is the proper guide to address or the proper way to approach the subject…?
Mike

Great question/ great observation!
It’s interesting that you bring up the parallel between Money (Abundance) and Love (Relationships).

Morgana Rae “discovered” this parallel while coaching people in and about relationships. She noted that people with relationship issues have comparable issues with money.

Last fall, while studying with Doreen Virtue, she also drew the parallel between being able to receive Love and receive Abundance, and brought up how “blocks” occur in both these life areas simultaneously.

This was indeed a revelation for me, because I sensed it too… Once it was pointed out to me, the similarities — the parallels one can draw — continue to grow as I contemplate these subjects.

Slade,
I thought you’d like to hear about this –

I took off work last week to stay with my parents in Missouri while dad had surgery. Prior to the trip, a brief worrisome thought about the lost income flitted through my mind. I let it go, and consciously stated, “I’m doing what I need to do. Whatever I need to accomplish the task will be provided.”

And it was. Plus some!

A unexpected dividend check in the mail for nearly $300.
Generous tips from happy clients. More so than usual.
More out-call fee income than usual (just “landing” in my lap).
Friends that borrowed my truck and returned it with a full tank of gas the day before my trip.
A cash gift from my parents for my “trouble and time” in coming to visit.
a friend that dog-sat for the week, saving me from paying six days of boarding fees for two dogs.

The “irony” that I actually “made” more money last week not working than if I had been!

The most important point in all of this for me is being clear about what I am to be doing and just doing it. And usually, what I need to be doing is doing, NOT worrying about the details of the doing! (seems like SOMEBODY has told me this a time or two, right?)

Now to manifest my miracle house sale for big bucks in record time! (this week’s post being very timely for me as well).

B.

Oh, you’re RIGHT — I do love this!

A great case study in how abundance and support “happen.” The same kind of thing has happened to me so many times — not worrying about the specifics, or the details, or the “form” the money/support will come in, but simply asking “Take care of this situation!” and then allowing the rest — the form, the details, the How — to be a surprise.

Practicing What I Preach

Slade Roberson — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 15:04:50 +0000

This week, my mother’s doctors discovered a tumor in her stomach. Technically, it has already been removed, but because the biopsy revealed malignant cells, she’s now facing an additional surgery. She goes to an oncologist tomorrow. I insisted on the Catholic hospital where my own doctors reside — I am (we are) are protected by Mary and I would prefer that Her presence be invoked in every nook and cranny.

Waiting is the rust of the soul.
–Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind

As I considered possible new messages to write about this week, my own personal experience has called for a grand review of topics I’ve already shared here. Challenges like this, the tests and lessons that come along with a serious medical issue, present an opportunity to practice everything that I preach:

Oh, hell, it would take me all day to list every Shift Your Spirits post that applies — it’s literally an archive of my articles.

I’ve been calling in the angels and asking for signs. Choosing the right oncologist was our primary topic of conversation and first request for divine guidance this week. Even as I write this, my Mama just called me, excited to have received an encouraging sign — one of her sisters who lives in another state just received a health magazine in the mail yesterday with a feature article about the doctor we had chosen. Very cool. I love that sound in someone’s voice, when they share a synchronicity with me… When they know it’s more than coincidence…

I was hesitant to share this personal story, mostly out of consideration for my Mama’s privacy, but yesterday she remarked on the positive benefits she’d experienced from calling in her support system. Although she is nowhere near as literal as I am in the way she practices her belief system, she said to me “I do believe there is something powerful and helpful about having a lot of people thinking about you at the same time, even if they don’t call it prayer.”

I totally agree, and it just so happens that I have access to thousands of people who are energetically connected to me, who are tuned in, who pray regularly, who communicate with spirit guides, who are master manifesters… You guys!

So, this week, I’m activating my own global network of Love and Support and calling in some favors.

Hold my mother Sharon (and me) in your prayers.

UPDATE — as of Monday, April 20th
John, my mother’s fiance, and I went to Sharon’s consultation with her oncologist. I took notes and typed everything up so Mama can send out an email to everyone at once.

(We all liked the oncologist — very good vibes and intuition about him — his family goes to John’s church and I know his mother…)

During the endoscopy earlier this month, they technically already removed a small nodule (also technically called a gastric carcinoid) from the inner mucosa of the upper stomach. It was 6mm in size (which is about half the size of my pinky fingernail; anything under 1cm is considered very small).

Although the nodule was removed from the inside, there is a root (like with a wart, I guess) still embedded in the wall of the stomach which can’t be reached with laproscopy (surgery from the inside). If the root is not removed, it could simply re-grow, so he will need to surgically remove a piece of the stomach about the size of a half dollar.

He indicated making an incision about 4 or 5 inches.

The surgery should be the only treatment required.

There is a very low chance of lymph node metastasis; and a very low chance of spreading to any other organ.

Sharon will now have a blood test to check Gastrin (sp?) levels, and a CT (CAT) scan of the abdomen and pelvis to make sure there aren’t any others visible anywhere.

This type of nodule is considered fairly rare, although the oncologist says he does see them quite often in his practice. This type of nodule could likely be related to pernicious anemia (which she has had her entire life, problematic during her pregnancies).

Next week, Monday April 27, they will look at the results of the blood test and CT scans and then schedule the surgery. It will likely be later within that week.

Sharon could be in the hospital for 5 - 7 days (although he did suggest that she could be out a few days sooner).

After that, he said she can pretty much go back to work when she feels up to it (depending on how long she feels weak or sore). He said it would probably be 6 weeks until she truly doesn’t feel that she’s just had surgery.

The details are very encouraging, very operable, very much on the “minor” end of the scale, as far these things go…

A Miracle is Always an Option

Slade Roberson — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 13:33:35 +0000

My friend Donna needed a miracle.

Her husband Bruce landed a new job in a far-flung suburb on the other side of the metro area. They loved their current home but it was “too much house” as she said — too big, too expensive… Because Bruce had been working from home for the past few years, they had already given up one of their two family cars to keep their finances comfortable. But now, in order to transition up with entirely positive changes in their circumstances, they needed to relocate into a smaller home with a lower monthly mortgage, closer to Bruce’s new job. They could use the extra money to put a second car in the garage again.

Donna is a unique client for several reasons — I’ve known her for ten years; she’s my hairstylist; I get to work with her in person; and I get to do readings for her on a monthly basis. We began bartering our professional services a few years ago when she opened her own salon and I coached her through the start-up of her business.

The Worst Case Scenario

After receiving my congratulations on this new success for Bruce (and their family), she stood behind me snipping away and launched into the stressful details of what she kept referring to as The Worst Case Scenario — chock full of phrases like:

“Plan B”
“If it doesn’t work out…”
“If we can’t…”
“If that doesn’t happen…”

She also caught me up on the conversations she’d been having with one of her best friends, whose husband lost his job and whose house had been on the market for fifteen months in Nevada… all the trials and tribulations they were going through, how much they were representative of dire statistics about the grim housing market, etc.

Donna said she’d been praying a lot about how to handle all these challenges and getting a lot of good intuition regarding “back up plans.”

…and The Best Case Scenario?

Now, Donna is one of the most faithful and most religious people I know, so I gently asked her:

“What kind of insights have you received when you pray about The Best Case Scenario?”

She abruptly stopped cutting and looked up at me in the mirror, her jaw literally hanging open. “What do you mean?” she asked. I could see the gears already clicking though, so I waited patiently without answering as she processed the question in a matter of seconds… Her eyes closed, her hand went up to cover her mouth.

“Oh my God,” she said. “I am so busted!”

She looked a little panicked. “I totally get what you’re asking me. I haven’t even thought about the Best Case Scenario — I’ve only been praying about the Worst.”

“It’s okay,” I reassured her. “Back-up Scenarios and Contingencies and Practical Plan B’s are all good. You’ve done a lot of work defining those. But you need to at least know what the Best Case Scenario involves. You gotta give Everything Working Out some air time too.”

“I have been spending all my energy, straight out of the gate, on how I’m going to handle failure! I get it.”

“Well, let’s walk through defining the Success, right now,” I suggested, “so you can start praying and manifesting that.”

What is The Best Possible Case Scenario?

What does that look like?
What are the details?
What does that feel like?

And don’t worry about the How — the cool thing about miracles is you aren’t required to micro-mange their progress.

Her Miracle Features:

We put our house on the market ASAP — like, this week.
We get tons of people looking at it.
We get multiple offers.
We sell within three months.
We immediately and effortlessly find a smaller, cheaper place near Bruce’s work and we use the difference we’re paying on the mortgage to get a second car again.
All timing is Divine.

… but then she appended it with more doubtful comparisons to her friend in Nevada’s horror stories.

First of all, I pointed out a few things that do not warrant her comparison to her friend’s situation — not in the Mystical Spiritual Law of Attraction Realm — but in the Literal Physical Here-and-Now of the Third Dimension.

Her husband has not lost his job — he’s just landed a new one.
The Nevada real estate market is not the Tennessee real estate market.
Their house has not been for sale for over a year — they haven’t been trying and failing — they haven’t even listed it yet.

And, incidentally, with something like selling a house (or even landing a job) you don’t really need multiple options and offers — ultimately, you only need one — the right one.

(We are all so quick to collect other people’s well-intentioned cautionary tales — what about at least modeling one other person’s fantastic success story?)

What’s even better than The Best Case Scenario?

Based on my personal experience, there is a tendency to pray for — or manifest, or creatively visualize — the Least that you need and call it the “Best.”

“I just need $500 extra dollars” — Why not go for $1000?
“I just need this to happen within three months” — Wouldn’t one month do the trick, too?

“Well, yeah!” Donna said. “Selling our house within one month would be great — but that’s beyond a Best Case Scenario — that would be a Miracle!”

“And it just so happens that you not only believe in miracles, you’ve experienced them…” I reminded her. “I recommend you at least start with a miracle.”

A Scene from Alice in Wonderland:

“There’s no use trying,” Alice said, “one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Three people looked at Donna’s house. The first person made an offer. She and her husband sold their house ten days after putting it on the market. She told me later that out of all the planning she’d worked on, the one plan she ended up needing was the one she hadn’t prepared for — what to do when everything works out better than you could have ever expected.

I do believe in miracles. I especially believe a Miracle should at least be one of your options.