Shift Your Spirits

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!

© 2004-2009, Slade Roberson. Communicating with Spirit
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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.

How to Blow a Wish

Slade Roberson — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 13:56:41 +0000

A few days ago, I witnessed a mom introducing her two young sons to the Power and Proper Protocol of the Dandelion Wish.

Spring is in full effect here in Tennessee — lawns have been mowed for the first time; lions and lambs are still wrestling the wind out of the weather; every other day the sky unwraps premonitions of summer sunshine and 75 degree weather from clouds like heaps of soaking wet charcoal gray towels; and the trees that are late to the Pastel Ballerina Barbie Wonderland Tutu Fashion Show are leaking that sheer chartreuse halo fuzz of new leaves instead.

I sat on the balcony outside the cafe overlooking a strip of sidewalk and grass that leads away from the Carousel Park by the river. Leaning on a stroller that acted as an air-craft carrier for a toddler unlikely to need to land any time soon, a young woman lagged behind two brothers with identical little-boy-bowl haircuts — I would guess they were two- and four-years-old.

They had obviously been briefed on at least the first lesson regarding Dandelion Wishes because the oldest boy yelled “There’s one!” and left the sidewalk to retrieve the “flower.” He pinched it off carefully, low on the stem, and held it up like a lollipop for his mother to verify.

“Yeah, that’s a good one,” she said. “Now make a wish and blow on it.”

He hesitated, squinting up at her, and then looking back down at the magical tool in his hands, studying it with a serious expression. He looked worried — either deep in the process of deciding on his wish, doubting the execution, or possibly considering that there might be a civilization of Whos on a dust mote whose entire world depended on his actions in this moment. He began slowly walking back to join his mom on the sidewalk, like a tight rope walker carrying a candle.

His little brother zoomed up and made to snatch it away from him, shrieking instructions “Blow it out!” The older boy let out a panic-stricken yelp and held the flower high above both their heads.

Their mom patiently pointed out that there were plenty of others, successfully diverting the little brother’s attention to all the possibilities waiting in the grass. In a flash he was leaning over in that precariously balanced pose that toddlers assume when they find something on the ground, the one that reminds me of a cross between Pinocchio and a miniature sumo wrestler, pigeon-toed, squatting with their butts out… you could literally hear the Pull-ups training diaper rustling under his overalls.

The older boy still brooded over his dandelion, his mother trying to convince him that his wish wouldn’t come true until he blew the flower apart. “…I don’t want to mess it up…” he said.

It was indeed a perfect dandelion seedpod specimen — enormous, spherical, without a single blemish or missing piece. Like a computer-generated prop straight out of Horton Hears a Who.

Meanwhile, his little brother was tearing any trace of white fluff off the stems with both fists, clapping his palms together, puffing his cheeks and huffing with all the cartoon might he could muster. He was even throwing handfuls of the shorter, yellow-sunburst companion flowers away from him, gobs of clover and green grass… He was soon running ahead of a small tornado of swirling spring confetti. He became a speeding comet of wishes, screaming “I got another one! I got another one!” I believe his wild manifestations even included gravel and mulch; just in case, he intended to rip up the entire ground and fling it away from him, in a full blown AK47 assault of scattershot desire.

Their mom chuckled and cheered him on, the older brother frozen in horror at this extreme technique.

“Can’t I just save it for later?” he asked.

“You can save it, but you have to blow it out in order to get your wish.”

The little brother sped on away down the border of weeds, dive-bombing nature and announcing wish after wish after wish, dragging his mom behind him with some invisible rope like a water skier behind a boat, her steps all but buried in a foaming wake of fluttering petals and blades and sticks and stones.

The older boy lagged behind now in a tip-toe zombie walk, shielding his intact specimen with one hand, as if the blowback from his brother’s reckless magic — or even his own breath — threatened his entire future or the population of tiny entities who prayed back to him.

I wondered if it might be a birth order thing — because I could see myself and my own little brother at that age, employing very similar approaches to wish fulfillment. At the age of four, I would most definitely have been worried, fearful, serious, reverent about the preservation of a single wish — afraid that by blowing my wish into the world without careful consideration, I might blow it in some other sense of the word.

But today, I have carefully trained myself toward that mad, abandoned method of the younger. My maturity resembles a relaxation, a regression… an evolution moving in the direction of learned spontaneity (if there can be such a thing).

I recognize the intuitive wisdom of the toddler, that puts the immediate actions — and quantities — ahead of the contemplation and expectation.

Which little boy are you? How do you blow your wishes?

Image credit MJorge via Creative Commons on Flickr

The Money Shift

Slade Roberson — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 21:06:11 +0000

The Money Shift — a guided meditation to identify and release your negative beliefs about money with a one-month program to allow more abundance into your life — is now available for immediate download.
http://sladeroberson.com/classes/money-meditation

I find it fascinating that markets and economies are quantifiable material expressions of abstract concepts. We talk about money as if it’s something “real” — perhaps the most real thing in the world — yet money is an idea.

Thoughts are things. Stock market indices represent our Collective thoughts-as-things. In this spiritual new age, we love to reference that we are One, that there is a synergistic Whole that is greater than the sum of all of as individuals, that collective human consciousness is an entity, a living organism — and perhaps the most fascinating dynamic of all, it’s evolving.

I am not participating in any kind of recession and I also view all that madness from a much different perspective — a long term view of growing pains and transformation. I do think the current system is undergoing tremendous change, but I prefer the word Renovation. The economic system we’ve known in recent human history is not coming back — something new is emerging in its place.

I have faith that this is desirable; it’s Good News.

I could wax on indefinitely about the psychology of markets, but I am also torn about contributing my voice or anymore volume to the Fear Channel, but:

I can’t ignore the fact that 3 out of 4 of the readings I gave over the last two months were related to money/ abundance issues.
I keep receiving emails from people who say they desperately want readings regarding financial and/or job security, yet they can’t afford to book one.

So, I decided to package the energy clearing and the exercises in a home study version that hopefully anyone can afford.

Back in February, I saw the results of a CNN Gallup Research Poll that struck me as perfectly representative of what I’m observing about how we are participating in Collective Thought. Thank God I don’t pretend to be a journalistic, because there’s so many of those damned opinion polls that I’ve wasted the better part of the day googling for the one I made personal note of with no luck… So, I’m sharing this as Anecdote.

75% of the people polled said that they think the global economy is in horrible shape.
75% of the people polled said that their own personal financial situations are unchanged/unaffected.

WTF?
This speaks volumes to me… Do you see the Big Disconnect, here, too? Is it just me, or is this not… (collectively) deranged?!

“Mommy, where do recessions come from?”
What happens when 75% of the people who are doing just fine financially collectively believe the economy’s going to hell? Isn’t this the very definition of how recessions are created?

Listen, I understand if you are one of the 25% of people who truly has been negatively affected — you have every right to think and act according to that experience.

But what excuse do the rest of us have? Fearful thoughts and beliefs impact our decisions and our behavior. Fear is self-actualizing and self-fulfilling.

Pessimism is The Great Global Pandemic
This all seems… dangerous to me. I wonder, do we have a moral obligation to one another to heal these thoughts and maintain a higher vibration? Aren’t those of us who are doing well that much more beholden to express the positive? I mean, it’s easy to see why someone who is out of a job is fearful — but how insane do those of us who have jobs have to be to contribute to — to participate in — that mindset?

The factoid that 7% of people are unemployed is no more or less accurate than the statement that 93% of people have jobs. Don’t we have a glass half-full/ half-empty choice here?

And isn’t right now, in this emerging renovation, when we are more and more aware of the collective power of our thoughts, not the perfect time to get a handle on how our negative beliefs about Money are crippling our ability to allow Abundance to do its thing?

I’d love to hear what you think of the new meditation and how the exercises help you make this important shift.

Image credit Penguincakes via Creative Commons on Flickr

The Other Part of Your Power

Slade Roberson — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 20:47:57 +0000

On March 17, 2009 I had a vision — that word sounds almost silly, doesn’t it? I can’t find a better one.

I had a vision of golden light.

I was in bed reading and waiting to slip into the very specific state of consciousness that comes sometimes before actual sleep. This state is a delicious, deep, instantaneous moment that probably lasts seconds in real time but feels like an hour. The thoughts on the page move seamlessly — bleed into — another channel where I am no longer receiving prompts from the words I am reading, yet I am following a new strain of information in a similar way. It’s like sinking down into a pool to retrieve a penny — once I realize consciously that I have landed on the bottom, that I’m holding my breath and running out of time, I will open my inner eye, spot what I am meant to see, grab it, and kick off back to the surface.

Back in my body, I repeat the message to myself so that it crosses over and won’t be lost. I place my bookmark, turn out my light, reposition my pillows, and then I roll over and prepare to actually go to sleep. This brief, lucid state is like a news broadcast I must view before I am content enough to release and end the day.

The observations that occur in this hypnotic state are usually extremely rich, lucid, and easy to retrieve without having to write anything down, as might be the case with dreams. The details are never vague or prone to fall apart, as dream logic will in the light of day.

These visions make sense, and continue to make sense, as I carry them around me in my wakeful daily life. Indeed, I most often induce these states the night before I work on a reading for someone, as they are like prologues to the information I will channel in the morning immediately after getting up.

When I have an evening’s impulses to myself — meaning, no readings scheduled or intentions to retrieve for other people — I ask specific questions to be answered just before crawling into bed. The vision is like the book jacket, the first page, and I can continue “reading” immediately upon waking.

So, on this night I want to tell you about, I was in this “trance,” and aware that only my left inner eye was open — my right eye was covered or blacked out, like looking through an optometrist’s contraption during an eye exam. I saw what I had asked to see and was just preparing to come up, and out, satisfied with some personal nugget I was hoping for when I heard:

WAIT! HERE’S THE OTHER HALF OF YOUR POWER!

This came from what I call my Aslan Voice — it’s a booming male voice that is not one of my guides (my primary spirit guide is female) and it’s not one of my ego or my still small voice (the ones that sound like me) and it’s not an interior clairaudient impulse (seeming to come from within the mind)…

This is a Voice that must be capitalized — it is experienced as undoubtedly external; it seems to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once; and it is so loud and shocking that when I hear it I jump out of my skin. This is a Voice that only comes unbidden, is always a surprise, and shows up very rarely — maybe a few dozen times in my whole life. On most of the occasions when I’ve heard this Voice I was a child, and it was usually to warn me away from danger.

This Voice is terrible in some Old Testament use of the adjective — like the Terrible Beauty of the Face of God, or the Great and Terrible Oz…

DON’T GO IN THERE!
YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE!
STOP!

These commands are protective, parental, benevolent, and authoritative (and have literally saved both me and my little brother from certain physical death) but they SCARE the HELL of me. I freeze. Adrenalin flood gates open. My heart pounds. The temperature changes over my entire body. Sometimes I cry out in an embarrassing, uncontrollable way. And I tremble for at least five minutes afterward.

(My Daddy tells a delicious story of being saved by this Voice when he was in Vietnam… Another time for that, I’d like to have it in his words… My mother and my brother are generally intuitive in the way that I am — the Aslan Voice is something that only my father has experienced and I wonder sometimes if I have “inherited” it…)

I haven’t heard this Voice in about five years — not once since I began publishing Shift Your Spirits. (A good thing, too; as far as clairaudient experiences go, I definitely categorize this type as undesirable.) The last time I heard this Voice was when I first read about the Technological Singularity and was told that I would never be depressed again nor would I ever be afraid of death — irrevocably freed from those fears, liberated by a certainty.

“HERE’S THE OTHER HALF OF YOUR POWER”

The right inner eye opened… I thought Oh My GOD, what IS that? It was like what you see through closed eyelids when you turn your face toward the sun. It was like viewing something larger and more infinite than the sun through a peephole in a door… A universe of golden light.

I didn’t know if I was meant to somehow grab it and take it with me or if I was only supposed to see it, because I was blasted away from it as quickly as I glimpsed it — a shock wave woke me. I reached for it as I resurfaced but it was like a coin still falling underwater, swinging and flipping in that peculiar, pendular way that evades a predictable trajectory that would allow you to catch it.

“The Other Half of My Power” — Is power so simply quantifiable? You mean I’m accessing 50% of my power already?! That’s surprisingly good news… I would’ve thought I had a handle on about 2% or something… Is it that big part of the human brain we supposedly don’t use? Is it in the dormant fragments of our DNA which have been mysteriously switched off?

Where is this Other Part and how do I access it? I’ve been walking around for weeks haunted by this — but remarkably calm about it. Okay (I think most of the time) with the Mystery of it.

I alternate between wanting desperately to articulate it and feeling absolutely no urgency to do so. For over a month now I’ve felt like I know some Great Secret that I want to tell strangers on the street with a crazy grin on my face. There is a part of me groping around for it on hands and knees, like it’s a diamond dropped in weeds, or a contact lens in shag carpet, or like it lives in a box in an attic in some house that could be anywhere on the planet and I didn’t catch the address.

But it feels… enough… to know it’s There.

Interpretations
Basic, generally held, popular aura color interpretations suggest the gold is Christ Consciousness (don’t squirm if you’re not Christian — technically neither am I and neither was He — and this isn’t just about Jesus. This is a concept that certainly includes the Big J, and resonates with answers to “WWJD?” without a doubt — but I truly believe it extends beyond any individual ascended master to include all human potential…)

Golden light is also about creativity, artistic ability, deep insight, performance, enlightenment, extreme happiness, and personal riches.

The Right Side indicates that it is projective power — not something for me to receive, but something I hold that can be expressed, shared, given, put out…

I finally broke down and talked to my best friend about it yesterday afternoon (forgive me, it’s so annoying to expect people to listen to elaborations on dreams and visions that mean nothing except to the person who’s doing the telling). As soon as I had tried to describe it, last night I began to receive a flood of information from multiple sources — in emails from my readers, in a newsletter message about Kabbalah, in whisperings from my guides.

Make me a vessel, I said. Give me some message I can pass on to others.

The Message for You

About your golden light, about the other half of your power

It is a divine technology, that provides you protection, energy, and grace.

To manifest it in your life you must first understand that it represents the unique creative divinity, gifts, and talents you carry with you into this incarnation. This power was given to you so that you may share it.

This week — just for at least this one week — devote yourself to finding your unique talent without jealously considering, examining, or comparing it to other people’s talents.

Their talents are not yours, and they were never meant to be acquired or copied or borrowed or modeled…

What is it?
What you seek is something different from all that — unique to you and only you — waiting only for you to rediscover it. That unique Something, whatever it is, will bring you a sense of purpose, joy, and fulfillment.

You actually know what it is — it’s a dream so important that you may hide it (even from your conscious self) seeking to protect it. It’s the Thing you keep assigning to Someday, the Thing you inadvertently preserve with procrastination, the Thing you can’t bear to fail at, and the Thing you can’t leave here without trying.

It’s a piece of your soul so dear you can’t risk it — yet it’s the one thing you must risk. It’s so Big and it’s so Personal, you may not even have dared to dream you could manifest it.

It’s the Thing that will energize every facet of your existence — it’s actually protected and powered in a way no other part of your life ever has been or ever will be.

This week, set in motion even one tiny action that breaks through the fear of its not being true for you — bring it out into the light of day and acknowledge it. Give it words in a way you never have before. Look in the mirror, and confess it to yourself.

Image credit Michele Catania via Creative Commons on Flickr

Why Would You Worry?

Slade Roberson — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 15:00:31 +0000

Anxiety develops from a lack of actionable intelligence, compassionate support, and/or alternative balancing energies.

I’m struck by how much we are all willing (myself included) to run the What if…? program in a pessimistic context more than an optimistic one. And beyond that, how much we will stay stuck in Wonder without moving beyond the dizzy spinning in Head Space to the simple application of the practical. All the hocus pocus and mysticism — the intuition and creative power — don’t do much to affect the reality of our daily lives.

Gathering Intelligence

Do you have facts?
Do you know where to find the facts you require?
Is there someone who has/ can find the answers if you can’t?

Without facts — specific information, data — you can’t make decisions or take meaningful action.

Inviting Support

Who may have the information that you require?
Is there someone you can ask for help?
Are you trying to bear your burden in secret?
Are you stuck in the vacuum of your own bubble where your perspective is skewed?
Do you just need someone to be a sounding board, to listen while you process/ work through your options?

You are not alone. You are most likely to receive the answers to your prayers, the potential solutions to your problems, from other people. You’re here reading this, which means you have access not only to information but to people all over the world.

Taking Action

What is the next most obvious step? Don’t jump ahead to Steps X, Y, and Z until you’ve chipped away at A, B, and C. You may only need to take one small step to start a chain reaction that creates momentum, that starts a domino effect that reveals an entire path forward to your goal.
What’s the next most obvious step after that? Course correct if necessary. If your first option didn’t lead to much, that’s great — you have just gained a valuable insight into what will not work and you can cross it off your list. Anxiety feeds off an over-abundance of What if scenarios — the more of these options you can remove, the lighter you will feel.
Are your intentions and potential courses of action grounded in the Present (or at least tomorrow morning)? If you’re time-traveling into Past or Future actions, you’ve slipped out of reality.

You might assume that Imagination likes to pal around with Intuition — but actually, it’s Fear that loves to engage the Imagination. Fear, Worry, Anxiety, the Ego, the Thinking Mind — the voices in this part of your channel reveal themselves by how much they love to invent endless variations on a theme.

Often the very first thing you need to do (or the next thing you can do) is a combination of all three of the above. The next right course of action may simply be asking someone who has access to the information you require.

A client came to me worried that he might not be able to get out of a contract…

Do you know for sure that you can not get out it?
No…
Have you dug into the details of the contract for any loop holes, time frames, etc?
Not yet…
Have you asked someone who knows?
I need to…

Another client came to me with three goals for the coming year, all of them involving travel and event planning, and had already convinced himself that he could not accomplish all three because he was fearful that there could be timing conflicts down the road which would force him to sacrifice one or two goals (possibly all three)…

Do you know the exact dates for each event?
Well, I know one of them is definitely in August… Not sure about the dates for the other two.
Do you know where you can find out? Is there someone you can ask who knows?
I can probably find the dates online…
Have you considered the possibility that all three events may be divinely timed so that it is effortless for you to attend all of them, without any scheduling conflict?
I guess I’m rushing into the worst possible case scenario, huh?

Another client is starting a business and worried that she won’t have enough money for all the start up costs. She’s not sure if she may need a bank loan, a partner or investor, or if she can cover everything with savings…

Have you sat down and created a simple plan, breaking down with a list of everything you need and how much each will cost?
Well, a friend of mine told me her total start-up was $ X,XXX.
Is she running the same kind of business?
Not really…
Do you know someone with a business model closer to what you have in mind?
Yeah, I do, actually. He said he’d sit down with me over coffee and let me pick his brain sometime… I’m just shy about bothering him.

Spinning
When your Fear and your Imagination start building a time machine in the backyard and taking you on a lot of trips through the Looking Glass, to Narnia, across Parallel Universes — congratulations, you’re the proud proprietor of your own inner Film Studio, complete with props, special effects, imaginary characters, and infinite potential dramas.

My closest friends know that when I say I’m spinning it means I’m paralyzing myself spinning scenarios that may have nothing to do with reality. It’s all story-telling spun like cotton candy so that it looks like it has greater mass than it really does. Once you take a real bite, or grab hold of it, it quickly shrinks. Or it’s a cocoon of wispy threads that, cumulatively, over time, can turn into a smothering straight-jacket.

We even have a Spinning Scale of 1 to 10 to describe how much we need to be unwound, unraveled.

Alternative Balancing Energies

Are you having any fun?
Are you taking breaks and getting away from what you’re working on?
Are you allowing yourself to mentally escape or relax?
Are you getting any physical activity?

So Much Air You Can’t Breathe
Worrying, over-analyzing, over-thinking, problem-solving, decision-making, weighing options — these are intellectual, logical, mental activities.

Intellectual ideas, information, data, and communication are associated with the element Air. We are currently living in the Age of Aquarius and the Information Technology Revolution — we are overwhelmed by Air. Collectively, we are hyper-connected. Individually, this can be greatly magnified for those with a lot of significant Air in their astrological charts.

Cerebral, elemental Air activities must be balanced with Earth (physical grounding in the third dimensional body and its environment), Water (emotional engagement, social interaction, simple joy), Fire (passion, expression, energetic release), and Spirit (the intangible synergy of holistic divinity).

An over-abundance of any of the elemental energies may bleed into and effect the other aspects of your life, and they make very poor substitutes for one another.

Image Credit Meredith Farmer via Creative Commons on Flickr

Change Ain’t Always Pretty

Slade Roberson — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 13:52:01 +0000

Could these Heavenly Downloads — these spiritual shifts, program updates, and rearrangements — be analogous to birth contractions? The miracle of life, rebirth, and change can be a great source of joy in the long term, but in the short term, shouldn’t you expect some serious (perhaps escalating) waves of discomfort?

Invoking the Goddess Kali can bring a serious mixed bag of blessings — I don’t know why she’s depicted wearing a chain of human skulls as a necklace instead of swinging one like a wrecking ball. It’s easy to forget that Change, as the primary Engine of Creation, comes with built-in destructive (and de-constructive) forces. Order is made from chaos.

Before you go to bed at night you pray for a new life to be built out of existing materials — you P.S. the “Make it so” with “Make it quick!” — but you still wake up horrified at the sound of dynamite. The Really Big Changes are usually not renovations — they are condemnations with tear-downs as a first phase.

The Collective
Change we can believe in, a New World Order, the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius, the Birth of the New Earth, Ascension, Apocalypse…

Yeah, so we’re pregnant. We’ve known this for a while now, right? We’ve been celebrating and expanding with our potential… Seems like our water broke recently, huh? Are we feeling the labor pains?

The birth is imminent, so we’re inevitably waiting or pushing… or just breathing in between.

The Personal
I’m not good at the in between bits. I’m incredibly willful and pretty damn comfortable at this point in my life with that aspect of myself. I like to push. I like to make things happen. I like momentum and forward motion, even when it feels reckless, dangerous… at least it feels alive. I generally suck at surrendering, being patient, and waiting to exhale. I’d probably choose an uphill battle with a goal on top or a high speed downhill chase with no brakes over a treadmill any day.

Even though I may intellectually recognize the microcosmic parallel of my life to the Collective — that I’m not alone in these processes of change — I nevertheless experience it in an incredibly lonely, personal way.

How are the details of the Big Changes taking place manifesting for you? Because the personal bits are the only parts that you can hope to affect or experience. You’ve got your own crumbs to carry. As the Universal Lego set gets broken up and handed out, you only get a handful of the bricks to work with. What madness have you constructed?

Right now, during this bizarre stage of y/our evolution, a lot of things that have not been right for a long time are up for review — demanding that you clear them out or at least correct them before going forward.
Any structures you have in place that lack integrity are being flagged to come down. Hard as it may be to put yourself in the right perspective, consider painful alarms and warning bells as blessings — alerting you to weaknesses that need to be revised, corrected, or thrown out to make way for something better.
Circumstances and environments and behavior patterns where you misuse (or possibly waste) your energy are grinding to a halt, or at least losing momentum.
Actions motivated by your ego-driven thinking mind are becoming difficult to catch or to control. Does it seem like you’ve dangerously reverted? Or does feel like two-steps-forward/one-step-back?
Your affirmations don’t seem to be doing you a damned bit of good when it comes to tuning out the voices of fear. You’re muttering to yourself like some crazy street oracle, but it just doesn’t seem to be working as well as it has in the past, does it?
You’re blessing everything in sight, in a desperate invocation of gratitude, and somehow that’s making you feel just the opposite of grateful — and guilty about that whole inverted spiral.

What the hell are you supposed to do?
If you can relate to these experiences, at this moment in time, you aren’t supposed to be doing anything. Don’t try to make life-changing decisions or take action.

Use this as an opportunity to:

Evaluate and plan, prior to the next wave of change energy.
Get clear about your priorities.
If something’s not working for you, stop working it (at least entertain what it might feel like to stop).
If you’re running into walls, stand back, catch a breath, and see if there isn’t an opening you’re missing in your haste to move only forward.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, make a list of whom you might ask for help.
If you’re stagnant, take a look at what your procrastination may be pointing to. Reconnect with a dream you pushed aside for some “better” future.

Honestly, I’m not keen on ranting like some End Times preacher (or news anchor, for that matter) prophesying doom and gloom. Neither am I into playing the mouthpiece like one of those New Age gurus with a glassy look in the eyes who sounds like he just ate some mushrooms. You know the Ones — their messages are liberally dosed with vocabulary that sounds like a bad science fiction script and Every Other Word gets Capitalized — “Lighworkers are Being Called to Hold Hands Around the Globe and Hum Together as One with the Hosts of Heaven and the Father-Mother God in Shifting the Planet to the Next Vibration of the Galactic Alignment that will Usher in a Utopian Age of Quantum Bliss.”

(I just gagged on that a little bit… Did you?)

Seriously, I shouldn’t disparage these authors so cruelly, because even though I aspire to pin the words down somewhere closer to grounded, a good portion of the time I do Get what they’re trying to describe. I’m probably (technically) one of these mystical cheerleaders, as much as I hate to admit it. I’m certainly more Out There than Anderson Cooper.

This Shit is hard to articulate! It’s neither as terrible or as glorious as either manic extreme might make it out to be. But I do believe it — Something Big — is happening and, yes, I do feel it. I feel confident that, if I chose to, I could even approach this evolution of human consciousness from an agnostic, woo woo-free perspective. What we’re experiencing is as much about technology and global society as it is about God.

I received no less than twenty-five emails this week from readers who feel like they are coming unglued — and I know that means there could be twenty-five hundred who feel the same way and are suffering in silence. For me, the greatest challenges in producing a blog like this on a regular basis is finding a reasonable middle ground between everyday reality and the mystical — between addressing the panic and pessimism that many people genuinely feel and wearing some crazy Happy Face mask of Magically Delicious News that you can’t relate to.

The emails I received all used words like overwhelmed, anxious, stuck, scattered, confused. I apologize that I can’t respond to them all individually… My advice right now is:

Breathe. And contemplate the following questions:

“What do I truly want?”
“What’s the next most obvious step to get me where I want to go?”
“What are the most important things in my world?”
“Am I living my life in a way that honors what really matters to me?”

Wait for the signal to push again. You can’t miss it. You’ll feel it…. And don’t mind the mess. It’s part of the process.

Kali image by Nico Nelson via Creative Commons on Flickr

Self Esteem and Relationships

Slade Roberson — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 15:05:28 +0000

In my post on truths about relationships and soul mates, I included “Listen carefully when someone tells you she’s not good enough for you — this is truth straight from the source.”

I intended this statement to be ironic — and I maybe I was a bit too clipped and cheeky… The original post was a topics lists for other articles, and this particular statement seems to be the first many people wanted to discuss further. So, allow me to elaborate.

image by Gabriela Camerotti via Creative Commons on Flickr

Three Potential Sources of Truth

You’ll note that I used smaller-case truth and source in the my thesis statement — not The Truth and not The Source.

Universal Source | Universal Reality | Universal Truth — it goes without saying the Universe (God, Spirit, Source, the Creator) does not allow for any individual to be more worthy than another.

Your Source | Your Reality | Your Truth – obviously, you’re not judging someone you love as not good enough for you — just the opposite. Your Truth reflects the Universal Truth.

His/Her Source | His/Her Reality | His/Her Truth — the only other facet of what is true for an individual, is what s/he believes.

We’re dealing with a three-legged stool here — a perfectly sturdy structure, unless one of the legs is broken. No matter how strong the other two legs are, they can not compensate for or bear the load for the whole, and by so doing un-break or fix the weak one. It must be mended, healed, corrected.

Relationships are synergies — where the total is greater than the sum of the individual parts. When I say “this is the truth” I mean you have been alerted to a powerful reality regarding the relationship.

When someone tells you she is not good enough for you, she is expressing her reality — in which case it is literally true — it becomes true — for her. When someone tells you he is not worthy of your esteem, he is alerting you to his perspective — the one from which he operates.

His motivations in communicating this may be:

to warn you. His intentions to let you know who you’re dealing with may be lovingly motivated.
to prompt your affirmation. He may need to hear the message that his self-judgment is wrong; but he is seeking an external source of personal power, where he will not find it.
to manipulate you. He may consciously be playing you emotionally, in which case there are a million other problems with this relationship and you should certainly run like hell.

You are an individual expression of Divine Source; and so is anyone with whom you enter into a relationship. These sources are original, unique, yet identically balanced in their pure spirit forms. They have equal power to shape reality.

Someone who is operating from a reality where he believes he is not powerful, is not powerful. His beliefs — the words he uses to describe and communicate those beliefs — manifest his experience, his reality, and all the outcomes of those stated intentions.

He will make decisions according to his truth.
He will take action according to his truth.

He will reinforce this truth in a feedback loop of self-fulfillment — which in many (if not most) cases translates as his ego looking to sabotage the relationship rather than release the negative self it has become comfortable with.

Where does self-esteem come from?

There’s an obvious truth in the prefix we attach to the phrase self-esteem.

Healthy self-esteem is discovered/formed at a very early age, when the child’s ego both over-identifies as the center of the Universe, and looks for power and authority to come from external sources. This is why all forms of child abuse or neglect are so devastating and pervasive. But once individual wills are formed, in relation to others, adults must choose to continue giving away their power.

Even if you have been victimized, you do have the will within you — at some point — no matter what you’ve lived through — to transcend it. To choose your reality.

You do not have the power to transfer self-esteem to another person. You may hold her in esteem, but you cannot make her feel differently about herself. Can you impact someone in a positive way? Of course — indeed, it may be the reason why you are in the relationship. You can create a loving, safe environment in which she can change herself. But you can’t change her. At some point, it is her choice.

One of my closest friends who is a psychotherapist describes what he “does” in his work as walking with someone wherever she needs to go. Not driving her. Not changing her. Not fixing her. Holding a space of safety and support in which someone may heal herself. Or discover the truth that she can accept and choose to be healed.

We are all broken to some degree. We are all here to discover our self-worth — it may be one of the universal facets of a spiritual mission. We are the way by which the Creator experiences itself. In relationships, we act as one another’s hand-mirrors, held up to the individual expressions of God within each one of us.

I’m not suggesting that you should not love another person who hasn’t figured out how to switch this self-esteem — this divine personal power — into the on position. The one thing you can do is provide a working example of what it looks like to love yourself — this could be especially powerful for someone who did not witness this as a child.

I’m not suggesting that you can’t provide a loving, compassionate environment in which someone may heal himself.

I’m just stating that, if you are seeking to create a healthy, whole, mutually beneficial, equally balanced relationship with someone, and she presents you with her truth… Realize, with your eyes wide open, that this is as good as the truth.

God doesn’t have a self-esteem problem.

Seek Wisdom — Practice Love

Reading Testimonial
Slade, I had a reading with you last year and the impact of the advice you gave me not only dealt with the issue at hand but is something i will take with me for the rest of my life.
Stephanie

What will you say about your reading?

Can Spirit Guides Give Bad Advice?

Slade Roberson — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 14:44:49 +0000

“Do spirit guides ever give bad advice or the wrong advice? I did what (I thought) they were saying I should do and it ended up being a mess. Now I’m afraid to trust them…”

The questioner didn’t give me any specifics about her situation, so I’ll adapt a few other people’s stories as illustrations — one of them being mine.

I recently went through a frustrating situation that speaks to this (which I’ll tell you more about in detail in just a minute) but let me go ahead and give you my short answer up front.

In my experience, it’s not so much that spirit guides can or can’t give “bad” advice — it’s that we sure can do a lousy job of employing them properly and/or interpreting their messages:

hearing what we want to hear
interjecting our own will (even though our judgment may be flawed)
believing their will can precede ours
making bad decisions
needing to learn things the hard way
and taking the wrong actions

Bright Shiny Object Syndrome
You are distracted on your quest for treasure, and veer off the map to pick up another glittering gem that just happens to be close enough to your path that you think… “Oooo! Not exactly what I’m after, but it’s right here. What can it hurt?”

(Retail stores very craftily tap into the emotion of this kind of opportunity by placing items in the check out line that you didn’t come in for, didn’t need, and didn’t know to want until you saw them — they call them impulse buys.)

When close enough ends up closer to wrong…
Last fall, my friend Jeff received some divine guidance about relocating to Hawaii and starting his own business. He had a reading with Colette Baron-Reid (we’re big Colette groupies — love her!) and she confirmed this. When I met Jeff in November, I also picked up that he was going to move to Hawaii this year as part of a major life change, and that in addition to (or prior to) launching his own business, there was also a job opportunity working for someone else (an older female) in a similar field. But I definitely got Hawaii from his guides, in a big way. Multiple psychics kept confirming this for him — the job description, generally; and the location, very specifically.

So, in December, pretty much out-of-the-blue, he was offered a position working for an older man in a very similar capacity — but in Arizona. It had to be the correct path for him to take, right? It was SO similar to what he wanted to be doing… only the location was really “off.”

Everyone involved was a great person — but the job started elusively shifting and changing the moment he took it. He stuck with it thinking “But it’s almost perfect. Surely moving to Hawaii will be so much more challenging — this is Right Here! Maybe I can change my original plan to accommodate the easier and seemingly more immediate path…”

Logical Override
In the Angel Therapists’ community we refer to this as logical override — letting the ego-driven thinking mind deconstruct the clarity of our intuition with its “practical” fear-based arguments.

Jeff’s career detour quickly deteriorated with unforeseen blocks and complications — and it all felt awful — stress, discomfort, anxiety. The body is a powerful and accurate divination tool.

He ultimately had to course correct, to realign with his original intention to move to Hawaii. This seemingly more monumental move unfolded effortlessly — and quickly — in a comparable amount of time. He experienced instances of divine timing all over the place… and he leaves for Hawaii in less than a week.

And he feels good — invigorated, excited, enthusiastic. The right decision or action feels right.

Lost

A few weeks ago, I completed production on the latest version of my class on Talking to Your Spirit Guides. Although the information in the lectures did not change much at all, the quality of the recording was a tremendous improvement — and the guided meditation underwent a HUGE transformation. I was very proud of the results and wanted to make the upgrade available to everyone who had already taken the class. Especially since I received such great feedback about the attunement portions of my workshops, with many requests to record them.

I talked to my spirit guides about potential courses of action to take regarding my meditations:

getting the new version to existing students
marketing the classes
and producing more guided meditations on a variety of other topics.

My guides gave me very brief, succinct, simple, clear, common sense advice:

Give the spirit guide attunement away — to EVERYONE. The easiest way to make sure anyone who wanted to download could do so — plus, a free preview would help to authentically market the full course.
For several days there were 222’s everywhere, which I interpret as additional confirmation of the guidance to involve others. I had planned for months to offer an affiliate program, as soon as I felt that the product was top-notch.
Last but not least, immediately begin writing and recording more, while my creative momentum was high. I began writing new meditation scripts, on a variety of topics — I was effortlessly downloading (channeling) them, like a court reporter, pure transcription… I had five new scripts in various stages of completion, with two of them ready to record and mix over the next two or three days…

And then I… lost my freaking mind, apparently, and wandered way off course. Got completely lost, spent two weeks working on unnecessary tasks that were not part of the original plan, and ultimately, after stressing myself into a frenzy, ended up having to revisit The Art of Surrender (yes, AGAIN!) and undo everything. Retrace my steps backwards — a LOT of steps in both directions, just to get back to Step One.

But, hey — change your mind; change it back. Abort when it’s warranted — when it’s clearly not working.

It was exhausting. But I can not blame it on my guides. If I stuck to the simple, obvious, next, straightforward steps — I would have uploaded the meditation preview, stuck the link in my free resource Contacting Your Spirit Guides, and posted on the blog telling all subscribers to check it out.

… Then, proceed with the new recordings…

Which is where things stand today. But let me tell you the ridiculous tangents and detours I went off on first/instead.

I am very willful. I am very aware of my free will. I am very aware that I am the authority of spirit manifested in my life. I am very aware that I’m driving the car and my guides are, at best, big mouthed passengers and back-seat navigators. I don’t pray to my guides. I don’t beg them to do things for me. I don’t even ask my spirit guides what I should do — I tell them what I’m planning to do and let them weigh in.

I decided to segment my lists — a tedious activity that is unlikely to interest anyone here, except maybe those of you who are internet marketers — let’s just say it was serious overkill in getting the word out about my meditations.

Bright Shiny New Marketing Lists
I decided while I was at it to build some entirely NEW lists. Guys, there are quite a few of you, I am happy to say, but the size of my list and how quickly I can build a new one meant that I TRIPLED the expense of my monthly business overhead in twenty four hours. For NO reason other than I could. (I am very proud of the fact that I have run my own business for five years on a tiny overhead budget.)

Once I had new lists, I “decided” I needed new publications to serve them and spent days coding email newsletter templates — which is like the most aggravating activity for any designer on the planet. And to top it off, there were technical issues with the list management service that put the most serious problems entirely outside of my ability to control or fix.

Brick wall, after dead end, after briar patch, after muddy ditch, after locked door… Let me tell you one thing I absolutely know to be true:

Solutions (good solutions) are NOT complicated. The set backs and the blocks — not to mention, the body stress that goes along with it — are sure signs that you are NOT engaging a good plan.

Did it positively affect my income? No.
Were more people reached? No.
Did it get me NEW readers? No.
Did it cost me more money? Yes, I was going to spend three times the amount of money to run my business, with no effect on the bottom-line. STUPID.
Did it create more work? YES, like… to infinity!
Did my actions fulfill the intentions I had set with the advice of my guides? NO.
Did I need to learn some lessons from this? Yeah, apparently I did.

If you can’t find any other philosophical distance to maintain your sanity, the perspective of a necessary lesson will usually work when all other answers to Why Me? don’t suffice.

There’s a piece of marketing wisdom I learned several years ago (can’t remember who said it) that has broader application:

“There’s no such thing as a failed marketing campaign, only useful data about what does NOT work.”

So, my spirit guides clearly did not give me bad advice, right?
Well, that’s the most interesting observation of all. During the course of this series misadventures — all along the way — I was telling myself that my guides had told me to do all this. I kept prompting them for additional input, at each hurdle I encountered because of my (ill-advised ?) detours, and they kept trying to help me — with MY crazy-assed course of actions, not theirs — for awhile…

I called Jeff to tell him about my meltdown and what was going on and the first thing he asked me was “What are your guides saying about all of this?”

My guides aren’t saying jack. They stopped talking a while back. As a matter of fact, they had me pull over and drop them off. They said “Pick us up on your way back to Grounded, dude.”

When your guides go quiet on you — especially after you’ve been asking them the same thing over and over again — chances are they’ve said all they have to say. They’ve already given you the best advice they have. You’ve probably been asking repeatedly, because you’re not getting the answer you want. There’s something already laid out there, before you, right in front of your face. Once you get it you can move forward again.

The lesson may not be fun; it may not be easy.

Most of the significant things we learn, we learn the hard way.

image credit Lupinthe3rd via Creative Commons on Flickr

Soul Mates

Slade Roberson — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 17:40:03 +0000

You might not know it, just from reading the articles currently available on Shift Your Spirits, but Relationships are the #2 Most Requested type of Reading I perform. I’ve been meaning for some time to introduce this subject publicly, and this post really represents a list of potential relationship article topics.

Although I can only directly listen to the spirit guides of the person who gives me access and permission, I am a big believer in the unique wisdom offered through astrological composite charts. This is where the natal information of two people is cast together as a chart of the synergistic relationship, as if the relationship itself is literally a living entity with its own soul records. (I offer interpretations of these composite charts as a “bonus” to consultations for those with relationship questions, who can supply the necessary birth information for both parties.)

My “Truths” about Soul Mates and Relationships

These are some general chunks of wisdom I have observed during relationship readings and couples counseling, and/or truths I have learned the hard way — through my own personal experiences.

Relationships are the mirrors by which we experience ourselves. You are always having a relationship with some part of yourself, reflected and externalized by your partner.

There are differences between soul mates and twin flames. In the Western Hollywood vocabulary, soul mate is often intended to refer to a specific type of soul-contracted relationship that is synonymous with a twin flame — the idea that each person has one and only one perfect potential romantic partner. While I wouldn’t say that there’s no such thing as a twin flame, I would venture that it is a rare phenomena and not one which everyone is destined to experience in this lifetime. I also believe that we have many potential soul mates with whom we can create a variety of successful partnerships, including marriage.

We all have many potential soul mates with whom our partnerships defy categorization, type, role, or recipe – members of our spirit family, those with whom we walk together. Not all soul mates are required to exist within romantic, sexual, and/or marriage templates in order to be spiritually fulfilling. It’s quite challenging to create a relationship with someone when the connection is greater than any known social construct, especially in the beginning. The power of the initial spark may be hard to compartmentalize without assuming it is meant to be romantic.

Spiritually important relationships are learning experiences even when they don’t end up in bliss. Soul-contracted (in which you have chosen prior to this lifetime to know one another for the purpose of delivering [shared] lessons) or karmic relationships (in which we work out unfinished business or repay energetic debts) may often be painful or difficult, even while still being very spiritually significant.

Sometimes it’s not about you — it may feel like you’re playing the Lead, but sometimes you are a Supporting Actor, playing the role of messenger or teacher for your partner.

Projection and Transference are tricky forms of love. If you’re a light worker, with a life purpose and/or a professional career that involves heart-centered healing, be aware that there is a big difference between clients/patients and friends/lovers. Anyone who appears to be both will probably belong to the first group.

While Saving Someone may be motivated by a truly loving intention, it can be a disastrous foundation for a marriage.

The pattern in your relationships is carried by you, not by your partners.
Mary has a disastrous relationship with John.
Mary has another disastrous relationship with Bob.
Mary has a so-so relationship with Michael.
Mary says that All these men have the same issues. While that may be true, who is the obvious common denominator in all these pairings?

Human beings are not ideas. Be careful that you’re not having (desiring to have) a relationship with an idea. If you prioritize a Role over an individual person, you will be disappointed by anyone’s inability to become an Idea.

Being alone is always better than being with the wrong person.

If you’re not complete, no one else can complete you.

The ideal relationship is not 50-50 — in the highest numerical quantification, you bring 100% and your partner brings 100%. 50-50, 60-40, 70-30… These recipes are expressions of (and probably formulas for) co-dependence.

Sharing your life with someone who also has a life of his/her own can be the icing on the cake. But icing with no cake is a plate full of frosting, which is probably way less appealing (and ultimately less nourishing) that it sounds.

Having a relationship is never a good substitute for having a life.

A relationship is a unique entity co-created by the participants. It is not ultimately comparable to any other partnership.

You always attract the relationship with the lesson you are meant to learn at this time. You can’t really fail at a relationship if you maintain the philosophical position that allows you to perceive it as a learning experience.

Lowering your vibration, playing small, or dumbing down to your partner’s level in order to make the relationship “work” is unsustainable.

Don’t bank on conditional future beneficial changes in your partner. “She’ll be perfect for me once she…” “He’d be perfect for me if he’d just learn to…” This is like playing the Change Lottery. Evaluate the relationship based on what you know to be currently true. What if s/he never changes in the way you hope?

The balance of energetic currency in a relationship does not have to take the same form to be reciprocated. An excellent massage may be reciprocated by a gourmet meal. An expensive gift may be reciprocated by priceless emotional support.

There IS such a thing as a successful, temporary, transient relationship. Important or significant do not necessarily equal forever.

If you doubt that he’s your soul mate, you’re probably right — he’s not.

Listen carefully when someone tells you she’s not good enough for you — this is truth straight from the source. (Allow me to elaborate on self-esteem in relationships.)

When people tell you they “don’t want to hurt you” or “don’t want someone to get hurt,” it usually means they’re preparing for that likelihood. This is a big clue to their expectations, if not their intentions.

If you want to be in relationship with a woman or a man who’s into yoga (fitness, hiking, books, pets, spirituality… insert your interests here) don’t look for him/her in a bar. You may get lucky, but the odds are stacked against you. Statistically — logically — most people in bars are into one thing for sure — drinking. Go to a more obvious, relevant source environment.

511 — Too Much Information. Confession, Authenticity, and Honesty are not necessarily the same things. Don’t talk about your exes or introduce your history of relationship nightmares as a topic of conversation during your first few dates. Why do people continually make this mistake? If you want to open up, open up about a bright future, not your neurotic past. (Not yet, anyway… Save your Dark Secrets for someone who can receive them in the proper time and context.)

Be clear about your intentions and careful what you wish for — your ability to manifest is very powerful, for good or bad. If you choose to manifest a relationship where money/financial security is prioritized over other qualities like mutual love/respect, please don’t be shocked when you find yourself in a loveless marriage with a rich dude who treats you like a trophy.

Your ability to receive (deserve) Abundance affects not only your relationships with people but also your relationship with other forms of wealth such as money.

The Good News is that the person you want to become, the life you ultimately want to create for yourself, and the partner you want to attract, with whom you can share your highest self and your best life can be achieved as one goal. This power, this happiness, this flow — it’s a package deal. You are most likely to fall in love with someone else when you fall in love with you — with your world. You are most likely to meet a partner who shares your values in an environment where like-minded people congregate over mutual ideals.

When you “get” the Big Picture, all the pieces tend to fall in place effortlessly.

Image credit Lynn via Creative Commons on Flickr

Free Spirit Guide Meditation Download

Slade Roberson — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 16:37:02 +0000

When you subscribe to Shift Your Spirits, you will receive access to download and listen to — for free — the Guided Meditation | Spirit Guide Attunement portion of the course Talking to Your Spirit Guides.

The ebook Contacting Your Spirit Guides 101 has been updated (January 2009) to include the mp3 meditation. So, if you haven’t downloaded the ebook or read it in awhile, check the links at the end of recent articles in your email or feedreader.

Please check out the page below to sign up for the free mp3:

http://sladeroberson.com/free-spirit-guide-meditation/

Automatic Intuitive Response — version 3.0

I spent the month of January 2009 in the studio, composing, mixing, mastering, and re-recording the psychic development classes in the Automatic Intuition series:

Talking to Your Spirit Guides
Automatic Writing Lessons

In addition to more professional production and sound quality on the lectures, I’m especially excited about the Guided Meditation | Spirit Guide Attunement portion — which now has a full-blown original music background track! I’ve been jokingly referring to the musical score among my close friends as Heaven on Painkillers — it’s super dreamy mystical airy-fairy… I can’t wait for you all to hear it!

http://sladeroberson.com/free-spirit-guide-meditation/

Special thanks to my brother the sound engineer — for Christmas this year he hooked me up with a lot of high-end, professional sound recording tools and equipment — essentially helping me build my own Mac-driven home recording studio (Snowball microphones, LogicPro… the works!)

For those who have already purchased an older version of the classes prior to February 2009 — Hell Yes you get free upgrades!

I have all your purchase information on file, so just shoot me an email and let me know your name and the email address where you want me to send you the new upgrades. The information content of the classes has not changed — but the meditation is a Big Production now!

The easiest way to get you the new Spirit Guide Attunement is to give it to everybody. http://sladeroberson.com/free-spirit-guide-meditation/

After you listen to the guided meditation, please send me some feedback and let me know what you think!

Psychic Shielding for Empaths

Slade Roberson — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 15:38:15 +0000

I’ve yet to encounter anyone who has a high level of natural intuitive abilities — such as clairvoyance, clairaudience, or claircognizance — who is not also primarily clairsentient. Empathy — experiencing external emotional energies as your own moods and sensitivities and feelings — is the foundation of being psychic.

For those of us who are lightworkers, it comes with the territory of everyday life. For those who take this identity into the professional realm — obvious careers such as psychotherapists, counselors, coaches, social workers, medical professionals, massage therapists, energy healers, psychics, ministers, teachers, and child care; but also human resource professionals, customer service workers, hair stylists — anyone who deals with numerous individual people, called to assist (at least listen to) others who are processing a lot of negative conditions and circumstances — residual energy is literally an occupational hazard.

Psychic Protection from Human Energy
Here are some excerpts from reading requests I’ve received in the last few months asking for psychic protection techniques for specifically human-to-human energy exchange:

I need to be empathetic enough to effectively communicate, be able to explain my point of view without having to be defensive or worried about being attacked, still show compassion and a willingness to listen, YET remain detached enough that I can be true to myself, authentic, stick to my guns.
I find myself constantly being drawn in to other people’s drama. I’m a good listener, and I care about other people, but sometimes it feels like I’m a dumping ground for other people’s stress and bad energy.
My friends and family love to talk to me about their problems. I’m the one everyone comes to for advice. I feel that it’s truly my life purpose to play the part of the counselor. On the one hand, I do feel that I’m helping and being of service to others… but more often times than not, I end up feeling drained.
I proudly identify myself as a light-worker, a way-shower. I am very open, very intuitive, very sensitive. I want to continue growing and opening myself further, but there’s a part of me that resists. Just as I start to pick up on someone’s vibes, there’s a part of me that wants to rise up, slam the door… to protect myself. How can I do both?
I guess I’m what you call an empath. I am a psychic sponge — I absorb everyone else’s energy and I don’t know how to turn it off. Is there a way I can turn it down or protect myself without turning off?
I worry a lot. I worry about everyone. I worry for them. It’s like I have a sign on my forehead that says “Leave your problems with me.” I know it may sound crazy to someone who doesn’t experience it, but it can literally make me feel ill — my stomach is either in knots or my neck muscles are stiff all the time. I worry more than anything that I’m going to give myself cancer from carrying all this stress.
I try to be positive, but it feels like the whole world wants to tear down my attitude.
The relationship is over. It has run its course. We both know it, we both agree, and we both want to move on… But there’s still a lot that has to be negotiated in order for us to go our separate ways. Every time we even talk on the phone, it’s like the wound gets torn open all over again, and we both end up in tears. How can I move forward and heal without backsliding into that painful place that feels like square one?
Help! I feel like I’m under psychic attack. I’m afraid that if I open up my intuition too much, I’m going to make myself more vulnerable.

I most often share the following psychic “soft” shielding technique with empaths who work in para-professional or healing arts fields where heart-centered connection is a requirement. In addition to this, regular clearing and cord cutting is a must.

Empathic Shielding
I’m sure you are familiar with the concept of Purple Light and White Light Shielding — Purple Light being the highest angelic vibe you can invoke for spiritual protection, nurturing, and support; White Light being the universal holy shield.

White Light may be too hard core
The thing to keep in mind about White Light is that it is entirely impermeable and allows for too little heart chakra to heart chakra reflection/ interaction. White Light protection in everyday relationships is a bit overkill.

Try Pink Light Visualization
As an alternative to using White Light shielding, use Pink — the ethereal, aura color representation of your Higher Self. The color of rose quartz, which can also literally be assigned, associated, activated, and amplified by the crystals themselves.

When talking to (anyone with whom you may require this softer, tender-hearted protection) picture yourself sheathed in a column of pearly bubble-gum pink light, from just above your head extending all the way through the floor beyond your feet. Imagine it being poured on top of your head, starting at your crown chakra. I personally picture this substance as having the appearance and viscosity of liquid soap or shampoo. You may also envision that you’re Glinda in her big pink bubble — that’s about the the right size in relationship to your body/aura. (Besides, it’s just plain fun to call forth your Inner Glinda once in awhile. Even the biggest bad ass among us has an Inner Glinda.)

Pink Light as both Mirror and Filter
When the subject you’re communicating with projects onto you, the most positive authentic heart-centered energy is reflected back to him/her. The Pink also allows for your loving energy — compassion, concern, good will — to pass through, yet the White Light (which is still present within the Pink) blocks negative energy.

So, it’s a semi-permeable shield — which expands the Highest Self-loving Energy that either of you project; and it’s a kind of filter — magnifying what you most hope to receive/ project, while still blocking psychic attack completely and absolutely.

Using Actual Crystals
If you have rose quartz crystals physically present, they can act as a switch or consciousness trigger for turning on this shield. I recommend that therapists and mediators actually have some piece of rose quartz in the line of site of both parties; on the table between you is ideal. Wear rose quartz as jewelry or carry a piece in your pocket. Just seeing this color acts as a subconscious activation switch, even for those who don’t intellectually know the symbolic spiritual significance.

Remember that the Woo Woo Stuff — the visualizations, the meditations, the rituals, the spells — is really just a representation and a reminder of your commitment to a particular conscious intention. Just going into a conversation aware of what you want to block, what you want to project and receive, impacts your word choice and allows you to set the energy.

When you set a strong energetic intention like this — when you are willfully driving the vibration — others must conform or deal with great discomfort. They have no choice but to match that energy or they have to leave. In which case, the integrity of the kind of conversation you want to have is ultimately maintained.

Remember, if in doubt, you simply express how YOU feel; that’s the most honest thing you can do. Your feelings are non-negotiable, no matter how controlling another person might want to be, or think they can be — when presented with someone’s feelings, there’s nothing they can do but accept them.

Anyone not down with the good vibes — who refuses, who chooses over and over again to be difficult — is undoubtedly someone not worthy of your time and energy. I’d say two chances would be my line in the sand — after which, as much distance and lack of contact you can make happen is entirely warranted.

You can’t have a war if both sides don’t show up. We have legal channels and barriers if necessary — security, attorneys, mediators, etc. (If you keep answering that cell phone when he calls and engaging in another verbal battle, you are participating.)

Don’t forget the most basic intention manifestation/ law of attraction factors — if you establish before-hand how you WANT the script to go, then you’re creating it — not reacting on the fly and finding yourself unequipped to provide the details of the Best Case Scenario. If you prepare for the conversation going badly, if you prepare a dialog of argument, the Universe will be sure to shoot that scene for you.

You may be pleasantly surprised, even blown away, by how positively others will respond and behave if YOU are prepared for them to.

image credit stephweiss via Creative Commons on Flickr

Talking to Money

Slade Roberson — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 16:31:37 +0000

Have you talked to Money lately? How has your new relationship with Money progressed?

Many recent subscribers are not aware of the life-changing, transformational Abundance project I began after discovering the work of Morgana Rae. I forget that my journal Hornets and Honey Bees: How I Married New Money is not actually online — only excerpts and updates from time to time.

If you haven’t already, catch up on — or engage in a refresher of — the other Money | Abundance Writing exercises posted on Shift Your Spirits. Here’s a recap of the relevant links:

Money Manifesting Exercises

Abundance Meditations | Dialogs with Money

If Money Was a Person, Who Would Money Be?
Your Meaningful Money Makeover
Financial Alchemy — the original article by guest author Morgana Rae
5 Tips for Being a Money Magnet by Morgana Rae

You may also wish to visit my more recent journal excerpt, Paper Money Airplane. Incidentally, during my last visit to the lavatory on the long plane flight to Hawaii, someone had left a “million dollar” bill beside the sink. This bill has since been added to my altar alongside my paper money airplane. I’ve started a collection of magical money and pennies from heaven.

When I was in Kona for the Angel Therapy® Practitioners Workshop, Doreen Virtue took us through a guided meditation to release any vows of poverty we may have made in this or other lifetimes — significantly, this took place on 11/11, and in conjunction with a Full Moon.

Personalized, Private Abundance Clearing | Healing Sessions
Two decades ago, while in college, my friend Lance taught us his Cajun grandmother’s Full Moon Money Spell, which I will save for another update. If you are interested in an angelic clearing session surrounding your relationship with Money, as well as learning the additional rituals I use, this would be perfectly suited to a phone consultation.

Doreen also shared her own version of this powerful dialoging exercise. Note: These concepts have come to me through others, and I have both Doreen’s and Morgana’s blessings to teach them to others. You may also consider performing these exercises in conjunction with my own spirit dialoguing and automatic writing techniques, substituting a coin or other form of paper currency for the power object in the guided attunement.

Doreen Virtue’s Money Dialog

You can use a paper bill of any denomination and/or national currency to focus the exercise. The amount is not important — the physical representation is.

(The vast majority of Shift Your Spirits readers live in countries where paper money bears human portraits, which is certainly significant considering we are relating to the personification of Money. Because Abundance for me personally is also represented by a honey bee, I can’t help but think of the gorgeous, colorful Dutch bill with a large yellow sunflower and a honey bee watermark…)

Three Questions to Ask During Your Meditation | Journaling Exercise

Money, how do I really feel about you?
Money, what can I do to have more of you in my life?
Money, what else would you like to tell me at this time?

Be sure to thank Money for the conversation.

Again, you may wish to use the timed writing constraints in Automatic Intuitive Response, or simply write as much information as you receive.

Your turn — what did Money say to you?
You may wish to do this exercise now, before reading my own responses in the diary entry below. If you feel moved to, and if you have a blog of your own, create your own post and link back here so we can all check it out. Or feel free to share your own conversation with Money in the comments below.

Slade’s Conversation with Money — 11/11/2008, Kona, Hawaii

Money, how do I really feel about you?
You feel judged.

Money, what can I do to have more of you in my life?
You need to play harder, be Bigger, shine brighter, and by all means stop apologizing for your relationship with me.

Money, what else would you like to tell me at this time?
I’m always waiting for you. I’d always like to see more of you. Stop putting off our time together. You can’t need me and then reschedule me — keeping asking me to come back when you’re ready, when you’re worthy, when you know how to be with me in some imagined “perfect” state. You will learn about me through having me in your life — not by thinking about me.

Image Credit whatadqr via Creative Commons on Flickr

The Psychic Closet

Slade Roberson — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 16:12:54 +0000

The last thing on earth I ever wanted to grow up to be was a psychic. Not that I cared so much about being psychic; I just feared being labeled a psychic. Actually, what I most literally avoided was being labeled crazy. Mentally ill. Delusional. Insane.

My favorite — my “best” — readings for other people are life purpose readings. During one of these consultations a few months ago, I mirrored for a client the struggle I went through of trying to become everything other than what I am. No doubt you may also relate to a similar misguided process, where you try on every out-of-the-box socially-acceptable label you can find, trying to find a template or a recipe into which to cram your unique talents and life experience.

Goldilocks Picks A Major | Goldilocks Reads The Want Ads

Maybe I’ll become a _____.
Maybe _____ will be the perfect (easiest) path for me.
Maybe _____ is the blueprint I am seeking for the life I want to live…

The first, current, last, and future career option for me has always been Writer. That’s safe and general. It’s definitely true. Among other reasons, it allows me to tell stories behind a veil of fiction. I figured I could just write about paranormal experiences without claiming they happen to me and get away with being imaginative — crazy and delusional work really well — are perhaps even desirable skills — for novelists.

But, over the years, I began to panic about all the writers who ended up in the loony bin. It seemed that crazy was a label that might follow me into the writer’s closet and do me in anyway. After watching An Angel at My Table, the bio flick about Janet Frame, where poor young Janet stares out the school bus at the asylum she will eventually wind up in… To think I ever complained about having to wait tables to support myself while struggling to find the time and motivation to write, while poor Janet takes up a pen and writes on the walls of her padded cell… Later in life she learns that she has been awarded her country’s most prestigious literary award and autographs copies while strapped to a bed, sedated under a heavy blanket of psychotropics, barely conscious of where she was, let alone what she had accomplished…

Years later, it was Judy Dench portraying Iris Murdoch slowly losing her vocabulary and ability to speak… I swore right then and there I wouldn’t suffer through any more tragic biographies of writers losing it.

It seems our fear is destined to find us, and the only way to handle it is to become someone who has handled it — to engage it and move through it. I’m paraphrasing the truth of Jeanette Winterson.

Incidentally — poetically — it was not a psychotherapist or a career counselor who busted me out of the closet I was hiding in — it was my literary agent. Literary agents and editors are adept at reading between the lines, cutting efficiently through bullshit, spotting weaknesses, and laying them bare without platitudes or ego coddling.

Agent Phil was the first person who ever read all my work, interviewed me, and basically nailed me. “You write the same story, over and over again,” he said. “You do realize — you’re consciously aware of — what that Story is, right?”

God no, I did not. I thought my stories were wildly varied…

“It’s okay. Nearly all writers write A Story over and over again, and it’s usually — inevitably — their Stories. I’m asking because you can do more with it once you’re aware of it.”

So, what is my story?

“You consistently retell the story of Joan of Arc, or possibly the Anunciation of the Virgin Mary, dressed up in a modern context. People who hear voices they know to be benevolent and divine in origin, but who are inevitably socially ostracized and persecuted. I’m wondering how that is your Story…”

So I told him. The whole story. My real story. He was the first person to whom I ever really confessed where my ideas came from. (I sure as hell would never have risked telling a psychiatrist.) “Well, I’ve got to tell you,” he said “Your own story is at least as interesting as your fiction, if not more so. And I believe what’s holding back the power of your fiction is your non-fiction. It also concerns me that your stories always have tragic endings… I think it might be really important for you to write — to live — a different autobiography here, my friend…”

I was busted — and this man admittedly had no interest in “all that New Age” stuff, other than that there was a market for people like me and he was looking to create exposure for me, and an income as a producing writer, through article writing, columns, syndication, etc.

In my experience, you will most likely find the messages of your spirit guides confirmed — even eerily repeated — in the voices of real, living, breathing, human beings. The most successful psychic reading will tell you exactly what you already know, what you’ve already heard.

My spirit guides and angels had been repeatedly telling me “You are already everything you’ve ever wanted to become. There’s nothing to fix. You fulfill your life purpose with every breath you take.”

They also told me “Nothing else you attempt will ever have the success or power or impact you desire until you speak with your authentic voice. Your life purpose is not about you — it’s about how your life serves other people.”

Phil made a bet with me — a dare really — to build an audience for my true story. He even set a very tangible goal, an actual number… Although I would never have foreseen it when I began publishing Shift Your Spirits in 2006, I reached that goal in 2008. Here we are. I believe I’ve completed the tangent I was meant to explore, to retrieve the part of myself I was trying to shake off along the way.

The Dreaded P-word
My colleague and friend Andrea Hess and I have had so many conversations about what we jokingly call “the p-word” — how the word psychic made us cringe a little bit. She has also experienced a recent shift as a result of stepping into this simple, spiritual authenticity. It seems we have both taken the word psychic and proudly wear it now like a badge, with powerful results.

I still tried on costumes that seemed more credible, taking baby steps that would eventually bring me here: I switched from pursuing a masters in clinical psychotherapy to a more spiritual masters in holistic counseling. I am guilty of thinking “Maybe if I’m a minister, I will be safe.” (What is UP with this? Is it some past-life trauma of having been burned at the stake or something?) Then once I began receiving requests to do readings for people and discovered that I could indeed do them, I still went through a closet full of safe labels — I called myself a “professional intuitive consultant.” Well, so what the hell is that, exactly, in the most authentic, simple terms? Translated, it means “I’m a professional psychic.” There I said it. I have claimed it.

Facebook
I resisted getting a Facebook account for the longest time — partly because I avoid unproductive, time-eroding online activities, but also because I cringed at the thought of all the people I have known, some of my oldest and dearest friends, discovering that I had never had the balls to tell them my truth.

I have discovered the same thing at every stage of my coming out process — that those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind. Even better, there are thousands of you who have waited to talk about your own truth, and that my doing so as well allows an important conversation to take place that we ALL want to have — I am only really holding up a mirror.

The very people who I feared might judge me — who might not like me anymore if they knew — are now writing to me about their own spirituality. These stories are twenty years old and they usually start with “I’ve never told anyone this before…”

What’s really bittersweet is that we could have shared these stories decades ago and it would have been okay. It might even have been amazing.

So, I’m on track — I’m still a writer of fiction and an aspiring novelist whose day job happens to be performing psychic readings. Yes, I’m a minister, a counselor, a life coach… None of those labels are really important. As soon as I had acquired them at my ego’s insistence, I discovered they aren’t necessarily all that important. I’ve got to tell you, being a psychic is the best job I’ve ever had. It beats the hell out of waiting tables.

Downloading Heaven

Slade Roberson — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 16:13:01 +0000

As we walked up toward Bell Rock vortex in Sedona, I asked my shamanic guide what to expect. “Am I supposed to feel something in particular?”

According to Native American legend and popular lore — my memory of the details is a bit spotty, please feel free to research — each individual vortex in the area corresponds to either masculine or feminine energies. I believe most people report a fast or rapid vibration — energy speed — at Bell Rock, which must mean that I am spiritually hyperactive, because I experienced a Ritalin Effect.

Bell Rock shut me up and slowed me down — I experienced an incredible hush within that energy. I became very quiet.

The Airport Mesa vortex, which, if I remember correctly, is “supposed” to be more calming made me feel antsy and uncomfortable.

This doesn’t really surprise me — I often experience the opposite of common side effects with medicines… If it makes most people drowsy, I won’t sleep. If it jacks you up, it probably sedates me…

My conclusion, of course (indeed, it’s probably the most common thesis statement you’ll find here running through this variety of topics) is that What You Feel when you experience spiritual energy is incredibly personal — as unique as your fingerprint whorls and the mosaic flecks in the irises of your eyes.

Since this past August 2008, I’ve been receiving increasing amounts of email questions, article suggestions, and consultation requests regarding (primarily) clairaudient and/or auditory phenomena:

high-pitched ringing in the ears
faint modem-like noises
ghost music or ambient loops
split hearing (when one seems to drop out or become momentarily muffled)
soft tapping, popping, or other subtle percussive effects

Do I personally have these types of quasi-physical experiences? The short answer is Yes, to all of the above, at one time or another.

Do I believe they are related to psychic ability or spiritual communication of some kind? Yes, ruling out all other potential physiological causes, I’m pretty comfortable at this point associating these episodes with intuitive theories.

Disclaimer
I am quickly developing in the area of medical intuition, but I am certainly not a medical professional, so please understand that I am speaking from an assumption that you have ruled out physical causes. One of the most effective ways that spirit guides and guardian angels will assist you with medical issues is by leading you to professionals — other people — with the proper training, experience, wisdom, and technology to treat you. Don’t trade a good doctor for the advice of a psychic or vice versa — a combination, a synergy, of all available sources is always the highest potential path to effective healing.

That disclaimer stated, I’ve had my physical hearing tested several times in the past, convinced that I must have some medically diagnosable hearing loss. Those tests have shown that my left ear is slightly weaker than my right, but barely discernible, nothing noteworthy, nothing to write a post about… Yet I can not dismiss my personal experience — my clairaudient intuitive impulses seem to come in on the left side of my head and I can not talk on the phone — can’t hear anything — without holding the handset or receiver up to my right.

I have been putting this post off for months (years, really). It seems that every time I experience one of these phenomena, I’m left with a sense of What is going on — that I’m receiving what I call a Download from Heaven, or a soul level software update — but not necessarily with a clear sense of Meaning, Significance, or What New Features may be included in the latest version.

For years, I listened carefully to the pillow tappings, alert for some pattern to reveal itself to me, as if it might be a kind of angelic Morse code. Many of my clients request explanations or interpretations of similar experiences during readings — “What is the message? What are they trying to tell me?”

The catch-all answer to these questions is that you are probably receiving a Download from Heaven — your spiritual software is being updated — but it’s not necessary for you to process a specific message from those individual episodes while they are happening.

Continue Working…
Remember the days of dial-up internet and AOL, when you could actually listen to the video game scream of the modem? Those electronic noises simply meant “Your computer is talking to the web.”

Similarly, when your computer receives an automatic software update, you’re prompted with a request to install or a notification that you may continue working while the updates are being downloaded and installed. At most, you may see a progress bar, a graphic depiction of the process taking place… but you don’t have to Do anything. Even if you could watch the download coming in and attempt to read it, you’d see only code scrolling by too fast for your brain to process, in a language that your computer can process and understand perfectly, but your understanding it is not necessary for you to receive and install the goodies. At most, you may be required to reboot for the update to take effect.

This is basically the explanation I receive whenever I ask my spirit guides about this phenomenon — whether for myself or for you.

The really cool thing about having a relationship with all of you is that I have so much incoming data to work with — when I receive multiple emails from readers and clients asking the same question in a given time frame — especially when it corresponds to something similar happening to me — then I know Something’s Going On.

At the end of the Summer, 2008, SO many of us received a spiritual update. It was so Big that it took me months to process on my end… Not to mention, that Download from Heaven seemed to be accompanied by medical problems and challenges down here in Third Dimensional Meat Space. So many of us became physically ill at that time, and even more of us have reported that September 2008 was… um, Challenging, i.e., A Month from Hell, in one way or another. (Which is partly my excuse for not even addressing it — it was nearly impossible for me to report from the eye of the storm… I was just hanging on with both hands to a metaphorical palm tree blown horizontal and trying to ride it out.) There was also a noteworthy Download around/ up to November 19, 2008, the purpose of which was to urge you to Go Bigger.

So, last night, I’m asking Heaven what to publish today at the beginning of this new year — I had a few possibilities in mind — and, what do you know, I lost hearing in my left ear (my spirit ear) for a good fifteen minutes. This was accompanied by a muscle twitch in my left leg.

I am not alone in my theory that we tend to receive intuitive impulses on one side of the body more than the other, with the other side being the stronger in the physical sense. This is certainly true for my eyes as well, with the vision in my right eye consistently testing stronger. Some of you know that I had a minor stroke about six years ago that rendered me partially paralyzed on my left side. Although I have recovered about 90% of the nerve function, I still have this annoying twitch in the left side of my face — which hurts my vanity more than anything…

That extreme experience was accompanied by a surge in the Voices that I hear. Somebody turned up the volume to a degree that I could no longer deny or repress it. I don’t know Why, I don’t know How you may experience Downloads from Heaven, I don’t know that all of you who receive them are necessarily aware of them when they occur, but if it makes you feel better to know, we are not alone in this. We each get a little piece of the truth — our personal connection to Source; this is my little puzzle-piece contribution.

Note the signs and the patterns that are unique to you. Some of these may be similar to what others report; some may not.

My guides and guardians assure me that Whatever it is that’s being Upgraded, Shifted, Adjusted — the New Features — will reveal themselves when the time is right, and that may not be at the exact moment we note the New Code coming in.

I asked early this morning if they could give me a Calendar of Heavenly Downloads for 2009 — something global that we might all use to anticipate and track what’s happening. I’m going to post this for whatever it’s worth, as a kind of experiment. It might be interesting to see if any of these dates prove to be relevant throughout this upcoming year. Please note that corresponding physical experiences will most likely occur in the week or so preceding these dates.

January 11th
February 15th
March 17th
April 4th
June 11th

If I receive any additional information that corresponds with these dates, I will post it. Please feel free to alert me to anything going on with you so that I can record any patterns among us.

Stuck on Outcomes

Slade Roberson — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 15:05:46 +0000

One of those 2008 Requisite Year’s End | New Year’s Personal Development Posts with Resolution Exercise Alternative

I don’t know what happened to me.

(Well, actually, I know exactly what happened to me, and I’m going to tell you about it, but first let me take you back approximately forty-eight hours and walk you through my amnesia.)

I had a fantastic Christmas experience; I was feeling all Super Abundant and Thankful; and I know (at least, intellectually) what “the Secret” is… You’d have to be downright dense to present yourself as some kind of New Age guru riding on a Unicorn (which, you’ve probably figured out, is my Nutshell Agenda) and still manage to fall off the Law of Attraction Wagon as hard and fast as I did.

Oh, but I did.

Ego Radio
The Naggot (which is the personification of my ego) got a hold of the microphone some time in the wee hours of the day after Christmas and I woke up already listening to some Shoulda Coulda Woulda Telethon, broadcast live on the Ungrateful Channel, right from my own Special Place in Hell.

Maybe I’ve kept my poor Naggot crated too long these last few months — I went on tour to various Heaven on Earth destinations — Hawaii right before Election Day, and then on to Phoenix and the healing vortices of Sedona — all resulting in CNN deprivation. Wolf Blitzer hosts The Situation Room, Anderson Cooper has AC360, and the Naggot is my own private Lou Dobbs on a short leash. Maybe he’s just uber-pissed that I chose not to participate in “The Recession”…

Whatever the neurotic details, my ego, successfully muted for months at a time, will find the remote control and take over once in awhile. Part of the nature of a serious Ego Hijacking is that it finds new, original, insidious ways to circumvent your psychic security, your guardian angel intelligence, your big purple bubble, and your pink taffy lightworker filters. As with any terrorist event, you wake up when the sabotage bombs actually detonate…

You become the schmuck walking around asking WTF?

I absolutely adore the energy of a New Year. I like ALL New Year’s days — Beltane, Birthdays, Back-to-School, Neo-Pagan/ All Saint’s Day, Chinese… Solstices, Equinoxes, and New Moons. You name it — if it marks a Beginning, I’m there, with all the craft supplies for a Vision Board in my arms, and the U2 classic playing on a loop.

I’m not into your Mama’s New Year — I don’t drink a drop and I don’t do resolutions, either. I also can’t stand to read articles by people like me who tell you how to set goals. “Pick one thing and persevere!” Screw that — that singular-minded Goal Setting Getting Things Done Playbook has never done a damned thing for me. I wasted three decades of my life believing I was a failure for not “following through,” until I discovered that I am a Scanner — which I have had the pleasure of identifying for tons of my clients.

If you’re wondering why your One Perfect Goal turns into an annual exercise in Divine Abortion, I highly recommend you look into the life-changing Refuse to Choose: A Program for Doing Everything That You Love.

I am a proud Plate Spinner. I am a Chaos Surfer. I don’t succeed at One Thing At A Time. I’ve accepted Juggling as an Art form bordering on Religion.

I know this. The Naggot knows it too, and for the most part, he pouts in the corner in a specially-crafted sound-proof booth, mud-wrestling with pundits and raging at the machine… If I could outright murder the little bastard, I would, but he’s kind of like the software that comes pre-loaded on my End User Human Body. He’s the Gollum to my Fellowship. He’s part of the Mission – can you hog-tie your ego, duct tape his mouth, and drag his ass across Mordor, and still learn how to love (yourself) in a life time?

Fast forward to my meltdown
I guess I accidentally opened one too many classic New Year’s Resolution posts — I’m sure it wasn’t yours; I strayed too far outside my regular reads… I allowed some well-meaning personal development blogger to get my Naggot all riled up. (Like half-hearing an irritating pop song you did not choose to listen to that nevertheless gets stuck in your craw.) I’m not pissed at the blogosphere or this awesome Time of Year; it was my own damned fault.

My friend Jeff Peck called me and got an earful of Negative Nancy’s Greatest Hits at full volume:

I didn’t do enough.
I wasn’t good enough.
I have to do more, better, faster, bigger.

My ego took me time-traveling all over Where I Should’ve Been Six Months Ago and Where I Need to Be Six Months from Now.

The Absolute Sin of Ingratitude and Non-Presence

Living for the future
Mad at the past
Missing right now
for loving it last…
me

Poor Jeff, bless him for walking with me where I needed to go… He asked me what my spirit guides had to say about what I was experiencing. “That’s just it!” I wailed. “You can’t hear clear for shit when your ego’s running the radio station…”

So, he pulled a card for me. Now, Jeffrey Peck has The largest collection of oracle cards I’ve ever seen assembled under one roof. That includes metaphysical bookstores. Actually, I used to be a buyer for a metaphysical bookstore, and Jeff’s cards put most catalogs to shame. When Jeff pulls a card for you, even the choice of the specific deck itself is an exercise in divining, on many levels.

Fruition
Manifestation, realization, attainment. Maturation, ripeness, fulfillment. “I reap what I have sown through sincere effort.” The splendid harvest. Who amongst us honestly expects to reap any reward without first offering up some degree of spiritual, emotional, and physical effort. The degree of energy we are willing to invest in any project has a direct bearing on the quality of the outcome. This card acknowledges your efforts thus far, and suggests that abundance is yours for the having. We can get a little stuck on outcomes, though, to the point where we lose sight of the journey itself. Although this card speaks of abundance and fruitfulness in return for our efforts, it reminds us to enjoy the process. Once we have reached one pinnacle, we see from our new vantage point that there are further pinnacles to conquer. This could be frustrating, were we not to acknowledge the blessings inherent in each and every day. Enjoy the journey. Acknowledge the gift of each moment. To view all of life as a gift leads to true fulfillment.

Linnie Lambrechtsen
www.ahaoracle.com

After twelves hours of torturing myself, I got it. I found the mute button. I immediately dove into a tried-and-true method of course correction. Reframing is the simplest, easiest, most obvious thing in the world (except when your ego’s spinning the tracks…). Saturday December 27 2008 is a New Moon, so this weekend is a perfect time for this exercise.

The Exercise

Step 1 — Start 2 lists, on separate sheets of paper. If you’re working on a computer, create two documents.
Step 2 — Let your ego write the first list, recording all his complaints and failures.
Step 3 — Create a second list of everything you DID accomplish, everything for which you ARE grateful, everything you DID do right. Wherever it applies, take items from the first list and record the lesson you learned from the challenge.
Step 4 — Burn the first list (or delete it) with much ritual fanfare.

Now you have repossessed your secret of joy and may proceed into the future.

Instead of writing this post, I had planned to simply publish my 2008 Gratitude List, but it’s actually LONGER than this rant and… I gotta say, some of it is too personal/ private. I think what I’ll do is choose 12 of the items I feel comfortable sharing — one for each month of the year — and post them below in a comment.

I’d love it if you would participate with me — if you have a blog, feel free to create your own post with a 2008 Gratitude List and link back here so we can find it; or, you are welcome to use the comments section below if you have a list you’d like to share.

Slade Goes to Mars

Slade Roberson — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 16:24:49 +0000

You know the oft-played sitcom schtick of someone forcing you to come over and watch his vacation slideshow?

Yeah, well, you might have preferred that I pulled that with my trip to Hawaii, but I have way more cool pictures of Arizona. Actually, I’m still processing both these enormous experiences… If you want to keep up with my personal life and you just can’t get enough of my twinkly deep brown eyes and my bearded, lop-sided smirk then, by all means, add me as your friend on Facebook and check out all the pictures I’m posting — I will totally confirm you; I’m cool like that.

If you are a subscriber to Shift Your Spirits, I assure you that I consider you a friend, on many levels.

This was my first trip to the American Southwest | the Desert. Like Hawaii, it was my absolute favorite form of traveling — Work / Pleasure. I’m lousy at just being a tourist. I work seven days a week because I choose to, for the sheer joy of it; I prefer to have a project to focus my reason for being somewhere.

Big Sky
Whenever I fly west of the Mississippi I am struck by the overwhelming presence of the Human Grid. In Tennessee — really, along the Eastern Seaboard | Appalachia — the Grid must conform to the mountains and rivers; starting in the midwest and heading out into the vast Big Sky parts of the United States, the evidence of the Grid is mind-blowing. Talk about ley lines and power lines and human energy pathways — I can hardly wrap my brain around roads that stretch from one horizon to the other without so much as a slight curve. Even from the vantage point of air travel, it all looks a bit like Sim City meets Google Mother Earth.

I get SO excited when I fly, you’d think I’d never been in an airplane before, but my dad was in the Air Force and I even logged semi-legitimate flight training hours before I was in elementary school; and my mother’s brothers build those little VW bugs with wings. My first conscious memories of air travel are from around age 7 or 8, and I am still that little boy every time I get on a plane. Window seats are mission critical (and these days I don’t have to share with my brother), and although I bring books and a laptop and a neck pillow, until/unless we are so high that there is no view of the ground or at the very least some wicked cloud formations, my nose is pressed against that super-thick fishbowl glass with a gaping mouth and a constant silent “Wowwwwww” playing in my head.

I also have serious clairvoyant experiences at high altitudes — I see angel lights in the sky for days. Does this happen to anyone else? Don’t tell me it’s just air pressure or something — until you can prove that I’m not seeing angel lights, I prefer to apply my magical world view. It’s probably an added bonus to be on a plane with me because my prayers are devoid of common fears but jam-packed with invocations. All my flights are courtesy of Throne Air, escorted by the Mother Goddess’ private air force. Spiritual travel tips — you can call in any number of saints, angels, and ascended masters as travel agents: Ganesha keeps all the complexity of factors like luggage and arrival/departure times syncing smoothly; Jeff Peck assures me that Kali, whose heavy hand can be a bit scary in many circumstances, nevertheless obliterates all obstacles from your path.

I was probably in my twenties before the realization dawned on me that I might not grow up to be an astronaut after all. I spent another decade being depressed that trips to outer space might be unlikely for me, until I began to download guidance concerning the coming Technological Singularity and Radical Life Extension. Now I feel the potential is still there for many of us alive today to actually — literally — end up on Mars at some point. (No, I’m really not kidding. I romanticize the notion of being a colonist.)

Arizona looks like Mars, terraformed
I’m not likely to write about it much here, and only a few of you know that one of my favorite subjects of study (one of my hobbies, I guess) is areology — I have a lifelong obsession with the space program and the planet Mars, particularly with the imminent need for the human race to survive and evolve beyond this planet. Mars is, of course, one of our likely future homes. Some even believe that we came from there in the first place.

One of my favorite explorations of the subject are the Mars books by Kim Stanley Robinson. If science fiction jacks you up, put his books on your Read It Before You Die list.

So, my first thought as the plane dropped down toward Phoenix was “Holy Shit! Arizona looks exactly like future terraformed Mars.”

I need mountains to feel comfortable anywhere I go — Arizona’s mountains are like a handsome, rugged young man with a few days’ worth of stubble; Appalachia is his much older half-brother from a previous marriage with a full-on Green Man beard growth.

I loved Phoenix, but the place was incidental to my friends there — my ATP® brother and soul mate Jeffrey Peck who hosted me; and of course most of you know my intuitive colleague Andrea Hess. I can’t tell you how many times Andrea and I have burned up the cell phone minutes, wishing out loud that we just lived down the street from each other and could meet for coffee. Talk about manifesting — it happened! It was so awesome to hear her familiar voice with the added physical presence and visual feed of her lovely face sitting across the table from me. I must tell you, Andrea is super-striking in person. As we embraced for the first time I said to her “OMG, you’re so PRETTY!”

Jeff was kind enough to arrange two meet ups with Andrea (since I had no idea where I was or how to get anywhere) and sit patiently listening to us chattering away. As if I even needed the caffeine! Andrea and I talked about how many of you we wished could have been at that table with us; but of course we would’ve needed a convention center. Workshops with Slade and Andrea in the future? I believe it’s likely — wanna come? Stay tuned…

Okay, let’s break this up — I have tons to share from this trip — including my photoshoot in Sedona among the energy vortices and my ghost hunting trip to Jerome. All pictures by Jeffrey Peck.

“Thank you for calling Heaven…”
I’m officially back at the readings desk this week, and I love doing the live, private phone consultations so much that I’m extending my special rates through the month of December.

A Single Issue 30 Minute Reading (regularly $150) is $99.
I’ve also adjusted the Multiple Issue 60 Minute Reading down to $150 (regularly $250).

I KNOW — can you stand it? I’d be honored if you gave yourself a Holiday Gift of a Year Ahead Session with yours truly.

Intuition’s Wake

Slade Roberson — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 15:50:12 +0000

If you’ve already taken the first class on Divine Dialoguing, Talking to Your Spirit Guides, right now, for a limited time, you can download the second class on Automatic Writing for $20 USD.

Automatic Intuitive Response is the basic set of tools and techniques I use to identify, exercise, develop, and express clairaudient information. The magic, for me, is not about mystically deep meditation so much as it’s about tricking the enemies of Intuition — Time and the Intellectual Mind — into supporting your psychic abilities instead of overriding them.

Why Time Constraints Work
More than anything, it’s a timing factor that trains your brain to jump in and capture that brief, lightning-fast, automatic, immediate moment of intuitive clarity. Once you capture that moment, jump on the right train, take the first step down the right path, you can bring in your Thinking Mind to elaborate and explore further.

You’re near a lake when the water’s calm, and suddenly you hear a splash — a fish has briefly jumped or surfaced — you may even catch a flash of motion out of the corner of your eye, and your head immediately jerks around to center on the spot… You see the ripples of the disturbance spreading out. The wake of that moment continues to move across the surface, very slowly compared to the initial splash. You can watch the ripples spreading for quite sometime; but you may have missed the source action of the initial disturbance — because it happened so quickly. You didn’t catch it. You didn’t see what kind of fish may have jumped. Maybe the splash was made by someone throwing a rock, or by an object falling from the sky.

Your intuitive impulse is the split-second event that occurred in the still surface of the water. Your thinking process is the contemplation of the ripples that continue to spread from that point, very slowly by comparison. You only have a moment to witness the automatic knee-jerk response to the intuitive impulse; but you have plenty of time to mull it over and think about it, wonder what it could have been, wonder what it means…

If you are unsure about the explicit source or nature of that event, your intellectual analysis works against you — unraveling that brief moment of intuitive clarity, spinning in circles of Maybe Logic and ego-driven Could-be’s, or embellishing inaccurate potentialities. When you freeze-frame that same initial impulse, the Thinking Mind, the Intellect, and the frames of reference and experience stored by the Mind can be brought in as servants of Intuition and psychic ability.

Your Higher Self, your connection to Source, or your spirit guides are much more likely to deliver brief, powerfully short, simple, no-nonsense information. The brevity and lack of embellishment are the clues by which I identify communication from Spirit.

Your Thinking Mind, your Ego, your Fear, your Anxiety use a blow-hard Voice — a Voice that drones on and on, filibustering 24-7, without a break, with near-infinite capacity for repetition and tricksy, slight alteration of detail. That Voice depends on a lot of Magnification as well — just as the ripples or the wake on the water may grow and slow at the same time, becoming less sharply defined, even as they become relatively larger and move across a greater distance.

Counter-acting and re-ordering this series of spiritual and mental processes is not as esoteric as you may think. My goal is to share with you just how simple and practical all this woo-woo can be.

Wordless Prayers

Slade Roberson — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 16:48:44 +0000

Unarticulated means uttered without the use of normal words or syllables.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished that the invocations and spoken prayers that come out of my mouth could have been captured all these years. If only the windshields of my cars were conscious witnesses; if only the rocks on the mountain paths I walk could record my voice; if only only my pillows had hard drives and the transcription programs from our near future…

I would be effortlessly prolific; I might even have been a Poet.

But the magic of divine dialoguing is impermanent. The minute I introduce the technology or the awareness of capture or preservation, the unselfconscious zone of free styling or free versing, channeling, speaking in flow doesn’t happen. It doesn’t have to. The power of the present is an energy — actually, an energetic thought charged with emotion.

Even if you don’t identify with being a writer, you have experienced this magic in conversation. If you’re a musician, even better, you know the synergy of jazz and jam. If you are clairaudient, it’s likely not the words that you read or the sounds you hear that speak to you, but the emotional core between, behind, within the translation.

Seth called me the other morning to tell me about the transformation that has occurred in his relationship with Spirit as a result of reintroducing the conversational element; he said he has been missing that dialog. Curiously, I’d just written the three paragraphs above, and our chat found us crossing paths, passing with a wave and a hello in opposite directions.

I’ve become increasingly aware that the more open I become, the more deeply reverent I try to be, the words evaporate. Now, I’m not talking about asking my spirit guides questions to retrieve specific information, or relaying the conversations I hear occurring between my clients’ Higher Selves and their guardians, or writing with the intention of being read — divine dialoging and automatic writing techniques are meant to package our communication with spirit in language. I feel it must be a rare moment for any of us that we do not think in words. Thoughts are things; words are the handles, the magic incantations that call our manifestation genies out of the lightworker lamps of our hearts and minds.

Hawaiian Mini Memoir #1
During one of the many readings I received from the other Angel Therapy Practitioners® who attended Doreen Virtue’s workshop in Kona, I was told that one of my spirit guides — the one who assists my ability to manifest — presents as an enormous purple-blue genie.

(Kim was that your reading? Let me know so I can credit you properly.)

I love that image! Is a big genie not the most wickedly, deliciously perfect way to personify your power to manifest?

The De-evolution of My Morning Prayer
For many years, I’ve engaged in elaborate invocations of the Mother Goddess — my own original chants and songs and wordy beseeching hellos. But many months ago it began to change, and I’ve only recently become consciously aware of how and possibly why.

An elderly male cat whom I call my Buddy divorced the family two doors down and moved up the street to spend his retirement years with me. His human mother had a baby, and then they got a dog, and Buddy’s home territory was reduced to a garage prison. He wasn’t having it. You have to respect a cat’s love and relationship because it must be earned and maintained. My garage combines a cushy warm cast-off armchair with the independent freedom of a pet door.

Cats (as well as dogs) are highly sensitive to psychic energies. I have observed that my feline familiars are particularly drawn to sex and prayer. Very early in our friendship, Buddy began to approach me during my morning invocations and demand to be included. I would pet him and speak my invocations to the Mother out loud as opposed to silently, as if he required the vocalization to participate. I prefer purring to church choirs and pipe organs. If I could purr, I would have no need for any other form of prayer or healing meditation.

My morning ritual evolved — it became simplified — to the joy of my hand chakras harmonizing with Buddy’s purr, as we face the dawn. All those decorous words distilled into a brief shared statement — gratitude to the Mother for giving us another day.

Now, it is just the emotion and the thought behind that gratitude, with the squinty-eyed cat smile that accompanies our shared vibration.

Walking Meditation
All the years I called it pacing, and disparaged my movements as some expression of mania. Someone recently asked me if I might consider doing readings via video chat. An excellent idea, if it weren’t for the fact that I tend to run around outside like a squirrel while I channel information for you. Even my live teleclasses are coming to you via mobile phone as I walk up and down and all around the creek at the back of my yard.

Again, a fellow Angel Therapist® did a reading for me recently in which she referred to my walking meditations. Oh, wow — is that what I’m doing? Don’t you love it when someone objectively reframes your areas of negative self-perception in such a way that you can shift to empowered intention without changing anything but your perspective?

Stones, Henges, and Sigils
I’ve instinctively arranged stone circles in the woods since I was child. My drip sand castles were not Disney medieval but cathedrals in the style of Anton Gaudi (although I didn’t realize it until art history classes when I got to college).

To this day, nothing feels like a more appropriate physical skeleton for my thought forms and prayers than an impromptu sculpture of natural materials. You too have sat in the grass in summer making daisy chain crowns or plucking petals to divine Heaven’s plans for your pubescent romances. You too wrote messages in bottles and tried to send them out into the sea — frustrated with the reality that the tide doesn’t take them as easily as you imagined, but still. Maybe you buried treasures in suburban time capsules, so that you might be remembered by future civilizations. Or maybe you carved your presence into desktops in ballpoint pen? Left your chewing gum on an amusement park tree, like some colorful hasty equivalent to a wailing wall? Have you tied messages for recently deceased loved ones to helium balloons and released them into the sky?

Maybe you’ve just arranged leaves on the ground in an absent-minded moment of introspection.

Hawaiian Mini Memoir #2
There are miles and miles of black lava fields across Kona; as if Pele herself has poured an enormous asphalt parking lot beside the highway. Hundreds upon hundreds of people have left what at first appears to be spray-paint graffiti, but is actually white rock or coral arranged into words and designs upon the near infinite dark background of lava. Everything from memorials to names to pictures scroll by as you drive.

There were many times after particularly profound rituals that I found myself meta-pacing, out to the black cliffs of the resort overlooking the Pacific. I had a favorite spot that I returned to, every night and every morning. And though I witnessed others out there on those cliffs dancing with their iPods, bellowing affirmations at the waves that answer with a crash and jet of spray, bending in the slow motion of Tai chi, or silhouetted against the sea in lotus positions or yoga poses —

watching others, my own presence seemed noticeably un-theatrical or not-so-grand by comparison. In my deepest moments of needing to express gratitude, I could barely stand in that spot and choke out a Thank You before the emotion welled up behind it and obliterated all intentions of dressing a tsunami of feeling power up in words and orchid garland leis.

And, I realized, in one of those moments, that the words just aren’t even necessary.

Before I left, I snapped a picture with my phone, of what Slade’s impermanent testament actually looks like in physical form. It’s not an illuminated manuscript, or even an inspired blog post.

My most powerful memorial to gratitude for that week of healing and learning is the evidence of my absent-minded hands at work on the ground as I let the wordless emotions simply come through me — my single character monogram in white coral on black lava.

I’m extending my 30 Minute Phone Consultation at the special rate. I’m booking readings well into December, but if you purchase the time during this month, I will still honor that price until further notice.

Calling All Angels

Slade Roberson — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:02:04 +0000

I’m baaaaack! Thank you for all the prayers as I traveled. Hawaii was a-MAZing — I can’t even form a sentence around it without gushing like a joyful fool.

Special Reading Rate
To complete my Angel Therapist® internship, I’m offering special pricing on my 30 Minute Phone Consultations. For a limited time, you can schedule a Spirit Guide Reading | Angel Energy Healing session for $99.

Look for the 30 Minute Phone Consultation option marked in red.

If you’ve considered booking a reading with me for some time, or if you’d like to experience the new healing modality, tools, and techniques I’m now offering my clients, November 2008 is the perfect time. Work with me, your Angels, Spirit Guides, and Ascended Masters to identify and clear away the spiritual energy blocks that are restricting your peace and abundance and keeping you from living your life with purpose.

I’m busting at the seams — can not WAIT — to start applying all that I learned at the Angel Therapy® Practitioner Workshop.

For the past few years, I’ve been providing information-based readings, spiritual life coaching, and advisement — but it’s mostly been just information. I’m so grateful that I can now offer an additional level of energetic healing and clearing as a part of my practice.

Still Spinning in the Ether
I have so much to process, to share, to teach, and to write about in the coming months — be patient with me as I work to make lucid sense of all this new energy and these new insights. How many epiphanies can you stand to have in a week, you know? I’m still integrating it all, with hundreds of new posts swirling around right now. If I tried to write an article this week, I fear it would be a rattling book without an end. I’m working on some essays as part of the course requirements; I have every intention of incorporating much of what I’ve learned into my posts here at Shift Your Spirits…

In the meantime, I’d love to work with even more of you one-on-one. I want to connect with as many of you as I can in the coming weeks. Please click the 30 Minute Phone Consultation option to book your reading at the special rate.

Angel Therapy Practitioners®

Slade Roberson — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 16:21:35 +0000

I leave Monday morning at dawn for the Angel Therapy® Practitioner conference in Kona, Hawaii!

To say I’m excited would be an understatement. Certainly too stoked to organize my thoughts much this week, but I wanted to give you a head’s up about my absence.

When I attend Gatherings, Spiritual Retreats, and Healing Workshops I like to leave my computer behind and go off the grid as much as possible.

My response to emails and comments will be limited from 11/03/2008 through 11/11/2008 (perfect return date, huh?). I’m booking readings to resume 11/12/2008 — stay tuned, I will have some additional reading options and special pricing when I return.

Before my trip
I’m releasing as many expectations as I can, but I do know that studying with Doreen Virtue represents a move toward more confidence in working as a medical intuitive. The Universe sends me more and more people with medical requests; it represents a context of intuitive work of which I am still fearful. Medical intuition carries an enormous amount of responsibility, but it’s also a kind of ultimate goal — representing one of the “highest” ways I feel I can serve other people. So far, my specialty seems to be identifying prescription interactions and dosing issues.

I’ve been working to upload medical vocabulary into my frame of reference. The information comes in a predominantly clairvoyant format — I can see a lot of things I don’t have the language to articulate.

Fear | Excitement
For me, October was a month filled with exercises in patience and anxiety control. I will replace this temporary announcement post with a more thoughtful article in the near future, but I wanted to leave you with one observation to contemplate. Switching from extremes of anxiety/fear to the excitement/anticipation of this once-in-a-lifetime trip, I can’t help but note how similar the vibrations are. Almost as if excitement is a half-note away from fear. It’s like standing in the same spot energetically, but facing one of either opposite directions.

A lot of the energies I’ve been working with lately seem to highlight the fact that power, in and of itself, is neither good or bad. I can channel or raise power from Source, independent of where I project or direct it. My body’s physical response is almost identical in either state of fear or excitement. I just discussed this over coffee with one of my practicing Buddhist friends; she mentioned that Fear/Hope sit right beside each other.

Hmm… Something to think about.

Send me prayers of protection as I travel, along with any concerns I can carry for you — I’m off to pack!

Image by POSITiv via Creative Commons on Flickr

Big Idea Channel

Slade Roberson — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 14:35:49 +0000

Have you ever had a great idea for a story or novel… you jot down a few notes, you put it on one of your backburners — your To Do List, your One Day | Some Day List, your Once Something Else is Done or Completed or Perfect List — and then, some months later, around the time you originally imagined Some Day to be, you discover it faced-out on a New Releases shelf in hardcover glory, bearing another author’s name?

Or you’re flipping channels on TV and there it is — Your Story — in a “Coming Soon” trailer, or maybe even the scenes playing out before your eyes…

You’d swear to God someone has read your mind; someone has telepathically “stolen” your idea. It’s not exactly the same, but it’s SO close, so similar — enough that your own “original” idea would now — Some day, One day, if and when you get around to it — look like an obvious derivative.

Maybe you’ve had one of those inspired moments of conversation where you speak out loud to your witness (your friend, your partner, whoever’s with you at the time it comes through):

“Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…”
“You know what Someone should make?…”
“Somebody needs to invent…”
“… Wouldn’t that be awesome?”

It seems absolutely surreal how soon after naming it that you run across your invention, already patented and for sale.

Maybe you are the one who’s telepathic, picking up on someone else’s Big Idea, like it’s being broadcast across some common airwaves.

Those of you who have researched potential business names and web domains know the frustration of just how many people have already beat you to that perfect name or concept. With some, you’re not surprised — they seem inevitably destined to exist; if not already, then soon. But with others you can hardly believe it.

“What are the chances?!” You wonder out loud.

It’s one thing for a dot-com to be registered; it’s even more disappointing when you travel to that page and find a fully developed site, business, or collection of content. Beyond new, beyond born — already breathing, alive and kicking, walking and talking, all grown up, fully mature.

Six months before I started Shift Your Spirits, I showed a few pieces to an editor friend over lunch. This was before I’d decided to do a blog; I wasn’t even sure at that time that it wasn’t a book outline… He said “It feels like some kind of column; what would you call it?”

My guides whispered, without hesitation “Shift Your Spirits.” It probably sounded like I’d given it some thought. I had not. I heard it. I brought it through, automatically, instantly, hearing it tumble out of my own mouth in the next breath.

Three people have contacted me to say that they felt compelled to Google the phrase “Shift Your Spirits” for no apparent reason; that’s how they discovered my site.

On the one hand, this can be such a disheartening experience. It pains me to even think about the projects I’ve “lost” to some other, faster, more productive creative channel. The Muses must be fickle — even promiscuous — shopping their seeds and sparks around the ether… (In publishing, this scattershot manifestation technique is called simultaneous submissions and it’s usually unacceptable when we want to do it.) You might begin to wonder just how special and creative you really are… were you chosen or polled? Do the Muses say it to all their prospective partners — “You’re the only one”?

After all, it’s Man who invented arranged marriage, reproductive science, and selective fertilization — Nature just likes to spray.

Has this always been the case, but the speed and spread of our communication technology only now makes it so apparent? For hundreds (thousands?) of years there were only a few Books and a handful of authors to physically bring them through. Now our Story doesn’t require oral history, it has millions of mobile mouths and feeds.

But then there is a Bright Side — there are other, more positive, potentially wondrous aspects to consider:

The awareness that you DO receive great ideas. Good enough that someone else has been willing to invest creative blood, sweat, and tears, too. If nothing else, you should feel affirmed by that.
The awareness that there is a Collective Psychic Wisdom, and you ARE connected to it. You DO have access.
The awareness that there is a Creative Source, and that you ARE one of its potential vessels.

I feel that Ideas choose to incarnate, much as any form of Spirit. I feel that an Idea Whose Time has Come, will come. I may be called to be the channel through which it makes its way into the world; or you may be. Or that Ideas Whose Time Has Come may be beating down all the potential doorways at any given moment, and many of us may rise in the night to answer and let them in.

I feel Creativity ascends, and Consciousness evolves, beyond competition toward increasingly complex collaboration.

Who knows what combination of factors makes us, as individuals, the perfect vessels — maybe our intellectual frames of reference, our training, our preparation, our practice; maybe where we live, or when we occupy that space. Serendipity, synchronicity… Being in the Right Place, at the Right Time, you may be called.

Do you answer? And having answered, do you commit to nurture your inspiration? Do you commit to bring creation through? Or do you only half-rise to the brilliant idea that wakes you at the Monk’s Hour? Do you falter soon after your initial enthusiasm?

I do believe that an Idea Whose Time Has Come will find a way into the world. These ideas are not Mine or Yours; they are Ours. I don’t feel nearly so responsible for Making Anything as I feel responsible as a parent for the Thing That Will Be Made. (I can only imagine how those of you who have human children must feel in this regard… Interestingly, the facets of your chart that indicate your likelihood to reproduce human beings also govern your creativity in general; there is really no distinction.)

Make Me a Vessel
The one prayer I say before every reading I perform, or every message I voice, or every story that I tell is “Make me a vessel.”

In place of your aspirations “I want to…” reframe your intentions with this simple request of Spirit — “Make me a vessel.” The power and grace that can accompany this commitment replaces the most industrious To Do List. The wonder of it is quite humbling, really, even as it makes magic of your life.

Image by Curious Expeditions via Creative Commons on Flickr

Automatic Writing Lessons
Course #2 in the series of classes on Channeling, Divine Dialoguing & Communicating with Spirit is now available for instant download.

Relatively Quiet, Significantly Present

Slade Roberson — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 14:42:04 +0000

I can’t help but notice how the most significant moments in my interior life are so relatively quiet. Not silent. Commonly neither clamorous or especially still. The more powerful my sense of the Present, the more it seems to be strung indifferently between peaks of comparable noteworthiness — like a hammock perfectly and equidistantly suspended from moments strong enough or tall enough to sustain its weight. The state of power and grace is found between events and eventfulness.

Presence hangs — creaking, groaning — when we cocoon ourselves within its net. It rocks with the motion of our coming or going, but the oldest deep-rooted trees, or the poles driven into concrete-reinforced holes, barely shudder to show when we are within it.

Whether or not we are aware that we are in the Present, the Present can’t be said to care.

Swaybacked split-rail fence of linear time, across the flattest desert, touching both ends of the biggest sky…

Moments of existential challenge
There is a moment, well after the arguments and negotiations, long before you feel necessarily single again, when you sign the divorce papers.

There is a moment, well after the results of the blood test, long before the side effects, when the chemotherapy first drips, when you swallow the first pill.

There is a moment, well after the shock of the news and the pageantry of the funeral, still long before it seems real that someone you love will not walk through the door, when it feels like it hasn’t happened, even as you know that it has.

or moments of conscious joy
There is also a moment after you’ve discovered that you’re pregnant, but you haven’t yet begun to show. There is that moment when you know you are in love, but you are in between the last time you saw her, or the next time you will see him seeing you again… There is that moment when you hold a book in your hands that bears your name along its spine, when you accept the award, when you deposit that enormous sum of money.

There is that moment when you wake in a new city, in a new room, with your new life still trapped in the transition of boxes… You are aware of all the life around for which this place is entirely ordinary — how can that be so? But it is.

These are not the moments when you first react, when you call someone to witness your reality, or when you even cry alone. These are not the moments of heated arguments or the later conversations and reflection. These are not the moments furiously released in your diary.

These are not even the moments when you pray. These are not the scenes of intense drama or rare delight…

The Present may disappoint you in its ordinariness. Perhaps you find yourself looking in the mirror for some evidence of profound change… but it’s just you there, pretty much like always, no matter what different details course through your veins.

Shouldn’t there be a soundtrack? A sound effect? On a day this tragic, shouldn’t the Universe magically supply you with rain? On a day this memorably wonderful shouldn’t virtual strangers on the street break into musical theater dance routines, to broadcast and backup your private glee? Can it really be that the refrigerator hums like it always does, that there is always a bird making a racket somewhere if you listen, and kids playing or people fighting in accordance with their own scripts, regardless of what you know to be true?

Wouldn’t it be appropriate now to find the color has leaked from the world, or that God has washed over everything with a new filter of sparkles, of lens flares, of slow-motion blur…

If this were a film of your life, this would be your close-up. This would be your cue to cry and collapse gracefully to the floor. This would be the scene when the ghost in the machine “randomly” selects your favorite track and you crank it up to dance around like a fool in your underwear, and if anyone saw you they would have to smile…

Don’t misunderstand me, there is tremendous grace and power here, of another kind — because this is a Now when you get to realize that the Universe is not watching you. You are the one paying attention. Attaching emotion, directing drama, dragging decoration into the scenes to reflect the meaning that might otherwise go unwritten.

It may indeed be one of the most important moments of your life, one you will always refer back to… You may glorify, embellish it, weave it into your Story in the Later Telling of it. But in the moment that you live it, that it happens to you, it can be so relatively quiet. Not silent. Indifferent. Preternaturally Calm. Detached.

There are no triple-digit numbers on the clock face, no other magical signs that the external world accompanies you. It seems that if there were any moment when your spirit guides and guardian angels would speak to you clearly, this should be it… but they are only here, present, attending you and keeping your private company in the manner of dozing beloved pets. There are moments when no course of action must be decided, but when directions are simply followed through — when you step into and through the inevitable; when you go one moment more, and by doing so, prove to yourself that you can.

There is tremendous power and grace here, in a moment that needs nothing else to be significant — hold it, bookmark it, so that you may return to it. The truth that you are looking out at an infinite marching succession of Now, as if through a mask, a space suit, a window.

There is a part of you that only observes. There is a part of you that retreats into detached safety and works from curious, non-reactive awareness. This is when you know the eternal part of you that is not your body, is separate from your Story, is untouched by emotional reactions, is unchanged by events.

It’s not particularly dramatic. It may not be especially magical.

It is infinitely powerful.

Image by Omar Eduardo via Creative Commons on Flickr

Theotókos, The Mystical Rose — Video

Slade Roberson — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 13:25:24 +0000

I was approached by filmmaker Liane Legey, of Humanity Healing Network, for permission to feature text from my morning invocation of Mother Mary in a video meditation mantra called Theotókos, The Mystical Rose.

I am honored by the final product and very pleased to share it with you. On a personal level, this film is divinely timed. For anyone enduring great changes and in need of the sheltering grace of the Mother, I hope this answers your prayers, too.

You may watch the film embedded below, or at YouTube.

The Humanity Healing Network is producing a series of meditation mantras and videos in conjunction with Isabella Rajotte and Webs of Sound Production, Canada.

Original article by Slade Roberson can be found at:
Morning, Mother Mary

Other posts on Shift Your Spirits related to the Divine Mother:
Why I Blog — Big Mission for An Ugly Little Word
Channeling the Mother Goddess

I’d love to hear what you think of the video.

Paper Money Airplane

Slade Roberson — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 18:31:28 +0000

Last week, while sitting outside in the finally-Fall breeze and sunshine, reading over entries in my Abundance Transformation diary Hornets & Honey Bees, a gigantic paper airplane fell out of the sky and landed neatly at my feet.

Of course, it startled me, and my immediate reaction was to look up and about to see where it had come from — I expected to see some laughing kids on a balcony nearby. I anticipated other café patrons at the adjacent patio tables looking over at me with bemused expressions on their faces — but no one else seemed to have noticed that a 14-inch long facsimile of a $100 bank note had just been shot down over the Stone Cup.

I squinted into the sky, wondering if I might see a squadron of bills in formation, flying south for the winter from New York or Washington, D.C. If this story was intended to be fiction, in the genre of magical realism, I’d claim that a plastic CEO action figure in painted-on pinstripes soon followed, floating down on a coffee-filter parachute spray-painted gold. (For the record, I would not have felt compelled to rescue his ass.)

My life isn’t quite that whimsical (though I suspect Wall Street might be). But as you know, I do walk around in a manifested existence somewhat (sometimes) like a virtual reality game.

Birds deliver messages to me, as do trees.
I find feathers on the floorboard of my car far too often to be accidents.
The prayers of my friend Seth, a collector of cobalt bottles, arrive in various forms of blue glass trinkets dropped along my path.
Ghosts leave pennies near doorways in the houses and apartments I move into.
Strangers regularly email me answers to the questions I’ve asked while talking to my spirit guides.

Hornets & Honey Bees : How I Married New Money is really more a wedding scrapbook that an active ledger. I haven’t touched the diary since soon after the Honeymoon, but I’ve had intentions of sharing an update about the success of my Money Makeover — and I started receiving reading requests last week from a few people responding to the fear-peddling “news” of Market Meltdown.

I decided to sit in contemplation of Collective Abundance, looking for any useful insights within my personal experience that I might share. I find it fascinating that financial markets are an absolute manifestation of ephemeral, abstract, collective thoughts — fears, beliefs, emotions. Many of the same people who are terrified that they will “lose” their financial power, and are ruled by fears about money, probably don’t even believe in the Law of Attraction.

They doubt that their vibes can literally transform their lives for the better, yet they never question for a moment that just their “thoughts” of a crash can create that reality. If you’re going to believe in the shadow side of this power, why wouldn’t you choose to have faith in the light? You can’t have yin without yang – what kind of pessimistic madness is that?

I kept returning to something I heard Dr. Wayne Dyer say about how he simply doesn’t participate in that Collective Channel of Fear. I realized that Morgana’s Financial Alechemy is about shifting that awareness at the personal level, so that you have your own customized authentic relationship to replace the shabby hand-me-down that was invented and used by other people before it was foisted on you.

The most effective way I’ve found to change that channel when it seems the world has stolen the remote from me is to engage in some small action within the mindset — from the interior space — that represents the Abundantly Blessed Me and my new Honey.

Who are you when you become the person you wish to be? What thoughts does The Powerful You think? What interior dialogues do you engage in? How does the conversation change? What kinds of decisions do you make and how do you make them differently? How does That Greater You ACT?

You can’t catch $100 bills that fall out of the sky while clutching two fistfuls of pennies, afraid to let them go.

How to Shift Your Spirits Regarding Money

Here are some of the “little” ways I practice Big-Time Abundance that you may certainly copy, borrow, or adapt to raise your vibration:

Leave a donation for a blogger you really like. I can assure you that any amount, even a small one, will have an enormous emotional impact on the recipient.

Make a donation to a charity. I know a place where you can spend $10, right now, that will make you feel like a freaking bazillionaire on an energetic level.

NothingButNets.net
I am absolutely in love with this movement — the elegant simplicity of this concept, inspired by a child’s response to a news story that a human being dies every 30 seconds from malaria — a tragedy that is entirely preventable by a cheap mosquito bed net. “We should send them nets.”

For every consultation or reading that my clients purchase, I will send a net. I’ve been doing this for the last month and it is literally one of the best highs I think I’ve ever experienced. I am addicted to sending $10 nets!

Buy a small treat for someone. I like to buy a coffee for the person in line behind me at the café once in awhile. You’d be surprised how powerful the gesture can be!

Hire someone who’s self-employed, has a new business, and is passionate about the services they offer. You both benefit. Even helping to promote someone you believe in, through social media/networking sites like StumbleUpon, or making recommendations to friends and colleagues is an incredible way to share abundance.

Invest in your own financial self-care by taking a class or participating in a group that supports shared goals. My friend, self-employment coach Tom Volkar of DelightfulWork.com is leading a Five Day Business Discovery Group. Click here to view more details

If you are self-employed or have your own business, give away a copy of one of your products. I adore having downloads for sale on line because it is so easy to gift a piece of what I have to offer, in a matter of seconds, when I feel called to do so!

Move pennies from the ground to collection cups. I used to pass by pennies on the ground thinking “I don’t need a penny” until a psychic told me that, just like a $100 bill, the pennies are a symbolic gift of abundance from your guides and that to refuse to pick them up because they are too “small” is snubbing the Universe. If you find a penny, then the penny is for you to find, not to be left for someone else. If someone else needs it more than you, then do your part to pay it forward by physically placing it where it may better serve the world than a crack in the sidewalk.

Show the Universe how you behave as a steward of abundance by the way in which you handle small change. How you handle one penny, or one dollar, is an indication of how you may handle greater sums. I think there may also be a connection here with throwing pennies into wishing wells…

Use your attention, your effort, your time as a form of currency. If you are struggling with finances and feel you can’t possibly afford to spend a penny, your attention is a form of currency. Organize your financial paperwork, balance your check book, or throw away old receipts you don’t need to hang onto. Even simple housekeeping that clears your environment of clutter creates energetic space for newer, bigger, and better things.

Go “shopping” for free facts. Anxiety comes from a lack of actionable intelligence. Do a little online research regarding finances and empower yourself with financial information. Or gather inspiration for a new creative project.

Share the wealth of your wisdom
Do you have any simple acts of abundance you’d like to contribute here?

Back to the paper money airplane — my digital camera is kaput, so I had to snap a picture with my phone. I had to show it to you and share this story, because I really haven’t arrived at a meaningful conclusion. This post represents some of thoughts I had just prior to the plane’s arrival. I’d love to know how you interpret this sign I received.

What do you think my paper money airplane means?