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

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

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

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

I hope you enjoy it!

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

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Contacting Your Spirit Guides 101

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corporeal Angels

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

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

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

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

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

Some Qualities that Might “Give Away” the Incarnated Angel

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

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

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

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

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

Circumstances Where Angels Tend to Intervene

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

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

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

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

“So, what do I do with that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I never saw him again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free Downloads for Subscribers:
Contacting Your Spirit Guides 101

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

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

Become a Professional Intuitive
Training, Certification, and Mentoring Program.
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Shift your relationship with Money in one month
Release negative beliefs that are blocking your true connection to abundance -- The Money Shift

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesse’s House

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you just move in?” I asked.

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

The whole house smelled like saffron incense.

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

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

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

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

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

Angels?

Really?!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Indeed they are,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I have?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stranger Angels — Part 4 concludes this serial here.

© 2004-2010, Slade Roberson. Communicating with Spirit
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My time in Paris was… difficult. I felt stressed, distracted, uneasy, but also mute and invisible. I’m someone who talks a lot, but because my roommate Allison was fluent in French, she did all my talking for me. Her friend Natalie was a French national, and though I’m sure they didn’t purposefully exclude me, they chattered away with me along as a silent third wheel, just listening, catching only about fifty percent of what they said.

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

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

And when we spoke, we bickered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amsterdam

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

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

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

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

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

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

Impossible. Are you kidding me?

I fled the museum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I AM powerful, I answered back.

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

You are fine, it promised.

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

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

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

Dread Lock

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

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

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

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

Two things flip my fire switch:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is just a Prologue.

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

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

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

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

image credit lambertwm via Creative Commons on Flickr

© 2004-2010, Slade Roberson. Communicating with Spirit
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Helpers who magically step in, deftly orchestrated by fate, then just as quickly and mysteriously disappear?

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

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

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

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

Paranormal Memoir

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was then that I realized I was being watched.

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

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

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

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

Preternaturally Normal

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

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

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

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

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

That was it — he looked like a living mannequin.

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

John was… supernaturally ordinary.

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

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

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

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

“Be invisible,” he ominously advised.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was John.

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

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

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

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

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

…to be continued…

image credit mdezemery via Creative Commons on Flickr

© 2004-2010, Slade Roberson. Communicating with Spirit
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If you are even here, reading my posts, interested in pursuing your life purpose and following your spiritual path, you are by default experiencing great wealth of opportunity. When your basic, third-dimensional needs for survival (shelter, food, money) are not being met it’s nearly impossible to graduate toward the concerns of the soul.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2004-2010, Slade Roberson. Communicating with Spirit
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God knows, after a month of recovering from surgery, Holiday downtime, and a post-Baby Jesus/Baby New Year sinus infection…

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

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

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

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

Super digression…
Where was I?

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

Wait for Inspiration?

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

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

Are you waiting for Inspiration to create your Momentum?

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

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

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

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

A body in motion tends to stay in motion.

Shift Your Vibration First

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

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

Start Out in First Gear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Become a Professional Intuitive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These action steps are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Use that initial achievement to propel you forward.

You do it once?

You’ve done it.

Do it again.

Image credit jared via Creative Commons on Flickr

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

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

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

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

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

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

Readings

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

Professional Training Applicants

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

Check out Automatic Intuition Professional page for details.

Renovation and Repair

I’m really excited about this medical procedure!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How can you tell the difference between fear and butterflies?

When you start to doubt and wonder:

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

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

Ask yourself this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Contacting Your Spirit Guides 101

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Spirit Guide Readings:
Who are your spirit guides and what messages do they have for you?
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Shift your relationship with Money in one month
Release negative beliefs that are blocking your true connection to abundance -- The Money Shift

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

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

Ready

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aim

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

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

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

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

Fire and Release

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

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

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

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

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

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

Automatic Intuition

The Professional Intuitive Training, Certification, and Mentoring program has officially been released! I have one (1) remaining course available at the $200 discount — is it yours?

http://automaticintuition.com/

Subscribe to the new blog — I’m preparing lots of articles dedicated to intuitive development and communicating with Spirit which will begin to trickle in this week.

Image credit Mark Rutter via Creative Commons on Flickr

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

Free Downloads for Subscribers:
Contacting Your Spirit Guides 101

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

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

Become a Professional Intuitive
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Automatic Intuition

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

I’m relaunching the Automatic Intuition site with:

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

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

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

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

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

Free Downloads for Subscribers:
Contacting Your Spirit Guides 101

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

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

Become a Professional Intuitive
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Automatic Intuition

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

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!

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

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Contacting Your Spirit Guides 101

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Spirit Guide Readings:
Who are your spirit guides and what messages do they have for you?
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Automatic Intuition

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

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

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

Free Downloads for Subscribers:
Contacting Your Spirit Guides 101

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

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

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

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

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!

© 2004-2010, Slade Roberson. Communicating with Spirit
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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

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

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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

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

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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?

© 2004-2010, Slade Roberson. Communicating with Spirit
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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

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

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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

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

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Contacting Your Spirit Guides 101

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Who are your spirit guides and what messages do they have for you?
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Shift your relationship with Money in one month
Release negative beliefs that are blocking your true connection to abundance -- The Money Shift

“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

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

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

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.

© 2004-2010, Slade Roberson. Communicating with Spirit
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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

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

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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.

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

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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

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

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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.

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

Free Downloads for Subscribers:
Contacting Your Spirit Guides 101

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

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

Become a Professional Intuitive
Training, Certification, and Mentoring Program.
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Shift your relationship with Money in one month
Release negative beliefs that are blocking your true connection to abundance -- The Money Shift

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

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

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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

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

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“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?

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

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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…

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

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• 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…

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

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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…?”

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

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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

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

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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.

© 2004-2010, Slade Roberson. Communicating with Spirit
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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.

© 2004-2010, Slade Roberson. Communicating with Spirit
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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.

© 2004-2010, Slade Roberson. Communicating with Spirit
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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.

© 2004-2010, Slade Roberson. Communicating with Spirit
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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:

• Defining the Best Case Scenario and expecting miracles
• Confronting worry and recognizing where anxiety comes from
• Accepting Change (the less-than-pretty forms of Change)
• Staying focused on the Next Obvious Step
• Hearing what you’re hoping to hear

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…

© 2004-2010, Slade Roberson. Communicating with Spirit
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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.

© 2004-2010, Slade Roberson. Communicating with Spirit
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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

© 2004-2010, Slade Roberson. Communicating with Spirit
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Release negative beliefs that are blocking your true connection to abundance -- The Money Shift

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

© 2004-2010, Slade Roberson. Communicating with Spirit
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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

© 2004-2010, Slade Roberson. Communicating with Spirit
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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

© 2004-2010, Slade Roberson. Communicating with Spirit
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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

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

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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?

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

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Release negative beliefs that are blocking your true connection to abundance -- The Money Shift

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

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

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Contacting Your Spirit Guides 101

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Spirit Guide Readings:
Who are your spirit guides and what messages do they have for you?
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Automatic Intuition

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

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

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

Free Downloads for Subscribers:
Contacting Your Spirit Guides 101

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

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

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

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

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!

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

Free Downloads for Subscribers:
Contacting Your Spirit Guides 101

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

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

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

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

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 inte