Coming out of the spiritual closet

I hear a Voice. That’s about it, really.

I didn't always; the first time I heard that Voice was when my best friend Johnny opened his Buddhist altar to show me what was inside. As those altar doors swung wide, visible waves of sparkly, effervescent joy tumbled out to greet me, followed by a crystal clear Voice that spoke out loud inside my head.

And the Voice said:

LONG TIME NO SEE

Okaaay. I was a dark and snarky 27 year-old club kid at the time, but that Voice was hard to ignore, so I let it lead me on a breathtaking journey of spiritual discovery that continues to this day.

But unexpected as it was at the time, the arrival of that Voice was not my first brush with Crazy. As a child I was tormented nightly by light-filled ghosts. And I never could predict when time might stutter or stop without warning, or when spatial blips might cause buildings or whole city blocks to appear or disappear at will. I never really doubted my own sanity; the likelier explanation was just that the universe hated me.

Although my brain sometimes seemed to work differently from the brains of others, I just thought it meant I was weird. Or spacey. Or maybe low blood sugar-y.

I never possessed the understanding or the vocabulary until very recently to call these things what they were: Visions. Trances. Out of body experiences. And nobody was more surprised than me to realize, decades after the fact, that those light-filled ghosts weren’t ghosts at all. And they most definitely did not hate me.

I was always deeply ashamed and afraid of my weirdness. My differentness. But now at this advanced stage of life I say: Screw it. This is what I am. This is what I do. I get messages from Spirit, and I pass them on. So this is me, giving notice that I’m officially out of the spiritual closet.

My book (besides being the story of how all this came to be) is filled with messages from Spirit, and you’re welcome to ‘em. And I’ll keep passing those messages along as I receive them, for anyone who’s interested.

To paraphrase Deepak: I’ll just be singing in the shower. Y’all are welcome to listen at the door if you choose.

Just don’t peek in the keyhole. That would be creepy.

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I’m sorry, and you are…? (Who’s doing the Talking?)

It’s taken me 20-plus years to figure out what that Voice really is.

The first time I heard the Voice was when my friend Johnny showed me his Buddhist Gohonzon. Naturally, I assumed it was Johnny’s Gohonzon talking.

And then after I became a Buddhist and set up an altar of my own, I assumed it was my Gohonzon talking. (A Gohonzon is a scroll of paper. But really, is it any weirder to hear a piece of paper speak than it would be to hear a statue, or other inanimate object?)

The Voice didn’t say much at first, and it didn’t speak often. Every once in a blue moon, it would deliver a short declarative statement:

HE JUST WANTS TO BE LOVED.

Or, several years later,

THAT’S NOT WHO YOU ARE.

It was such a rare and random occurrence that I never took the time to wonder who (or what) might really be doing the talking.

After what is now known as the Dinnertable Awakening of 2005, I began to study other forms of spirituality for the first time. As I did so, my communication abilities (both hearing and speaking) strengthened bit by bit. As we eased gradually into actual 2-way conversation, I started to think of this Voice as my Guide. But it wasn’t until I took up the study of A Course in Miracles in 2006 that the Voice seemed to reveal its true identity for the first time.

I should probably back up for a moment and say this: It’s not my job to endorse any particular path, or advise anybody about anything. When I agreed to write the book, it was with the understanding that I only have to tell the story of my own journey of faith in my own irreligious words, and to pass along the messages that I get while I’m at it.

Thankfully, it’s none of my business what anybody does with that information. So although I speak about various spiritual disciplines, and particularly A Course in Miracles, I do so only because that’s the practice that resonates most powerfully for me personally. If you’re into any of these disciplines, great. If you’re not, equally great. We’re good, you and me, either way.

Now, back to the true identity of my Voice. I’ll just quote you a passage from my book that says it all. Let me set it up for you:

My husband and I had just spent the morning hiking in the Sequoias, and throughout the hike Spirit had been pushing me persistently (but lovingly) to leave my own interpretation of the world behind and allow the gentle truth of Heaven to fill my awareness instead. That’s not nearly as easy or pleasant a job as it may sound, and by the end of the morning I was a little bit annoyed about the whole thing…

Back at the lodge I made a long-awaited beeline for the ladies room. As I headed into the stall, Spirit spoke once more:

EVERY MOMENT OF EVERY DAY, THE TRUTH AWAITS YOUR MEMORY. WHY NOT MAKE IT TODAY?

“You’re asking me to give up everything I know, but why should I listen to You? You’re just an imaginary Voice in my head.” Kidding. Sort of.

OH, MY LOVE, THINK AGAIN. I’M THE ONLY TRUTH YOU’VE EVER KNOWN.

“What does that mean? What are you exactly?” It had never before occurred to me to ask.

I AM THE MEMORY OF GOD IN YOU

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I’m pretty sure we all have spiritual abilities we’re not tapping into; I’m also pretty sure we can all develop those skills if we work at it. The unused 90% of our brains, and all that.

But then there are those few individuals who are born with those talents, and they seemingly don’t have to work at it at all. Those are the ones we call psychic or clairvoyant or whatever.

I’m not one of those. (Or at least it doesn’t feel like it from the inside. On the other hand, I’ve been described as ‘an open window between worlds,’ so what do I know.)

I guess what I’m saying is, when it came to communication skills, I definitely had to work at it. I’m still working at it.

In 2005 I was studying Barbara Brennan’s book, Hands of Light, and found in it a workbook exercise designed to strengthen communication with one’s Guide:

Ask a question in your mind, write the question down and then be still to meditate. Write down all images, words, feelings, smells, sounds, whatever, as they come to you. Don’t judge any of it, just write it all down.

So I did. I’m a visual person, so at first I got only pictures. Then I started getting pop tunes of the 60’s-90’s to go with the images. (I left that part out of the book – some of those music stories were amazing, but it’s a book, not a 10-part miniseries. Not everything can make the cut.)

The pop tunes were forever sending me to the computer to google the lyrics, because I often only knew the title or chorus. Every time I read the full lyrics in light of my question asked, it was a revelation – who knew Nights in White Satin could be so deep?

Or that Landslide would play a role in causing me to leave behind my 20-year practice of Buddhism forever? (And I never even liked Fleetwood Mac, really.)

The musical interlude was short lived; I think its function was probably just to get me more accustomed to listening. Within a month or two, the music faded and the Voice began to speak more frequently in those meditations.

Up until then, it hadn’t occurred to me that the Voice and the Guide and the pictures and the music could all perhaps be coming from the same place. Or could even be the same thing.

We were still a year or so away from long, free-flowing conversations. Those began in July of 2006, on the same day that the Voice (which by then I called Spirit) delivered this little shocker:

WHEN YOU’RE READY, YOU’LL WRITE BOOKS.

My immediate reaction was more or less unprintable; sort of a peacefully surrendered WTF, if you will. But I was highly motivated to learn how to communicate back, after that. And motivation is really all it takes.

For you, me or anybody

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Recently someone on Twitter asked me this: “I sometimes feel that Spirit is speaking to me, but I’m never really sure if it’s Spirit or just my ego mind playing tricks. How can I tell the difference?”

That’s such a good question. Rather than answer it myself, I’ll just quote Spirit, in this passage from the book in which I asked the very same thing:

As wonderful as this new and improved communication channel seemed to be, I wasn’t entirely sure I could trust it.

“These conversations are great,” I said to Spirit, “and it’s always a pleasure to hear from you, but I have to ask: How can I be sure it’s really you talking and not my ego mind? We both know the ego is a master impersonator, and it’s capable of slipping in to hijack any discussion without me realizing it.”

IT’S VERY EASY TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE, MY DEAR. JUST LISTEN CAREFULLY TO EVERYTHING THAT’S SAID.

IF WHAT YOU HEAR IS LOVING, GENTLE AND DESIGNED TO LEAD YOU TOWARD ULTIMATE FREEDOM, YOU’LL KNOW IT’S ME TALKING.

IF YOU HEAR THE SLIGHTEST JUDGMENT, OR A SINGLE WORD THAT LACKS PURE UNCONDITIONAL LOVE YOU’LL KNOW IT HASN’T COME FROM ME, FOR I’M INCAPABLE OF ANYTHING LESS THAN TOTAL LOVE FOR YOU.

BE VIGILANT IN EACH OF OUR CONVERSATIONS, AND SOON YOU’LL BE ABLE TO TRUST WHOLEHEARTEDLY IN YOUR ABILITY TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE.

Following that advice, I taught myself to pay close attention to the meaning behind every word, and soon found it easy to tell each time a bogus thought or idea was planted within our conversations.

And as I learned to trust in my own ability to recognize the words of Spirit, I also began to relax and trust more deeply in the lessons being offered.

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A great big chunk of my story takes place in Sedona. The place has changed a lot in recent years; when we first visited, it was sort of a nondescript little town surrounded by staggering scenery. Now it’s much more developed and resort-y, but still surrounded, thankfully, by that same jaw-dropping beauty.

I’m deeply connected to the rusty rock energy of that place. Of all the spots in the world, that’s where I find it easiest to absorb messages from Spirit.

It’s ironic, this deep connection. Before all this happened, I was never what you’d call ‘into nature’, being more the slick fashion and trendy restaurants type. If anybody had told me I’d one day be developing a great fondness for hiking boots, or venturing hundreds of miles into remote wilderness on purpose…well I don’t know what I would’ve thought.

I guess in the grand scheme of things, this newfound outdoorsy-ness is probably the least unusual development of the past few years. But it was astonishing news to me that nature could facilitate profound spiritual experience.

Oh, sure – stillness, beauty, all that John Muir stuff. I got it, intellectually. God’s glorious handiwork in the American West, and all that. I just never managed to feel any real connection between spirituality and nature.

It took that crazy-powerful Sedona vortex energy to shock me out of my city girl complacency. Wide open conduits just waiting for a hookup. Who wouldn’t want to get right up in there and explore?

It’s kind of funny, because these days I practice A Course in Miracles. One of its core tenets is that everything is one. Which means, among other things, that all places are one. No individual place is more sacred or spiritual or special than any other. All are exactly the same.

Spirit sends me beautiful, loving messages of oneness all the time, but I continue to experience those messages, visions and deep synchronicities most powerfully in Sedona. So I get messages about the non-special nature of Sedona, while absorbing those lessons most deeply due to the special nature of Sedona!

I used to feel a little bit bad about that. But now I realize that nobody is able to put the Course’s very challenging teaching of ultimate truth into practice right away. Or at least, nobody I know.

And Spirit is endlessly creative at using whatever tools are available at the time. In this illusory 3-D world, I get a huge communication boost from being in Sedona. And Spirit is happy to make good use of that particular illusion, as it has made good use of so many others.

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It’s true that Sedona’s vortex energy exerts a big influence on me, making it much easier to absorb messages from Spirit.

But in the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that I really don’t do it alone. I’m blessed to have others who act as very powerful spiritual conduits for me.

One Sedona resident in particular does this for me in the most profound way imaginable. Fran and I first met when she came and found me at my house – which is nowhere near Sedona, by the way. As we sat chatting in my dining room, she facilitated an event that is now known as the Dinnertable Awakening of 2005. It marked the end of life as I had known it, and the beginning of another.

This is the description of Fran from my book. The conversation begins immediately after the awakening:

“What is it you do, exactly?” I inquired faintly, wishing I could go lay down.

She hesitated. “It’s hard to explain. All I can tell you is: I know I’ve done this many times before; I always go first; and I’m very good at what I do.”

I nodded. I had no idea what she was talking about. Then, as if this would clarify things, she made an infinity symbol with her hand, beginning the loop at herself, sending it out towards me and then back to herself.

“I do this.”

“Uh huh,” I said.

Fran confessed then that she’d been delaying the launch of her company for months—years, even—afraid to set up her website for precisely this reason. She felt it was completely beyond her ability to describe or explain the spiritual experience to anyone. To put that which transcends words into words.*

“Oh! Piece of cake,” I said, “I’ll help you write your website. That’s what I do.”

She looked at me as if I had just offered to lasso the moon.

And so began a most unusual collaboration. Our relationship is not quite client /vendor, not exactly teacher/disciple; nor are we precisely friends or sisters, although it holds elements of each of those. Fran’s description comes closest: Bookends. Opposites in nearly every way, yet two indispensable halves of one mystical whole.

(*Now after a few years of seeing her in action, I can better describe for you what Fran “does” when she takes people on her InnerVision journeys)

Like most deeply gifted spiritual intuitives, she’s sensitive in a variety of ways; information and experiences are seemingly always coming at her from all directions. She might surprise you with a message from your dead uncle Phil, for instance. She’s also a synchronicity magnet, routinely drawing profound spiritual connections into her life, which then manifest as divine coincidence in the physical world.

These are useful talents to be sure, but there is another way in which Fran is of invaluable service to others: She is able to receive messages from the highest Self of the person she’s with, then tap into her own aspect of that same highest Self to relay the messages back to the person in the manner most appropriate to him or her.

Here’s what that InnerVision thing feels like when she does it for me: It’s as if a vast, mighty bridge opens up to another realm, and then waits in patient non-judgment while I decide whether or not to cross. Most of the time I accept the invitation to cross that bridge, and whenever I do, it’s an absolutely awesome experience.)

Fran is brand new to the Twittersphere; I’m sure she’d love to hear from you. If you’re on Twitter and you’d like to get to know her, go introduce yourself @innervision12.

And be sure to say hi for me.

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There was a time, back in the day, when I used to be very, very angry at one half the world’s population. So angry in fact, that I probably would have willed myself gay just to be rid of the bastards, had that been an actual option.

It wasn't’t.

Years passed, Buddhist practice ensued, and eventually I got over it. Or so I thought, anyway. I mean, I’ve been married nearly 19 years now to a seriously great guy, so you can understand why I might’ve assumed that grudge was ancient history.

But then I had to write this crazy book filled with the most horrifyingly private personal things. Things that nobody, male or female, has ever known about me. Bad enough to have to tell it to women, but to men? Please. I don’t think so.

The internal discussion about it went something like this:

I’m never telling men that this book exists, because men aren’t spiritual.

Well, ok…maybe a few men are spiritual.

But they’re not going to want to read a book like this – it’s chick-lit, for Christ’s sake. A woman’s story, as told by a woman. Men aren’t interested in that.

Well…maybe a few men would be interested in that. But it’s none of their damn business. Ok so it’s none of their business.

But the book is loaded with all those messages from Spirit. What about those? Are they really only meant for women?

…………No.

Maybe.

No, I guess not.

Well it’s not like I’m STOPPING a guy from reading the book; I mean, if he happens to find it on his girlfriend’s nightstand or something…

And then in mid-April I joined Twitter. And was immediately followed by all sorts of interesting spiritual people, many of whom were men. My God, there were a lot of spiritual men out there. Well, no harm in following back, I guess…

And the Twitterverse began to work its mysterious magic right away. Within days, I started meeting wonderful, wise, caring women. That didn’t surprise me, of course, because That’s How Women Are. (And bless all of you, dear ones, for your kind friendship. I’m honored to have met you.) But here’s the astonishing thing: I also began to be pulled, over and over again, into radiant, loving, ‘spiritual conduit’ connections of the most profound sort imaginable…with men. Mind blowing, heart-expanding, eternity-inhabiting bonds. With MEN.

Ok, I get it. Lesson learned.

Twitter’s awesome role as powerful spiritual connector is the subject for some other blog post on some other day. Right now all I can say is: God bless Twitter.

And yes, dammit, God bless men.

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Oops.

That piece of news required a major rejiggering of the worldview. I don’t know about you, but I managed to skate through an Orthodox Jewish childhood and a 20-year practice of Buddhism without ever once imagining that God might really exist.

(In my own partial defense, Nichiren Buddhism doesn’t address the question of God as we know it. Sure, it has a few allegorical gods who show up in the Sutras now and then, but they’re treated more as symbolic functions of the universe than actual deities.)

As I began to learn about non-dualism – the teaching that we’re all one – for the first time in the spring of 2006, I felt the unmistakable resonance of its truth deep within me. But I was knocked flat on my butt by its central concept: God is real and the world isn’t.

Of the 2 halves of that statement, you’d think the assertion that the world isn’t real would have been the more shocking – and in some ways it was plenty shocking. But it was the God part that completely blew my mind. Not only that God is real, but that God is the only thing that’s real. Because God is the only thing. Period.

Maybe this is old news to you, but I sure as hell had never heard anything like it.

This is part of a diary entry (from my book) in which I chewed over these ideas:

April 11, 2006

Leatrice lent me a book almost two months ago, a dog-eared paperback called Realization of Oneness by Joel S. Goldsmith. I didn’t like anything about the look of it. The grimly earnest, band aid-colored cover positively shouted “Eat your alfalfa sprouts!” circa 1973.

She’d said I’d probably find it interesting, but it turned out I just couldn’t get past those visuals. (Yes, I am totally that shallow.) So I slipped it discreetly to the bottom of the homework stack, where it languished for at least six weeks. And then the guilt of keeping the book too long finally got to me. I pulled it out and began to read.

Wow. This ugly little volume turned out to be jam packed with electro-buzz recognition, even as it spoke of completely alien concepts like: God is real and the world isn’t; (Really? Seriously? God is real?) And: We are not separate people who live in separate bodies. In truth we are one Being.

And then there was this one, which seemed the total opposite of everything I’d ever been taught: It doesn’t matter what we do (or do not do) in this world, because none of it is real; only God’s perfect unconditional love is real. And nothing can exist outside of God, because God is everything. So only unconditional love exists…

Freaky, right?

Yet, as it turns out, all true.

I swear, you can’t make this stuff up.

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Do you ever get that feeling, when life is changing at a blinding pace, that what seems like a year has only, in fact, been a couple of months?

Yeah. It’s been like that.

It all started in mid-May, with a workshop Fran was putting on back in Philadelphia. Her very first one. Naturally I had to be there.

(If you read the Sedona posts, you’ve met Fran as the intrepid Southwestern rock climber. The other half of the story is her previous East Coast society existence on Philadelphia’s Main Line. If forced to sum up Fran in one sentence, I’d probably say: Half trophy babe, half mountain goat. Don’t tell her I said so.)

Anyway, this workshop was a big step for her, for a couple of reasons. First, it took place entirely inside a downtown office building, with a whole bunch of people sitting in chairs and waiting expectantly to hear something spiritually helpful. That’s quite different from what she usually does out in nature.

And, second, she was forced (well, I forced her, to be honest) to admit to a group of strangers what she really does. She’s never done that before; has always been terrified of trusting others with that potentially dangerous information.

She began the day with an overview and a lecture on quantum science and spirituality – and it was a fascinating lecture, beautifully given – but we both knew she wasn’t really connecting.

During the lunch break she kept asking for my honest assessment of how the workshop was going, so I finally told her: You need to be authentic and tell these people who you really are and what you really do.

After lunch, she resumed the lecture but right away she began to be dragged to one person’s thoughts, someone who seemed to have unspoken questions that needed to be aired.

And I was so pleased, I felt like a proud mama to see her make the decision to interrupt the lecture and tell everyone the truth of what was going on.

In that moment, it all came together. The information flowed, it caused beautiful healing experiences for several of the workshop participants, and when it was over everyone present that day knew they’d been a part of something extraordinary.

What does this story have to do with me and the past 2 months? A whole hell of a lot, as it turns out.

But it’s longer in the telling than I realized, so I guess this’ll have to be the first half of a two-parter. So…

To be continued.

(Spoiler alert: nobody dies, although there are a certain number of explosions…

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So Fran’s workshop was a complete success. Hooray.

But I knew damn well that when I told her: ‘You need to be authentic and tell these people who you really are and what you really do,’ I was actually talking to myself.

I know I’m incredibly fortunate to have the advantage of direct communication with Spirit; I’ve been told many times in no uncertain terms (both by Spirit and by Fran) exactly what my Earthly role and purpose are supposed to be.

I just didn’t want to do any of it. At least not yet. Maybe later – you know, after I’m more enlightened or something.

But on my last night in Philadelphia (aided strongly by Fran’s ‘spiritual conduit’ effect on me whenever she’s nearby) I knew it was time to finally accept that Earthly role and purpose, and just get on with it already. Time to make the quantum leap from terrified shadow-dweller to center-stage truth teller.

All it would take, really, was a shift in intention.

Maybe that, and a complete personality transplant.

But I decided to make that seemingly impossible leap of faith right then. No matter what it took. And no matter what kind of spiritual work I’d have to do to accomplish it. Sad. Happy. Painful. Scary. It really didn’t matter. (Usually I prefer my spiritual work to be of the gentle-joyous variety. To ask for lessons in whatever form necessary was a first.)

All this prayer and intention-shifting was taking place late at night in my darkened bedroom at Fran’s house. The moment I put that rock-solid intention out into the universe, I watched as a supernatural apparition started to form itself in the dark and move toward me.

Ooh. Scary.

In the past, that’s all it would’ve taken to make me back down and go diving beneath the magic covers for protection instead, my big brave vow forgotten. Because even though I was no longer terrified of the supernatural as I used to be, I didn’t exactly want it crawling into bed with me, either.

But this time, I just calmly watched as it approached, and then said: Bring it. Whatever it takes, I’m ready.

And the entity, whatever it was, hesitated for a moment and then vanished.

…You know, either I’ve gotten incredibly wordy all of a sudden, or there’s much more to this story than I thought. Maybe both. Anyway, there’s no way I can tell all of it here.

Stay tuned next time for part 3, I guess.

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So. My vow to ‘get on with it already’, (that whole Earthly role and purpose thing) newly made, I left Philadelphia and headed for home.

And within 36 hours was contacted by the first of those Guys on Twitter (see ‘The Grudge’ for more about Guys on Twitter). Perhaps ‘contacted’ is not really the word for it. He reached out through the Twitterverse, grabbed my full attention and became an unregulated, unfiltered spiritual conduit, pouring massive quantities of direct Heavenly communication my way.

It was beautiful beyond description.

Naturally he had no idea he was doing it; the supplier of that kind of spiritual linkup is usually the last to know. The whole thing went on for over 2 weeks; it was way too much of a good thing, unfortunately - something like being hit continuously with a Heavenly firehose.

I spent hours each day in anguished prayer, just to keep from drowning in it.

If I sound like I’m complaining…well I guess I sort of am. Although it was glorious in concept and sometimes wonderful in actual fact, the overall event was really, really painful.

(The Divine communication itself was perfect, pure, gentle and completely loving. How could it have been anything else? But I wasn’t able to absorb such overwhelming nonstop light, so I experienced the gap between my own human frailty and that limitless Heavenly perfection as intense emotional pain. I know. Bummer.)

After at least 10 days of letting me flail around in complete WTF confusion (and more than a little humiliation over this peculiar, one-sided ecstatic experience that I was/was not sharing with a total stranger), Twitter Guy finally admitted that this sort of thing happens with him all the time.

He is, in his own words, a ‘catalyst for other peoples’ explosive awakenings.’

The operative word here being ‘explosive.’

What was this explosive awakening like, you ask? Like somebody dropped a brick building on me.

And everything that was fragile got smashed.

After it was finally over I spent another month or so sorting through the rubble. Then one day I suddenly realized: Hey, I’m not scared anymore. I don’t mind if people find out about me. And I don’t care about hiding in shadows, either.

I think I might even be ready for that Earthly role and purpose thing.

So I changed my Twitter username from @carrietriffet to @unlikelymesngr the same day, as a first step out of that spiritual closet.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

(The moral of the story, of course, my darlings, is this: Be careful what you ask for. You’ll very likely get it.)

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Hafiz always says it best

Fran sent me this poem by Hafiz the other day; it was one I hadn’t seen before. It seems to describe perfectly the “explosive awakening” I spoke of in my last blog post, so I thought it might be a good thing to include it here. Enjoy.

Tired of Speaking Sweetly

Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
Break all our teacup talk of God.
If you had the courage and Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,
He would just drag you around the room
By your hair,
Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world
That bring you no joy.
Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
And wants to rip to shreds
All your erroneous notions of truth
That make you fight within yourself, dear one,
And with others
Causing the world to weep
On too many fine days.
God wants to manhandle us,
Lock us inside a tiny room with
Himself
And practice
His dropkick.
The Beloved sometimes wants
To do us a great favor:
Hold us upside down
And shake all the nonsense out.
But when we hear
He is in such a “playful drunken mood”
Most everyone I know
Quickly packs their bags and hightails it
Out of town.

From: ‘The Gift’ Translated by Daniel Ladinsky

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Strange sort of hiatus…

I was so good about writing blog posts for awhile, and then got completely derailed by life…

First Fran (of InnerVision12 fame) came to visit, which is always a metaphysical trip and a half. Then she went away for a week or two, but quite unexpectedly came back. And the visions and synchronicities were flying on both visits, let me tell you, but especially on that 2nd one. Oh, the stories I could tell if I had the time. Don’t even get me started on the 37-person sweat lodge.

On every day of the visit Fran & I went beach walking in the late afternoon, and the things we saw/felt/realized on that beach would be enough to fill a whole ‘nother book.

And speaking of books, that’s my other excuse for this sudden & prolonged silence: I’m knee-deep in graphic production on my book. It’s seemingly taking forever, I’m only on chapter 12 (of 32) as I painstakingly turn a funky-looking Word doc manuscript into a lovingly designed paperback. So each time I’ve had a spare hour for working & the question has been: book or blog? The book wins every time.

Not that I don’t love you. Anyway, that’s it. More another time, I promise…just don’t know quite when

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Adventures in One-derland

I was going to tell you about my visits to the church at Chimayo with its crazy little patch of miracle dirt – I’ll save that story for next time, it’s a good one. But today I have something better to talk about. (Yes, even better than miraculous dirt. I know, hard to imagine.)

I was meditating this morning, trying as usual to put the principles of A Course in Miracles into action. Meaning, in this case, that I was attempting to overlook the illusion of separation by merging my own mind in Oneness with the minds of others.

These others were chosen more or less at random; my husband, because he was wandering through the bedroom at the time, looking for clean socks; Baxter the hellcat, because he was yammering about nothing at all, having just been fed. To these I added a friend many thousands of miles away, and, last but not least, Spirit (who is always included in these Oneness exercises – being the only expert in the room, so to speak, at how it’s done).

Now, I should back up & tell you this, if you’ve never tried the Oneness thing: You won’t like it. Your mind will fidget, your body will twitch, it’ll feel like sandpaper is roughing up your last nerve.

That’s because our ego minds have quite a lot invested in our belief in separation. And it takes some serious effort to retrain the mind to start accepting the idea that we’re all One. (Oh, it might sound good as an abstract Bob Marley-esque concept – One love, One heart. Let’s get together & feel all right. But now try putting it into actual practice and see how it really feels. Not all right. Sandpaper City.)

Long Time No See tells half a dozen stories on the subject of minds joined in Oneness. 3 years ago, when Spirit first proposed that I try joining, (in a story titled, “If you let me, I’ll show you what you are”) I did everything I could to avoid becoming One with Spirit. It was only when I realized I had no choice in the matter that I finally gave in. And I wasn’t what you’d call gracious about it, believe me. See for yourself in the following excerpt from that story: …

“This is a very powerful spot,” Fran informed me. “By sitting in this round opening with one foot inside the cave and the other foot outside on the rock ledge, it’s possible to straddle two dimensions at once. Go ahead and try it,” she suggested, climbing out the hole to meditate on the ledge overlooking the canyon.

I positioned myself in the opening, yet couldn’t relax. Although seated very securely with my back supported against the curved opening and both feet planted on solid rock, every time I closed my eyes I had the uncomfortable sensation of falling sideways out the hole, jerking myself upright over and over again. I tried and failed to meditate for at least ten minutes before giving up in exasperation.

This is a complete waste of time, I thought crankily, I don’t know what we’re supposed to be doing here. I climbed out the hole and joined Fran on the ledge. This felt a little better.

Closing my eyes, there came an immediate invitation:

If you let Me, I’ll show you what you are.

I considered for a moment. Even though the offer was plenty frightening, I probably did want to see what I was.

“Yes. Ok.”

Soon we were flying along hand in hand over the canyon, me on the left and Spirit (a vague and non-specific entity) to my right.

What are we supposed to be wearing? I fretted. Shouldn’t we both have some kind of white robes or something, flapping in the breeze?And a moment later we did.

Looking to my right, I saw Spirit’s free hand dissolve into a shower of shimmering light, like a gentle, glowing birthday sparkler. The ball of light climbed up the right arm, dissolving as it went, across the body and down the left arm until only sparkling light remained. It paused where our hands met, asking wordless permission to continue. I could see where this was going and didn’t like it a bit, yet after a long hesitation I agreed.

The light dissolved my hand, arm, body, other arm, hand. I jerked away reflexively and we became two individual balls of glowing, sparkling light. My ball sped crazily around the other, repelled yet drawn like a maddened bug to a candle flame. As my ball zigzagged its agonized orbit, the other ball remained absolutely still, waiting patiently.

I knew what was being asked of me—I just didn’t want to do it. The game wore on for another excruciating minute before I finally hit my limit, unable to stand the discomfort of resistance any longer.

“Oh, all RIGHT,” I said testily, pausing at last to allow our two balls of light to merge gently, softly into one…

It ain’t easy, getting used to that ‘joining in Oneness’ thing. At first blush it feels like the complete loss of individuality, & who among us would sign up for that?

Well, those of us who want enlightenment would sign up for that. And it’s taken 3 years, but my mind is getting sort of used to the idea of Oneness now. Sort of.

Except I’ve been so wordy that I see this story will need to be continued another time. Join me then (!), won’t you?

Long Time No See buy the book from

Adventures in One-derland Part 2 – Go ask Alice

So last time we talked about the discomfort and difficulty of trying to join in Oneness. That every attempt feels like spiritual suicide at first; like complete loss of self.

Well I guess that’s because it is complete loss of self.Or, more accurately, the complete willingness to leave the self behind forever.

So why would anybody want to do that?

Oh, so many reasons. Because Oneness is our true state. Because the state of Oneness also contains infinite love, eternal peace and perfect joy. You’ve no doubt heard all these things many times before, from far wiser and more learned people than me.

But wait! There’s more. This is the part that people don’t talk about nearly as often: Attempting Oneness is better than any drug you can name. Even the smallest willingness to surrender to Spirit and join just a little with ‘other’ minds brings about a truly amazing high unlike any other. And (I don’t know this part first hand, of course, but it’s hearsay from a very trusted Source) – once that joining is fully accomplished by an awakened mind, it’s way better than sex.

This is what Spirit had to say on the subject of joining and sex (as quoted in my book): …

Sex is a kind of joining; indeed it’s the only kind of joining that you can experience within the 3-D world of form. Sexual union between bodies isn’t real, you know, yet it serves a useful purpose as a symbol to help you understand this concept of joining and Oneness. Sexual joining is nothing, yet true joining is more wonderful than you can imagine.

True joining (which can only be accomplished by the mind) is eternal love and ecstasy; contained within that ecstasy is a perfect memory of Self, a certainty of home, of freedom, of limitless innocence and complete joyous fulfillment. Words can’t describe how magnificent is the joined state of Oneness.

Sex, the illusory union of bodies, is the small and impoverished echo of joining that you allowed the ego mind to devise as a substitute for the real thing. Although you find it difficult to believe this right now, it’s impossible to describe just how worthless is the “joy” of sex. Once you truly understand what real joining is, you’ll never remember what you thought you saw in it.

So let’s recap. The bliss, the profound peace and happiness that comes from even the tiniest glimpses of Oneness, is like the best drug ever but without the hangover. This I can vouch for personally, having experienced it many times. It’s awesome. And legal. And free. Ecstasy without the Xtacy.

And, as Spirit assures us, joining in Oneness is like sex, only a million billion times better. The Infinite Neverending Joygasm.

So the question becomes: Who wouldn’t want that? I’m not saying it’s easy to get there from here. Remembering Oneness still seems damned difficult to me, and there are no guarantees any of us will awaken to Oneness in this lifetime.

But, given the rewards, you’d think a hell of a lot more people would be trying to.

Long Time No See buy the book from

God’s Love and the art of pest control

As a student of the practice of Oneness, I can tell you some pretty gorgeous-awesome-powerful things happen during my meditations on that subject. Beautiful radiant visions of perfect peace and divine Love; the feeling of being connected to everything that Is. No complaints, it’s wonderful.

But remembering to actually believe in these things during normal business hours is the real trick, isn’t it. And I’m not always so good at that. But I’m happy to say I was very good at it once recently.

Last week I had the house to myself; my husband was in Japan for his annual Buddhist pilgrimage.

For several weeks prior to his trip we’d been noticing an unusual buildup in the ant population surrounding our house. Columns and battalions, wave after wave of ant reinforcements marching in busy streams all around our property. Kurt commented on more than one occasion that the first rainfall would surely bring a huge infestation into our kitchen.

And it did exactly that, the day after he left for Japan. Ants on the countertops, ants climbing the walls, cavorting in the cupboards, exploring the trashcan, carrying off Baxter’s bowl of cat food. (well, maybe not that last one. But nearly.)

And at first I went to that place of ‘Us versus Them,’ of trying to kill them all and make sure they didn’t come back. I cleaned the cupboards and countertops, I took out the trash, I drowned as many ants as I could find. And in spite of my efforts, the infestation doubled in size over the next few hours.

Then, miraculously, I caught myself and realized what I was doing. Of my many conversations with Spirit, a significant number of them have dealt with this very subject of ‘Us versus Them.’ That there’s no such thing as ‘Them,’ and no such thing as someone or something outside oneself to be protected from.

So I looked down at the moving streams of ants and thought, “Okay, I’ll find the connection of Oneness that I share with you, and I’ll use it for communication purposes. When I know you can hear me, I’ll tell you to leave my house, and that you should save yourselves by going away peacefully. Because I really don’t want to have to kill all of you.”

(As any student of Oneness knows, that’s a compromise use of Oneness that I was planning to try. In connecting with the eternal Oneness of those ants, I was intending to overlook the 3-D reality of their ant-selves, but not overlook the 3-D reality of my kitchen. A flawed strategy, sure, but I figured it was better than wholesale ant murder, which was my Plan B.)

But as I closed my eyes to begin joining with those ants in Oneness, a remarkable thing happened. I felt them as thousands of individual sparks of divine Love; saw them as thousands of points of holy light. And a tremendous sense of gratitude unexpectedly welled up in me.

Part of me was still thinking: “Ok, you’ve connected with the ants, now tell them to get out of your kitchen.” But I found I didn’t care about my kitchen anymore. The kitchen wasn’t real – the divine Love of those ants was my only reality. So I offered them my love, my reverence and my gratitude for the remainder of that meditation. And I knew that when I opened my eyes and went to check the kitchen, the ants would be gone.

And they were.

Long Time No See buy the book from

Forgiveness, Trust and YouTube

I hired this amazing video guy and last week we shot a really cool YouTube video promo for my book. He did a great job, I think. It’s fun, it’s atmospheric, and at the end it says ‘Available wherever books are sold’ and then lists my website, www.unlikelymessenger.com.

Beautiful. The only problem is, the book isn’t available wherever books are sold. In fact, it isn’t yet available, period.

And that website address isn’t even live yet, either. Oops.

But I wasn’t worried, because I figured I’d hold the video for a bit and release it when all systems were go. (Hopefully within another week or 2 the book will be available for preorder on Amazon, and the website will be up as well.)

But the video guy uploaded it to YouTube without telling me. And I found out because I saw it splashed across my Facebook page. And my Twitter page.

Then he needed to tweak the file format for best viewability. So he kept uploading new versions of the video – and Twitter and Facebook kept breathlessly notifying everybody about each one. So people kept going up there to view it.

The first video got 66 hits within just a couple of hours. Then the 2nd video got 29. Then the 3rd and 4th got a few each.

Then he put up a 5th video. And deleted videos 1 through 4, losing me over 100 page hits and some 5 star ratings in the process, and leaving a boneyard of broken links all over Twitter and Facebook.

So it was kind of exciting but mostly horrifying to watch this slow motion WTF train wreck taking place.

But I’ll tell you what, it was a prime forgiveness opportunity.

’ve been practicing A Course in Miracles for a few years now, so usually a forgiveness situation like this is a no-brainer: Side with the person and not the circumstance. The Course says the person is in Oneness with God; eternally perfect and entirely innocent of whatever crime I think he’s committed. And the circumstance is nothing more than an imaginary fever dream.

All I know is, I feel deeply peaceful whenever I side with the holy innocence of the person. And I feel like hell whenever I don’t. So that’s why I’m usually so diligent about practicing forgiveness and overlooking the imaginary circumstances. I prefer to feel good.

Except here’s the thing: As you know, if you’ve been following this saga from the start, back in 2006 I was informed by Spirit that I was going to write books. Becoming an author was just about the furthest thing from my mind at that point, believe me.

But eventually I embraced the job offer, and have been engaged in this Blues Brothers-esque ‘Mission From God’ ever since.

So there’s a certain expectation of a little Heavenly help, here. And that YouTube debacle didn’t exactly qualify as helpful. So when I sat down to apply forgiveness to the video guy, I found I couldn’t get past the pointless mess created around the video’s release.

I had to stop right there and remind myself that I really have no friggin’ idea of what’s the best way to help my book find its audience. Or anything else, for that matter. I’m still caught up in the fever dream; how the hell do I know if 100 hits and some positive reviews make any difference at all to the effectiveness of that promo video? Or whether that video will make any difference to the success of the book?

So last night I just surrendered the whole thing to Spirit, and trusted that everything has been happening exactly as it’s meant to be. I had no other options, really.

And in the resulting ocean of peace that washed over me, I was able to connect with the divine Oneness of the video guy’s true nature and forget that whole Twitter/Facebook/YouTube mess.

And I discovered in the process that the video guy is holy, magnificent, radiant and totally perfect exactly as he is.

And I’m good with that.

POSTSCRIPT This morning Video Guy informed me he could restore all my page hits and 5 star ratings to the remaining 5th version of the video. So I’m back up to 115 views, a half dozen 5 star ratings, and no lasting damage done.

I love it when I learn important lessons and it all works out happily ever after. Don’t you?

(to view the 5th and final version of the video in question, go to the video page)

Long Time No See buy the book from

Holy Dirt and the awesome power of belief – Part one

Ten years ago, Kurt & I spent Christmas in Santa Fe. Christmas Eve is magical there with Canyon Road lit by the amber glow of farolitos, the air made pungent by bonfires of piñon pine.

Christmas day, a little less magical. Although our hotel staff did their best to make us feel welcome, let’s face it – it was Christmas, for God’s sake, and we all knew they’d rather be home with family and friends. So we got out of their hair and went for a leisurely drive, ending up in a tiny town called Chimayo.

Chimayo is world famous, at least among the faithful. There’s a strange little church there called the Santuario de Chimayo, and it’s got some Holy Dirt in it. But we knew nothing about that.

We stopped there because we were transfixed by a sign on a neighboring shop stating it was THE HOME OF THE HOLY CHILE OF CHIMAYO – VIEWINGS $1.00. I very dearly wanted to see that Holy Chile (was it in the shape of the Virgin Mary? Did its heat on the tongue cure one’s ills?) but alas, the Christmas Day thing was working against us.

So we checked out the church instead. We had the place to ourselves. A docent greeted us, then left us on our own to explore the church. I love twisted Catholic folk art (the gorier the better), and this place was a treasure trove of devotional folk artwork both high and low.

Solemn 19th century paintings in heavy gilt frames nestled up against winking Jesus holographic Last Suppers circa 1977. Heartbreakingly adorable, this place.

My favorite piece: a gigantic rosary (big enough for a beanstalk giant), each bead made out of what appeared to be wadded up papier mache and spray painted silver, the whole thing draped over a single crutch.

I just love this stuff. Probably because there’s no Christianity in my background, so I can approach the whole thing with the innocent delight of the total outsider. I find it deeply touching, fascinatingly creepy and sometimes just plain hilarious.

So there we were, being bad kids in church (literally), cackling, whispering, shushing each other while Kurt madly tried to document as much of it as possible with his camera.

And that’s how we discovered the Holy Dirt. Because while trying to get a photo of something else, Kurt backed up and stepped in it.

Oops. Who knows what that poor docent lady thought when she discovered the perfect sneaker print immortalized in the Holy Dirt. Luckily, by this time she had her hands full with a tour busload of sight seers who were trouping through the place, so as far as I know she didn’t actually see us do it.

We decided we should go before she discovered what we’d done, so we headed quickly for the door. In that same moment, all those tourists also exited the church and streamed toward their bus.

And the strangest thing happened as we made our way outside.

On that busy walkway, the docent lady stood looking me straight in the eye.

Time seemed to stop for a moment and all the other people seemed to disappear from my awareness as she smiled gently at me.

“YOU can come back anytime,” she said.

(This is the end of part one. I apologize for not including a single word about the awesome power of belief. That’ll show up in part two, I promise.)

Long Time No See buy the book from

Holy Dirt part 2 – The awesome power of the Travel Channel

I never forgot that church docent’s enigmatic invitation (‘YOU can come back anytime…’) so when Kurt & I returned to Santa Fe 7 years later, in the fall of 2006, we made a point of trekking back up to Chimayo.

To say the place had changed would be putting it mildly. In the years since our last visit, Santa Fe and its environs had been featured on a number of cable TV shows, the kind that focus on travel and the unexplained. ‘History’s Mysteries,’ that sort of thing. And those shows put Chimayo on the map in a big way.

We didn’t even recognize the place as we approached, and had to drive back & forth past it several times before assuring ourselves this must be it. Half a block away we found the parking lot expanded to 5 times its previous size to accommodate the scores of tour buses and cars driven there by eager pilgrims.

Sadly, on approaching what was now a huge complex of buildings and vendor stalls, we could find no trace of the Holy Chile or the shop that once housed it. In the church I could find no sign of that docent. And I was deeply disappointed to discover that there was now no folk art.

Oh sure, the 19th century pieces were still there. But all the sad, funny, wildly tacky and heart-breakingly sincere stuff contributed by local parishioners had been swept away and replaced by shiny new plastic Kmart treasures, bland and mass-produced and completely without character.

I couldn’t help mourning the loss of the winking Jesus and the papier mache rosary and all the rest. http://twitpic.com/qe4pd

But oh, that Holy Dirt. The Holy Dirt sits just beneath a smallish hole in the church’s floor. On our first visit the hole was cordoned off on 3 sides with a sign warning not to step in it. (Again, oops.)

But this time the hole was thronged 3 deep with devotees patiently waiting their turn to scoop out buckets of that Holy Dirt into baggies or jars or Tupperware containers to take home with them.

OK now, really. If that were truly the original Dirt in that hole (the very foundation the church was built on)…at this rate of removal the Santuario would have collapsed in on itself long before this. Besides, while the Dirt looked like dirt on our first visit, this time it bore a serious resemblance to clean, commercial-grade sand from the hardware store.

I’m just sayin.’

It may sound like I’m mocking the faithful who scooped that Dirt, but I’m really not. I was serious when I named this story The Awesome Power of Belief. In 1858 one person had an authentic revelatory experience at Lourdes, but countless others who later heard her story have also experienced miraculous healings there. Why?

I don’t doubt the initial revelatory experience that happened at Lourdes (or the one at Chimayo). I can say from personal experience that revelatory experiences can and do happen anywhere. I’ve had some of my best ones while driving an offroad jeep in Sedona; in a Parisian clothing shop; and in the ladies room of Wuksachi Lodge in Sequoia National Park, to name just a few.

And I’m not saying it’s the power of suggestion that makes the Healing Waters or the Holy Dirt work for all these later people. It’s way more than that. Belief is a truly awesome (and underappreciated) force.

Let’s consider this for a moment: That we are all One infinite being of unlimited creative power. But that’s a very tough concept to take seriously while we still believe we’re separate minds housed in separate bodies, living in the 3-D world of form.

When we’re awakened to the memory of our perfect Oneness, then together we’re able to exercise our divine creative powers. But we can’t access that unlimited creativity if we believe we’re not One. As separate individuals, our unlimited creative abilities can’t be used properly, so instead we funnel all of that awesome unused power into belief.

If we believe something fully, in other words, it becomes 100% true for us. (All those fans of the Law of Attraction out there would no doubt agree.) And if all us individuals believe in something together, then that thing becomes collectively true for all of us. Sickness is real only if we believe in it; spontaneous healing becomes real exactly the same way. Regardless of whether your Holy Dirt comes from the Santuario de Chimayo or the hardware store.

So I guess the moral of this story would be to always take a good close look at what your beliefs are.

Awesome, powerful you.

Long Time No See buy the book from

The Meaning of Christmas – random thoughts from a Jewish Buddhist Voice-Hearer

Let me state this right up front: My relationship with Christ has always been complicated.

Messed up, really.

I was born into an Orthodox Jewish family that was still very busy mourning the effects of World War II when I arrived on the scene in 1958. Christ was a complete stranger in our household, Christianity seen as nothing but a dark catalyst for terrifying world events.

My resulting relationship with Jesus is summed up in this story (from the book) called He Who Must Not Be Named: …

On the one hand He looked like a nice enough guy—His blond, blue-eyed portrait smiling down on my sleepovers at the neighbor kids’ house. And of course it was widely known that if you believed in Him, Santa brought you all kinds of magical swag on Christmas.

Yet He was also the reason I wasn’t allowed into some of the other kids’ houses. I was a dirty Jew, or so their mothers informed me, and Jesus wouldn’t like it if I spread those cooties around.

Meanwhile, school brought a whole different kind of challenge. I learned nothing at all about Christ or Christianity at home or in my Hebrew school studies, except that He was somehow associated with unspeakable evil, and so the name of Jesus was never to be uttered aloud.

“Why? What happens if you say it?” I figured it must be bad because nobody would ever tell me. Maybe saying Jesus’ name was what killed those six million Jews?

This was back in the day when public school kids were routinely made to sing religious songs, so for these occasions I was forced to adopt a weird sort of ventriloquist’s dummy approach:

Wag-wag(soundlessly my jaw moved up and down)

Loves me, yes I know

For the Bible tells me so.

…………………….Yeah.

Does it seem insane to you that anyone would teach a child to equate Jesus with Voldemort?

Well, you’re probably right about that. But cultural context is everything.

The Jews who taught these lessons were not the slightest bit nefarious in their intentions. Just scared. Traumatized. And deeply worried that their bacon cheeseburger-loving American offspring were in danger of forgetting recent cataclysmic history.

Now fast-forward several decades to our post 9-11 world, and that 2007 story about the Muslim Mickey Mouse with his own TV show. And we think: How could anyone be so evil? And are they insane, using Mickey to teach children to hate and murder?

Well, yeah. They’ve already proven they’re at least a little insane, if only by ignoring the global reach of Disney’s fearsome legal team.

But the very embodiment of evil? I’m gonna go out on a limb here to say: I don’t think so. I think maybe they’re just wounded citizens of a deeply damaged world, trying to pass their belief system on to their kids.

So. Back to the meaning of Christmas. (Or maybe it’s the meaning of Christ that I’m really after.) It’s taken me a half-century to undo all that well-intentioned cultural conditioning from my early years. But I don’t regret any of it, because that outsider status has allowed me to approach the subject with fresh eyesight.

For what it’s worth, here’s what I think:

There’s no such thing as pure evil. There are only degrees of damage and desperately misguided ways of coping with it.

And let’s face it, we’re all at least a little damaged and a little misguided.

So my personal practice – all year long, but especially now during the Christmas season – is to overlook the damage and the mistakes as best I can, and try to see only the Oneness and perfection that lie deep within each person. I’ve been told (and see no reason to disbelieve) that everybody who’s ever lived is equally perfect and worthy of unconditional love. So, what the hey, I’m giving it my best shot.

Do I slip and forget? Constantly. That’s why they call it a practice. But on the days when I manage it, I’m enveloped in peace and joy and a sense of…holiness, really, that feels like warm cocoa wrapped in a cashmere blanket. Or something like that. To be honest there are no words to describe the feeling, except to say it’s real good.

So I think that’s the meaning of Christmas. Joy. Oneness. Letting the world off the hook for its collective “sins.” From that guy in the SUV who steals my parking spot at the mall (dammit, he SAW me waiting), to the Muslim Mickey who teaches hatred to yet another generation of children.

I’m hoping to let a whole lot more people off the hook as the season progresses.

Because practice makes perfect, you know

Long Time No See buy the book from

Past-life murder and present day forgiveness: The ultimate do-over

I remember bits and pieces of some of my more colorful past lives. I never get the full story, though – just quick, disconnected flashes lacking any kind of meaningful context.

I know I was once the leader of a secret religious order called Lamb of God. But I only see images of torchlight flickering on roughhewn walls; of long white tunics and heavy crosses worn around the neck. It would be nice to know a little more, but that’s all I have.

And then there’s a shamanic episode a couple of centuries later that took place on Navajo land: I see images of a black horse galloping at me, its rider silhouetted against the sun; I’m raising my arms, and wearing a long cape that seems to be made of shiny black feathers.

In general, I’m not all that fascinated by the idea of past lives, so I haven’t gone out of my way to find out more. I don’t know, maybe that’s because I tend to remember less about past lives and more about past deaths.

I’ve been burned at the stake. Shot in the back. But before I talk about past death, I want to go back a minute and tell you more about that shamanic memory. It took place at Spider Rock in Canyon de Chelly, during an amazing 5 day InnerVision journey I did with Fran in 2008. (if you don’t know who Fran is, see any of the blog entries listed under ‘Sedona’s spiritual connection.’)

We toured a great big loop through Arizona and Utah. It was amazing – someday maybe I’ll write the whole story as an epic 5-parter. We hit lots of well known sacred spots on that trip: Valley of the Gods, Monument Valley etc., as well as some lesser known areas like Mexican Hat.

Fran had long been telling me about Mexican Hat. She was afraid of that place; she knew she had a deep connection to that very troubled land, and that she was supposed to do something powerful there but had never felt ready. She told me the land had been raped – mined for uranium which was then processed at nearby mills, leaving the area with permanently polluted groundwater.

InnerVision journeys are never planned ahead of time. Fran just goes wherever Spirit leads. As we approached Mexican Hat, her description of its painful history grew more heated and angry. I was expecting to see a ravaged landscape, but as we got out of the car the place struck me as astonishingly beautiful, a study in red rocks and green (don’t drink it) water.

Suddenly she stopped in mid-rant. She was remembering she’d been ‘told’ long ago that she would one day bring someone there who would heal the land. And she just now realized that someone was me.

Time stopped and I watched myself out-of-body as I said to her: “To heal the land, we need to love the rapists.”

I wasn’t entirely sure at the time what I meant by that. But the other night I realized that this episode actually connects to another one, a past-death memory. Here’s that past-death story as it’s told in my book:

…The next thing I knew, I was in three places at once. Part of me was reliving my own murder from a previous lifetime, a brutal rape and strangulation. Yet it wasn’t nearly as scary or disturbing as you’d expect, because a second part of me was peacefully watching it unfold from a detached bird’s-eye viewpoint and the third part of me knew I was safely lying in my own bed the whole time.

‘I’m being shown this for a reason.’ This was the thought that filled my mind, and I knew it was the truth. ‘I’m supposed to forgive this guy.’

Yet it didn’t seem to require forgiveness in the usual sense of the word. I didn’t get that I was supposed to be saying, “Oh, there, there, it’s ok that you’re murdering me.”

It seemed I was being asked to remain open-hearted and peacefully present while he did this awful thing. So I did. And as I made the choice to do it, I dimly sensed that this decision to stay loving in the face of hatred was having a big effect, shuffling the deck on my own past or future timeline, although I couldn’t begin to say how.

This past-death experience occurred shortly before I was introduced to A Course in Miracles. Now I recognize that it was asking me to practice forgiveness as defined by the Course: To completely overlook the imagined transgressions of this world – no matter how evil or terrifying they might seem – and to respond only with love.

And what’s the payoff, you ask, for responding with love instead of attack or defense? The payoff is huge. Probably more awesome than you or I can comprehend, in fact.

When I made the choice to offer only love and peace to that rapist-murderer (instead of responding with terror and rage as I had done the first time around), I felt a massive shift that I described at the time as ‘shuffling the deck.’ But it really felt as if time itself was collapsing, shortening my journey immeasurably. I had the strong impression, in fact, that it was rewriting my past or future to leave out certain painful portions because those lessons were learned now.

A Heavenly do-over, if you will. Pretty powerful stuff.

So, back to Mexican Hat. Could that ravaged land really be healed through the simple action of choosing to love its ‘rapists’? I’m thinking yes. If time and destiny fall like dominoes when love is chosen over fear, surely the Earth can be healed by that same gently loving choice.

After all, that’s another of the Course’s basic tenets: We’re all One with everything that is. Which presumably includes every rock and stream. Heal ourselves as we heal the rapists, and in that simple choice the land is automatically healed too. So can you imagine just how powerful love really is?

I don’t know; something to think about.

Long Time No See buy the book from

Catching The Red Eye Flight

(Reporting live from Santa Fe) – Ever feel like your life is filled with so many Heavenly blessings you've run out of fingers and toes to count them all? That might seem an odd way to begin a story that nearly ended up in the emergency room, but sometimes it goes that way.

Here's how it started: Due to a whole other series of mind-blowing Heavenly blessings, I was offered the amazing opportunity to come to Santa Fe to be interviewed about my soon-to-be-released book (9 days & counting!) and to meet a couple of writer-heroes of mine, Nouk Sanchez and Tomas Viera, authors of Take Me To Truth. Their book lives permanently on my nightstand, along with A Course in Miracles.

The day before I was to leave for Santa Fe, my right eye started to hurt for no reason. So I took out my contacts, thinking that would fix the problem. Wrong. The eye grew more and more irritated as the day wore on; by nightfall it was red and swollen and streaming tears, and by bedtime it hurt like holy hell. In total darkness the pain was bad enough, but the faintest glimmer of light brought what felt like a parade of stiletto heels stomping on my eye.

Ooh baby, it was gonna be a long night.

Around midnight I started toying with the idea of the emergency room; by 2am I was starting to wonder whether I'd have to cancel my trip? That meant passing up a (literally) God-given opportunity; it also meant I'd be pissing away $1000 or so on nonrefundable travel arrangements.

On the other hand, I was now virtually blind in one eye, unable to function except in total darkness and nearly mad with pain. Perhaps it was not the best idea to drive myself to LA, get on a plane and go to another city for 5 days.

Well I had no friggin' idea what to do.

One thing I did know: I want to wake up from the dream of 3-D existence more than anything else in this world. And sometimes the best way to help do that is when your back is to the wall and you're completely out of options. So I let go of all my own opinions and fears about what I was supposed to do in that situation, and I started to pray.

But I was determined not to merely replace the dream of pain with a dream of healing. (After all, I want to wake up from all dreams.) I didn't pray to feel better. I just handed the whole mess over to Spirit with no strings attached, and asked only for an unmistakable sign whether I should keep my date in Santa Fe or not.

Then something curious happened. Right away the pain sort of dissolved and I fell into a kind of interim state (it definitely wasn't sleep). 2 hours later, just before the alarm went off at 4am, I snapped out of it and realized my eye felt at least 50% better. Definitely bearable now. Taking that as my unmistakable sign, I rolled out of bed and hit the road.

But as if surrender and spontaneous physical healing were not enough, there was actually another (and far deeper) healing connected to this event.

You know how sometimes you don't realize how much you've changed or grown until all of a sudden you're thrown into a situation that would've been your worst nightmare in the past but now isn't?

To say I've always been deeply self conscious about my looks would be kind of a crazy understatement. I've caused myself needless decades of pain and shame over what Spirit has referred to as 'my self-imposed prison of ugliness.' And I know the whole thing is stupid, but have always been unable to get at the roots of those deeply held beliefs to be able to heal them.

But as I wandered the LA airport with a blood red eye, glasses and no makeup – not my best look, I assure you – I was surprised to realize my appearance didn't matter to me at all. At all.

It was as if the door to my prison cell had been hanging wide open for ages, but only now did it occur to me it was ok to step outside (blinking in the unfamiliar and still somewhat painful light). That I was free at last.

Oh, the interview: Fabulous. And meeting all of those wonderful people: Even more fabulous. So fabulous, in fact, that in September Nouk, Tomas AND I will be putting on a 3 day seminar together here in California.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Holy crap, this spiritual journey is fun.

Long Time No See buy the book from

Learning to live without commercial interruptions

This past month or so has been an extraordinary time for me. My book is released and is becoming a bona fide hit on Amazon; my speaking career is in the process of revealing itself to me. (As in: what the hell might I say to a roomful of listeners? And in what sorts of venues might I say it?)

I've also informally partnered up with an amazing producer type guy and we're collaborating on film and book projects; and in general I'm bowled over by the outpouring of love and support from all sides as I step forward and try my hand at this crazy public messengering thing.

So naturally, it was time for my ego mind to weigh in on this beautiful turn of events. Because that old ego's been with me a long, long time. It knows me better than anyone else. And it knows with absolute certainty that all this success is just some cosmic mistake – I don't deserve it and soon we're going to have to engineer some kind of drastic monkey wrench in the works, something that slows my progress to a crawl.

Because a little love and success is fine, but enough is enough. It's time to reestablish the natural order of things.

I woke up today very painfully aware of the deep down rage-filled workings of my ego mind. Which was ok with me, because lately I've been asking to see (and heal) the entirety of that unconscious mountain of mud. So while I was excavating down in angry, fearful Mudland, I took a good look at my firmly held belief that I can't tolerate sustained success – and then chose to release that firm belief.

I handed over that very mistaken idea to Spirit. And then got out of the shower and got dressed.

A minute later the phone rang. It was Fran, calling from Sedona. She said she'd been trying to email (bad internet connection) but Spirit said, "Call her."

She said she wanted to tell me how richly deserved all my success and momentum is. That she's so proud of me, and feels like I've waited my entire life with the 'pause' button on, but now for the first time am stepping forward to tell my story with the voice of my true authentic self. (It feels that way to me, too.) And that Heaven can't help but shower me with its joyous outpouring of ongoing love and support as a result.

Well that took my breath away. Spirit often speaks to me through Fran, but somehow the fast turnaround time really caught me off guard this time. I told her what I'd been wrestling with and she laughed and said:

"Well, those kinds of things will continue to come up from time to time. Think of them as commercial interruptions from the ego. So when it happens, just say you're not interested in buying the product!"

Well I've been laughing with gentle joy ever since.

Sure, there'll be ups and downs along the journey. How could life in this dreamworld be otherwise? But now I realize I don't have to watch the commercials anymore.

Kind of like getting a spiritual DVR. Goodbye to unquestioned ego beliefs, and hello to the 30-second skip!

Long Time No See buy the book from