8/20/12—Feeling the Vibe

Today's Draw: Shaman from the Vision Tarot by Dirk Gillabel. Can you sense the energy of those around you? Do you sometimes walk into a room full of people and feel overwhelmed for some reason you can't explain? Is there a person who, even though they're nice, you just don't like to be around?

This week is going to be Energy Week. But not the kind of energy that fuels your car or runs your TV. The kind of energy that vibrates within us and throughout the universe. 

You've probably experienced it before...when someone is angry, you can feel it. They emit the energy of anger. No words have to be said. The person's face doesn't have to be contorted in an angry look. In fact, you've probably even felt someone's anger when they were doing their best to look normal and deny their anger. 

You can sense someone staring at you. You know when someone is lying to you. You may have felt that someone died before you knew it to be fact. Or maybe you felt creeped out by something you couldn't see, like a ghostly energy. Or you entered a room and it somehow felt peaceful. Some of this can be explained by visual or verbal cues. But some of it can't. Some of it you might call intuition or even instinct. But what really are instinct and intuition if it doesn't involve tuning into the energies around you?

Every day we're interacting with energies you can see and not see. A person is an energy you can see, for example. But there's a whole other energy body within them and around them that you can't see. There are the electrical systems that run our heart and our every thought. There's the caloric energy that fuels our body. The kinetic energy of motion. And, many believe, an energy body made up of chakras. Spiritual energy that's transmitted between us and God. And energy that transmits between us and everything in the universe. 

A shaman is a mediator of those energies. Each day we make countless energetic exchanges with other seen and unseen energies around us. We understand the energy exchange of food, for example. You eat it and use its energy to power your body. But what about all the energy exchanges you make with unseen and unacknowledged energies around you? Just because you're not conscious of them, doesn't mean you're not interacting with them. Wouldn't you like to be more aware of those exchanges?

That's what the shaman has come to us about today. To start noticing energies around you. As you interact with people today, take a moment to note the kind of energy or vibe they put forth. Is Joe's energy laid-back and mellow or is he a quivering nerve all the time? How does his energy affect yours? If you walk into his cubicle when he's not there, can you feel his energy there? 

Likewise, if you walk into a store or a room or someone's office today, connect with how the room feels...the energy it emits. Or hold an item, preferably of someone else's and see what kind of energy it has attached to it. You may not feel anything the first time try, but keep trying.

Before you can interact with energy, you first have to know it's there. And before you can shield yourself from unwanted energies, you have to understand how you interact with them. 

Energy exchange is a language all its own and it's something that was critical to the survival of early man. The tribe shaman was the go-to guy for everything from physical and spiritual healing to energetically ensuring a successful hunt through his interaction with the spirit world. He was the most venerated person in the clan. That's how important this skill once was to us. My own instinct tells me we can't let this ability slip away. It's a part of us we can't afford to lose to evolution. And it's a part of us we'd be remiss not to explore in this lifetime. 

So play around with it today. Nobody else even has to know. And see what you can tune into. At the very least, the more tuned in you are, the more information you have to guide you toward success.

1/4/12—Unleashing Your Inner Priest

Today's Draw: The King of Cups from the Tarot of the Holy Light. Who gets to decide what the word of God is? And if you don't believe in God, who tells you what to believe? What do God's confidantes have that you don't have?

In this deck, the King of Cups is equated to a shaman. Technically, a shaman is an intermediary between the human world and the spirit world. Their functions are far ranging, from healer and counselor to diviner and ceremonial leader. He is both medicine man and holy man, a spiritual guide and a priest. You wouldn't find a shaman in a church or temple, however. His church is in nature.

Today's shamans are more healers than priests, though I'm sure there are plenty of aboriginal tribes still around who count their shamans as holy men. From prehistoric man through Iron Age man, there was no "God" as we think of God today. Instead, they worshiped animal spirits, ancestral spirits, elemental spirits, the divine feminine, and the multiple gods of mythology and polytheism. The history of "not a Judeo-Christian God" is significantly longer than the history with one on this earth. 

It's interesting to note that as far back as man has existed, we've had a tendency to entrust our communication with the higher power to a mediator, whether a shaman, priestess, pastor or priest. This is how religions are built. A handful of these special people have communicated with a higher power, had mystical experiences, written texts, interpreted texts, developed a set of morals and values and brought their takeaway to the people, who then adopted the input as beliefs and it became a religion. Whether you worship a bear, Zeus, Allah or Jesus, that's how it happens. Much of what people believe in today is based on the input and interpretations of men who lived a couple thousand years ago. 

But we're talking about spirituality and a kind of "2012 new world order" this week and in the context of both of those things, I think the King of Cups has come here today to tell you that YOUR line to God is just as strong as those men's who lived thousands of years ago. It's just as reliable as your community's most beloved pastor's. And it's just as profound as anything you've ever read in a book. 

Which is not to take away from the studies and knowledge of priests and pastors and the like. They know their scripture better than us, no doubt. But talking to God isn't about scripture, is it? It's about learning to hear and recognize the voice of something greater than ourselves. Which is a capability we're all born with. It's not like holy men are born with a gene we don't have. They just have more of a discipline and practice of communicating with spirit than we do. But that doesn't mean we can't catch up to them and even surpass them in our communications.

So how do you do it? Well, prayer and/or meditation work. But what many may not realize is that we don't always hear clearly and the higher power doesn't always speak in words. You may get messages in symbols or pictures, feelings or intuitions. 

There are a few things that help set the stage. One is being in a quiet place where you can hear your thoughts. While you can connect anywhere, another is being in a place where you think you'll more easily commune with the higher power. For some, that's church. For others, it's nature. Both offer the kind of profound silence and stillness you're looking for. Then state your intention that you want to talk to to God about whatever it is. Visualize and feel the light and presence of the higher power surrounding you and just set yourself on "receive". Then, and this is the most important part, trust what comes to you, whether it's a feeling, thought, picture, words or even a smell. The more you practice, the more fluent the conversations will be. 

***Now for a disclaimer for the marginally stable among us, God's not going to tell you to hurt someone or do something you know is morally or ethically wrong. God won't tell you to manipulate or control. And God won't scare you. So if anything like that is happening, maybe it's a good idea for you to pass the Jesus on the Mainline phone over to someone else.***

A couple of years ago the American Religious Identification Survey (google "ARIS survey") showed that American's are becoming increasingly less religious, identifying themselves as having no religion or being spiritual, but not religious. In fact, the number of people identifying as having no religion has doubled in the past 10 years. These are the people we might call "lapsed Catholics". I know a lot of them. They have faith in God. But they no longer have faith in the church. They've never been told they don't need the church to know God, in fact quite the opposite.Truth is, they can do the same thing those men 3,000 years ago did when the whole earth was just getting to know "God"...find out for themself. 

So me and my Kingly friend here are suggesting that all the answers and love and communication and signs you seek are within your reach. Don't stop talking to God because you stopped talking to the church! And don't give up on a higher power just because you don't believe in God. The "force", the energy, the power, the being, the entity—whatever you call it—has been here all along. In all sorts of flavors and colors. Tens of thousands of years before the first priest came along, he/she/it was communicating on the wind you see blowing into the card above. In the cycles of the sun and moon. In the reflection of the ripples on the water. In the rustling of the trees, shape of the clouds and visage of a bear. In fact, that power was communicating long before man ever existed, just for the insects and dinosaurs to hear.

The 2012-ness of this is that, like the study suggests, we're trending toward being our own self-intermediaries with spirit right now. If we want to have that relationship, it's time to find our own vision. And, if you read yesterday's post, respect the visions of others while you're at it, whether their vision is their own or the church's. Can the earth survive 8 billion different visions of God? I think it already does in one sense. It doesn't have to be organized to resonate in our hearts. And it doesn't have to be a battleground, either. Because everyone I know who has their own mainline to God says the same thing—it's all light and love. And the more we know it and understand it and feel it straight from the horse's mouth, the better off we'll be.