Image via Wiki Commons

I’m 23 weeks pregnant, which is very exciting. I’ve been meditation on/with the spirit of this child who will also be a guide to me for years and it will be great to meet him in person. He threw me for a loop by choosing to incarnate as a boy, though his spirit had always appeared to me as a female before. Just one more reminder that who we are in the body does not at all encapsulate who we are in totality.

Anyway, that’s all by way of introducing the lovely meditation I had the other day that I felt led to share:

In the meditation, I grounded myself by visualizing roots tying me to the Earth & being surrounded by white light. Then I visualized myself walking near a stone wall where I took what Ronnie calls “the fairy door.” I found myself in a lush, walled garden full of fairies with large trees, many plants and stone benches and a long stone table. The fairies (in their small, winged forms) called it one of their last strongholds on Earth.

They gathered around me, especially near my belly and blessed me for taking on all the incarnations and karmic weight that led to this most important lifetime and the sacred child I carry. They blessed the child within me, saying that he, like me, will be full of fairy magic, and to make sure he spends lots of time in nature so he would learn to access his power. They told me that he will be my teacher and guide, though I must also teach and guide him. They called him a son of the moon and the sun, a uniter of dualities and a light of truth and wisdom.

Then, taking on more human proportions, they once more laid their hands on me and blessed me. Then we sat down to a large banquet of fruits, cheeses and breads. I noticed there was no meat at the banquet, and asked if I should raise my child as a vegetarian. They responded that he will know his own path & that all I have to do is support and guide him when he feels lost.

After dining, we danced together as the sun set in the sky and the stars shone brightly above us. Then they told me I was to go back home & I came back to where I had grounded myself in front of my altar, feeling very peaceful and blessed.

Runes are most commonly used in divination, but they are also helpful meditation tools. Today I’m going to share two recent meditations on the run Inguz. Inguz as a symbol stands for fertility, DNA, reincarnation, lunar & earthly magic, germination, growth, spiritual aspiration and the manipulation of the natural environment. So I was not surprised that both meditations focused on my body, my pregnancy and my energy field.

For runes, the color of activation is always red, so each meditation began with steady breathing, then I imagined the lines of the rune glowing red, as if with fire. The center of the rune opened like a portal of light.

In the first meditation, I went through the Inguz portal and saw a red mist and nothing else at first. I heard a heartbeat that I mistook for my own at first, until I realized that I was inside my own womb where a child currently grows inside me, and that the heartbeat belong to the child. I saw my baby sleeping peacefully in the womb.  I energetically cradled it and gave thanks for the vision of my child as healthy and safe.

That was the first meditation, which was rather short.

The next one, started the same way, but when I went through the portal this time, I entered the white bright star which I understood as my own spirit energy. I merged with the light, breathing deeply. I saw it soak into my human body where it touched all parts of me, moving from large organs to the tiny twisting strands of my DNA. Each strand was purified by the light. I saw clouds of darkness leaving my DNA, releasing me from the darkness of past lives and ancestral problems I’d inherited. When I saw my DNA full of light, my inner sight moved me to the child within and its DNA strands, embedding them with light and love through my intention. I saw the unborn child’s body full of light, blessing us both with its brightness. I came back to myself with my hand resting on my baby bump, grateful for the purification of the body that comes through Spirit and grateful for the connection I have with my unborn child.

As I sat before my altar, intoning OM repeatedly, the image of a raven I have there seemed to come alive. I followed it as it flew through mist and over water, then over an ancient forest, where a dove rose up to meet it. The birds dove to the ground and my spirit followed. They perched on a large boulder while I looked around at the nearby cave, lake and surrounding forest, waiting to see what would reveal itself to me.

I didn’t wait long before a tall woman with long black hair, wearing a shining white dress appeared to me. She introduced herself as “The Lady of the Lake,” and I recognized her from a past-life flashback that I’d had earlier this year.

Let me break briefly from my description of this meditation to describe her and our relationship to you:
Aeronwen is a goddess of fate who determines which side wins in battles. She is sometimes associated with Agrona and Morrigan. The raven is sacred to her as is Glyndyfrdwy, Wales, where there is a shrine to her on the river Dee. The name of this location can be translated as “Water of the Goddess.” Allegedly, human sacrifices were offered to her through drowning.

In a vision I had earlier this year, it was revealed to me that many of my lifetimes ago, I was the daughter of a cheiftain, engaged to our tribe’s fiercest warrior who I loved passionately. We were engaged to be married, but our tribe (who lived near Aeronwen’s sacred site) and those around us and our way of life were threatened by Christians invading our lands. One night as I slept, Aeronwen appeared to me, and told me that I could single-handedly save my tribe, my father and my lover from the invaders – at least for a period of several decades, when my father would have passed on and my lover would have passed into old age. The only way this could come to pass, however, was if I sacrificed myself in the lake, allowing myself to drown. When I woke, I shared my dream with my father, and he agreed that it was a true vision, though the idea of my sacrifice saddened him deeply. Knowing I could save my people, I went to the lake and plunged in, forcing myself to let my body sink into the dark water. As I passed from that life, the goddess appeared brilliantly before me, leading me to the heavens.

So when she appeared to me in this recent meditation, I recognized her immediately. She asked me if I remembered meeting her before, and I responded that I did. She then directed me to sit before a small pool of water near the cave, where she wanted me to scry. At first, all I saw was my face and her’s over my shoulder, but then I saw the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where a seabird who’d landed there looking for scraps had tangled its wing in some plastic and couldn’t break free. Moved with compassion, I prayed for the bird’s freedom and watched as the plastic dissolved and the bird flew away. Then, the vision shifted and I saw a turtle lower down in the patch, swimming through the toxic water, looking for a safe place to go.

As I watched this, the goddess spoke to me, saying that I must not let go of my vision to change the world for the better or to allow myself to think that I am powerless to do so (as I’d been thinking just the day before this happened). She told me to remember that love and passion are the only things that will change the world for the better and that I must be as passionate about helping my human and animal families now as I was about saving my tribe when I sacrificed myself to her. Our animal friends, she said, are adapting as best they can, but they need help from humans to clean habitats, change laws and teach respect for all forms of life.

I thanked her for her wisdom and guidance and the scene disappeared from my mind’s eye and once more I was back in front of my altar.

Seal Island, Scotland

In meditation yesterday, I was led by one of my animal totems, the dolphin, to an island that most people would consider “deserted.” It was a wild place where only sea birds and seals lived… or so it seemed, until I was met by a a small fairy creature that looked like a mossy tree branch.

This fellow spoke to me saying that I should be careful not to lose my wildness or to associate wildness with uncontrollable behavior or self-destruction. Then he transformed into a very tall human-like, sage green figure with green hair and curling satyr horns. With a very grave face, he informed me that wildness – both in myself and in the Earth – need to be encouraged & fostered. He then left me alone to meditate on the wild nature of the island.

As I observed the birds, animals and the waves moving about the island I began to perceive that I had been thinking of wildness only in terms of its shadow side. The light side of wildness, which I observed there in meditation, included:

• peaceful stillness;
• the simple trust of creatures that everything will be provided for them;
• change through gentle, constant repetition (as waves change the shoreline);
• and joy in simply BEing and DOing as the inner self directs.

Image via JonathanParker.org

I’m on Ross Bishop‘s email list, and today this was just what I needed to read. I hope you will find it as inspiring and encouraging as I did. (All words are his, but the emphasis is mine).

UNDERSTANDING LIFE

by Ross Bishop

One of the difficulties people have doing spiritual work is that even after all that has been shared with us, we have a poor understanding of what life is about. Put in the simplest terms, your spiritual development is not completed and you came to earth to move the process forward. Earth was created as a learning place for your growth and development.

Today when challenged, you are not able to hold the God Space. Instead you move into fear, feelings of inadequacy and self doubt. When things go wrong you blame yourself, others, get angry at God or the world for your troubles.

Although we rarely see life this way, our dilemmas are really opportunities for learning. The key is to shift our perspective from being a victim to becoming a student of life. A big part of the problem is that the learning system, although extremely effective, is painful and not entirely straightforward. The saving grace is that our conflicts, although unpleasant, can do no permanent damage.

Having free will does complicate matters. Because of free will, any changes you make must come from within, they cannot be given or taught. They must be experienced and accepted as your own personal truth. The most powerful way to help someone who has free will find the truth is to first convince them of its opposite. This may seem convoluted, but over time, faced with the growing conflict between false belief and the truth, there is nowhere else for a person to turn but to the truth. Because the choice is individual, when you make that shift, you will hold the truth more deeply than is possible by any other means. Learning in this way respects your free will and insures that your newfound truth will be unshakable.

Before you came to earth you were with The Creator. The limitations in your consciousness were not an issue, they could not create any difficulties there. However the moment you separated from The Creator to come here, the limitations of your consciousness were exposed. In addition, in order for the learning process on earth to work, you had to temporarily forget your connection to The Creator. Otherwise, nothing that happened here would have caused conflict for you to learn from.

Because of your inner uncertainty and vulnerability, when you left “heaven” you felt as though you had been cast out into the cold, uncaring vastness of The Universe. You concluded that you had been abandoned, unwanted, unworthy and unloved. None of that could be true, they were completely impossible, but your Misunderstanding was profound and deep. This was intended. Your feelings of unworthiness and unlovability would serve as the pivots around which your earthly learning experiences would evolve. They would form the foundation for the learning you needed.

Your limited consciousness was unable to grasp the greater truth of who you really were, and so you chose to believe you were flawed. And you have been working to resolve that Misunderstanding ever since. The beliefs that developed out of the separation have shaped and twisted every experience you have ever had. Responding to the energy of the Misunderstanding, The Universe creates situations to help you work through your false beliefs in a manageable context.

For example, we were all hurt in childhood. That is not accidental. It is a setup designed into the life process to trigger your inner uncertainties and create false beliefs. Remember that life on earth has been set up to convince you that you were unworthy, unlovable and even possibly damaged so that over time, you would reject those beliefs and embrace who and what you really are. The fact that this happens for every child on the planet should convince you that this is not some random, happenstancial occurrence. It is a planned and intended, integral part of your learning process. Any conflict between a belief and the truth must eventually be resolved for the truth. You can divert things for a while by living in your ego, but there is always a price for that.

Your childhood experiences would propel you into a lifetime of difficult experiences that would ultimately lead to an expanded consciousness. It is not a pleasant or enjoyable process, but healing your childhood wounds, learning to move beyond the ego and your beliefs and live in the truth, will help resolve your inner wounding and bring you closer to The God Space. From the human perspective, the learning process can seem uncaring and callous, but we need to remember that this is God’s agenda, not ours. God loves you, but will not be dissuaded from His plan if your ego gets dinged. Actually, the pain that comes from your ego being dented is a very important part of the learning process.

Most people get caught up in the struggle and fail or refuse to realize that while they are getting the stuffing kicked out of them, there is a far more significant process taking place. We feel hurt, remain victims, and rarely raise our heads high enough to get above the fray and witness the learning being asked of us. The change, by the way, is always about moving to greater compassion and the stuffing you lose isn’t real anyway. It is something we are better off without. It is when we paint ourselves into a corner and are faced with the either/or of “surrender or die” that most of us challenge and eventually surrender, our false and limiting beliefs.

Finding ways to trust in God’s guidance and make the “leap” to another way of believing, leaving your wounds and scars behind, requires finding the faith that if you leap, you won’t simply crash and burn or be left out in the cold. That is why, even though most of our connection to The Creator has been camouflaged, there always remains a chord of light to build faith on. We need to find something to trust, either a belief system or a teacher we can have confidence in to help us make the leap.

Your Misunderstandings profoundly affect everything you do.

***

To get on Ross’ e-mail list, visit his website.

Pomegranate Tree - Image Via "Fruits, Fables and Folklore"

The pomegranate has been used throughout history and in almost every religion as a symbol of humanity’s most fundamental beliefs and desires, including life and death, rebirth and eternal life, fertility and marriage, abundance and prosperity. Almost every aspect of the pomegranate has come to symbolize something . . . its shape, color, seeds, juice.

…

Pomegranates were eaten by the Israelites while they were in Egypt. As they traveled to the promised land, there were places without pomegranates. But the promised land would once again provide them with the luscious fruit… A belief also circulated that the fruit eaten by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden was the pomegranate.

…

The pomegranate is often seen in paintings and statues of the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus. It’s a symbol of resurrection and everlasting life.

…

Legend states that each pomegranate contains one seed (aril) from the pomegranate in paradise.

…[T]he changing of the seasons is said to be caused by Persephone eating a pomegranate seed – - food of the underworld.

From “The Power of Pomegranate Symbolism“

*****

Pomegranates
an original poem by me

A golden silence abides

within and beyond all forms

of expression (mind or matter),

a joyous energy so sensuous and fertile

that to speak while in tune

with this mysterious frequency

would cause pomegranates bursting with ripeness

to fall from your lips.

But a wordless prayer invokes brilliant shafts of light

illuminating the secret splendor of the mundane,

even the luscious red arils of your quivering heart.

Between and behind its beats,

the silence grows,

a golden tree bearing heavy scarlet fruit.

***

In the meditation, I offered up the parts of my life I want to change on my heart-flame altar, then jumped off a cliff, transforming to a dove as I fell.  I went through a tunnel of light to ancient Egypt and saw myself as a priestess/healer. I was visiting a poor house, where a father and his son greeted me enthusiastically.

I went inside to find their daughter/sister lying ill on the bed. I crossed over to her, laid my body upon her and prayed that her illness would be transferred into my body, and that my body and the energy of the Universe would heal me as I took that on.  I could feel and see in my mind’s eye my cells doing the processing.  When I felt the process was done, I pulled myself off the girl, and she jumped up, hale and hearty.

I walked back to the temple, where my acolyte – who is a woman I have been seeing in visions and calling to me as my dream lover – took me by the hand and led me to a couch where we lay together. I was resting from my massive energy out-put and she was just loving and supporting me.

This was powerful for me in many ways, but one way in particular I’ll mention is the acolyte/dream lover I saw.  This is a soul who I recently met in this lifetime. He’s in a man’s body this time. We both felt a deep connection when we first met, and I knew that we had history in Egypt together. I had wondered why being with this man makes me feel like I’m being super-charged with light and power! Now I feel like I understand. I am so grateful to have this soul back in my life, and so grateful for the deeper understanding this meditation brought to my awareness.

I just had to mention those before I went into my review, because I really enjoyed them both, and I think that reading them helped me to feel more “in touch” with an over-arching view of the afterlife, versus the very particular stories Browne tells, through her spirit guide, in Afterlives of the Rich and Famous.

Afterlives of the Rich and Famous is divided into 4 major sections: “Introduction” (which I mostly skipped since I’ve read several of her other books and knew most of what she covered there), “Death…and Then What” (a brief summary of the most pertinent information in Temples on the Other Side), “Glossary” (definition of terms the reader might be unfamiliar with from “astral travel” to “the waiting room”), and “Celebrities” (the largest and, most interesting, section of the book).

As usual, Browne did her homework before writing this book.  Each celebrity she discusses is described through a brief overview of his/her life and death. Since I wasn’t really expecting that, I found it a bit off-putting, until I got to a celebrity that I wasn’t really familiar with, and then I was very grateful to have the information handy!  After this overview, there is a section from Francine, Browne’s spirit guide, whom Browne channeled during recorded interviews.  This section describes how the soul of the celebrity entered the afterlife and what they are doing now.  A couple celebrities also had sections from Browne, describing how she had been involved with the spirit of the deceased prior to writing this book.

The celebrities Brown covers include Paul Newman, Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant, George Carlin, Rock Hudson, Heath Ledger, Grace Kelly, John Kennedy Jr., Walter Cronkite, Abraham Lincoln, Michael Jackson, Princess Diana, George Harrison and many more!  I was especially interested to read about George Carlin’s experience upon entering the afterlife, since he’d been so thoroughly anti-God in his lifetime.  This is an excerpt from Francine’s description:

I wish you could have seen the look of shock on George’s face when he emerged from the tunnel and rediscovered that there really is life after death after all.  And when he found his first wife, Brenda, waiting to greet him, he was stunned into a long silence while he held her, after which I’m told he gaped at the hundreds of spirits and animals who gathered for the reunion and said, “I’ll be damned.”  George is an excellent example of the fact that atheists are embraced on the Other Side as surely as the most devoutly religious, and with his humor, self-honesty, and misguided but honorable intentions, he tried to live a godly lifetime, no matter what words he used to define it.

Once he spent time [reviewing his previous incarnations], all his memories came flooding back, not only of the life on the Other Side to which he’d just returned, but also of the life that preceded this most recent one — he was a black man in the mid-1800s, wrongly convicted of and executed for a murder he did not commit, the murder of a white woman, which, it was later learned, was actually committed by the presiding judge.  It was understandable that George arrived angry and rebellious against “the system,” and it was brilliant of him to have charted a sense of humor that would allow him to express his outrage through the power of laughter… (pages 78-79)

It was very interesting to learn about the choices these souls had made about their life plans and the way they felt about how they did afterwards.  It added to my understanding of just how little we can truly grasp about ourselves and our mission here on Earth while we are still experiencing it.

Of course, not all of the souls chose to go “through the tunnel” to the Other Side.  Some remained Earth-bound for years, haunting their familiar places, until they were helped over to the Other Side, or else chose to go into what Browne calls “the Holding Place” – essentially what we know of as purgatory, where souls who chose to separate themselves from Love wait to reincarnate.

Reading Afterlives of the Rich and Famous helped me to realize in a new way just how much love, support and wisdom our souls and our spirit guides have to offer us (though we can always chose to deny it).  It’s also wonderful to have example after example of souls learning deeply from their life experiences and, sometimes, choosing new spiritual careers afterward.

I was often moved to tears while reading this, and I am very grateful to Browne for writing it. Definitely recommended reading!

"Wonder" by Alex Grey

“All lovingly unfolds through time and space

Life constantly transforms, but in essence nothing changes

There is nothing to fear, there is only love

I am one with the Universe and stars

Love is my guiding force.”

- Toni Carmine Salerno

“Listen to the World’s heartbeat.”