Down the Channeling Rabbit Hole

When I was eight years old, I asked what god was. 

I didn’t ask my parents or a teacher or a preacher - I asked the ether. 

Specifically, I asked my bedroom ceiling. 

Talking to the ether was my thing in those days, along with stacks of Babysitters Club books and imaginary friends. So it surprised me not at all when I got an immediate answer. 

I saw all the living beings in the world as points of light. As I watched, all those points of light converged as a massive light in the sky - and that was god. 

Obviously. 

So, visions as a wee sprout, check. But then clairvoyance and all other clairs started retreating into the background as I got older. 

Stuff crept through, of course. Being nudged out of the psychologist’s office when he wanted to prescribe me a bunch of drugs. Blogging my way through my late twenties and learning that I could write my way to healing and answers. My physical body saying “hell no” as best it could to a relationship that wasn’t good for me. 

It wasn’t until what I call the cracking open moment in 2012, around the time of my dad’s death, that this weird path really began to unroll in front of me. 

Kind of like the universe said, “All right, it’s time. Let’s give her a kick in the ass.” 

A few months later, one of my first teachers walked into my apartment in Santa Monica and said, “Oh, you’re an empath and a channeler.”

I nodded like I knew what she was talking about and then, as soon as she left, googled “empath” and “channeler.” 

Slowly, I began playing with the channeling - automatic writing at first, for friends and then for kind strangers who were willing to be my guinea pigs. Eventually, I graduated to spoken channeling and then group channeling and energy healing and energy healing on a timer - setting it up for people like I was preparing the coffee machine to dispense life-giving elixir in the morning. 

It seems that as long as I’m willing to say yes to whatever is coming through, the more I get handed. As long as I’m willing to keep barreling down this unknown path, the universe will keep handing me etheric superpowers.

So that’s cool.

For a long time, I didn’t know what energy I was channeling. I knew it was deeply wise and loving - beyond that I didn’t need much information. 

A few years in, I figured it was time to find out.

I was walking through my neighborhood in Mill Valley and idly asked, “Is there anyone specific I’m supposed to be working with?” 

Immediately, I saw seven figures in front of me, and I stopped dead on the sidewalk. It was a rather immediate answer, like they’d been waiting for me to pop the question.

So I saw them. But since they weren’t wearing convenient name tags, I had to ask who they were. 

The first guide to step forward was Jesus.

I admit, that threw me. 

Since I was raised in the Church of Hippie, I didn’t have any particular thoughts about Jesus, except that he seemed like a cool dude and super helpful to everyone, regardless of race, creed, gender or occupation.  Also, Christmas is the best because who doesn’t like cookies and presents and trees in the house?

But I had questions and wanted to do some double-checking, during which he patiently humored me. “Yes, it’s me. Yes, people call me Jesus. Yep, still me.”

Standing with him were Mother Mary, Mary Magdalene, Archangels Michael and Ariel, Brigid, and Joan of Arc. 

Sure. Okay. Why not.

So I worked with them for awhile - both for myself and with groups of amazing women - and, sure enough, it just kept getting weirder. Because etheric rabbit hole.

A council of magical animals stepped in about a year later. Giraffes, unicorns, lions, otters, dragons, a peacock, and a feisty phoenix.

A few years after that, star beings started waving at me. So I started channeling them too - and basically dropped dead because the energy was so high. 

While I call it channeling, because that’s the word that resonates for me - like I’m turning my super sensitive radio dial to different frequencies and sharing what comes through - there are tons of speakers and teachers and writers who are tapping into this universal source and frequency in a similar way without calling it channeling. 

It really doesn’t matter what you call it. 

We’re all simply tapping into that well of universal wisdom. 

Everyone can do this. We all have access to this guidance and the healing. But it can be so helpful to have other people translate it for us, especially when we’re learning. Especially when we’re floundering. 

(I personally spend at least five percent of each day floundering, often quite a bit more.) 

But it was first called channeling for me, and that’s what stuck. 

Since falling down this rabbit hole, I’ve talked to dragons and Joan of Arc, gotten dating advice from Mary Magdalene, had visions of my future babies, had visions of other people’s then-future-now-present babies, hung out with Jesus, gotten writing tips from the ghost of Mary Oliver, released the ghost of the dude my grandpa killed in a bar fight in the ‘40s, had etheric birthday parties with unicorns doing back flips on trampolines - as much weird, amazing stuff as I can handle.

Playing with all this keeps opening new doors, and I’m so excited to see what comes through next.

Life is a Playground

You have this body. A pre-assigned suit you were born with, that hurts when you bash it and feels good when you rest it and lets you taste cheesesteak and spot red balloons in that blue, blue sky. You can dance with it. You can run with it. Its finely tuned responses and firing neurons help you drive the car that someone else’s firing neurons helped invent. Amazing.

With your body comes your brain. Nothing in the human experience escapes the story we’ve invented. As much as those stories torture us sometimes, the brain is also where all the great stories come from. West Wing, Friday Night Lights. David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell. Jane Austen, Walt Whitman. Each brain filters its stories differently and sometimes people write them down, giving us all access to endless variations. That’s an incredible thing.

But the brain is noisy. Full of agitated, hungry hamsters. That’s okay. You learn not to judge what goes through your brain because that’s a big, fat waste of a life. I speak as one who’s wasted a solid 78 percent of her waking hours listening to the hamster brain. Hush, hamster brain. You can sleep now.

It’s why we like sex so much. There’s a moment, right at the good part, when your brain just…stops. It’s still. Almost the only time it’s ever still. This is amazing. It’s peace. For the six whole seconds before it starts up again, prodding you to remember that maybe you did that one thing wrong and your partner maybe isn’t the best person for you to sleep with and you have a deadline in two days… yup, there it goes. But for one minute, there was relief. Even grace. Sometimes love. It’s best with love.

Work and money. That’s fun too, if you look at it the right way. People are always making amazing things. For work, after work, during work when maybe they should be doing something else. Everyone is creating. The smart ones are getting paid for it. Money is just a game, really. A game where the prize is collecting enough to board planes and buy birthday gifts and eat toro sushi on dishes someone else will wash for you.

Then there are the monsters. The gremlins. The trolls. Most of them live in your head — worries that never actually happen, worries that do happen but weren’t nearly as bad as you thought, worries you never thought to worry on until they blindsided you on a Wednesday morning. Evil little gremlins that look like parking tickets, that cold you can’t shake, abuse, unbearable loss. But if you look at them and feel them and love the gremlins, as best you can, they evaporate. Not the illness, not the unbearable loss, but holding love in the midst of pain gives you just enough space to breathe again.

Here’s my favorite part — the people. The people you love. The people you hate. If you don’t hate anyone — and you probably don’t — there are the people who aggravate you or manipulate you or teach you how to hurt. So you learn how to get over that hurt. You learn that no one can manipulate you unless you let them. No one can hurt you unless you allow it. You resist that lesson because it means that maybe you didn’t have to hurt as badly as you did or for as long. But maybe you did. Because that’s how you learned. Don’t get caught in that particular hamster wheel. No regret. Keep moving forward.

Because you have the world. The great, wide world. Stuffed with elm trees and hot sand and endless stretches of concrete with grass poking out of the cracks. You can see as much or as little of it as you want. Every piece has its own microcosm, until it barely matters what you see and what you don’t. That patch of daisies on the corner of the cul de sac where you grew and lived and died has as much as the Amazon rain forest or the Great Wall of China.

Life is a playground. An astounding, incredible playground. I rarely remember this. Most adults don’t. Kids do. Kids are full of joy and rage and live everything fully and loudly. Until we teach them to forget, because forgetting is how you get through a world where most don’t remember. Twenty or forty or fifty years later, you begin to recall what you once knew. That making things just for the joy of creating is good. That running around in a circle until you fall down is fun. That blowing bubbles just to watch them drift and float is one of the best ways to spend an afternoon.

You remember that nothing matters as much as you think it does. And everything matters more than you ever imagined.

The Ghost of Mary Oliver

Driving up the California coast to Point Reyes Station is one of my favorite things to do. I wander around, eat pizza, and occasionally buy expensive local tea or candles. I always stop in the little bookstore and poke around, because poking around tiny book shops in tiny towns is one of the great joys in life.

A few weeks ago, I was in the bookstore, post pizza and post glass of cabernet, and one of Mary Oliver’s books caught my eye.

She had passed away a short time before and I honestly didn’t realize how much of an impact her words and life had on people until everyone on my social media feed started posthumously quoting her.

I went to Barnard in the late ‘90s, conveniently coinciding with Mary Oliver’s tenure there. When President Obama spoke at Barnard’s graduation in 2012, I suspect my mom deeply regretted having me twelve years too early, but such things are generally beyond our control.

My own regrets surrounding my college years are fairly sparse. I only have two real disappointments and, weirdly, neither of them have anything to do with not going on a single date. I was a late bloomer in every respect and was too busy trying to navigate Manhattan as an empath who was still thirteen years away from learning what an empath was. Dating was simply beyond me and that was fine.

Instead, my two keen regrets were, and remain to this day:

Not accepting that Rolling Stone internship because I was too worried about money.

and

Being too chicken to apply for Mary Oliver’s small fiction-writing seminar.

I did take one of her big lecture classes, one you just had to sign up for before it filled. I don’t remember what the class was on - of the Virginia Woolf oeuvre probably - but I do remember writing a paper that had something to do with cherries. I was wildly proud of it until the mark I got didn’t reflect my excitement surrounding my cherry-driven conclusions.

To be fair, writing fiction scares me to this day. I don’t want anything bad to ever happen to anyone, much less people I’ve invented and so I control their fate and why would you do that to someone? But fiction where nothing bad happens tends to be deeply dull and no one wants to read deeply dull fiction.

Also, maybe I’m bad at it. I don’t like being bad at things.

But, god, what a waste. Can you imagine being one of seven or so students who got to work on their writing with Mary Oliver? Neither can I, because I was too paralyzed to grab the opportunity when it was offered to me.

All this flickered through my slightly cabernet-hazed brain as I stared at her book propped up on a table twenty years later.  

Gazing at her book, brain softened from the wine, Mary Oliver popped in and said, “I can work with you now.”

Startled, I looked around as if someone was standing next to me, but of course no one was. Thanks to my years of flirting with the unverifiable or maybe the wine, I didn’t immediately dismiss it.

One of my talents is jumping through dimensions, peering through veils, being a cosmic conduit, generally engaging with things that aren’t part of most people’s everyday reality.

But I rarely talk to dead people.

My father pops in every so often. My ex’s mother poked me pretty insistently a few months ago when she wanted to talk to him. (Luckily, this was less uncomfortable than it sounds, but there’s no way to text “Your dead mom wants to talk to you” to a former love without a little awkwardness creeping in.)

So when I heard the ghost of Mary Oliver offer to work with me on my writing, I did some checking - is this really her, are you sure this is a thing we can do - but I was basically on board.

When I did the double check on her identity, she just waited calmly for me to catch up.

When I asked “can we really work together” - tinged with the unworthiness that has colored most of the interactions in my life (sigh) - she replied:

“You have the potential. The potential.”

It was that slight emphasis on the second potential that sold me.

My own guidance knows how easily convinced I am that my work isn’t worth anything and I shouldn’t bother, so it rarely allows in any doubt, because it doesn’t want me to lose another year, five years, another decade. (Whoops.)

But this calm yet firm “You have the potential, but will you truly meet it?” just felt like her, even though how would I know? But it certainly wasn’t me or the energies I’m used to communicating with.

Maybe it was the glass of wine. That’s still an argument that can be made. But I prefer not to make it. I prefer to deepen into the trust I’ve spent years building around what I receive from the untouchable ether. Because all arguments of real or not-real aside, that’s simply more fun.

If the ghost of Mary Oliver is ready to help me with my writing, I’m ready to take it. Show me how, Mary Oliver. Show me what we can do together.  

“You’ll listen better now than you would have before,” she says. Which is also true.

Strangely, I’m far less intimidated by the ghost of Mary Oliver than I would have been by Mary Oliver in the flesh. It feels easier to connect, like she understands my own specific human frailty and will be kind about it, without putting up with it for long.

Or maybe it’s because I’ve always been better with the ethereal beings than with the real humans.

But maybe it’s also because this is what’s happening now, and we can only ever dance with what’s in front of us. Maybe this is also reminding me that it’s never too late. That maybe if we miss an opportunity at one point in our lives, that opportunity will circle back around twenty years later, when we’re finally ready for it.

There’s a lot of hope in that, and I feel like Mary Oliver wants to help us all lean into the hope and the possibilities that are here for us in this great, wide world.

“What if you didn’t need to suffer?”

Here, have a question that will implode your reality.

When my energy healer said this to me on Friday night, my brain went KABLAM. Like a cartoon frog being catapulted into outer space via rocket launcher.

That question is still sending ripples reverberating through my reality, a surprised green amphibian ricocheting through the continuum of Amber.

“What if you didn’t need to suffer?”

My god, what would I do with all that extra time?

Until the moment the question was asked, I didn’t realize how much of my experience was colored by suffering.

My thoughts, my feelings - basically the entirety of my internal reality.

The only time I’m not suffering is when I’m channeling, writing, dancing, eating, or maybe having sex.

But I want those times to be marked by joy, not the absence of suffering. My god.

I blame it all on my brain, of course. And that ever-pesky empath thing.

My brain throws a royal fit every time I expand. Since I’m expanding pretty much all the time right now, my brain is in a near constant state of flip-out. (Which is good, but when I’m mid-flip-out, I don’t remember that it’s good, so I just panic.)

Being an empath doesn’t help. Because so many other people in this world are suffering and I am picking up on it, simply by existing and doing things in the world. Things I can’t avoid. Like getting groceries. I do a pretty good job at being a hermit, but even hermits need potato chips.

What if I didn’t need to suffer?

What if I don’t need to suffer, just because everyone else is? What if I don’t need to suffer, just because my family did? What if I don’t need to suffer, just because the world says I do?

What if none of us need to suffer?

[KABLAM]

I know the answer is already floating around me. We always have the answer the moment the question is formulated. But my brain is still trying to catch up.

In this moment, I know the answer is breathe. Sink into your body, let your soul take the reins. Give your brain a break. This will allow a fuller understanding to come in, and the suffering to unravel and loosen and eventually drift away, leaving me in a different state of being.

When I was talking about this last night, I was asked: “What’s the opposite of suffering?”

I didn’t have a ready answer.

Peace? Joy? Neutrality?

Being?

I can’t think my way through this one. Thinking is more or less how I got into this mess in the first place. I can only be.

Trust the be-ingness of it all to unwind whatever suffering is woven throughout my experience, leaving freedom and, I don’t know, aliveness in its wake.

Some would argue that to be alive is to suffer. I would have probably been one of them. But I’m not sure I want to subscribe to that any more. I’m not sure it’s necessary.

What if we don’t need to suffer? What then? What opens up? What else can we experience?

The answers are still assembling, but I’m sure as hell ready to find out.

Cascade Falls in Mill Valley, California: a good place to go to not suffer.

Geriatric Wonder Woman

Yesterday, I tried to go for a run. All I could manage was a geriatric shuffle.

One conversation with one human earlier in the day had totally sapped me.

I have to be so, so careful about the energy I allow in. People’s energy and emotion can hit me like a dump truck. If I’m not on my guard, the truck will flatten me. And possibly dump old spaghetti all over my head.

One conversation and I lost an entire day. Poof!

Geriatric shuffle instead of a nice productive run and climbing into bed instead of working.

At least I notice the drain now. That’s significant improvement from my days of WHY CAN’T I MOVE WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME. I can assess the situation and understand that I’m not shaking it off because someone else’s judgment was pointing a finger at where I’m judging myself.

I can look at that judgment, decide what I want to do about it, return to my truth and trust that everything is unfolding perfectly. (While also texting a friend for reassurance that I am not a shitty person.)

(I am not a shitty person. My friend said so.)

As I was army-crawling my way through the sludge, I kept reminding myself that just because someone else has a story and energy around that story doesn’t mean it has to be my story or my energy. They can have their truth, I can have mine. It doesn’t mean anyone is wrong, it just means we all get to choose how things look and feel for us.

What helped was imagining a shield of light on my arm - kind of like Wonder Woman’s bracelets - that I could swing up to send the energy deflecting back.

Pew, pew!

Unfortunately, the second I put the shield down, the energy zoomed back in and dropped like a wet wool blanket thrown on top of me.

Honestly, it made me mad. Mad that this happens to me, mad that it still happens to me even as I learn more about how energy works, mad that people hurl their stuff at me because it makes them feel better, even knowing that I used to do the same thing - and sometimes still do, if I’m in enough pain.

But I woke up today feeling so much better. Knowing that I’m allowed to make determinations about who I choose to spend time with based solely on whether or not my energy is drained afterward.

I want to spend my time and energy with those who nourish me, not suck the actual life out of me. Which in turn helps me be someone who nourishes rather than drains.

Being an empath is weird. The interaction of energy is weird. This is supposed to be my area, but I still have so much to learn.

I find this frustrating, as I would so much rather be perfect and know everything already.

But today, after I did a few sessions - including one high-frequency star session that knocked everyone on their asses - I started to wonder about the really powerful and intense experiences my clients were having as we sat on conference calls together. Why is that?

OH. IT’S BECAUSE ALL I DO, ALL DAY LONG, IS HAVE INTENSE EXPERIENCES.

Why can’t I go to the grocery store without crying? Oh, because I’m me. Why can’t I have a charged conversation without having to take to my bed, like a Victorian heroine in a melodrama? Oh, because I’m me.

BECAUSE ALL DAY LONG I’M HAVING POWERFUL ENERGETIC EXPERIENCES.

While this sensitivity to energy is a major pain in my ass, it also helps me help other people have their own powerful experiences - of release, of transformation, of their own divinity, of their own power, of feeling so much better about whatever the challenge is - BECAUSE ALL I DO ALL DAY LONG IS HAVE POWERFUL ENERGETIC EXPERIENCES.

Big sigh for not being a normal human, having normal human experiences.

The upside is garlic cheese fries on session days (they’re grounding! really!) and Netflix. So I can watch other people having intense experiences, while I sit in bed and eat popcorn with my stuffed therapy otter.