DatingGod

The Anti-Guru

Half-way into the six-month Integral Shamanics Training Program I've come to realize deeply and fully why I waited so very long to launch it. I have an abhorrence of guruship, of being set up as cosmic teacher, of telling people what to do. It's a visceral reaction, an acknowledgement that the only teacher is an internal one, even as it uses outside sources as a mirror to reflect possibilities of growth, awareness, leaps in consciousness. 

Early in 2011, I became obsessed with the program's vision. I could see its simplicity, its practical application. It was a stripped down, clarified version of the tools I use to do shamanic and psychic sessions for people, tools I'd honed from some 30 years of study and practice with shamans, energyworkers, psychics, yogic masters. The program structure was taken directly from the architecture of my Master's degree in Public Health with its concentration in Social Behavior and Community Health. The philosophic underpinnings were what I'd come to see as human culture circa the new millennium, what the false belief systems were, how entrenched they were in the human mind, body, heart, spirit, and how painful and arduous the process was likely to be as a person set about freeing themselves from them. And how simple, though not easy, the process to freedom was.

I knew the program wasn't about enlightenment, couldn't be about Waking Up. And not only because I myself wasn't enlightened (whatever the frak that is) but also because I understood so very clearly that enlightenment can't be pursued, much less taught. What the program would be was an introduction to a small but comprehensive set of tools, tools for accessing the energetic data stream that runs underneath, behind this thing we call "world".

The tools would be straightforward - shamanic, psychic, energywork. Participants would learn how to shamanic journey, build a medicine bag, connect with guides and power beings. They'd access the psychic flow of data using the psychic channels present inside of themselves. They'd clear and balance the energybody using sound, movement and repatterning techniques, tune chakras. They'd bring all of these skills into practical applications in their everyday living.

A personal development component was also added to help people navigate the ass-kickings the body-mind-heart-spirit go through as they attempt to peel away the beliefs they hold at a deep level. These false beliefs say that the keys to their freedom lie in another's hands, that anything not observed with the five senses is imagination or mental illness, that the only reality is the one that media, friends, technology, family, government, health practitioners and mainstream educators say is real. And they aren't real, only a mass consensus, layered over and over, a hundred thousand layers deep, until the layers appear as a solid ground. But they're not. Yet the trick is to unpeel the layers, allow them to fall away, even while navigating the fear that arises as what was once believed to be a solid floor to stand on is in fact merely wisps of thought, feeling, projection.

The vision of the program hinged on levels of awareness: Access the data stream while lying down with eyes closed to enter shamanic reality (journeying), then access the stream sitting up with eyes open (psychic reading), then bring it all together while standing and moving the body (energywork). The three levels of access each hold a key to the free and easy access that is inherent in the stream.

Shamanic journeying requires surrender and acceptance of the flow of data - a kind of passive release into the universal energyfield, to interact with the healers and guides and beings that can be met with there. This softens the hold the mind has on controlling and shaping what is allowed into consciousness enough so that the prison walls that are our current culture's human mindstate can be dissolved enough to be seen through. 

Psychic reading is acceptance of the fact that we have the ability to know what's going on, and that accessing this knowledge is as easy as pulling a book off the shelf or net, and then reading it. This breaks through the belief that psychic info can only be accessed by people who have "the gift", or that it's something that is mystical or spiritual. It shows that it's simply another way to read, to gather information, like surfing a universal google portal.

Energywork is acknowledgement of the energyfield that flows through body heart and mind, that moves through environments, all of it setting the stage for how human consciousness is experienced. If there is dis-ease in the body, mind or heart, there is also imbalance in the energyfield, and by working with this powerful underpinning of the material world, the body, mind and heart can be healed.

And so it goes.

It's now three months into the inaugural six-month program, and folks are beginning to find their sea legs in the shifting currents of their expanding awareness. There's less fear and more excitement in the exploration. And most of them finally get that I'm not a guru, just a fellow explorer who is passing on identification of the tools, sharing some ways to use them, encouraging them to find their own way, their own method of incorporating them into their own storyline.

Because I'm not a guru. And the past three months have held some very intense moments where some of these nine folks got upset or angry when they came to me for The Recipe To Fix The Unhappy, and I gently or not so gently, handed it back to them. One person quit the program, then a few days later, rejoined, in many ways still wanting to quit, but willing to keep showing up, because the expansions being experienced ultimately surpassed the fear arising. Three people almost quit - I watched them descend into something awful inside of themselves, where they saw that all they wanted was the happy and the joyful and the funk arising was certainly not that. And then each one of them got it: the awful, the funk, was only the barrier, the block, the one they'd been banging their heads against for years. And each one of them faced it straight on, and passed through the wall as if it weren't there, like the collection of layers, of false beliefs that it was.

For over a decade, I set myself up as a spiritual teacher, with the goal to project an image of perfection, of radiant light and sweetness, of Having Arrived At Healed. But I've learned that one of the most valuable things I can show to others is that this swirl of living can be faced and swum in without drowning, no matter how dark or light the waters appear. Transparency is more valuable than the projection of another layer, no matter how shimmery that layer appears. And that until I get my own sea legs with this new way of showing up, I'll be facing my own walls until they dissolve into mist.

We all have walls to walk through. I plan to keep orchestrating this training program reflecting that. Showing my process. Letting them see what goes on behind the curtain, even when someone has mastered all the tools they're just learning to use.

And so I'm not a guru, or even a teacher. Just a guide, a shamanic cartographer. A flicker of their false belief system made manifest, so that they can see through, and then let me go when their hearts, minds, bodies, spirits are clear enough, strong enough to let go of the image projected out of this being called Katherine. 

Why? Why Not?

The dirt nap is coming for us all . . . a conscious dance of shiva is a good way to go . . .

Zoom and Stillness

It's been a roller coaster couple of weeks inside this brain, body, heart. Nothing going, of course, according to plan.

The plan was to do a deep cleanse for the nine days after leaving the fellowship. Water fast, yoga, walking, lots of sleep. Instead I sort of crash landed into a pile of No, and spent the time mostly resisting the urge to pack up the kitties and flee to some cabin in the middle of nowhere. 

Partial cleanses occurred. Lots of sleep occurred. Days free of burning and fermented and caffeinated plants occurred. Carby snacks found their way into my belly, via a tunnel in my mind. Kitties snuggled the heck out of me, then avoided me when the No got too noisy. Joyful interactions, and less joyful interactions. Stepping up and backing away.

I got a lot of work done. Okay, maybe not a lot, but enough. Over the next couple of months, This is happening, and there's lots to do to build it in a way that's strong, stable.

Part of the last couple of weeks has been questioning whether or not I can pull it off. I've been doing this work for almost three decades. Teaching others how to do it for the past fifteen years. Planning it for over a year. But putting it all together, in three local and global online locations? This is new.

The tagline for the training is: Mastery, Transparency, Tribe. It's technique based - shamanic skills, psychic skills, personal development - a very practical way of learning how to access, translate and utilize the data stream that runs behind, underneath this world. Gold standard methods used worldwide, across all times. Clear, straightforward, easily learnable, like playing the piano, or learning to read.

But a vital aspect of using these skills isn't so head-on and has to do with transparency. It's around how to do healing work without pretending to be sunshine and light, without wearing a mask of "perfect". Because trying to show up in a certain way blocks the flow, actually decreases access, and limits the ability to translate.

And yet sunshine and light is generally what's expected of healers. Being respectful, being kind, is simply about being decent. Whether the healer is a physician or a massage therapist or an energyworker, decency goes a long way in helping clients, patients, relax enough, feel safe enough, to enter into their own space of healing. But the dynamic of healer as perfect, and client as broken, needs to change.

We're all - every single one of us - in various places of aliveness and decay. It's the way of this place, this world. Enlightened people get the flu, die of cancer, go bankrupt. People with abusive tendencies and lots of cash have access to medical treatments that 99% of the world barely knows exists. There is no "fairness", only flow, movement, change.

We take the actions that Life is urging us to take. Or we fight the urge, based on some sort of "should" lodged inside the body-heart-mind of how we believe we're supposed to show up in the world. We find a hole in the wall of resistance, and take action to release the should. Or we sit at the base of the wall, and eat cupcakes and watch tv to pass the time, trying to ignore the drumbeat inside that says: Further.

Facing who we are, and who we're not, takes courage, fortitude, and usually comes packaged with suffering. Grief and mourning are part of it. Anger and depression, too. So is pointless joy, random moments of synchronicitous hilarity and revelations of perfection. And on the other side? Immense gratitude. 

The past couple of weeks have been about asking myself: how dare you step up to take on a tribe of folks, to teach them, be with them as they navigate their own storms? It all just seems too big, so impossible, so foolish to take on. I feel inadequate to the task, afraid that my own patterns and struggles will keep me from being there for folks in the ways that they need, from engaging with them in a way that facilitates Yes for both of us.

But where I keep coming back to is this: it's still about individuals, helping them see the map, teaching them how to read a word, a sentence, a paragraph at a time, showing them how to access their own individual way of translating this for themselves, the people they serve in their living. It's about doing session with them, entering into the landscape inside of them, helping them unweave the No a strand at a time, see the story they surround themselves in. It's about feeling such profound joy whenever Life gives me the opportunity to do this with someone. It's about showing up, over and over, even when fear is present. It's about being still and knowing All Is Well. 

And of course, as usual, Life has shot me through a tube, dumping me out with a thud in a land where only one path is available. I suppose I could listen to the fear that says I'm an idiot for not being in a job with health insurance and 48K a year. But that path disappeared a few months back. I hunted around for it for a while, and still am open to a trail if it happens, if I find it. But for now, there is only this one path, called Tribe of Yes, and the landscape is mostly unknown, and the flow of dark moon and bright sunlight cycle quickly, and the razor's edge between delusion and vision is hard on the feet.

Maybe I'm throwing a party and no one will come. Maybe this is just another emptying out. Or maybe this is when it all comes together - the shamanic, the psychic, the science, the muscles gained from years of mountain climbing - to create something that assists this huge shift in consciousness we're all deep inside.

I want to teach as many folks as possible about the data stream. How it's there for all of us, like an infinite library that contains all times, backwards and forwards, all dimensions. How the library card is our birthright, along with opposable thumbs and highly functioning frontal lobes. How to use that data stream to help connect the global biosphere in a way that sings Yes, that births a global organism that joins in the conscious, universal dance with truth, eyes wide open.

And as it all unfolds, I'll write more about the process. Transparency was taught to me here, in this digital stream that connects humans across vast distances of time and space. And so the word, the vibration, that I'm aligning to match is: courage.

Courage in the face of the No.

Courage in the midst of storms.

Courage in the quiet, the stillness, the Nothing.

Courage.

Psychic TV, Tech Support, The Story of I

The process I've been going through the past few years with the Integral Shamanics work has been paralleling the Waking Up/personal dismantling. I'm constantly questioning, asking: is this true? is it genuinely helpful? what does it really do? how can it be done better? clearer and more easily translatable? more usefully? is there bullsh*t involved? how can it be pared away to reveal the Yes?

The IS email list of ~200 people, a list collected over the past decade, has been a gift. It's a mash-up of a few lists started, maintained haphazardly, then set down when I went through transitions where the holistic work was let go of for a while. When I pick it back up again, I start a new list, but then eventually send out an email to the old list, inviting anyone who wants to rejoin the new to let me know. 

200 doesn't seem like a lot of people, but these are core folks - they open the email newsletters, reach out for sessions or to give updates or just say howdy. They are a lot like this blog, which has honed itself down to about 50-75 readers - again, not a lot of folks comparatively, but core people, many of whom have been following DG for years, some since the beginning back in 2003. About 20 of those keep in fairly regular contact, either through comments or email, but most show up once or twice a year, when a post triggers something for them, and they feel to de-lurk.

I'm happy with both circles of connectivity because despite the changes of the past decade, and the comings and goings, both provide a sense of love, of respect and acceptance, and also a safe place. Inside that safety I get the deep blessing of growing in the presence of family, of tribe who knows I'm a bit of a problem child, but that there are also waves of adulthood that come with gifts for the folks who feel to tune in.

They are also a kind of laboratory, a place to send out invitations when I'm trying something new, when another deep transformation is under way. I bring the underpinnings and basic architecture of these first to this blog, and then when some of the kinks are ironed out, and the flow is a little clearer, to the IS email list.

With the blog, it's more of my own personal action. With the list, the action beyond the personal takes place, where whatever gets triggered via the blog or the newsletter moves. The folks who want to engage in sessions, who want to take the conversation started digitally and move it to analogue, who are engaged in their own conscious process of transformation, feel to reach out for some assistance. In the land of minimal connection that has become my living, this is where the deep fun begins.

Once or twice a year, I contact a psychic or shamanic practitioner when I feel to reach out for help. It happens when I'm good and jammed up around some issue and the suffering has gotten red line and I need a little perspective outside of my own brainbox. Usually there's a fair amount of fear going on inside me, but even with that, it's always a dang good time. 

It's fun to get info around a thorny issue scratching up my living, but it's also great fun to watch another deepwork practitioner do their thing, to see what sort of tools they use, what sort of story they wrap their data in for presentation to both their psyche and mine. Most access some sort of guide or guides who tell them what the deal is, which they relay to me. Some just see an entangled path in the living and get to clearing it.

Most have a truly wonderful sense of humor - a delightful mix of la-la-la lightness and pitch black dark humor around the horror, man, the horror. Some are all business - they go in, do whatever it is they do, come out, give the facts, ma'am, just the facts, like they're working a conveyor belt, if that conveyor belt were worked by someone very, very skilled at watching and tweaking and assembling the shamanic widgets gliding past. 

And with every passing day, I watch more and more closely what it is that I do in session with my own clients. There is the part of me that is doing the work, fully engaged in the healing process being done for the person. Then there's the aspect of my consciousness that is receiving personal healing and messages, a sort of parting gift from The Almighty Yes for the work being done. And then there's the overarching witness, who watches and notes everything occurring. 

This witness is sort of like a recorder - for everything, all aspects - probably some sort of personal awareness of the Akashic Records in motion. This same recording that's utilized to analyze layers and details post-session can also be used if a client asks a specific question weeks or months down the line about something that occurred during a particular session. Or even years later, such as the email I received yesterday about how I'd said during a psychic session 8 years ago that her business would franchise in 8 years, and how as I read the email of how she was now franchising, the energy of that session, her response, rehydrated back into my conscious mind with clarity.

For the past year I've been working on a proposal for an Integral Shamanics Healer training program. It's grown to around twenty pages of outline on all aspects of it - content and flow, and also how to structure it so it can be web-based. And as I've worked on the proposal, sorting out what it is I actually do and how to teach it to others, going through all of the syllabi and materials for classes and workshops I've done over the past 15 years, it's fed the session work, and vice versa. 

And then there are the sessions themselves. For the past few weeks I've been hyper-conscious of exactly what happens in sessions - how the information comes in, how I translate it and relay the info to clients, how it's received. 

With the shamanic sessions, the soul retrievals, it's like watching tv, but without sound. There's often a cartoon kind of feel to it, as if I'm watching an animated version of real life. It comes across visually as real, but with slightly blurred edges, like watching a streaming net video of less than stellar quality, which causes the moments and images that broadcast in hyper-High-Def to come through with an almost psychedelic quality, so multi-dimensional it takes my breath away, jolts the mind a little, like a few seconds of a Mystical State.

There's usually a mythic feel to the sessions, grand and sweeping, like a high-budget movie with A-list celebrities, with the client as star, and me as the character that walks around for a bit, sometimes interacting, but mostly watching, collecting. But rather than a movie's straightforward dialogue and visuals, the scenes that unfold in the sessions are what I've come to call "emotional gestures", a kind of highly dramatic heuristic of a person's issues, beliefs, their personal wounds - emotional, physical, mental, spiritual - as well as their ancestral wounds, passed down from their family, tribe, the planet.

It's common that scenes from past lives come up, a sort of how-to of how the wound began, how it was carried into and is being expressed in the current life. And the "missing soul pieces" are also pointed out, by the lens of whatever it is that points the camera of my witness, that brings the mystical states in and out, sometimes to stop motion, rewind, play it again, sometimes several times, often at different angles or levels of close-up or wide shot.

The incoming flow of information and scenes seems to have nothing really to do with me. I don't create it or shape it, just witness. I'm not striving to make anything happen, just releasing into the unknown, staying relaxed so as not to squeeze, think or flex away from the flow of energy, information, data.

The real work comes toward the end of the session, when the journey into shamanic reality downshifts into four-wheel drive, when the actual real-time healing part begins, where the soul pieces are integrated back into the bodies, resistance and blocks to healing played with, toxins/No/imbalances healed. After this flows into conclusion, I come out and speak with the client, telling them what I saw, what happened.

This final fifteen or twenty minutes of an hour session is the most challenging part because it's often not what a person would prefer to hear, and it's usually around things they'd rather not talk about or want seen. More and more though, the sorts of folks who've been doing session seem more ready, more willing, are stronger, their hearts and minds more flexible, able to take in more info.

The psychic readings follow a similar path, but because I'm not going into "shamanic reality", it's more of a conversation, a back and forth, the client stating what they'd like to look at, a sentence or two around what they feel the issue is, like going in to a physician's office and saying: it hurts here. And then I go in and look around, watch the flow of information that arises. 

There's very little mythic feel to psychic readings. They come across as more practical. It's still like watching tv, but they often have sound to them, and the visual/audio stays in the background because the two layers are occurring at the same time: watching the scenes and interpreting them to clients as the scenes unfold in the moment. During a psychic session, I'll sometimes stop and go silent for a few moments so to better tune in, go deeper, before I come back to the surface to relay the info. How I picture it is that there is this world, and then there is the psychic/shamanic/dream layer beneath it, and to do this kind of work means to move between the worlds. Shamanic sessions are immersing in the world beneath this one, then coming back and speaking about the what was seen and done. The psychic sessions are a quick moving back and forth, surfacing and immersing depending on what needs to be done and where.

In a psychic session there's more time to go back and forth with the interpretation. As the info is being relayed I can watch how the client receives each chunk, and energy levels can be readjusted- tools like kindness, firmness, languaging, metaphor, backstory, pauses for their commentary and insights flowing in to tweak the reception.

I use to say that the psychic readings were more informational, and the shamanic sessions were more experiential, but I've come to see that the only real difference is how the client feels to receive the information. Not everyone can or even wants to wrap their brain around a shamanic session's contents, but most folks can engage in a psychic reading as it appears much like a deep conversation between two people.

But the psychic readings usually only take a person so far. They're like pointing out tools to a person, and whether they choose to use them post-session is up to them. During the shamanic sessions, actual healing takes place, sometimes fully, often as a jump-start, a clearing away of enough debris on the path so that they can gather up some speed. I'm much more conscious of the fact that this is their gig, and my presence is as tech support, cartographer, editor for film quality and selection of content. 

Realizing that's it's story, relating to it like story doesn't diminish what it is. Because it's all story. Western med, Korean applied Chinese medicine, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy - all story. We're all on an adventure called Being Alive, and knowing the story is half the fun.

And I'm so grateful to have one of the best seats in the house. To tune in and watch shows on the billions of channels that is Life in motion. To witness the flow of Yes, and the seeming No that blocks it. To have the vantage point of seeing that it all fits together, an infinite mosaic of Beingness living out each sliver in full-on prism.

You do, too, sweet Tribe of Yes. You do, too. All that has to be done is Open Your Eyes . . .

Shamanic Psychic Obsession

I get rather obsessed about things. All sorts of things. I discover spaghetti squash and a perfect-results way to cook it and then proceed to eat it a dozen times a week, for weeks on end. Or happen upon a new tv program - like the Stargate shows - and watch 25, 30, 35 episodes a week for weeks, months on end, until all 300+ shows are watched. Or yoga, 2, 3, 4 times a week for months. Or books on anarchy, or homesteading, or greenery growing and grainery brewing, dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of them.

These obsessions come and go, and my elegant theory around it all is that because of my psychic shamanic sensitivities, whatever is happening in my body/mind/spirit gets amplified, and if it detects something is needed, things like motivation and will go pedal to to the metal until whatever need is occurring gets satiated. And then it's done. Finito. 

For a couple of decades I was obsessed with performing and the fame that goes with it, with that transformation to bright, sizzling, vast energy that fills a person with brilliant light when they plug into it. Sometimes it was just as a model with the presence of a photographer. Other times it was on stage in front of 1000 people, bright lights shining heat, the rustle of the crowd like the sound of a lover's breathing, the small movements of their body telling you how to open them, how to receive them.

And then it shifted to the holistic work. Releasing into that space of vast, charged, deeply humming energy in such a way that all the people in the room could be taken with me, class space as space ship into the infinite Yes. Or adjusting the environment on all sense levels so the person on the table receiving energywork was invited, carried, linked into the energy space that lives just behind this ordinary one, supported as they found their own way to meet and inhabit the Yes. 

And now that is falling away - that need for either myself or the people I'm with to be in a state of heightened awareness, to submerge into the mystical experience of the layers underneath the layer called World. It's been falling away for a few years now. Not because those heart expanding, mind blowing, body luscious states aren't YES. They are. But with each passing day, I get that it is genuinely the Yes that's calling to me, and that where I'm heading now is toward the yes. Which is very quiet. And inside. This human body. And the body of kitties. The body of plants. The body of stones and soil and rain and dwelling and apple and bowl and shoe and bed. 

Who knows where this human called Katherine will end up? The movement is away from other humans. I wish it weren't. I so wanted to be a part of the tribe - loved, respected, a member who contributed in a deep and meaningful way. I guess that's the desire to be a hero that lives in all of us, yes? To bring back fire for our tribe. To save us from the coming storm. 

But all that is falling away too. And is almost gone.

What's left is a new obsession, a simple one - to make a living in a useful, bullsh*t-free way. It's been building for a few years, rotating on a single question: what do I have to offer folks that is genuinely helpful to them? And for most people, asking themselves this question is pretty straightforward- learn carpentry and get a job, get credentialled and go teach (although in today's job market, this path isn't as clear as it used to be). 

For three Mach-10 years that culminated with the right to attach several letters after my name, I was obsessed with higher learning, with science, with psychology and public health and social behavior and chronic disease. I still am. But it's rapidly becoming clear that I don't fit into the culture of that world. 

Maybe it's the job I'm in. It's too visible. My freakness is too obvious to the folks around me. We leave an important meeting with high-level folks, and two minutes out the door, the CEO asks me: so what are your thoughts? And because I haven't had time to process, what comes out is something way beyond a recap of How The Meeting Went.

I've got it together enough to not speak about how all sorts of different health issues each meeting attendee was dealing with was lifted into the light, and how their different emotional patterns fit into each physical expression, and how that impacted the way in which they heard what my team and I were trying to explain to them. But the clinical, professional assessment of presentation and reception? Not currently something I can give on the fly. I need some time to shape it, to figure out what needs to be edited out. Otherwise the psychic shamanic cat is out of the bag, and it won't be read as psychic shamanic. It'll simply look childish or emotional or irrelevant or just freakin bizarre.   

And it's a small office. I watch the discomfort of the folks around me - they know something is off about me but they can't put their finger on it. Am I immature? Am I arrogant? Is it lack of confidence that has me pulling back? Is it social ineptness that has me missing basic social cues? They don't understand that I've spent a lifetime discovering the hundred thousand other things occurring just behind the ordinary reality. That I'm watching things they can't see yet, hearing things they can't identify yet, putting things together in a way they haven't gotten strong enough to deal with yet.

This doesn't make me better or smarter or anything like that. By far, I am surrounded by folks smarter, savvyier than me. You seriously do not want someone like me building your bridge or developing your biologic cancer treatment. Me? I'm like the folks on Alphas or even X-men or even the cancelled tv show Lie To Me. It's just mutation that's been practiced and honed to a skill.

Did I just compare myself to a superhero? What the f*ck else can you compare this shamanic psychic thing to? Van Gogh and his mad visual acuity around color? Perfumers and their hyper-sensitivity to scents? These are all still about the known, accepted five senses, and the shamanic psychic thing is the spidey sense that lives inside of a human, with conduits through the nervous and digestive systems, receptors in the pineal gland and solar plexus, a kind of hijacking of different areas of the brain so that the inflow of data can be interpreted as visuals or smells or sounds or emotions.    

So why aren't I a superhero? Why aren't people flocking to me in droves for this fantastic shamanic psychic whammy that I can lay on them? 

There are dozens of possible answers to this. Some that blame me for being a crazy, deluded, incompetent wackjob. Others that blame clients for wanting the psychic feel-good, as in don't tell me the truth, tell me what I want to hear, tell me good things about flowing cash and loving soulmates and meaningful careers and effortless vibrant health. 

But the truth of it is that these skills and abilities live inside me. I've honed them for years. It's a normal part of every day. And it doesn't work like other people think it should work. It's more like being a physician, a healer, than most folks realize.

It's not:

I Know Everything About Everything, And Can Make Very Very Good Things Happen To The People Who Give Me Cash to Sit In The Scary Eyes Metaphysics of My Divinely Appointed Tarot Card Reading and Connection With Angels and Dead People

But rather:

This is what is occurring, this is what set it into motion, and these are different options and these are the most likely outcome for each of them. 

Not very sexy, is it?

And really, how successful is a doc who just says: lay off the cake and get your fat a*ss to the gym? And the ones that tell you the cancer is coming if you don't quit smoking or a heart attack is on its way if you don't lay off the Bo*jangles? Probably the least popular of all.

People want pills and treatments, they want genuine healing. They go in sick and want to come out well. That's what I go to my Korean acupuncturist for. But I'm not really that kind of healer. (I do healing work - the shamanic psychic thing has that piece to it, too, but the freakin scope of that is best saved for another post)

And so what am I? I'm more of an MRI. An organic MRI that sees physical, mental, emotional patterns. But how can I use this skill? What do I have to offer folks that is genuinely helpful to them? 

I have to make a living. Don't we all? My obsession with getting the BA and master's was around plugging into a career in a field I found fascinating and spot on with usefulness. 

And yet I don't fit. In a way that I understand may get me fired. My current contract is a temp one that ends January 1. I most likely have a job until then :) because I'm not failing at the job they hired me for - I'm just more weird and less fantastic than they thought I'd be. But who knows? And who knows after that? 

I'm applying for different jobs in the area, all public health chronic disease sort of gigs, but in larger companies, where I stand a better chance of blending in to the scenery, having my freakness be less visible (it's how I thrived in Cubicleland and Hiveworld).

The desire and need to be plugged into the Bright Mystical YES is gone. The obsession now is a life spent communing with plants, animals, weather, stones, of pulling even further back from World and into earth. 

And yet the question still comes around, over and over: What do I have to offer folks that is genuinely helpful to them? And how do I make a living doing it? 

Corporate intuitionist? Garden shop worker? Animal shelter attendant? Jury selection consultant? Some form of IntegralShamanics healer I don't know of yet? 

Living Outside the Box

Back in 2004, on the very first day in the back-to-school-extravaganza I took part in at the age of 38, in my very first class, psych 101, we watched a video on pathological states. And there, up on the screen, I saw my friends and colleagues and I described, the very basic skill of energetic connection we used, the one that flowed dozens of times a day as a normal part of our living.

In the film, it was described as mental illness, delusional people hallucinating that they could talk to plants, that the plants could talk back. And as I sat in that Albany, NY university auditorium, shame flooded through me, a sense of horror at being found out, judged as crazy, tossed out of the halls of science for being a nutcase. 

It was a warning flare from Life, letting me know what the lay of this new land was, what I was facing, what I'd need to do if I were to survive the experience I'd felt so strongly to pursue that I'd moved to a new city, left everything and everyone I knew behind. Life let me know that I'd have to disguise myself, have to hide who I was. Because if I began talking about energy and the connectivity of living, the web-like fascia between all beings - plants, animals - humans and non-humans all the same - stones - everything - they'd lock me up and feed me pharmaceuticals. And this wasn't random fear. These were the facts of this new world: No Wackjobs Allowed. 

In general, going back to college sounds like a normal enough thing. Sure - there are the challenges of the expense, the uprooting of a lifestyle, the mental strain. But for me, it was like entering the enemy camp. For those of you who've been reading this blog long enough, you'll remember I called myself a Spy in the Land of The Mind. 

I'd lived a nomadic life, based on pursuit of something outside of mainstream living, something I could feel pulsing inside of me, so gorgeous, so amazing, so outrageously Yes only an idiot would say no. Activated when I was a child by nature and books and accelerated learning in school, it shifted in teenage years toward theater and acting, being onstage or in front of the camera, and to the drugs, alcohol, promiscuous sex that went along with that lifestyle, that community. In my twenties it moved on to yoga, meditation, running, clean diet, the rigidity of ashram living. After that, things seemingly devolved for a while, a breaking down into the dark side of it all, fleeing an evil guru, escaping into exile onto the mean streets of NYC, getting drunk, stoned, more and more often. And then 30 came along, and I fled the city, spent a year in a kind of shock, then turned 31, beginning an intensive time of self-healing that paralleled a 7-year apprenticeship with an energetic master who helped hone psychic and energywork skills in a 100+ different modalities. I got strong and learned and rooted.

This next part I only remembered just last night. I'd forgotten it these past eight years, forgotten the beginning of the freefall that landed me in Albany, caused me to walk away from the happiest life I'd ever known. I'd always thought it was a series of events, cascading loss that ripped through my living - loss of best friend, violent downstairs neighbor that led to loss of home, betrayal by my lover, 9-11 that brought a difficult economic landscape to the NYC upper suburbs I lived in. But what preceded these events was something that set me up inside myself for all the events, or my reaction to them, to break apart my life so intensely that I'd have little choice but to go nomad again.

For 7 years I'd apprenticed with a master, learned her techniques, made them my own, incorporated them with other skills learned from shamans and psychics and energyworkers. By year two, I was seeing clients of my own, building a name as a strong healer, working with corporations, hospitals, working with other healers in the group, refining our techniques together. My abilities bloomed, deeply so, so intensely that even my teacher called me for assistance, to look at issues inside of herself or her family. 

In year 6, things began to change. There was a group of ~10 that had been studying with the energy master for five or more years, and in around year three, the teacher let in a new person, said she was accomplished enough to join the advanced group, although we all had to spend time bringing her up to speed. Over the following couple of years or so she became very close with the teacher and the group dynamic began to change.

I was one of only two of the group who was working as an holistic practitioner full-time, and both of us were poised to begin assisting the teacher as she expanded her classes. But instead of either one of us, the new student began assisting. I don't even know really how it happened. I didn't really think in terms of ambition, or lineage, or any of that sort of thing. But one day, I got a call from the new student, saying that she and the teacher had decided that if I wanted to be a part of the new training program expansion, I'd have to study under the student until she felt I was ready. 

It was one of those moments that feels like a bomb going off, total silence for a few moments as you try to figure out what just happened, utterly disoriented. I'm trying to remember what the actual conversation was but I only remember fragments - me saying: but that makes no sense, why would I need to train with you when I have more experience than you, have years and years more practice, when you still are using the techniques in rudimentary form, and haven't worked much with clients?  . . . and she saying, interrupting me over and over, passive aggressive comments that all members of our group found difficult in dealing with her, how she'd shut her eyes and simply keep talking, talking over anything that you tried to say, allowing only monologue on her part, only opening her eyes and smiling broadly when you'd finally given up and gone silent and she'd hug you and say: so we're agreed! and she'd happily walk off.

But that day, that conversation, I held my ground. No, I would not train under her. No, it was not okay that I was supposedly not allowed to assist in any of the classes. No, it was not okay that I was to stop working with clients until cleared by her. No, I didn't believe that this is what the teacher wanted. The student was not amused.

Weeks of back and forth commenced, culminating in the teacher agreeing with me - there was no need to train with the student. But the damage was done, and the training program expansion went on without me. Oops, the student forgot to let me know about a class date. Oops, she forgot to include me in organizing schedules or days or practices, or really anything. She simply left me out of the loop, and the teacher would back the student, saying how busy the student was with her full time job in addition to the training program, how she didn't mean to exclude me. And so I let go of trying to be a part of the school, and focused on my own practice, my own clients.

Within a year, all senior students were essentially working under the student, and the once cohesive collective of vibrant healers was now just a group of women who saw one another less and less. And when the teacher moved to California, the local school shifted completely under the student's control. 

That last year, I took a job working part time in a women's gym as a trainer. The student would stop by the gym every few months or so, and I'd initially feel so glad. The ruffled feelings, the group dynamic shift, had all been so upsetting. I just wanted us all to feel close, to be a part of the new training program together. And so the student would show up at my gym, say she just wanted to stop by and say hello, and I'd feel happy to be included, sought out. But within minutes she'd ask for my psychic advice - issues she had going on at her job, or with her romantic life. I'd tell her what I saw, but it was never what she wanted to hear, and she'd be dismissive, condescending in that broadly smiling way of hers, then walk off, and I'd stand there, feeling like sh*t and not knowing why.

And so, when the cascading shift of change hit, I just let go, let it all go, stopped fighting it. My heart felt so broken, I felt so defeated on every level, I just walked away, left it all behind, didn't even try. I gave away my possessions, gave notice on my apartment, even though I didn't have anywhere else to go, any money saved, no plan, nothing.

And I think after that, I was ready for anything. It's like I was stripped nekkid and jettisoned out into a brand new life like a blank slate. I had no idea what was next. And so on that morning when I woke up on that mountaintop in that cabin in Virginia with one of those emotionless directives: Go Back To School, I just did it, amazed and delighted as a dozen things clicked into place effortlessly, dumping me out into Albany, NY in less than three months. And in three years of back to back semesters, I had a BA in Psych, a master's in Public Health, over 10 years as an holistic practitioner, and no idea what to do with it all.

I found that because of all of the science I now understood, to the holistic crowd, I'd become a sellout or a partypooper or simply The Man. I found that I couldn't go back and simply be a holistic practitioner, and so I've pressed on forward, into the unknown.

The job I'm at now is a fellowship with a contract that ends January 1st. I don't know what happens after that. I don't know if there's a place for me in this world, this world of highly educated, savvy people whose religion is science and who live by its tenets absolutely, unequivocally. These are the people who run the world, who head hospitals and universities and government agencies, run corporations and research centers. They were, vastly by and large, raised in comfort and support. If they ever heard a plant speak to them, they'd see a doc, get a scrip, breathe a sigh of relief as the plants around them fell silent.

To them, people like me are freaks, mentally ill, just plain weird. Although sometimes, because it's become trendy, people like me can be kind of fun, if we do things like feng shui or meditation, as long as it's Granolahead Lite, as long as it makes other people feel happy and good about themselves, their life. They don't want the dark side, don't want the death or the void, don't want a light shined on the carefully constructed illusions they believe to be reality. Of course not. They are at the top of society, the upper level of resources and knowledge and power and control. Why would they want someone who sees it genuinely differently?

I want to tell them that we're heading into a very dark time, but that it's going to be okay, even as everything we know changes. I want to tell them what's coming, but it isn't what anyone wants to hear, and I've learned, hard learned, to hold it in, to not speak.

I wish I had the courage to just be a freak, to let others believe what they do, view me as whatever they do. But only a few hundred years ago they were burning people like me at the stake, fifty years ago tossing us in snake pit mental institutions. Now they press us to take medication, and if we still don't conform, they kick us out of communities, jobs, churches, families, peer groups. 

When visionary leaders talk about how they want people who think outside the box, they mean color of skin, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, maybe even small degrees of "different" in thought or perception. But for people who truly live outside the box of mass consciousness? Hell no. That's insanity. That's anarchy. 

And I watch as I drift even further away from the herd. Getting stranger. Less involved. Seeing underneath even more layers of this thing we call The World. I'm much better at not saying anything, not commenting or speaking to what I see, what is obviously going on.

Yet it gets more difficult to see the line between what they believe is and isn't okay. It's as if all of living were an enormous swath of expression, movement, flow, and where we are as a species, where the mass consciousness is, is a demarcation on that continuum: We will believe in things you can see, hear, smell, taste or touch physically - anything other than that is a pathology that corrupts sensory perception, rendering it unreliable.

And yet I've been a psychic, a shaman, an energyworker, an Alternative Practitioner for so long that it's simply how I live. I am constantly inappropriate, realizing it only in that three second wake of silence as the people around me attempt to compute the anomaly.

Did you know this? Did you know that there's a very specific language, dance, collection of images in a culture, a subculture, a metaculture? Did you know that this is all a tightly choreographed dance? If you're a female, did you shave your armpits? Is your hair clean and smooth? Do your clothes fit? Do they match, e.g. does your costume fit your character's role? Do you say the new catch-phrases? Do you understand the current metaphors? Do you smile at the right time about the right things? Do you express dissension at the right moment? Do you express the correct level of friendliness for your social station? Level in the hierarchy? Do you pair bond in an acceptable way? Do you relate to animals and plants and stones and air in a way that demonstrates that they are Other and not as important as humans? Are you thin, healthy, young, energetic, outgoing, confident? If not, are you working toward these states? Or at least the appearance of these states? Do you love to shop and see how its excellence is advantageous? Do you channel your animal nature, your intrinsic hard-wired love of violence into watching sports or instigating drama and competition in those around you?

Does seeing all this as you walk through your days make your eyes bug? Does it blow your mind that you are watching actors on a stage, and that all you have to do is say your lines, say your lines dammit, but it's getting harder and harder to do because really what's the point?

As I drift even further, to the outermost edge of the herd, I lose ever more interest in where the herd is. But I have a job. I go to the store, the market, deal with the acupuncturist, the landlord. Before every action, every conversation, I have to remind myself where the line is, where that place is that they can see and then see no more beyond it.

I watch as things slip and slide, move back and forth over the line. The person at work who answers questions that I haven't spoken aloud, only thought in my mind. She doesn't realize she's doing it, but one day she will. And I know better than to expect she'll be awed and pleased by the realization, and want to be my BFF.

Or clients who used to book sessions for the feel-good, who are slowly realizing I'm doing something very different.

Or the decent job I'm doing at work, though my bosses feel something is off somehow, though they can't seem to put their finger on what or why. Just find out what they want and give it to them is my goal. Do the work. Do good research, write good papers, give good presentations. Give them what they want, how they want it, when they want it. It's what they pay me for. It's a fair trade. They have no need for any of the other things I see, or do, or experience. And it's the way it should be. 

I do very few holistic sessions with folks any longer. I send out no newsletters, no website updates, barely return emails. It's been heading that way for many months, but culminated in something that happened a few weeks ago. I did a session with a woman who genuinely wanted a nice psychic reading, something that would make her feel good, strong, give her pointers for having the things she wanted in her life. Instead she got a nihilist who told her how she'd surrounded herself with No and if she wanted it to change she'd have to leave certain people and situations behind. By the end of the session she was so angry she could barely contain her rage. And the next day she sent one of the most hateful, vitriol infused emails I've ever received. Instead of engaging, I sent her a refund, wished her well, and then blocked her email and IP addresses.

In the moment it all felt so practical. I 'd done two sessions during the previous weeks for a woman who'd had a biopsy done, had helped walk her through what the diagnosis would be, possible courses of treatments her medical team would recommend, what things to look for. I thought the two sides of the same push of energy were perfect: one woman crying on the phone, telling me how grateful she was to have found me, the other spitting bile and threats, calling me a charlatan, a scam artist.

Neither was true. Neither was false. Neither got what they really wanted - make the cancer go away, make the bad feelings inside go away. But both got what they needed. And somehow, between the polar aspects of their energy, something in me let go. 

Since then, I only do sessions here and there, no more simply saying yes. I took down the paypal link on the website, ignore most of the emails, pointedly opt out of the psychic, shamanic gig.

I don't know what's true with it anymore. I can tell you that I saw her cancer, saw it move, saw what would make it stop moving, go away. I can tell you I saw the relationships the other woman surrounded herself with, what it would cost her to set herself free. These are absolute truths to me. Like seeing the wind move a tree branch, watching the leaves flutter. It's simply what is observed. But is it helpful? Does it truly assist other people? I'm no longer sure.

I don't know what's happening anymore in general. There's no goal, no ambition, no plan. Sometimes there are pulses of energy that move my living in one direction or another, tell me to take an action, or refrain from an action. Beliefs unpeel, one by one, in the course of a conversation, a single exchange, during a dream, or watching a tv show. No trying. Not much effort anymore.

Still painful as all f*ck. But it passes much more quickly, sometimes within seconds, in the time it takes to take a breath and release it, or turn my head to look in a different direction, or simply say No Thank You.

I don't pray for things anymore - money, love, success, good health. Instead I pray for the grace to accept what Life brings, for the courage to face what's in front of me, for the strength to acknowledge my part in the flow of energy that surrounds me.

And I pray for silence, that I can let go of needing to speak at all. In this current social climate where everyone clamors for their voice to be heard, where everyone believes that they have something vital to say, to contribute, I long for the courage to stop adding to the noise.

Or conversely, for the trust that if something needs to be said, it'll be said. It doesn't need to come from me, or if it does, it'll be so obvious I won't need to hold it back, it'll bloom into the conversation and that'll be enough.

The conversation back in 2001 with that student when the bomb went off was a turning point. I feel something similar coming around. Don't know what or when. Feeling such fear and vulnerability around it. Even as somewhere underneath, courage is building, the strength to make the next leap needed. Or maybe it's trusting that the force of movement will take me where I need to go if I simply surrender to the momentum.

I understand now that I'm not the wind. I'm the tree. And I'm okay with that.

I'm in better financial shape this go around. And there are so few material objects to lose or social fabric around me to tear. There's more trust in what's happening. And less need for drama. And yet I feel more naked, more vulnerable than ever before. As much as I can, I keep my eyes open, try to stop repackaging reality into pleasing shapes. As things collapse, I breathe, sleep, snuggle kitties, look for the way through.

More will be revealed. 

And now the narrative quiets, finally out of me, released.

I turn toward you, feel you as you sit, reading these words on the lighted screen in front of you.

Do you feel this change, this big shift in the world, too?

I guess if I have a tribe anymore it's you folks, you few dozen scattered over the globe.

As you read this, what's been triggered in you? How are you navigating it all? 

Elucidation

I woke up this morning with another one of those messages.

What the heck else do I call them? It's like having a line from a technical manual read out loud. Utterly emotionless, without any sort of judgment or inflection. Just a statement of fact. Said once. Fini. And then I lay there, watching as my brain fills in the details of how it applies to my living, this thing I'm doing called Untangling, or Waking Up, or growing up, or Whatever.

This morning's was: It's Not More Story, It's Less.

It's not about adding anything in - a new technique or endeavor or plan or frame. It's about letting go of the different storylines of Katherine, thread by thread.

And I saw that "enlightenment" is about no more personal story, as in the person isn't seeking to create a specific storyline that they think is "good". It isn't about creating more, but about opting out, over and over, to the aspects of the story of world that are about more exciting, more colorful, more amazing dreams.

And even with this letting go of self-generated story, it's about surrender to whatever the storyline is that Life has for the living. To see Life's storyline, the personal, will-asserted storyline has to be released. Two competing plot generators is simply confusing and dividing.

The tricky segment of this surrender? Moving from the wanting that self generates, to the wanting triggered by the radiating from Life. The difference: one is a grasping toward, the other is a delighted, willing following of sign posts.

Yet there is creating story and telling story. And it's the telling that has always served my Untangling.

Which leads me to what to do with this blog. This blog here that turned eight-years old in April. 

In no particular order, the issues are:

• folks I work with, as smart and sensitive and evolved as they are, seriously don't have a context for what the shamanic life is about, or what psychic ability means, or how deep transparency is simply the next wave of human evolution. i've genuinely stopped posting details based on this alone.  it isn't about fear. it's about recognizing what another being can and can't take in based on how awake they are. and acknowledging that i love my job, the work i'm allowed to do there, in the environment that these lovely folks have created and sustain on a daily basis. this isn't opinion but statement of a recognized fact: appearances count, and to hang with a certain tribe means you have to dress in a way they can accept, physically, mentally, and emotionally. i toe the line on all fronts. but the blog, and even my twitter account crosses the line. 
• i hardly read anyone else's blog anymore, so it's more of a monologue than a conversation, which doesn't lend itself to the whole bloggy spirit. i apologize - something in me just turned off - like a switch - for all but a few blogger's stories. 
• i still have a hard time with the haters and semi-haters and advice-givers and general groove-harshers that like to enter a blog home, lounge on the sofa, partake of the snacks, and then poop on the rug. it isn't just me. every single blogger i know has to deal with this, and the ones that write/talk about it don't like it or enjoy it any more than i do. it is a very present, very sucky aspect of blogging. much like having a conversation with a friend in a restaurant and the person at the next table gets up and comes over and sits down and takes over the conversation with complaints about their many health problems and how you really are such a p*ssy and a loser and your fear of the dark is so pathetic, and then they laugh in sheer enjoyment, hahahahaha! seriously, it takes a tremendous amount of energy not to lean over and poke them with your fork. you know it is. and then you realize all restaurants are filled with these folks, and you wonder if you should just stay home, stop eating out, and yet you miss out on amazing meals cooked by other folks, and the ambience of favorite places to go, and the energy that's created when you go out with friends you know and love.
• blogs as they were - these amazing, intimate dwellings in the wilderness of the internet, a place where folks could come and hang out, love and be loved - is pretty much done. there are lots of possibilities for the next wave - letter.ly, less personal posting - but none of them feel right. 
• who the heck even reads this anymore? i know there are somewhere between 10-50 people. i think. since i backed away from responding to most comments and emails a couple of years ago, and the blog content got so intense, less phun, it appears that most folks wandered off. but then i'll hear from folks i haven't heard from in a while and realize i have no idea who still comes here. (except for you hardcore dozen or so who still regularly comment or send emails)

The real issue though, in this living called Katherine, is of course why I'd want to keep writing, what purpose it serves in my living, this Untangling.

I'm very clear I don't owe anyone anything. That used to be a huge deal. It isn't anymore.

My heart still cracks open in Yes when I read an email or comment from someone and they share a connection they felt reading a post, or how a post triggered something, a light or a signpost, for them. The feeling I have that the blog serves a kind of "breadcrumb" purpose for a few folks is validated.

And yet there isn't a doubt in my mind that if this blog receives no more input - from myself or from others - Life will simply redirect us to wherever else we need.

So why write? And how to create a new environment that the writing can thrive inside of?

The former is the same thing it's always been: this is a main channel that Life uses as a guru-process for the Untangling inside of me. If I show up, and write, with the lights on in heart and mind and body, something Not Me falls away, and the process of this living is made more clear, less tangled.

I haven't figured the latter out yet. Or rather it hasn't revealed itself. And it's like a splinter in my mind. Energy is building, but no direction yet in where to direct it.

And so I do this sort of posting, feeling uneasy about it all, even with it's infrequency and lack of detail. 

So, if you feel moved to, leave any insights or feedback you have to all this in the comments section . . . maybe you have a tool I can use to help navigate this new landscape . . . and this is also helpful if you're someone who reaches out infrequently so I know you're still around and want to be included if I do some sort of disappearing act to another place or format . . .)

Survival Tips For Life in The Land of The Blind

I don't want to write, then I do, then I don't again. I wonder if writing ability rusts from lack of use.

The things going on don't feel important enough to write about, or important only to me, or important in a way that still doesn't have focus, stability. I'm not sure if what's going on makes sense, not sure if it's Waking Up or mental illness, not sure if the actions I'm taking will lead to healing or just more endless loops.

And I'm more reluctant to write because I know folks at work are reading - either the blog or the twitter feed which links to the blog. They don't know that I know but I do because of the fear and anger they slide between when they see me. Supposedly I'm a psychic, which is scary to them because they think it means I can read their minds, and then they get angry because I can go f*ck myself because they have nothing to hide from a wackjob like me.

They don't understand I'm not interested in the contents of their mind. They don't understand that human minds, mine included, are roiling pits full of fear and judgment and rage and pettiness and pointlessness. Looking into the minds of kitties is pretty fun actually but humans, not so much. 

I got bored with it all sometime around last year. Unless someone was paying me or asking me or something in me pushed to give the info, all I did anymore became a cursory scan to see: yep, naked roiling pit, or roiling pit covered with a joyful Happy Happy tarp, or roiling pit buried under several feet of geometrically superior architecture, or  . . . yeah. It's still like this, but the scans are even more surface and quick.

Why don't I use my psychic abilities for something amazing? Why don't I use them to win the lottery?

I have a friend who works for the F*BI, who asked me to help him solve a case. It was one of the most horrible experiences of my life, looking into that metallic razored shredding violence, and then not being able to give anything helpful to my friend to save someone's life, other than this person had cancer and the particular emotions and random past experiences of that member of the gang and what the neighborhood boy who was helping them was mentally experiencing. What was the point of any of it?

And I have won the lottery. Well, $100 bucks. I was walking past a convenience store and felt the energy of Now, This that kicks in when it's giving me A Download of informational truth. I walked into the store, it pointed me to one of those scratch offs, which I purchased, and found I'd won $100. I've never been able to duplicate the experience, which makes sense because I didn't create it in the first place, only followed up a directive with an action.

So it's a passive kind of skill, this psychic ability that lives inside of me. It can be pointed at things, people, situations, but it seems I have no choice in what gets seen. When clients are paying me to look, I can look at basic streams of a living - the relationships around them, the work situations, the health of the various bodily systems, organs. The probability of where these streams will end up shows up clearly, but it doesn't mean it's where they will end up.

And usually it's not what folks want to hear. That's been one of the most shocking and hardest truths to face: folks don't want the truth - they want to hear nice stories about themselves. Ironic, yes. 

And so I work as a health researcher now. The money is good, the company I work for is outrageously kind and adult and respected and cutting edge. I had a two-month review last week and got "outstandings" which was nice to hear. But the job I do uses so little of me. It's like Einstein working as a cake baker. Maybe the cakes made are really yummy, but not a whole lot of deep mining occurring.

(Did I just compare myself with Einstein? I did! How can you not feel kinship with a person who envisioned quantum foam???)

But the truth is that I'm still settling in to these huge life changes. I'm having to relearn the language of science, and the folks I work for and the job to do: absolutely perfect. And the folks I work with - how could they not sense that I'm a freak? Not like the others? A threat? I'm the actor on the stage with the smirk on their face, messing with their Actor's Motivation Mojo, and we're in the middle of Act Two, with a full house.

They're fine. It's me that's the problem in this scenario. I need to just keep my mouth shut other than to say my lines. I work very hard to do just that but I'm not pulling it off very well, and the audience just thinks I'm a sh*tty actor.

I feel so apologetic these days. Seriously apologetic, walking around feeling so badly that I can't play with others any more. They take it so personally. They don't understand that I want to, but I can't. I don't know why. It just is this way. My eyes are open, and they won't close. 

Or maybe I'm just a butthead with delusions of depth. Could go either way, don't you think?

I don't know what any of it means, or even if any of it is true, or if just another looping time-eating path. I don't know if I'm healing or just playing a healer on tv. I purposefully choose to live in an apartment outside of town, away from most folks, chose a cubicle tucked into a corner away from everyone, and yet then I'm left with only the sound of my own roiling mind to keep me company. 

Okay, there's kitties here too, and the occasional human to have a laugh with, so it's okay to put away your tiny violins . . .

I've been this way my whole life. Interspersed with soaring leaps of fascinating side trails and bursts of amazing color. But always back to this. Sitting away from others, failing to integrate my freakness into the general population. Always with someone who is willing to pay me for some work, a place to live, access to goodness, warmth, food, kitties.

I'm so grateful for my life. In this moment, I could just weep with how fortunate I am, how grateful I am to be alive and in a living so filled with goodness. 

Is this it? Is this all there is?

I can admire the folks on the stage who still want to put on the big productions - the Cirque du Soleils and Death of a Salesmens. But I know that no matter how amazing, difficult, expensive, fantastic the show, it's still something that will end when the lights go out. And off stage, behind the theater, off in the distance, the dark, something thrums, something vast, something still, something . . . 

Logic says that all a person has to do is walk away, just leave everything behind, kitties, job, everything. Go live the life of a hobo, a nomad, a traveler. But I know this is a trap too.

In my heart I know that the stillness has to happen in the mind, in the actions taken out of the web of beliefs, picking them apart, letting them fall to the floor. 

Yet how is this different than any other person who drops out of Life?

How am I different than the woman who lived downstairs from me - with her disability checks and diet related health issues and medications and cigarettes and crap food and isolation and incessant tv watching and anger and neediness? Am I different, better because I claim to be psychic, Waking Up, have an eight-year old blog and a master's degree, am a member of a CSA and shop at Trader Joe's?  

You are now experiencing the confusion, the weirdness, the judgment going inside of me. The back and forth. The judgment and release. The expansion and contraction.

Is it Waking Up? Is it mental illness?

All I know is to keep following the the strongest push of Yes, the direction Life makes larger and more bright.

My car broke down on Thursday night and after three hours of calls on Friday morning I was still unable to find a mechanic or a rental car. And so I let go and find that without a car I can't escape to prepared foods, yoga, errands. And so I sit, and then am moved to write.

Maybe more distraction. Maybe drilling down. 

All I know is that something connected inside of me that wasn't connected when I began writing an hour ago. 

That pointless smiling Yes is gently pulsing inside of me now. 

But mostly I see how beautiful the kitties are. Yes they are.

The rest of it? Who knows?

Postcards From The Now

Maybe it's about writing smaller posts, ie post cards from the Now? The habit here is to do long essay-ish posts, but it just ain't happening. Maybe it's about not writing for a while. For those of you who've been coming here for a long time, you know I go through this every couple of years or so. But this feels different.

At least I wrote this:

I would like to withdraw my application for the Program Coordinator position. I appreciate the opportunity to meet with you all last week, and wish you all the best in finding an excellent new team member.
 
Best Wishes,
Katherine Turner

The only thing I feel around it is: relief. Not regret, not bummer, not oops. Just relief. That I'd stopped tormenting my heart with my mind. That I stopped threatening the Yes with a big fat pending No. Every time I looked at the kitties I'd get a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach at what I'd be putting them through, the calm I would be tossing away as if it were a small thing. And I kept remembering my friend Kelly's words when I called her from the road immediately after the job interview, when I was dealing with the first onslaught of Just Say No Thank You. She said: it's okay to be still.

And although I appreciate all the emails telling me in one way or another that not pursuing this opportunity is about fear in some way - fear of change, fear of success, etc. - and that I should follow it through until they tell me No, that I should take their No as the real No, not my own intuitive, psychic No - I would just like to say: why do you devalue psychic ability in yourself? Why do you not listen to your own intuition in your living? Why do you fear what doesn't come from your mind or outside of yourself?

Can you imagine living your life totally in the flow of What Is? Of listening to the warp and weft of body-mind-spirit plugged into Body-Mind-Spirit?

I can. And more than that, I can feel it's presence. That's why I say: f*ck the prestigious job. Success in my book is following the trail of Yes. Even if it leads me to Nothing in Nowhere with No One.

So often in this Hiveworld of a job, where about 10% of what I can offer gets utilized, where I'm underpaid and overworked, I forget that I'm educated and capable and smart and have earning potential. Maybe that's all this job opportunity meant this go around: look at the sort of folks who want to hire you, look at the salary they offer, the sort of work you could do. So that even though the psychic Yes said No this go around, there'll be others.

And if not? I trust that too . . .

Soul Sister

You would not believe how many posts I've started and then left to languish in "draft" mode. Why? Because they're cack. Spew cack. Cack of the toxic runoff variety. And no matter how pretty I shape it, I'm just not going to post that sort of thing.

Mostly I'm tired. Really tired. I spent all day Sunday on the couch watching old Medium reruns. Actually, I did leave the house once. I went to the mall, bought thermal pajamas with wide-eyed, psychedelic owls all over them, went straight back home, then went back to the couch with my new jammies on.

I'm having many small pity parties. Several a day. Served with green smoothies and roasted broccoli, and okay, leftover pumpkin walnut gluten-free cake from the xmas dinner I attended. I'm drinking green tea, and okay some half decaf Newman's carmel coffee. I lay down on the couch, the kitties climb atop me and drape themselves up and down and in every nook and cranny, Season 3 of Medium lights up my laptop, and the latest small pity party commences.

I remember trying to watch Medium when it first came out but I didn't like it. People were always hollering at her, ridiculing her. She'd have a dream, and because it wouldn't be perfectly spelled out, like watching a documentary, or reading a research paper, people would give her grief, tell her she was nuts. It felt upsetting to watch it, watch the anguish she'd go through week after week. But a couple of weeks ago I started watching from the pilot episode, and it's been a great source of comfort, even as it's the ambient backnoise for my small pity parties. Each episode brings nuggets of understanding, of sympatico, that only another psychic could pass on. And I'm grateful for it. And it sure adds a dimension of "social" to my pity parties that drone on with just me and the fuzzy guys.

A lot of what I've been dealing with the past few months has been around coming to terms with my psychic abilities, what they mean, what I'm supposed to do with them, how I live with them. They come with so many down sides, and I don't think I've really admitted it to myself before, what a burden they are in so many ways.

People think it would be so awesome to be psychic. They think they'd avert Bad Things, and bring Good Things to their lives, the lives of folks around them. But the truth of it is that it makes you a freak, a freak who can never be a part of the flow of living that is this culture we live in, but who still has to make a living, deal with landlords and coworkers and department store clerks and family.

I keep trying to come up with a way to describe what it is like to be psychic in the way that I am - I hear, see, and feel things - like watching a movie going on right behind the regular movie of "reality" that's playing. And a couple of days ago, when I jetted in and out of the mall to get those pajamas it hit me: it's like being around shrieking people. Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, picture the people around you shrieking. Shrieking at a high pitched decibel. But they're not aware enough to know they're shrieking. And so not only do you have to deal with the fact that your ears are freakin killing you, you have to pretend there is no shriek. And even though I've gotten very good at dealing with it over the years, very grounded and practical, it still doesn't change the fact that when I leave my house, and enter the world, there is so very much shrieking, such loud shrieking, and everyone insisting they are so very quiet and lovely.

Poor me, right? Poor, psychic, misunderstood me. I told you there were pity parties afoot.

But there's more going on than I'm writing about. There's a job, an amazing job. A job with one of the top medical facilites in the country. A job that would utilize my MPH, the program management experience I have, and my knowledge of the holistic world. A job that would mean a ~8K raise. Where I'd get to work with MDs on the cutting edge of global holistic medicine. And I'm going to turn it down. Actually, they haven't made a formal job offer, only invited me to come back up, do a second interview and meet the whole team I'd be working with. But I'm not going to go. Because my psychic ability has spelled things out very clearly - it's not the place for me to be, that it's very existence in my world is nothing more than a test by Life to see if I'm ready to move on. And I know I'll email them, tell them I'm withdrawing, but in the meantime, all I can think about is the money and the prestige and f*cking Hiveworld and my oven that doesn't work.

Poor me. Poor, poor psychic me. Saved from a hell job by warnings from psychic postcards from the Yes.

And so I lay on my couch, then go into Hiveworld, even though I was supposed to have this week off, but can't because the Hilarious Coworker's replacement quit and someone needs to man the cubicle. But then after work I go back to the couch, watch some Allison and Joe, Manuel and Lee, watch what it's like to be her: a psychic who talks to dead people, then comes home to a man she can talk to, kids she can snuggle with, a context of Love and Yes she can do her psychic work out of and not go nuts from the echos.

Me? I'm just over here on a couch, throwing small pity parties for myself. I'm grateful to be out of range of the shrieking, grateful that I have a job that allows me shelter and food, holistic clients that allow me to use this psychic stuff for more meaningful use, kitties that snore and squeak and sigh and lick, and words, that I can string together so that my inside can flow a bit to the outside.