Familiars — Angels with Fur

Some of your pets are members of your god posse -- the team of guardian spirit entities who attend you on your life's mission — incarnated in animal form.

Borrowing from the Wiccan tradition, I refer to the elevated relationship between human and animal souls as a familiar.

In a very literal and tangible way, there are no relationships on earth that teach you more about the benevolent spirit entities who attend you in this life than your animal familiars. Not all your pets or domesticated animals are familiars -- the designation of familiar is very special and unique label.

The cat familiar is simply the most popular or well-known -- the traditional classic -- but this special spiritual relationship is not limited to members of pagan faiths or to any particular species of animal.

Here's what I personally believe about our familiars:

When you connect to an animal and she becomes your familiar, you elevate her spirit to the human sphere of consciousness. You know the ones you've done this with -- they stand out clearly among your pet/owner connections -- they become more human than animal. You willfully -- by your divine grace and choice -- lift the soul of your animal companion up to our level.

As a kid it always disturbed me that Christianity said animals did not have souls. There can be no doubt that if there are souls to be had, at all, period, by any living entity, then your familiars have souls -- a different kind of soul than a wild animal.

Like a spirit guide, ancestor, or guardian angel does for you, you become the sponsor or patron of this creature's spirit. Unlike a human child who emerges or breaks off from your physical body, but has an independent soul -- and so only requires a temporary dependence -- you bring your animal familiar into your spiritual body -- your aura. You lend a piece of your spiritual bubble to her -- she actually becomes part of your soul.

This is why you can't be technically alone with another human in the room, yet your familiar can be by your side, with you, in your most private physical space. When she leaves her physical body behind, she literally will not "go to heaven" because she is tethered to your aura and will remain with you, for good.

You are here to experience and learn how to love unconditionally. Your animal familiars are the most obvious, visible form of "guardian angels." They may even be the only kind of guardian that manifests a physical form you can easily perceive.

Our animal familiars are pure, unconditional love incarnate. They are the "sure things" in your god posse. Anyone -- no matter your physical appearance, personality, handicaps, abilities, talents, or human qualities -- can have this relationship. It transcends judgement.

The miracle you have manifested with your familiar in this lifetime is one of your A+ love lessons learned. You've already created it. It will never go away; it can't be reversed. She is on your Team for good. What she can continue to do for you one day will change -- but then she will become a small piece of your love -- your power -- that is not bound to the physical world.

There are certain tasks that my different guides and guardians are best equipped to handle for me. When I am asked to send my thoughts and prayers for someone's animal companions, I literally send my departed familiar Cera to deliver those messages. This is a kind of magic she is especially qualified to execute.

In honor of my familiar Cera's passing June 25, 2004, this week I'm exploring the phenomena surrounding the Animal Spirits in your God Posse with a brief series of articles:

• The passing of a pet -- a life loved to completion

• Euthanasia -- the flower of life blooming in reverse

• Shifting your perspective on the Angel of Death

My love for my familiar taught me so much about how the relationships with my guardian angels and spirit guides work... I can't dump the richness of familiars in one post. It has taken me three years to process the experience and control the emotions enough to revisit my fifteen year relationship with Cera and celebrate her as my "angel with fur."

Seek Wisdom -- Practice Love

Visualizing the Invisible

Back in February, I promised to detail how I personally experience and perceive psychic energy. I realize that if I continue waiting until I produce some digital masterpieces before sharing them... Well, then it might never happen. I've decided to smother Perfection with a pillow, and humbly proceed.

A Self-Portrait

Below is my homespun graphic depiction of my energy, viewed from above -- a simplification of what I see at the bottom of the circular window I described in an earlier article about how I conduct Distance Readings. The "map" below shows the physical position of a few of my guardians, in relationship/connection with my body.

Check out this simplified detail of the location of my closest guides:

• You're looking down at the top of my head -- my aura, for lack of a better word, is the bubble in the center
• The compass-like, light-blue graphic represents a clock face, for standard navigation purposes -- 12:00, the top of the image, straight in front of me; 6:00, the bottom of the image, right behind me
• The line connecting my energy to the bubble in the 6:00 position is my silver cord -- my direct connection to source -- monitored by an angelic I call DJ
• The bubble at 7:00 is Big Jane, my "primary" guide
• The little orb close to my right-hand side, at approximately 2:30, is my familiar Cera of fifteen years, now deceased, still attending me

These are by no means the only entities that I can map in this fashion -- I've chosen to list a few for illustrative purposes, just to give you a general idea. Your spirit guides and guardian angels do not float about, physically independent of your aura. They can "travel" instantly, much the same as any consciousness or thought, but they occupy general positions in your energy.

I'll discuss the variety of structure, formations, and positions in another post.

Balloons There is an elasticity to their movements -- they can stretch beyond comfortable boundaries from time to time, given the situation -- but I would liken their motion to helium-filled balloons tied to the wrist of a child.

They drift, spin, follow, float above -- but their energy is somewhat anchored to your location. Imagine if you attached mylar balloons to your chakras with rubber strings. That should give you some sense of how your guides behave.

You might also consider the behavior of soap bubbles or beach foam -- the size, number, and configuration of individual bubbles, clustered together.

What's with all the bubbles? I've been fascinated with photographing the behavior of water droplets for years -- the deciding factor in my first digital camera purchase was a killer macro lens, for close-up microphotography. I've snapped THOUSANDS like the background of the first image in this post. While my near obsessive-compulsive voyeurism of dewdrops on glass at sunrise could be seen as an exercise in abstraction, the motivation is actually quite literal:

I seek to contemplate super-common everyday examples of super-natural concepts -- the magic in the mundane. I prefer to embellish my articles with photorealistic imagery -- even when choosing pure abstraction. The premise for the imagery on this site was to avoid ooey-gooey New Age airbrush cartoons, employ the abundance of kick-ass user-contributed imagery available on the web -- much of the work lightyears ahead of my abilities -- and to generally avoid as much of my time-stealing design addiction as possible -- to focus on what I can accomplish with words.

But I am not only a writer, and I will never be totally satisfied with one medium -- here I am twenty years later, and I still can't choose a major! One of the goals of rebuilding my blogs, and moving everything under my name, was to bring back a more controlled expression of all the minutiae that make me who I am -- that make my Vision unique. And this certainly can't be accomplished by suppressing or censoring. I've waited a lifetime for the multimedia potential of the web -- I hope to put even more of myself into these projects -- in as many dimensions as possible.

Expect to see a lot bubbles around here -- like those on my front page. For me, bubbles, spheres, and orbs are the modern equivalent of all those centuries of halos in religious art history. I just can't find anything that more accurately portrays how I see energy -- the dynamic interconnections of souls, spirits -- as constellations of blogs on the web, or foot-traffic through the cafe from where I often write to you, or cars on the roads, ants on the ground...

If you wonder what I see -- yes, clairvoyantly -- contemplate what those bubbles, the crowds of foam, the elemental intersection of Water and Air, represent:

• the bubbles could be the Shift Your Spirits readers -- your attention converging around my screen -- this blog as mirror and filter
• the orbs could be the spiritual bloggers who comment and link here -- the constellation in web space I described in Stars of the Apocalypse
• these spheres could be YOU and the spiritual entities that surround you -- you're that big one at the bottom, with your god posse frothing around you, drifting either to or from light, or gravity...

Spirit Guide and Guardian Angel Portraits If you've engaged me for Readings, then you've given me permission and invitation to look for humanoid features in the bubbles that hover around you. I alter images of statuary to produce portraits of what the various members of my god posse "look" like -- where else can you find more vivid models for angels and gods? This is not an original idea -- I'm going along with some serious tradition regarding idols and icons.

If you've read about my primary guide, who I call Jane Throne, then you've already seen a rendering of what Jane looks like to me. Also featured in an article on this site was a transit guide -- meaning, she worked with me for a few months last summer and then moved on -- Angela. Angela assisted me with the launch and promotion of this web site, which revolved around conducting Spirit Guide Readings for each and every new subscriber.

I don't create these portraits just to amuse myself or to illustrate my stories about them -- both good enough reasons, certainly -- I render visual representations of my guides as a way to more fully develop my relationship with them. If you've delved into manifesting techniques and tools, then you're probably familiar with the concept of Image Boards; I not only use the portraits themselves, but more importantly, the PROCESS of creating the god posse portraits, to connect with their voices and stories.

Illustration often serves me as a meditative entry point to the clairaudient messages I receive -- like those medieval ladies that fall into trances spinning thread... For distance readings on strangers, I cast a graphic natal chart to use as the entry point.

Keep in mind that the Jury is out on whether the facial features and characteristics I describe are plucked from my mind or yours -- borrowed from versus projected by the entities themselves - but I am confident that what WE see -- the collective consciousnes -- is the hope chest full of drag that spirits pull from, when presenting us with physical form.

Do spirits already have preferences for forms? Do they assume their appearance, or do you? Is it your need that dictates -- requires -- them to appear?

I can see now that I have opened up yet another Pandora's box of potential posts -- your response to this discussion will be the best indication of whether or not I should prioritize these types of details and continue struggling through Visualizations of the Invisible. (This is damned difficult to pin down and translate!) My intention, for the next few months remaining in Year One of Shift Your Spirits, leans toward delivering on my promises of gory details and diary-of-a-mystic blow-by-blows.

See, as soon as I started writing publicly about my life-long clairaudience, somebody turned up the volume on my clairvoyance -- or, er... turned on the highbeam lights... or something like that. My writing is always running behind a speeding train of experience...

I realize this is exTREMEly self-indulgent -- but you know what? I love Jeff Lilly's narrative meditations, and many of you have written me excited about Vera Nadine's transparent accounts of her mediumship. Wait for me! The best I have to offer the campfire are my own "One Time..." tales.

Soap Opera fans refer to their favorite shows as their "stories" and their "bubbles" -- the metaphor of this slang is not lost on me. My Rich Inner World is a private drama of which I am the star, with a colorful cast of supporting spiritual characters.

I ususally labor to present my spiritual experience in terms that you can apply to your own life; but I wonder if I might not be missing an opportunity to simply set an example by sharing more magical detail from my own... Would you like for me to introduce the members of my God Posse to you?

Seek Wisdom -- Practice Love

Your Meaningful Money Makeover

Creative Writing Assignment

So, did you do the exercise If Money Was a Person, Who Would Money Be? Or did you turn it into Shelf-Help?

Shelf-Help is when you buy a Self-Help book, scan through it -- or even read it in its entirety -- think it's brilliant for about five minutes, and then put it on the shelf without actually implementing it. It sits there staring at you, reminding you that you now possess the tools to change something about your life, but for a variety of reasons, you still haven't got around to implementing the Action Steps it advises. The guilt you feel for NOT using it to help yourself feeds a sense of externalized resentment. Pretty soon, the Self-Help has become Shelf-Help, and you have to hate it and distance yourself from it -- avoid it.

The worst part about it is that you know deep down this doesn't work.

You probably DID consider Who Money has been in your world, Who Money should be… You thought about it once, when you read my article, or you even followed through and actually engaged in the exercise more fully -- maybe you already wrote it down somewhere -- but did the buck stop there?

The Personification of Money is a critical spiritual exercise, for a few reasons:

• You interact with Money as deeply and as often as any living person you know
• You believe in Money as much or more than you do your God, your Guardian Angels, your Spirit Guides (at least, you certainly behave as if you do -- you think about Money everyday; do you think about your spirit everyday?)
• No abstract concept has a greater tangible effect on your life
• Many of the techniques required to personify and talk to Money come from the same head space that you must employ to communicate with your spirit guides
• Money / Abundance is one of the oldest, most enduring relationships you have
• Your relationship with Money is most likely to remain dysfunctional, because you don't treat it as a relationship that can be improved upon

Our relationships with Money and how we manifest Abundance is the most accessible and universal spiritual communication I have observed. I'm turning this into a tag for other bloggers because it doesn't matter what your belief system is, it doesn't matter what your level of "psychic ability" is, it doesn't matter what you blog about, what your career is, or how you define yourself -- it doesn't even matter if you just want to Pretend this relationship -- the enthusiasm that Shift Your Spirits readers have shown for Morgana's concept of Financial Alchemy is awesome!

You can't afford for this eye-opening Money Makeover to become Shelf-Help.

You can't have a great first-date with your new, improved, more desirable personification of Money, and then go back to speed-dialing the old asshole Money you've been living with all these years. Did Morgana's concept (shared via my article) introduce you to the perfect financial Partner, but then you just went back to the abusive, co-dependent, dysfunctional relationship you're used to?

Okay, I'll go first, and then I'll lay out the assignment -- and a list of the other bloggers I'm tagging -- at the end of this post.

Slade's Money Makeover I started a diary to solidify my commitment to changing my relationship with Money. I call the journal Hornets to Honey Bees -- How I Married New Money

Old Money Profile Old Money for me was a ripped, handsome, well-dressed, attractive dude who looked great on the outside -- expensive haircut -- one of those dickwads who may or may not be deserving of a nomination to the People Magazine's Sexiest Men Alive List -- he was vain, cold, arrogant, self-important, sadistic, selfish, and completely devoid of affection.

I might compare him to the main character in Bret Easton Ellis' novel American Psycho - he worked out all the time, he was obsessed with his appearance, with projecting the image of perfection. He wore designer clothing, and was an absolute snob about material things -- the more expensive, the more valuable.

He valued Things, not people. He was nice to people in order to manipulate them. He came first.

Clearly, the guy was unlikeable, but he brainwashed me for most of my life. He constantly nagged me to be more like him. He disparaged the things I loved to do that didn't have a quantifiable income stream attached to them. He browbeat me, constantly reminded me that I was inferior to him.

He said things to me like "You're going to wear THAT? Why are you wasting time on THAT? You're never going to get anywhere doing THAT! Why are you talking to THAT person? Do you want to be a nobody? You'll never be rich; priests aren't rich. Spiritual people suffer. Ugly people are ignored. Weak people are walked on. Artists starve."

And always, behind these messages, the lie that He was my answer. He would save me. He was my only hope. If I did what he said, my life would improve.

Total passive aggressive -- he liked to convince me that I was "lucky" to have him. That he only wanted what was best for me. He nagged me because he cared. He wanted to see me better myself. He hated to see me suffer.

What would I do without him? How would I survive? If I left him, I would be out on the street, homeless.

Without him, I was nothing.

Deep down, I hated him. I knew he wasn't good for me, but I believed the poison he was feeding me; I was addicted to his mindset, I envied him, I was afraid of what he was capable of, I walked on egg-shells around him.

I tried not to make him angry at me, but mostly, I ignored him.

I avoided him as long as I could, and then when I DID have to talk to him, it was all apologies and martyrdom. I could never figure out which was worse -- trying to do what he said and keep him happy all the time, or suffer the intermittent consequences of his violent outbursts?

If I didn't let him in, he'd eventually kick the door down and there would be SCENES -- he'd wave NSF notices and bounced checks in my face and tell me what a fucking IDIOT I was…

My parents, and everyone around me, seemed to have a similar relationship with him -- only some people were able to kiss his ass, and they were rewarded for doing so. Everyone seemed to either go along with him, or suffer the consequences of defying him. He was a tyrant. He was powerful, he yanked everyone's chains. You were either with him or against him. You were either in his pockets, in his good graces, or on his shit list and out in the cold.

And if Money didn't favor you, it was your own damn fault.

Lack and fear are control tactics, lies about self-worth, the basis for slavery and power-over others, the Haves and the Have-Nots System was created by one group, but perpetuated by all.

New Money Profile I knew (spiritually) that God is love, that Abundance is everywhere, that the Universe has enough for everything in it. As I started to envision a personification of Money who reflected this type of benevolent leadership or representation, I discovered -- not surprisingly -- that the Money I WANTED to be with greatly resembled my idea of the perfect partner.

Morgana's original epiphany began when she observed this connection -- that there is a parallel between Marriage and Money -- that people who engage in dysfunctional, co-dependent relationships tend to exhibit the same behavior patterns -- that the kinds of challenges and repercussions they experience in their Love Lives are almost identical to the cycles and struggles they go round and round in their Financial Lives.

As Morgana shared the dialogue between her and Money, I couldn't help but note the similarity to a screenplay -- her conversations with Money were almost identical to cliched scenes from a soap opera -- the lines were the same as pleading with a lover, and I imagined how easy it would be to replace the name "Money" with "Honey" -- a term of endearment you might use in place of your partner's name, in arguments or happier contexts.

So as I wrote out my personal dramas in screenplay format, and when I spoke to Money, I called him Honey.

My friend Pam, years and years ago, told me she named her perception of God "Honey" because of the apiary/ spirit metaphor that exists between Bee Keeping and the Human Soul. "God's the Honey; I'm the Bee." She said the name Honey evoked warmth, nurturing, sweetness, harvest, natural forces, gold, etc...

I call God "God" for reasons I won't go into here and now, but the name Honey was perfect for my personification of Abundance, and it made the creative dialogue familiar and believable.

My Honey is someone who has everything he could ever need, materially -- he lacks for nothing. Because of this, he has no fear of want. He is SO wealthy, that he has transcended the worry and anxiety of NEEDING anything. He is free to focus on what he WANTS. His material existence is totally and infinitely taken care of, and so he is entirely ambitious about matters of the soul.

He is not searching for his next meal, he is looking for joy. His challenge is to find all the things that material wealth CAN'T buy.

How does my self-esteem hold up in the face of this kind of partner? If he doesn't NEED anything from me, if there's nothing I can give him that he can't give himself, then why would he want to be with me?

What does he GET from me that can't be browbeaten out of me, ordered, or bought?

Most importantly, what do I have to GIVE him that no one else can?

I envision my conversations with him to take place at a kitchen table at his farm. He lives on a ranch, an Adirondack-style log cabin mansion that is absolutely obscenely gorgeous -- but it's not intimidating, so much as it is wonderfully, opulently comfortable. When we are together, we talk over a table that has anything on it I could ever want to eat. I am not required to pretend to be someone I'm not.

He could wear anything he wants to in the world, but he dresses like a lumberjack, a blue-collar worker -- he wears flannel shirts and jeans. He is handsome, but without vanity. He is attractive because he laughs with his eyes, and because he doesn't talk nearly so much as he listens to me.

He doesn't care what I look like, he does not judge me, he wants to sit and talk to me for all the right reasons.

And when I ask him "What do you want of me? Why do you want to be with me and share all the abundance that you have? What can I possibly bring to you that no one else can?"

He tells me "I want your Stories. I want your Words. I want the Passion of your Spirit, I want to hear your Wisdom, I want to listen to your infectious Wonder. It brings me Joy to witness you articulating your Own Joy. That is the thing that no one else can offer me. That is the priceless thing without a price tag. You are the only source of it."

When I tell him I need Wealth and ask him what I should do to achieve Meaningful Wealth -- in all its forms -- his answer is always the same:

He tells me to Write, from the heart, the stories only I can, as I am here, right now.

He is right. My magic is in my words. The wealth I receive as a result of sharing my words is multidimensional -- beyond my greatest intentions.

So, I asked my Guides, my Guardian Angels, and Mother Mary for a Spiritual Restraining Order against the Old Money, who I now think of as a Hornet or a Wasp, the dark twin of the Honey Bee.

The Hornet is not allowed to come near me -- I do not wish to speak with him, ever again, for any reason, without exception. I have totally divorced him. I consider him to be a dangerous stalker who I have willfully chosen to break free from.

And like all restraining orders, they don't work if you answer the phone when your attacker calls, if you go back to him and continue to participate in the co-dependent unhealthy relationship. The Courts can't protect you if you breakdown, if you relax your resolve, if you back-slide and revert to old familiar patterns -- you can't hear him unless you let him in to whisper his lies. And you can never be rid of his poison until you refuse it and disown it.

The Hornet is DEAD to me. I'd have to be insane to continue a relationship with him, now that I have met his replacement. I've married a new money, and we're on our Honeymoon.

Where do these blog tags START?

Someone has to plant them -- start them -- right? I love a writing assignment, I usually find the restrictions liberating, but I've only managed to fulfill the recent tagging exercises by totally deforming the rules of the game. I was one of those 8 year olds that liked to elaborate the rules of Monopoly to a ridiculous extreme. In my family, part of the fun of a board game was spontaneous adaptation. It's amazing the way that kids play -- they turn House & Office -- the opposite of adult desire or fun -- into creative performance art.

My present lifestyle and my aspirations toward a willful, inventive sense of spirituality have grown into a love-affair with my homespun brand of chaos magic. In my rich inner landscape (that's what we say when crazy is too disparaging -- when eccentric feels over-used, self-indulgent, and increasingly-impotent -- when eclectic sounds like the only, obvious, inevitable label consciousness would ever agree to…) I tend a forest of creative kudzu, a mountain of vines, a blissful jungle. It's abundant and ripe for the scavenger hunts of motivational blogging and personal memoir -- bring it on, I say, tag me!

But I love starting things. I've got a bad case of Birth Order Entitlement -- I'm the oldest among the siblings and cousins who made up my earliest creative community. Now I have these grown-up writing peers to play with.

Here's Your Assignment: I want to hear about YOUR Money Makeover.

Read about Morgana's Exercise and consider the following in your story:

• Who's the Old Money?
• Who's the New Money?
• What's THE one thing -- the overarching Message -- your New Money advises you to do to invite Meaningful Abundance into your life?

Writing it down will help you to manifest the change you wish to see.

If you already have a blog, consider yourself TAGGED with this writing assignment.

• Write a post about your Money Makeover
• link back to this post
• You might also leave a comment here letting us know where to find your Money Makeover article

If you don't have a blog of your own, but you want to participate, well, here's another good reason to start one. You can go to Blogger.com or Myspace.com or Wordpress.com or Vox.com and start one for free, right now, in five minutes.

A few other options for participation: Simply leave the results of your Money Makeover here in the Comments. OR If you have a really good one and feel it's a little long for a Comment, but you'd like to share it, contact me about running your story here, on Shift Your Spirits, as a Guest Blogger. OR If you feel that the post would stray too far off-topic for your own blog, Contact me about sharing your Money Makeover as a Guest Blogger, here on Shift Your Spirits.

If you're reading this -- period -- consider yourself tagged. My tags are not exclusive -- they are open to anyone who wants to participate -- take this tag and run with it. Go forth and tag others.

You're IT: To get the ball rolling, I'm going to name a few bloggers whose Money Makeovers I'd definitely like to read:

• Sojourner
• Adam
• Jeff
• Angela-Eloise
• Damian
• Kay
• Erik
• Mandy
• Deb
• Jason
• Tony
• KL Masina
• Sally Stoneking (which has to be one of the coolest Fairie Names ever!)

Seek Wisdom - Practice Love