Do Spirit Guides Ever Leave You?

Yes, actually there are some spirit guides and benevolent guardian entities who come into your life only to assist you for a specific, intense period -- some of these may be significant events, life changes, personal challenges, or tragedies. But these experiences, events, and the spiritual assistance that coincides with them are not always negative; you may just need a boost to help you achieve a specific, positive goal.

Transit Guides

I'll give you an example of a guide who recently came into my life and then "left."

I've been aware of these temporaries before -- I now call them Transit Guides -- I theorize that they coincide with astrological transits. I've learned to notice their entrances, and to question what they may signify.

This Transit guide position seems to be occupied, for me anyway, as one of only a few Roles that have a kind of rotating staff... There is already a "new one" since the last one left -- I have yet to define who or what it is, or what its role may be. It hasn't spoken at all. I've seen it, clairvoyantly... also not the norm for me...

Angela

Last summer, I met a guide named Angela, my "switchboard operator." She came in response to my request for assistance with performing an enormous volume of distance Readings for subscribers to this site. Actually, I asked for help and guidance launching and promoting Shift Your Spirits -- the idea to offer free Readings was a directive. My guardians told me to do it, and I flipped out over the potential challenge of reading for so many people -- I saw the enormous benefit, but was afraid I couldn't handle the workload. They promised me I would receive special assistance -- help came in the form of Angela.

Angela was not the first transit guide I've ever been aware of coming in for a specific time and purpose, but she was different in many respects -- she identified herself quickly, was not mysterious or quiet or vague but easy to engage, interacted with me pretty much daily, and then quite suddenly she said "Okay. My work is done here. Gotta go..."

It's not that I can't still contact her, it's just that she's kind of moved on to a new job. I became really attached to her in the months she was here, and then one day I started feeling like something was up with her -- I noticed her silence, then her absense, and even pulled out the Tarot cards to clarify what might be happening when I realized she was leaving...

(A few years ago, other intuitives kept telling me to put the cards away and allow my direct clairaudience to come through. I finally took the advice, with amazing success. I generally avoid using divination tools to initiate contact or rely on them as a sole means of communication; the tools and the results are inferior to channeling, but they can provide confirmation or specific details.)

Angela's response to my questions about her leaving me were very Lifetime Movie of the Week -- cut and fade, melodramatic (the cards probably enhanced the sense of drama). I was reminded of one of those scenes where the main character comes home, finds the guest room bed made, the closet empty, a note on the dresser...

I'm describing the Hollywood flavor of the scene somewhat flippantly; but I was very emotional. It was bittersweet. It was one of those Right Endings -- not necessarily a Happy one.

The most noteworthy thing about this very special episode of my life guest-starring spirit guide Angela is how clear the communications with her always were -- and particularly when she left. Out of all the Interrogations/Confirmations I've ever pushed, I've never had a Guide that was so impossible to dismiss -- there was very little to question, or wonder about, no vagueness, no subtlety.

Angela's connection was clear as a bell.

We generally speak to spirits and ask them to say "Hello" -- to give us a sign that they are with us.

Isaak Denisen, the author of Out of Africa, wrote of partings

"I'm much better at Hello."

It never occurred to me how literal it would be to experience a spirit saying "See ya, later" -- and how definitely real she seems because she's not there anymore.

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

Why I Blog - Big Mission for An Ugly Little Word

The Question "Why do I blog?" might as well be a prompt to write my autobiography! But the super short answer is that I blog in service to Ascended Master Mother Mary.

Weaving My Words into the Web I've been "tagged" by the author of DruidJournal to write a post about Why I Blog. Tagging is the blogosphere's version of Show-n-Tell meets Composition Class meets...well, a game of Tag.

Jeff Lilly writes that he blogs because Apollo told him to. I blog because the Virgin Mary told me to.

Like Jeff -- a self-identified druid in service to a Greek god -- you may wonder what a Wiccan - Shaman - Clairaudient - Medium - Big - Mouth - Heretic - Punk - Rock - Preacher is doing taking direction from the Mother of Jesus. I mean, I'm hardly Catholic - I do not identify as Christian. Mary Herself points out to many of her devotees and visionaries that She ain't Catholic or Christian either.

Don't send me hate mail, Xians -- this is just a fact: neither Jesus or Mary could POSSIBLY be members of a religious affiliation that did not exist in their lifetimes. This does not affect their exalted position in human religion; nor does it detract from their spiritual status. So, just chill, y'all. I know Jesus. I love Jesus. His Mama and I talk all the time.

The Truth -- the Mystery -- is bigger than any of the names we choose to slap on it.

I think there's an enormous Message for all of us underlying the phenomenon of cross-pollinated spiritual paths -- world culture is blending to a degree that we've never known before. The Truth is threaded throughout all faiths -- it is literally a web of Mysteries and Wisdoms -- it is called by many names in many human languages.

The Mother Goddess has many faces. She wears her BVM drag for me. That's another story - a memoir I am feverishly working to complete, called Answering to Mary.

The Lightworkers are Gathering It is no accident that I discovered Jeff by way of the community of Lightworkers that cross paths with the Pavlinas. Erin Pavlina also made a similar decision in 2006 to step consciously forward into her life purpose as a medium. It seems that at least the three of us (and probably countless others I don't know about) were approaching a very similar crossroads within months of one another.

The synchronicity that stands out most for me is not only that many people would be given a similar spiritual ultimatum at a close point in time, or that we seem to have responded so similarly to the Call, but that we chose such strikingly similar vehicles and mediums within which to work.

Are you aware that Heaven has a Congress? What my spirit guides call the Congress I have learned is called by other names: the Council, the Emissaries of the Third Ray, the Hosts of Heaven… Lightworkers have been receiving instruction for who knows how long, but there are a couple of points in recent history where the spikes in the signal - the Call - from the Ascended Masters got cranked up in a major way.

What was going on one year ago? Last year - 2006 - something shifted. The volume got turned way up. The degree of transformation that my life underwent between the last two Januarys blows my mind when I look back along my Shifting Path.

Yes, I do believe it all has something to do with the New Age, the Ascension of Mankind, the Rapture of the Nerds ( the Technological Singularity), and the New Earth.

What did you start manifesting 7 years ago? I first "went" to the Congress on New Year's Eve 1999-2000 (the Millenium). Unlike Jeff and Erin, I flat out SUCK at lucid dreaming and meditation, although I do receive the clearest directive from my spirit guides immediately upon waking up. I connect with Spirit in a Joan of Arc-style form of divine chit-chat -- I am an open channel -- what parapsychologists call a clairaudient intuitive -- I hear shit.

The Millenium itself was significant because our attention made it so. I was wide open that evening to the awareness of how powerful it is when SO many people are thinking about the same thing at the same time. The Power of Prayer. Manifestation. The Secret.

You might picture this as receiving a computer-animated graphic visualization of what the energy of human harmonic convergence looks like -- if you were in earth orbit, like a communications satellite or the international space station, and you were watching the world roll by beneath you, and you could physically SEE the energy of people thinking the same thing at the same time...

That Big Thought was simply a conscious awareness of the New Millenium -- and I saw? heard? felt? it move across the world in waves. You've experienced something similar when you've stood outside on New Year's Eve or the Fourth of July -- the slight delay in the sound of fireworks and cheers and cars honking, as it spreads across the soundscape… Or maybe you've been outside at a large concert event, where monitors and loudspeakers are spaced out across acres, and you can physically hear the sound of the person speaking at the mic arriving at different sets of speakers at slightly different times.

At the Millenial New Year's Eve I was physically at Short Mountain Sanctuary, one of many such places where Radical Faeries and neo-pagans have enormous Gatherings to celebrate the Solstices and the Equinoxes and other major Calendar points -- much in the way that human beings have gathered since the dawn of human history. (Think the Burning Man Gathering for the most mainstream, contemporary image...)

To make this long story a little shorter, let me move on.

Where Was I? The Congress is an astral place where the Ascended Masters and human Lightworkers gather en masse -- I experience this other-worldly place as being a similar type of event, like a huge outdoor concert -- like Lollapalooza, or Bonaroo, or Woodstock, Farm-Aid, Live-Aid. Now mix in the United Nations, and blow it out with more souls than you can wrap your mind around.

Here's an excerpt from an email I sent Jeff about the Congress, astral travel, and lucid dreaming:

I honestly have my dreamtime schedule so full that it's not that I don't have deep and profound experiences happening during my sleeping. I have on-going, intense healing activities that take place when I sleep. I have sort of re-routed some major activities, programming myself to under-go passive angelic healing during my sleep. I spend my unconscious hours in a kind of "clinic" by default where I am worked on by doctors on the other side. It's almost like chemo-treatments or something. I've been undergoing these treatments for 6 years. I assume that this is what's going on by default during my deep REM cycles.

During my "surfacing" sleep cycles, I go to a place called the Congress. You've heard a lot of deep trance channels talk about The Masters, The Emissaries of the Third Ray, there are some other names... I experience astral travels to this place on a pretty regular basis. I receive conscious updates from this Spirit Collective between 4am and 6am. If I have Messages to bring into my waking day, they are playing immediately upon waking.

So basically, I am very busy when I'm unconscious - I just don't have the usual fun, flighty, drug-trip experiences most people have. I don't feel badly about this. I still have an active, practical connection going on... I just don't seem to have room to introduce other intentional dream activities. Like for instance, lucid dreaming. I believe that's just a given. I rarely have any kind of dream activity I wouldn't consider lucid. So, I think what happens when I attempt lucid dreaming techniques is like asking my Guides to stop at the Foyer and hang out, instead of going all the way in...

The Congress -- Heaven's C-SPAN The Congress is like a 24 hour broadcast of a network of astral beings, angelic entities, spirit guides, mediums, human lightworkers. It's like a news-feed for the Collective Conscious -- there's always a bazillion souls hanging out in there, and there's always a Speaker -- someone who "has the floor" -- sometimes it's someone droning on, grandstanding, and I am more fascinated by those closest to me, the other souls immediately present next to me in the crowd.

The Pope Was There On several occasions, I experienced the Congress when the late beloved Pope John Paul, also a Marian devotee, was Speaking. I usually do not recognize the Speakers, and more often than not they communicate in a particular language, many of which I do not understand, but sometimes a person near me in the crowd will translate or generally let me know what's being talked about.

And YOU Were There... Many people have written to me or told me about dreams and visions which take place in an astral landscape or monumental building that resembles what I call the Congress.

For now, we must fast-forward through my personal Blessed Virgin Mother visitation. When I was considering starting this blog a year ago, I had been consciously aware of my active service to Her for about three years, struggling to find the courage to express Her purpose for me.

Dr. Meg Was There... Exactly one year ago, my dear friend John invited me to attend a group session in Atlanta led by deep-trance channel Dr. Meg Blackburn Losey. I'd never been to an event like that before; my spirit guides directed me to accept the invitation because I was to pick up some further important direction from the Ascended Masters that speak through Dr. Meg.

Before she went into her trance, Meg asked for questions from the group, and being at that point in my life [TOTALLY in the closet about my clairaudience] I grilled her about her personal role as a medium.

I don't know what John and the other people present experienced, but once the trance began and the Masters entered the space, I immediately recognized where we were -- the Congress.

I've described the two dozen or so in attendance that night as being like toddlers at a sandbox, with our spirit guides standing around us like proud parents or nannies watching us all play together. I recognized a LOT of the people who were physically present. I knew them.

Like Erin Pavlina's ultimatum from her guides, that she must step into her life purpose or risk fading away into a purely Third Dimensional existence, the Masters spoke directly to me with this Message:

"How long do you intend to stay in your Tower? You've worked so hard -- alone -- for so long to reach the place where you Know what you do. Now that you know, how long do you intend to keep this information to yourself, when so many others can benefit from your sharing it?"

And they gave this Message to the whole group, multiple times:

"You are already everything you've ever wanted to become. You fulfill your life purpose with every breath you take. You are the way by which God experiences itself."

There is so much more to this story. As with every article I post here, I am only scratching the surface, chasing after the longer, on-going story of my life, and the Messages for all of us.

I am communicating with spirit, all the time. You are communicating with spirit, too.

This web site -- this broadcast channel -- this techno-vessel is just one of the strands of the Web where we communicate. This is just my thread in the tapestry of the Stories and the Mysteries. At any time, you may weave the silver cord and the sky blue hyperlinks of your own voice into this Chorus of Consciousness, this great big ball of conversation we call the Web.

Doesn't It Sound Enormous? Way too big for such an ugly little word --blog.

Seek Wisdom - Practice Love

You're IT, Mandy! Gosh, where to go from here with the whole Why I Blog Tag Game? Jeff and I took it Out There... Starman and Major Tom...

There's someone I can call for a little Ground Control

My Journaling Mentor Mandy Markham Johnson -- I've truly been meaning to ask you.