My Training as a Channel

This morning (April 10th, 2012), a visitation with the Ascended Master Saint Germain inspired me to blog about my training as a channel.  It is a fascinating story, but one I have never told publicly.  This is my lengthiest post to date, but for those of you interested in channeling I have tried to write something that will be of value to you.

As a teenager I loved the library.  I learned more from my trips to the library than I did in most of my public education.  I had long held an interest in unexplained phenomena like UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, and paranormal activity.  Eventually, at the age of 16, I came across a book about how to connect with spiritual guides.  It was not a very good book, but it did prompt me to attempt achieving a trance state for the first time.

I had a couple of experiences of feeling a tone or vibration in my head very briefly, which was startling and exciting at the same time. Without better information, I was uncertain about whether or not I wanted to continue with such experimentation.  Then, a breakthrough.

At age 17, (in 1993) I read “Opening to Channel” by Sanaya Roman and Duane Packer (I still recommend this book).  This was the first truly spiritual book I had ever read, and certainly the first book co-written by nonphysical guides.  I was hooked.  I knew that I had found my calling.  While reading the book, I felt touched by an awareness that connected me to my future and I knew that I was destined to be a channel.

I had always known that I wanted to be a writer, but now I knew I was going to be working with high level spiritual guides to bring new information onto the planet.  I was very excited about this discovery. It was like finding out that you had been accepted to a great college and knowing you would be able to get the training needed to become successful doing something that you love.  I felt like I had just gotten my acceptance letter to Hogwarts.

That year, I was working full time as a pizza cook after school and I had no time to practice meditation.  This was terribly frustrating and triggered an old wound of feeling like a slave to the system with no support to be the creative self.  I managed to do some prayers to let the heavens know of my interest in being trained, but I had to set aside any kind of spiritual goals and just focus on life in the physical. For the time being, all I could do was continue to explore channeling through reading channeled books.

During this period, I had a profound experience one night with the Master Jesus.  It happened while I was dreaming about mopping the floor of the pizza kitchen where I worked.  Jesus walked in and looked right into my eyes, which opened up a brief ecstatic experience.  I felt touched by his transcendent love for all of humanity.  This was how I knew that I could trust the path of becoming a channel.  Jesus would be with me on the journey.  It was like having his stamp of approval.

It was not until my first year of college that my channel began to open.  Reading the Celestine Prophecy inspired me greatly and aligned me with a series of mystical experiences that allowed me to get a preview of the kind of enlightened states of consciousness we are working toward as a species.  It was then that I began to have out-of-body experiences.  My invisible teachers wanted me to witness the greater multidimensional reality I was going to be channeling about one day.

One night, I used my new found ability to go check up on my grandmother.  I was very close with my Grandma Andrea, who had been a positive spiritual influence in my life.  She always talked about having a guardian angel and even painted a picture of an angel that she hung in her living room.  I was living almost 20 miles away as a freshman at Oklahoma University and didn’t get to see her much. During this out-of-body visit, I was approached by a woman who appeared and said that she was one of my spiritual guides.  She began to explain that she also had a body on the physical plane and that she was a channel.  Only two weeks later, I synchronistically met this woman and had a fascinating conversation with her about having contact with enlightened ETs.

I had no idea what Spirit was orchestrating, but this was the conversation that launched me in a new direction.  At the time, I had another friend who was seeking to open as a channel and the two of us talked a lot about spiritual subjects.  One night, while visiting a nearby lake with another friend to look at the stars, the three of us were visited by an ET ship.  It came right out of the sky and connected with us vibrationally.  We were all startled and raced to the car so that we could drive away. (My fear reaction to this positive experience alerted me to a hidden subconscious fear left over from an actual abduction experience from childhood that I had no conscious memory of at the time.)

The ship followed along from a distance and by the time we realized that we were not in any danger of being abducted, the opportunity had passed and the ship was gone. We all wished we had just stayed put, but given that we had walked away with knowledge that we are not alone in the universe, it wasn’t a total loss.  A whole range of questions were answered by that one experience, which only prompted more questions.  We knew there was something out there, and that they had an interest in us.

Afterwards, we discovered we had been altered by the contact.  We could see auras somewhat and could feel energy with our hands. Access to these abilities progressed more quickly for myself and the friend that was more highly focused, like me, on becoming a channel. It was only a few weeks later that the two of us had two more contact experiences at a different lake.

We had been going out to this place, seeking contact, hoping that whoever had noticed us before would notice us again.  On a side note, my guides recently took us back to this place in the out-of-body state and said, “This is the place where we chose to activate you as channels.” (It was Lake Thunderbird in Oklahoma, and the multidimensionality of that experience is still unfolding across many phases of our lives.)

One of the first things I learned during these early contact experiences was that there is a Galactic Community of highly evolved ETs who revere the work of the Master Jesus and see it as something that is unfolding and unraveling in human consciousness across many time references simultaneously.  His work is known not just as a planetary teacher, but also as a galactic teacher.  During these contacts I was also aware that some of these ETs are guides for us, and are acting as midwives to humanity’s birth as a unified consciousness.

I had thought that to become a channel it would involve meditating a lot in order to master achieving a trance state, but when you have clear and pure intent, your guides will just reach in and activate you as a channel.  You don’t have to be really practiced at meditation to begin your training with the guides.  I can hear some of you saying “Whew!”  What matters is that you care about being of service to others and that you form an intent to connect that really comes from your heart — oh, and a sense of adventure goes a long way.  The desire to explore the unknown and to face your fear of it will open the path very quickly.

Nothing about my training with the guides unfolded in a way that made sense to the linear, logical mind.  After several mystical experiences and several ET contact experiences during my freshman year in college, the spiritual activity in the physical seemed to die down.  I was guided just to focus on what was happening inwardly through dreams and out-of-body experiences, and not to keep going to the lake to seek contact.  I did return many times and nothing happened, which confirmed the guidance, but I was a little stubborn at first.  Once you have been activated as a channel, the process is about becoming psychologically clear and ready to learn.  Life itself becomes the training ground.

People are often given activating experiences in the beginning of their awakening process.  People call this their awakening, though it is more of a preview of awakening.  Best not to be attached to having these kinds of experiences.  I used to think that my enlightenment would happen by attaining that next mystical experience — that if I could just get to that next big experience, the mystical state would become permanent.  In hindsight, pursuing the next mystical experience did get me out the door a lot to have some important experiences, but there was a lot more to the path of enlightenment than I realized at the time.  I had to let go of outer pursuits and just allow everything to come to me, but it took time to figure this out.

For a while I felt lost.  No big experiences to confirm I was still on the path.  I had been shown that I would write books for Spirit but when I tried to write, nothing came through.  I had no direction about how to achieve such goals, but I continued feeling like I was being worked on and educated at night in my sleep.  I struggled with habits that I knew were detrimental to my spiritual progress.  I was partly resisting the calling of my life and the level of responsibility that really comes with being a spiritual channel for others, but also, there was a simple refusal to grow up too quickly.  God was asking me to surrender more of my ego and I was still in a process of figuring out that this was necessary in order to make real progress.

I was facing a growing fear of failure, and a feeling that I was not worthy or responsible enough to fulfill the potentials that were being revealed for my life through dreams and visions.  With each vision that acknowledged my potential as a channel, I felt more aware of my imperfections.  I had such incredible visions of my potential but I worried that because my writing wasn’t flowing I wasn’t living up to the assignment.  I worried that I was lagging behind or that I was missing the boat somehow.  I was 20 years old and I had no idea that it would take another 10 years of training before I would be ready to begin writing the first book.  My frustration with the timing led to procrastination and avoidance of facing the baby steps that were needed to go further on the path.  Finally, during a critical moment of my life when I was in danger of sabotaging myself with addiction, one of my invisible guides appeared.

When I say he appeared, I mean that literally.  I was alone, in my apartment, when I felt the presence of my guide.  He appeared at first as a wisp of smoke, which then formed into hands and a face.  I allowed the hand to touch mine and I also experimented with putting my hand into this etheric substance.  I felt a mild electrical current when I did this, and contact with this substance caused me to experience the telepathic messages of this guide.

The guide’s name was Daniel, and he instructed me to sit in a chair and meditate.  I did so, and felt Daniel begin to spin all of my chakras.  For the first time, I felt a guide come fully into my body as I entered a deep trance state.  From there, it felt like a pyramid of light was being placed on my head and I received an introduction from Daniel who told me that he is part of a Council of Twelve who works with me.  For the next half hour I explored the connection with my guides, and they gave me invaluable information that encouraged me to have faith in my abilities.  They started by referring to the prayer I prayed when I first read “Opening to Channel”.  They said that they were the guides I had been calling for, and that they had been with me my whole life.  I was determined not to give up and my guides responded to my determination by sending me opportunities to travel and step away from what was happening in the life I was destined to leave behind.

The following year (1997) I made a commitment to the Masters to tame all of my vices, free myself from attachment, and live a completely sober life, devoted to the teachings of the Masters.  I was 21.  Within a couple of days I experienced a profound initiation in a cave near Mt. Shasta and I knew that I had finally entered the Mystery School of the Ascended Masters.  It felt like I was back on track.

After that, I had to face many temptations and distractions that offered to pull me back into the old level of egoic resistance to Divine Will.  It was difficult at first to stay true to my commitment, and it took the rest of the year to reorganize my life to reflect my growing devotion to GOD, (I had to break off a lot of social connections with people that enabled me to stay distracted from the path); but, I passed the tests and felt myself raising in vibration and becoming filled with a pure and clear intent to make progress on the spiritual path.

The next year, I met Pranananda at the Mt. Shasta Wesak Celebration and had a reading from him some months later.  He channeled Sananda for me and also revealed that, one day, I would be giving readings like he was, and all kinds of masters and angels would be coming and going from my reality.

After this, I became more serious about meditation and was finally able to achieve a lasting trance state.  I spent a lot of time calling forth the energy of the Ascended Masters and inviting their support for the development of my channeling practice.  I did spontaneous ceremonies in nature to honor Spirit and the Earth, and I journeyed to sacred sites.  Then, one evening, I was guided to host a group meditation with some friends.

When I was about 23, there was a particular astrological alignment that had prompted someone to organize a global meditation, and a series of prayers and invocations had been written up and distributed over the Internet.  I offered to read the guided meditation for a group of seven friends who came together spontaneously to meditate at my request.

The energy of the meditation was noticeable to all.  By the end of it, I felt a spiritual presence in the room with us and I received a brief message from Spirit, which I relayed to the group.  I actually heard one of the Masters speaking this message subtly, and it was follow by a song from the angels.  This was the first time I had experienced angels singing, and I could feel and barely hear their tones ringing through my inner senses.  A few of the my friends noticed this sensation and got chills when I explained what it was.

Next, I felt inspired to organize an event that would bring together people who shared a connection with Christ energy and the work of the Masters. I knew it was time to begin sharing what I was learning with more people, and yet this was just another part of my training, a big part of which was about letting go of “needing to know” what to do ahead of time and just living in the moment.  At the first event that I hosted in Crestone, Colorado, I kept asking the guides what I was meant to speak about.  I had booked myself three time slots over the course of three days with the other speakers, but even the night before the event, I had no idea what I was going to say.

I kept meditating, tuning in, asking asking asking. Nothing.  Silence. No theme.  I felt the silence of the guides. Surely they knew what I was meant to say, but their lips were sealed.  It wasn’t until the very moment that I got up on stage to open the conference that I was struck by the inspiration of what to say.  Each session just flowed out from that spontaneous present moment place of trust and surrender. That was the beginning of a deepening trust in this kind of present moment cocreation with Spirit — all part of my training as a channel.

Next, I was offered a scholarship to a weekend long Reiki workshop. It was there that I had my first experience of laying my hands on someone and intending to channel healing energy.  I don’t think I even needed the Reiki attunements at that point (many of us have received attunements from living masters in other lives, and those attunements are still with us in this life).  The workshop was mostly important for giving me the opportunity to try something I had dreamed of doing.

I was paired with the workshop instructor and, as I was laying my hands on her, the energy came gushing through and I began to see images.  She was very surprised and said it was a powerful session. I was doing something more than just being a conduit for healing energy.  There was information coming through about the people I was working with and I was giving them an attunement to the realm of the spiritual guides.  It wasn’t long before I had several people offer to organize a series workshops for me to host.  I had no idea what I would do with these, only that I was meant to do them.  I was 25 at the time.

At each workshop I was given a message inwardly about the theme, and these themes seemed to take over, prompting discussions that lasted for hours.  The themes gave a platform to share things that I and others had learned on the spiritual path.  I also ended up channelling spontaneously a number of times.  It took me by surprise and yet felt very natural.  The messages that came through were both entertaining and profound.  The more I let go of control, the more Spirit brought to me everything I needed.

The people who organized the workshops also organized for each person to have a Reiki session with me; and again, the energy just poured through with images and messages for each person.  I really got from the beginning of this process that the linear mind has no business trying to control where the process goes.  It was all about trusting, letting go, and allowing Spirit to do the work.

I was beginning to live my life with the angels and I was receiving more direct and discernible training than ever before about how to cocreate with them in the physical.  I was starting to get in the flow of writing and journaling about my experiences and the angels had even given me a series of messages for the Internet, and yet my path was full of ups and downs.

I went through many years of wondering when I was going to write for Spirit the way I was shown when I was in my late teens.  There were periods of grace when abundance and synchronicity flowed, and other times when I experienced financial pitfalls and the realization that I had a lot of karma to balance in relationships.  There was no magic formula that I could see to becoming successful as a channel. There were so few examples that I could look to for what I was attempting to do with my life.  I didn’t know what my life was suppose to look like.

I had tried to make a living doing workshops and events, and while this was successful for a time, it was misleading to think that I was there yet.  The profound contacts that I experienced with the heavens would sometimes wane so that I would be forced to get more grounded and focused on earthly responsibilities.  Being married for a time to a partner that was not able to work put me on a path of becoming more grounded and I ended up taking a regular job, working in a grocery store.

I have to laugh when I think back to the whole sequence of events that led me to that point.  I had briefly known a man years before who was a channel that also worked in a grocery store.  Once a week he held a group session at his apartment.  He had a friend talk him down into a trance and from there he would channel a group of three guides.  He only took donations.  I also couldn’t help thinking of the old John Denver movie “Oh God” where John plays a grocery clerk who receives contact from God and is asked to be a messenger. Something told me that having to take this job was not a setback but simply the next part of my training.

As it turns out, the job allowed me to transfer between stores, helping me to move to the San Francisco Bay Area.  It was the perfect set up. And yes, I did start to have revelations from God while working there as a grocery clerk.  That is when I finally started writing the book I had been shown in visions all those years ago.

It would have been hard to channel a book if I had to work full time at a grocery store, but Spirit had something different in mind.  I was attending a spiritual retreat the summer after my 30th birthday when the facilitator asked if anyone could describe her crown chakra.  I gave a little explanation of what I saw inwardly, and during the next break, a group of women from Mexico came and asked me if I would give them a reading.

I remember saying, “I don’t really do readings,” and yet, I could hear the angels saying “Now you do”.  It had been a long time since I had done any kind of energy work and I had never given anyone a one-on-one reading in the way that they were expecting.  I told them I would think about it.

During the next meditation, a group of seven Ascended Masters came to me.  I felt them sitting on the floor around me and they explained that they wanted me to start doing readings.  Then they opened a doorway in my mind and showed me a room filled with sacred objects.  Each one was symbolic.  I was told to go into the room and that each sacred object was a gift from the Masters for each of the people I was to give readings to, and that the energy of these gifts would transmit through me and help to anchor a part of my channelship with the Masters.

I agreed to do several readings over the course of that week and so the sessions were booked.  At the first one, Mother Mary came in and announced that I would be channeling her.  This was a very profound experience where she was coming in to acknowledge the person who was receiving the reading.  This person had been one of her students in another life.  Next, I channeled Saint Germain, then Jesus, then a group consciousness of dolphins.

Not long after this, the four women from Mexico offered to fly me down and I received a visitation from a group of angels that said that they had arranged this for me.  I took off work and spent a week in Mexico City doing one reading after another.  I did readings for three different Mexican families, one for each family member.  It was an amazing experience that completely opened my intuitive abilities.  I also had the opportunity to visit the Pyramid of the Sun and another sacred site where I channeled information for the group about the hidden history of these sites.

During the sessions, I mostly channeled Saint Germain, though there were appearances by other Masters as well.  I also did several group readings where I was able to go around the room and look into each person’s field to read something about their unique soul signature, or how they all knew each other through past lives.  When I returned home I had a profound new confidence in my ability as a channel.  I started offering readings to people at work to get more practice. Though I had been paid well in Mexico without even asking, I did not ask for any money at first when I returned.  I just wanted to refine my skills as a channel.

It wasn’t long before my angelic guides came to me and told me to quit my job so I could work almost full time on writing and channeling for the Masters.  I had no idea how I would support myself, so naturally I resisted.  It was what I wanted more than anything, but how could this be?  When it came time to give notice, the angels had to literally push me up the stairs into the office of my manager.  Even as I said the words, I was worried that I might be getting myself into trouble.

After my last day of work, I began to ask the guides what they wanted me to do to make money.  Didn’t they want me to take action?  “No,” they said.  They told me to take the week off and that I had earned it.  In fact, they said just to relax and not worry about the money.  Hard to do when you have no job, no discernible source of income, and rent is due in a little more than a week, but that is what I did.  I tried my best to relax the mind (also part of my training) and did achieve some measure of rest, but I was anxious to find out at the end of the week what they had in store.

Then, only a couple of days before rent was due, I was asked to send out a message to all my contacts saying that I now give phone sessions.  I was flooded with bookings, and all the money I needed for rent and bills show up in a matter of days.  Of course, I had never done phone sessions before so it was a little intimidating, but I chose to trust and dove right in.

My first reading was with a woman named Susan, who, as it turns out, was destined to be my partner.  That was 6 years ago.  She became my biggest supporter and has been my spiritual editor ever since.  Our channels have worked together in profound ways to help encode my writings with the energy of divine union, and she is an amazing person to be with.  Her love surrounds my work.

For many months I did about two readings a day.  The most I have ever done in one day was six.  That was in Mexico.  On occasion, I have done a larger number of shorter readings when making short visits to places out of town.  Then, a funny thing happened with my training along the way.  Something I never expected at that point.

I used to receive the energy of whatever Master or guide I was going to channel several minutes before the call started.  At first, this is how it happened.  I would experience attuning to the Master’s energy first, and that is how I felt confident going into the session.  Then, the Masters started pulling back and not coming in until right when I made the call.  They were testing my faith and asking me to deepen my trust in the present moment.

It was like a game that they were playing with me during the phone sessions.  Then, one day, I was meditating before a session and waiting to see which of the Masters was going to come in when I made the call, but none of them came forward.  I kept waiting for something to happen, unsure of what to do.  The hour was getting later and I didn’t want to keep the client waiting.  Finally I said, “OK, now which one of the Masters am I going to channel?”   They replied, “YOU!”

They were saying that they wanted me to channel my own higher self.  This was different.  Was I really worthy?  Was I really ready?  I made the call and the reading flowed out but in a different way.  It was me doing it.  The Masters had activated my intuitive abilities to the point that they wanted me to start using them more in the readings and developing them as a strength.  They also wanted me to get to know my higher self more and discover my own being as a channel.  They still continued to interact with me during the readings, but mainly they were supporting me to strengthen my alignment with Spirit through my own channel.  I was learning to cocreate with them as an equal now.  I felt like a baby bird that had been fed by the channels of the Masters.  Now they were kicking out of the nest so I could learn to fly.

The sponsorship that flowed in to support my work as a channel allowed me to focus more on writing than on readings and gradually, the readings tapered off until my focus was almost exclusively on channelling for the books.

After finishing most of the work on the first book, I began to wonder what was next.  Susan and I spent almost two years editing the first one and then the angels told me to put the book behind me.  All this time I had waited and prepared to become a best selling author AND, the book had finally come through, but then I was told to wait and set it aside.  It didn’t make sense at first, but then I began receiving the inspiration for a fiction series for young adults that paralleled the original work.  A whole new group of guides came in and began to teach me a new process for channelling fiction.  I was blown away by how this enhanced my creativity.  Then, Pranananda invited me to come visit his Ashram.

This is where the story of this new blog really begins, but there is a lot I didn’t say in the first post.  During my visit to Orange County, I experienced a profound contact with Saint Germain during which he restored my awareness of the original revelation I had about being a channel when I was 17. (I am 36 now)  It was not just about being a writer for Spirit but about connecting people to Spirit and teaching them how to work with their guides.  There’s more.

Saint Germain said that my public ministry as a channel was about to take off.  He spoke of a number of other channels with gifts similar to my own who were seeking to open their ministry with the Masters and that, together, we were helping him open what he called his: “Ministry of Magic in a new age of channelship with the Masters.”

Saint Germain confirmed Pranananda’s prediction that everything would take off for us after moving to Orange County, adding that, “As you make this move, your gifts will combine with the other channels through the field of the Masters and you will be helping each other to bring through unique flavors of the Masters’ teachings in different locations”.  If you have been reading my blog you have a bit of an idea of the kind of grounding initiation that has been preparing me over the last half year to channel a whole new vibration.

As Pranananda says, the best way to develop as a channel is to become more psychologically clear by letting go of attachments and purifying one’s self of egoic patterns.  A psychologically clear person is what the Masters look for.  They don’t want to work through people who are unrefined.

Saint Germain also predicted that after we moved to Orange County, I would receive the support of a woman who would offer me a space to channel for groups and individual clients.  I was to have my own office.  Sure enough, this prediction came true, and I now have an office in Lake Forest, California.

On the morning I began this blog entry, Saint Germain had come to me in a dream and given me a shirt that was filled with violet and ruby red energy (he once came to me in a dream as a bartender — pouring me a glass of “Panther Meadows” wine).  I could feel myself wearing this shirt energetically in my morning meditation and he said it was part of a tune up he was giving me as a channel.  Since then, I feel more intensely activated by each session that I do with people. It feels like the journey has only just begun.

There is, of course, way more to the story than I can write here, but I hope this gives you an idea of what my training has been like. Getting to this point took way longer than I thought and the path was not linear, but every step of the journey was meaningful.  At times, I questioned how certain experiences fit in to the path, but I found that there are naturally places in everyone’s path when all of the pieces fall into place.

I hope that some of you with an interest in channeling will ask questions.  I am here to help.