I
never really wanted to be a channel. I didn't take any workshops to try to
make it happen. But clearly it was part of my life path that began to unfold
in the early 1980's. For a number of years I had said that I wanted to learn to meditate but I never found the time to do it. Then the summer of 1982, I was laid off from my job at a start-up company in Sacramento, CA. The first morning I was home with nothing much to do I realized that I no longer had any excuses. I had more time than I knew what to do with and I could start meditating.
So I sat down on my meditation bench and fidgeted. Quickly, I realized I didn't really have a clue how to meditate and I went downstairs and found that one of us had bought a book on how to meditate and it was sitting waiting for me.
It instructed me to sit quietly and count my breathes until I reached 8 and then to repeat the process over and over again for 20 minutes.
That first 20 minutes was an eternity but I did get through it and each day for the next 4 weeks I sat for 20 minutes outside in the shade near our townhouse and counted my breathes. Slowly I got to the point where I didn't need to count for the whole time. I could just sit and watch my breath as it entered and left my nose.
One morning as I sat worrying about getting our townhouse ready to go on the market while trying to count my breaths, I heard a voice say, "Yes, my child, you have many concerns." It was loud and clear and I was stunned for a moment and then said, "Father?" And the voice said, "I am not your father but you may call me that if you wish. I am here to teach you."
The voice went on for the full 20 minutes of my mediation and it instructed me among other things to return and meditate each evening too. I ran into the house and called Walter at work, who said, "It's about time, I've been expecting this." "You were? Well, I wasn't!" I was pretty irate. How could he be so calm. This was a BIG deal!
At that point in my life I had a very good memory so I would sit and listen to the voice and then come inside and write down everything I could remember that it had said pretty much verbatim.
So began what I called, "living based on guidance." Each day I meditated first thing and I did what the voice instructed me to do for that day. Sometimes it involved spiritual exercises or affirmations during meditation and it always involved what tasks I was to do that day.
The guidance supported our decision to visit a Spiritual Community in Massachusetts called Sirius and then supported our move to live there a month later. It metaphorically held my hand through the trials and tribulations of our year in community and the incredible spiritual grown that took place during that time.
My meditations and the process of receiving guidance remained pretty much the same. The voice always seemed to come from near my heart and I got pretty good at being able to tell the difference between it and when my own thoughts were pretending to be it. Then in the fall of 1985 we bought our first home computer and I began using the computer to type my guidance as I heard it in my meditation instead of waiting until I'd finished meditating to write it down. Typing with my eyes closed produced some interesting results--no capitals and occasionally totally unreadable results because my hands were on the wrong keys.
Typing opened some new avenues. I began hearing my master teacher, an entity introduced to me by Evelyn Jenkins, a channel who lived in Seattle. His voice came from the center of the top of my head.
Various psychics and channels had told me over the years that I was surrounded by beings of all sorts and varieties. They seemed to think it was a big deal but to me it didn't seem like anything much at all. Now my master teacher was introducing me to a whole circle of beings who sat with me as I meditated and called themselves the Circle of Light. They each gave me messages and all seemed to have a different agenda. It looked to me like I had my life's work cut out for me! One of them even began to dictate children's books to me. That was great fun though none of them were particularly stellar. I even went so far as to submit a couple of them for publication but no publisher was ever interested.
While this was going on, we also discovered Ramtha, an entity channeled by JZ Knight, who lived in Yelm, WA. We went to a 3 day Ramtha Intensive in November 1985 and then watched a raft of videos for the next few months with our friend, Patricia who we'd gone to the intensive with.
Patricia had a fairly large group of friends who were interested in metaphysics and she and her roommate had a pot luck for us all in late January 1986. After dinner we were sitting around a large round glass table talking about Ouija boards and channeling when someone suggested we close our eyes and see what we could call up. I remember thinking, "Oh boy, do they really want to do this?" But everyone was game so we closed our eyes and waited.
I could literally feel someone 'knocking on my door' and I told them to go bother someone else. But no one else was buying either. So we opened our eyes and discussed things and my dear husband, Walter said, "You know if we hold hands and do an invocation, I'm sure we could get something." So we did and sure enough now I couldn't refuse that knock, knocking on my door.
For reasons beyond me, I had the idea that if some entity was going to speak through me they should sound entirely different than me. So this poor entity (whoever they were) was forced to croak out a message to the folks around the table. I would let a sentence or two through and then collapse facedown on the table. Thank goodness someone managed to move the candles and wine glasses or I might have set my hair on fire.
The message was in essence that anyone could become a channel. I was already doing my channeled writing and I had no desire to be a voice channel so I figured that the message was for someone else and that would be that. Ha!
A week or so later at the very beginning of my meditation, the voice I was listening to got stuck and kept repeating the same thing over and over again. I don't remember now what it was that it repeated but I do remember that it occurred to me that maybe the voice would get unstuck if I said the words out loud. So I tried it and sure enough the words began to flow.
The voice, which eventually identified itself as someone new come to talk to me, told me to put my attention across the room and to pretend to sit on the file cabinet and listen to him. Thus began my training as a channel. This first entity we later learned was called Aranya. He was there to teach me to be a channel. He took charge right a way, setting a different time each day for me to meet him to practice so I wouldn't get stuck in a rut where I thought I could only channel under specific conditions or at specific times.
After a few days of practice he asked me to make a decision as to whether I actually wanted to learn to be a channel. I wrestled with this for a day or so. I knew that if I said yes, I would be giving up all hope of ever being 'normal.' But aside from that I couldn't come up with any good reason not to do it. And so I said yes since I hadn't succeeded in being normal yet and I wasn't giving up that much to do it. He then trained me to relax and open up to him and simply listen. He called it 'getting out of the way.' And I saw that as my only real job in the process--to work as hard as I could at not thinking and not interfering with the process and staying out of the way.
Over the next year Aranya introduced me to 6 more entities and trained me to be a pretty decent full body channel. He became a wonderful mentor and a dear friend to both Walter and I.
Aranya has a very wonderful sense of humor and we had a great deal of fun in that first year teasing and joking. As a result the group of entities that I channeled for 12 years were called Aranya and The Pixies. They have their own web pages where you can read all about them and their message.
Clearly, my years of getting guidance and then listening to the Circle of Light were part of my preparation and training for being a channel. And being a channel was one of the most growthful things I have every done. I was exposed over and over and over again to the incredible philosophy that the entities taught and over time it became mine.
Even more important, the entities taught that there was no difference between me and them. There truly were no entities, we were all one. Sara only existed as an illusion. They also taught that the purpose of life was not to do good or pay for previous sins but to LIVE as fully and completely as possible. And finally the taught that Forgiveness wasn't something you earned it was something you gave yourself when you saw that what you thought had been 'wrong' never really even happened--you let go of you judgment of the situation.
All this was very heady stuff and while over time I came to at least be able to understand it and accept it I wasn't ready yet to really fully live it.
After 12 years I came to a place where I wasn't getting that much out of channeling. In my attempt to keep my channeling clear and un-sullied by my own thoughts, I was working harder and harder to keep a wall up between me and the entities. And this was at cross purposes to what they were trying to teach me--that I was one with them and every one else and that I couldn't do anything wrong.
It got more and more painful both physically and psychologically for me to channel so with great difficulty I quit channeling in public the summer of 1998.
During the year after I quit channeling I had a number of spiritual openings that would last for a day or so and then dissolve back into normal every day life. After a year of this I realized where I was in Melody's cozying out of judgment process. I was still deeply trapped in the belief that suffering was real and that we all needed to do something about it. It became clear to me that what I needed was some way to realize that suffering wasn't real. Within a week of that realization I came upon The Work of Byron Katie. This was exactly what I was looking for. And it seemed to me to be the missing piece in all the things that the entities had talked about. Over and over again they had told us we needed to simply let go of judgment. But they never told us how. Katie's 4 questions were clearly a way to do it.
I've spent the last 15 years doing The Work and I highly recommend it. Have I become enlightened? No, but you know I no longer care if I ever become enlightened and I see that as a HUGE step. Do I still judge? Yes, of course, and yet I no longer fight against it but instead have a tool with which to make peace with and undo my judgments and set myself free from the traps they create.
One of the more amazing things that has come out of doing The Work is the change in my view of what my channeling really was. I had the opportunity to do The Work with Byron Katie and I chose to do it on my feelings of not being appreciated for all I did in channeling --my first judgment working over time again. We went through the process and at one point, Katie looked at me deep in the eyes and said, "Sweetheart, these are entities, is it true? Can you absolutely know it's true? Where does the voice come from?"
With great soul searching and even greater difficulty and lots of tears I had to admit that I had no way of proving that they were entities and that in fact the voice came from me, the words came from me. And that the turn around "These aren't entities" was as true or truer than "These are entities". This was really upsetting to me. I struggled with it for over a year. I was afraid that if I actually accepted that Aranya wasn't an entity and that it was all me, that it meant I'd been making it all up all those years; that I was admitting to being a fraud. In time I realized that wasn't the point. Nothing is real, just as the entities have always said. Aranya had always said that he was not separate from me. He knew that but I didn't. I heard him say it a thousand times. And yet it never went in and stuck.
So here's where I am with it now. Thoughts arise. Some thoughts have a familiar feel to them and I call those 'my thoughts'. They belong to Sara and all her sub personalities. Some thoughts don't have a familiar feel. Some I label as Aranya. Some as Harmony. Some as Melody, etc. The thoughts that I say belong to the entities tend to be much bigger and more expansive and wiser than the thoughts that are familiar to me and that I own as mine. But in truth those thoughts all come from the same place, what I call the mind of God.
I have come to realize--though I don't always believe it--that Sara as an absolute, really doesn't exist. I can find no proof of it. There is no one in there in my head that I can find when I go looking for her. There are thoughts. I have learned from Byron Katie to inquire regarding the truth of those thoughts. And just as the entities said, I have found there is no truth with a capital T. That Sara exists is not a Truth. She appears to exist. I live as if she does. But she is no more real than the entities. We're all equally illusionary and I've been making them all up all along.
I guess I'm actually starting to get the core curriculum of Pixie University. Maybe I'm finally ready to own my MMSU--Master of Makes Stuff Up. I've made up Sara and I've made up the entities and I've made up the concept of I. And while that may sound fairly outrageous it makes sense to me.