A Breath of Heaven

Last week, I spent several days revising the follow-up emails to my complimentary grief guide, Essentials for Grieving Well. I had decided that people would be more likely to read the emails if they were shorter. So I broke up the original long emails into bite-sized bits. The email The Way of Breath spawned seven baby emails. That's a lot of emails about something we usually do without thinking. But the breath I wrote about is a very different kind of breath -- a breath with transformational potential.

Focused breathing is what saved me, 28 years ago, during the crash and burn of my first marriage. For two horrible months, while my husband vacillated about leaving, I tried everything to keep us together. Each morning, I would wake to the brilliant Santa Fe sun full of possibility. Then Wham! I would remember my marital situation. From heaven to hell in an instant! I didn't do much breathing in those difficult days. It was as if by holding my breath I could hold my damaged world together. Sometimes my breath-holding was punctuated by hysterical crying. Which got me some oxygen, I suppose, in a hyperventilated sort of way. Then I met Sufi Master, Adnan Sarhan.

Adnan came to Santa Fe from his summer camp in the Manzano Mountains east of Albuquerque, NM. My husband saw the workshop flyer and suggested we go. Adnan taught every evening for two weeks, and two full days on the weekend in between. There was little talking at these workshops, just hypnotic middle-eastern music, slow movement, and breath. My over-active left-brain full of panicked voices was silenced. I entered a magical present where neither past nor future exists. My worries and confusion were replaced by a profound and delicious peace and an all-encompassing love. 

This love was very different from the human love I knew -- fraught with expectations, demands, and disappointments. This divine love was an expansive, chest-stretching, heart-filling feeling almost too big to contain. It was so huge; it brought tears to my eyes. This kind of love is what I think of when I read the heavenly descriptions of near-death experiences by writers like Anita Moorjani or Eban Alexander.

After two weeks of immersion in this glorious state, I was ready to let go of my marriage. I recall the exact moment. My husband and I had just returned to our car after seeing a movie about a marital breakup. Great choice, huh? He was in the driver's seat, describing his options to stay or move to Phoenix where his new lover lived. I sat huddled in the seat opposite him, hardly breathing, my body trembling, my hands clinging to the handle of the door. Suddenly, I saw myself from an observer's viewpoint. I saw with clarity the difference between the peace I had gained from the workshops and the misery I felt in that car. It cracked me wide open. No! I don't want to be this way! I breathed out and let it all go.

My husband moved to Phoenix a few weeks later. The following summer, I began a 25 year study with Sufi Master, Adnan Sarhan -- a study that continues to this day. Did it take away the grief I felt at the loss of my 10-year marriage? No. There are physical and energetic adjustments to loss that cannot be by-passed no matter what you do. But the workshops certainly made the process more bearable. What is more, they brought me into connection with my true self--lovable and full of possibility. The key is in the breath and the present moment. They connect you to spirit, your essence, and your heart. Everything is livable in that place of clarity and peace.

Do you need to learn how to breathe from a Sufi Master, like I did? Or from a coach who knows about these things? It couldn’t hurt. They can guide you to the place you want to be with their own energy and breath. However, breath is available to us all the time. It is our birthright. It just takes some practice and commitment to use it in this transformative way. I hope my follow-up emails with their tips on breathing help those who need it. 

To download the complimentary grief guide with its follow-up emails, click here: Essentials for Grieving Well.

For another blog on breath mediation see: May 2012.

Don't forget to breathe.
 

Michelle Peticolas

The Right Channel

by George Brooks

About twenty of us were squeezed into the living room of a small Brooklyn apartment awaiting the counsel of Laurie Lamb, a New York trance medium. It was 1986 and my life was in shambles. I had moved back home from New Mexico following a failed marriage, and was currently sleeping on a therma-rest pad in friend's apartment in Park Slope. I felt confused, disoriented and adrift. I'd try anything.

After a brief introduction, Laurie closed her eyes and went into a trance. She returned as a gruff authoritarian male admonishing us to get our acts together least we send the world to rack and ruin. This manifestation was followed by a kindly old lady who dispensed instruction like a daily advice columnist. Other entities also made an appearance -- a Native American shaman, a bawdy, flirtatious dame, an upper-crust matron -- seven or eight in all. They were so colorful and diverting, I found it difficult to attend to what was actually said. The diagnosis of a small lump on the back of my neck, never actually examined, later proved correct -- undigested milk fat. However, all in all, I left the event, skepticism intact.

Ten years later, I met with my second trance medium, Robert Johnson, at his apartment on the upper west side. I was interviewing him for a segment of On the Edge, a television show I produced, bi-weekly, for Manhattan Neighborhood Network. Robert was a hypnotherapist as well as a channeler for a group of otherworldly entities called "The Tutelage of Alpha Centauri." A plump, middle-aged man with a shock of white hair, a jacket and a necktie, Robert looked more like the car salesman he once was than any new age guide. However, I found his soft, confidential tone disarming and grew to like him as I learned the details of his unexpected spiritual journey, including a talking statute of Saint Jude and the discovery of a hidden talent for visions.

At my request, the Tutelage of Alpha Centauri was channeled for me and the cameras. Shirt loosened at the collar, tie gone, eyes lids lowered and speech somewhat clipped and archaic, the entity greeted me. What actor, I thought, could not have easily accomplished such transformation? I greeted the entity in return. He spoke with clarity and wisdom. I suspend judgement and listened.

The Tutelage told me about my own work, about how this show I was making that night would be aired more than once -- which it was, and that I would eventually have a production company -- which I did for my film series, Secrets of Life and Death. I was pointedly told not to seek perfection as there is no such thing -- an on-target bit of advise as perfectionism has long been a failing of mine.

To the general audience the Tutelage advised regular meditation. It was explained that there are three elements to a human being: the body, the soul (the autonomic nervous system) and the spirit. The body creates a wall that makes it difficult for the spirit to penetrate with its wisdom. Meditation lowers the wall and allows us to receive inspiration through our soul, the body's intermediary. This bit about the soul reminds me of PMH Atwater's research on the after effects of Near Death Experience on the mind -- in particular the limbic system, which is part of the autonomic nervous system. Apparently it gets a big boost from celestial encounters (See Chapter 20 of Near Death Experience: the rest of the story). A similar message about the important of meditation is currently being encouraged in a new YouTube video titled Awaken. Side note: I have some issues with the manipulative feel of this film, but not with its message.

Robert, not the tutelage, shared an interesting insight about channeling, which has stayed with me all these years: We All Channel! Channeling is not a special gift of the talented few. We receive wisdom from the divine all the time. We just fail to recognize it sometimes. For example, when I do a tarot reading or consult the iChing, I am channeling. In meditation, when I am flooded with ideas, I am also channeling. I no longer fight these thoughts in order to achieve an empty mind space; I accept them as a gift. When I am in my dream group or grief coaching, similarly, I receive insights and inspirations. Often they are stunningly on target. While my ego would like to take credit, I know I am simply a conduit for a deeper wisdom.

My biggest hesitation about channeling has been its susceptibility to fraud. See my early blog post on this. We all hate to be fooled, deceived or hoodwinked. So we are cautious when it comes to these arenas so difficult to verify. Are we not more inclined to believe the report, for example, of neurosurgeon and near death experiencer Eben Alexander regarding the after life because he was so steeped in medical science and such a disbeliever at the start? Disinterest and disbelief are the best credentials for credulity. However, when we relate to channeling as divine inspiration, it no longer matters whether Laurie Lamb or Robert Johnson are "really" being inhabited by spiritual entities. What matters is the quality of what is revealed. Do the words make sense? Are they life-enhancing and wise? Do they resonate with our hearts and souls?

I suspect that some channeling frauds may have begun as true transmitters of wisdom. However, fame and fortune can enlarge the ego, which invariably lead to folly.

Jeffery A. Marks, the next guest appearing on the teleconference series, The Mystery and Magic of Life, is not a trance medium, he is a psychic. That is, he is not inhabited by an otherworldly entity who takes control over his body and dispenses wisdom. Rather he receives visions and feelings that he has learned to heed and interpret and which turn out to be remarkably accurate. He obtains his information from the spirits of deceased human beings.

Robert Johnson explained in his interview that the entities he channels are of a higher order -- like angels. Other channeled entities such as Abraham, Seth, Ramtha, the Pleiadian Collective, God, etc, claim a similar higher authority. This is important to keep in mind as we begin to open to communications from the other dimensions. The view of heaven provided by people who have had near death experiences or by the newly departed souls in Jeffery's study will reflect some of the limitations of mortal beings -- augmented, of course, by their heavenly experience. Do not expect them to have all the answers.