Who's Running the Show?

The aim of channeling, or working with guidance or Spirit, is to remember what it is to live in alignment to your highest purpose. The work process is based on bringing together the body, mind and spirit so they may operate in tandem.

We’re often taught that the mind is our superior component. Our culture seems to value above all else (apart from extraordinary athletic ability) the products of mind. The mind, however, we often use to keep ourselves from remembering that highest purpose, as the forethought and planning the mind is so good at can edge or slip into cycling through (and recycling) fears and worries, leaving us stuck in them in our heads.

When channeling, the various energy centers of the body (chakras) are inventoried by tuning in to the messages offered by each. When this is done, it becomes clear that there is a lot going on in anyone’s body at any particular time. The messages from the energy centers tell of what’s going on in the body, mind and spirit. Learning to channel, something each of us has the ability to do, is in actuality learning to sort out the messages of the body and trust the faculty that is capable of listening and sorting them out, and doing for the whole what is truly best for the whole. This faculty is a central you, a core you, that is often allowing itself to be overshadowed by the rational mind. The goal of channeling, whether for students of the practice or clients of a practitioner, is to find out who’s running the show and why, and to heal any outstanding issues contributing to allowing any other part of us to run things.

The energetic work in the body, learning to hear the messages in the energy centers, leads to using the heart center to detect truth from fiction. The vibration of the heart center (love) is a constant, and when we learn how to find it within and center ourselves in it, it is obvious when we are or someone else is for whatever reason creating fiction. And it just so happens that fiction, as entertaining as it can be, is regarding the self anathema to anyone’s highest purpose.

Learning to listen to this central part of you, your highest self, is akin to learning all about the various knobs, dials and switches that would make you up if you were a soundboard. Coming to discern truth from fiction would with this analogy be learning to increase the input levels of desired frequencies, while learning to decrease the input levels of undesired frequencies. With practice, the ability to tune into what you want and tune out what you don’t want is gained.

That’s a bit on the process of learning to listen. But what are we listening to when we channel? As mentioned above, there are messages in the body to hear. The energetic and physical bodies share a relationship in which each looks like an echo of the other. That is, each conforms to disturbances in the other: The physical body will manifest as injury, illness or condition what is happening in the energetic bodies, and vice versa. In my astrological work, this often looks like people with physical complaints that are linked to emotional issues in the person’s life that are carried over via the emotional body from past lives.

The other element of this work is mentioned briefly above: guidance, or Spirit, or guardian angles. I tend to use the word guidance, as it’s for me a practical indicator of what they do. Each of us has at least one guide available, and working with one’s guides and those of others is a significant part of channeling work. Some channels work with a specific single guide, and others with a specific group of them. Still others work with their own and the guides of others. A number of channels experience turnover with guides at some point in their lives, as our increasing skills and altering directions over the course of our lives make different kinds of assistance necessary.

What’s it like to receive information from guides? It varies from person to person. It can come in the form of hearing (words or sounds), seeing (words, colors, shapes), sensation in the body, or a simple knowing that can look precisely like intuition. In my experience, a finely-tuned (or finely-tunable) faculty of the person is exploited as the medium by which information comes. When I began to learn to channel, for example, I realized that my body was an instrument for the work as I received energetic sensations as cues from guidance. This fit under the category of “finely-tunable,” as I was learning for the first time to feel my body and accept the fact of sensation.1

In time, my understanding of the vocabulary of evolutionary astrology has joined physical sensation, and my guides communicate with me at times with astrological symbols, even to the point sometimes of highlighting an aspect in someone’s chart in my mind’s eye with a flashing-neon-sign effect, recurring until I open to the interplay of the symbols that manifests for the person, or until I learn more from that person about what’s going on in his or her life.2

The next element of learning to work with Spirit, and the most important, is a willingness to look at yourself honestly and take responsibility for your life. Most of us spin fictions to keep ourselves from a state of closer alignment with our highest selves, keeping ourselves in various sorts of holding patterns a metaphorical half mile from where we want to be. Beginning the learning of channeling, or seeking answers in good faith through channeling, tends to send the message that you want to live more aligned with your highest purpose. Once this message is sent, you will have an abundance of opportunities to see yourself and your holding patterns in sharp focus. Each of us has to decide then if we’re willing to own up to what we see, and owning up to and changing our ways is the only way to come to be more aligned.

Anyone can channel. Anyone can learn to tune into each of his or her bodies and learn to find out what needs to be healed in order to operate from a more complete, more whole stance and aligned with his or her highest purpose. This is not something reserved for mystics or psychics, but is available to everyone willing to live in and with more honesty and take responsibility for what they see when they do.

1. I seem to have spent a lot of my life thinking I could exist only in my brain, or in the ethers, but not appreciating the experience of having this physical body.

2. The first time this happened, it might prove interesting to note, was during a reading given for a friend. I felt and described a blockage in the neck of the emotional body formed in the karmic past as a protective measure to separate mind from body. In my friend, the overall relationship with each had been well-developed, but the connection between them was in some ways weakened and not tried. I asked my guides why she would have developed this block for protection and was shown the answer of Chiron in Taurus on the Midheaven, signaling to me that in the karmic past, she had been made a public symbol for expressing her sexuality, and the disconnect was a Chironic attempt to avoid identifying completely with her sexuality.