chapter 15
Reconnecting to Find
Presence and Passion
As a research scientist, it’s Madison’s job to provide unbiased data upon which conclusions can be drawn. “It isn’t my job to draw the conclusions, but rather to provide the basis where it could be drawn. It is not good or bad, it is fact. As scientists, we want to make a positive impact, for the good of society,” she tells me.
Madison brings a list of questions with her for the All Lives Session. She is curious about her past lives and has some of the typical questions that people have for these kinds of sessions: What is my purpose for this incarnation? What causes me to feel blocked or exhausted for no particular reason? Why am I especially drawn to Native American cultures and experiences? What past life should I visit that would have the greatest impact/meaning for my present life?
In pretalk, Madison shares that as a child she was drawn to Native American books even before she could read. She immersed herself in anything Native American. Her favorite game was playing “Indians,” which for her meant hunting buffalo, searching for food for her family, and making tepees out of rags. As she got a little older, her parents took her to a Cherokee reservation, where she was devastated to see the reality of life there.
As a kid, Madison also enjoyed sitting under a tree meditating to commune with nature. She chose the field of science as a way to work close to nature and try to understand how it all works. She is curious about the spiritual connections humans experience and wants to explore them further. Madison mentions that she had been disillusioned by her religious upbringing, feeling that the idea of prayer feels disingenuous to her now.
As the session begins, Madison lets her awareness turn inward. Moving through time, she recalls an experience when she is very young, standing alone in the driveway at her house. It has just started to rain. She takes delight in feeling the warmth of the concrete under her feet and smelling the fresh scent of the rain. She enjoys how she felt so connected to nature and to everything and not separate from it.
Crossing through the abyss of time, Madison notices a white door surrounded by darkness. Images and sensations begin flooding in as she moves through the spirit door. Her body feels larger than her actual size and her feet are cold as if immersed in a cool stream of water resting along the smooth stones lining a stream bed. Her body feels flattened out as if it is a landscape itself when suddenly the notion of a mountain comes to her. “Am I the landscape or am I a person with my feet in water?” she wonders. It is confusing for her at first with the rush of sensations she is feeling. Is this a past life or something else?
It is around dusk. The weather is warm, like a summer evening. In the distance the rich green of the pine trees stands out against the backdrop of brown from the rocks and boulders. The reflection in the water reveals an older Native American man with long, straight, black hair and “fit feet” that are used to walking. He has dark eyes. He discovered this place while roaming the area and returns here whenever he can.
This special place feels familiar to Madison. “I feel that I’ve been here before, I enjoy this place … it’s a very sensory place, because the water is so cold, but the rest of me feels pretty warm …” she says as she bursts out weeping, while waving her arms through the air trying to feel the energy there. “This is a way of being a part of everything. I don’t have to worry about anything. I’m not thinking about where I’m going to go. I miss life that was like that!” Madison exclaims with a big sigh. “I have a feeling of gratitude; that I have come here to pray!” For a moment she is taken aback by the idea of praying, but intuitively understands this place is the reason why she has such a strong kinship with Earth. She is thankful for this connection and she doesn’t want to see Earth destroyed! Her weeping intensifies as she says this.
We end the session. This is enough for one day. After an intense couple of hours, Madison needs rest, so she can continue with our SESR session the next morning. This session has been filled with many long pauses and big releases through exhalations and tears. Sometimes the most powerful sessions are the ones where fewer details are given, yet more intense energy downloads are felt as the soul recalibrates the client’s energy field. What’s most important is the connection that’s made. I hope that we will be able to pick up here in tomorrow’s session, but I also know that sometimes the guides have another plan in mind. We will find out tomorrow.
The next morning, Madison arrives refreshed and ready to go. She’s noticeably lighter and comments that she feels as if something that had been hanging over her has been lifted. We begin the SESR session and almost immediately after the induction process, Madison notices darkness and a sensation of hands coming together to clasp in midair as if in prayer. She feels guided to move her hands together that way. Putting her hands together, she realizes that this is the “namaste” greeting of respect. Her guides greet her with this gesture, which in Sanskrit means “the Divine in me honors the Divine in you” or “I bow to the Divine in you.” She is deeply moved by this as she reciprocates.
Next, she feels heat releasing in her solar plexus. She senses someone familiar moving in close toward her, hugging her. As she hugs back, they whisper in her ear, causing her to cry. “Why the emotion?” I ask. “I don’t know; it’s like missing someone,” Madison replies. The tears increase as she becomes aware of a light that returns her to the sacred space with the stream and the rocks where we had left off the day before. She feels the rocks under her feet and hears the “whooshing” sound of the rushing water. Fireflies with orange sparks of light flash against a backdrop of the pine trees. She weeps more as one gently lands in her hand.
“I feel so connected to them,” Madison says in childlike amazement. “I hold these creatures in my hands. I love them so much! The little birds, the feeling of them landing on my head … the little ones, so round and chunky, everything is so alive! It makes me feel joyful! I don’t talk to them, I just know them. I just hang out with them,” she laughs. She begins to feel a little shaky as she continues to release heat from deep within her belly, solar plexus, and psoas muscle.
Madison lets out a big sigh as she realizes this scene of the stream cutting through the mountains resembles something that she’s painted since she was a teenager. It appears as an open space, like a gate split by mountains on each side. The open space with the crack through the earth allows a spirit to come through the opening. When she paints it, she often illustrates the scene as a nighttime landscape with a moonlit road going through the desert and the mountains on each side with lush waterfalls. Madison “knows” this place. She has painted it many times before.
A series of deep exhalations follow as her body continues to let go of its pent-up energy. “There is so much releasing. I feel shaky, it’s just everywhere. I feel trembly, my back muscles … even my elbows?” she chuckles. She pauses for a long while as these sensations work their way through her. “I feel like I’m inhabiting my body more … like I’m ready to pay attention … I’m feeling very calm now … like my mind is trying to experience the still point [between the two hemispheres],” Madison remarks as she points to the middle of her forehead.
The energy comes from the center of Madison’s body, like blasts of heat that cause her to break out into a sweat. A great sadness comes into her heart like a white-hot heat. It’s there momentarily, like a flame, before it immediately changes to something wonderful. She describes it as “feeling heat releasing from my gut! Sweating, like fire and water, it’s like whoosh!”
I ask Madison’s guides to reveal insights to her along with the sensations she feels to interpret what is happening. “I’m not really here … I’m just trying to get through it [life],” Madison replies. “I want to be more present. I had that feeling as a child, as being present, and I feel that at one point, it went away.” With each release she is more present in her body.
Everything is becoming clearer. Although I try, Madison’s guides bypass the questions she lined up for the session, choosing instead to take her through the spirit door and into this sacred space designed just for her to reconnect and remember. She knows this place is hers to return to whenever she needs, whether in her meditations, her paintings, or her dreams.
After the energy surges, Madison notices that she feels more alive, more empowered, and a little more whole. Even the insides of her teeth are tingling! “I feel like things are going to be okay. I feel okay … my feeling of passion is coming back,” she says as she makes a gesture with her fist over her heart. “My heart is feeling more open. I feel like I have a right to be here as much as anyone else.”
I ask Madison to tell me where in her body she feels the energy of “feelings of belonging here just like anyone else.” She describes it as “a feeling that is filling up in my body … a feeling of my feet being planted, a feeling that comes out of the gut … a feeling of determination, of being focused … I’ve felt like I’ve been scrambling, but now I want to be focused … liberation can allow one to be focused.” She motions with her arm straight out ahead like an arrow flying away from her, stating that this gesture itself helps her with focus.
She sees her body as if looking down on it from above. A white light the color of volcanic fire outlines her stomach, like lava but not hot. Over her midsection, she observes two domes of light: the first is over the sacral chakra and the second is over the solar plexus chakra. It appears like a bright white light with red-orange molten lava spewing around the edges of the white light and cooling. “It’s like fire in the belly,” she chuckles.
Next come tears of joy: “I’m getting a part of myself back … I’m feeling more integrated. I can be here [Earth] AND not be compromised. I can be here AND do what I need to do. I can be here, AND I can have joy,” Madison exclaims. “It’s the power of choice, choice is very powerful. You can choose, there’s no need to judge. Be free with your love, express the love. It lightens and helps every single person. So much repression! I have so much to offer. I went through a phase in this life where I got really beaten down and crunched up and I feel like this [session] is helping me come back.” More heat surges through Madison’s lower chakras from the sacral up to the heart chakra.
I try again to get answers to the questions Madison has on her list. I ask about her career and the work that she does. It takes a moment, as if responding requires switching gears in her brain from the physical releases to find the answers to the questions. “My work feels restricted,” she replies. “I feel that it’s noble work. In this world, people want the numbers, they want to see the numbers, they want to know how bad is this thing, do I need to worry about it? I’m in a place where I can provide the unbiased information … maybe somehow these numbers will make an impact … I sit at a desk all day and I read, and I write, and that feels so restrictive.”
I ask, “And so what is your passion?” Madison replies, “I feel passionate about helping people reach their fullest potential … I wanted to be an educator at one point to create a place where children can simply be who they are, find out who they are, and feel the curiosity of exploring this world. Maybe it comes from my own feelings of having been repressed or smashed down; or being closed up or walled off and not knowing about how extraordinary this world is. I would like to bring a flow to help them see how everything is connected.”
Madison admits that she knows her guides are in constant communication with her, especially in her dreams, though at first she doesn’t always understand the messages they send. “I dreamed about candy for months! I used to have the most horrible nightmares, but then I had a bunch of dreams about spontaneously encountering candy! Life can be sweet, it’s okay!” she said. “There can be sweetness, even in this life, which is sooo far away from the [Native American] one. I’m realizing that it all has value, it all has lessons. I just need to be focused.”
Next, Madison’s guide calls her by her soul name. She joins with her soul’s energy and feels it activating a soul recalibration deep within that realigns her with her true self. More big exhalations follow. Her soul’s message is for her to not be afraid to express her joy and creativity! “It’s my right as a human being to feel like this … to be open!” she happily exclaims.
We briefly explore the connection between her soul, body, and mind to learn whether her soul is in alignment with this mind, or in opposition to her soul’s energy. “We [soul/body/mind] are able to work together. We can see both sides [right and left brain] to integrate it. Modern life is so hard. So distracting. This side has to think and think and think and think to get money. There’s got to be an easier way,” she responds. “So serious … it’s time for some fun and finding delight in the world.” A white crystal shaped into a half moon is placed in Madison’s chest with an arrow covered in feathers coming out of it. It points straight ahead as a reminder to her to not get distracted and keep her focus.
A deeper message about integrating both hemispheres of the brain emerges: “In modern life, all of these brilliant souls who have so much to give are scrambling to live. There are so many important things to do. The world’s got to change, each person needs to change, each person makes a choice. The choice comes from their heart, from a very deep place. Everyone knows, deep down inside. The pain comes from them not knowing this. It’s knowing. It’s just knowing. The left side of the brain has trouble understanding, but it’s how we live in this world now. But they can work together.”
The session begins winding down. Before emerging with Madison, I thank her guides for allowing me to be part of such an amazing session they’ve carefully crafted to take her out of her analytical mind and into her emotions to rebalance her chakras. Recreating a sacred place from a past life that has been special to her gives her a place to revisit in the future whenever she needs to recharge or be more connected to the world around her. I finish by asking for a keyword to serve as a reminder of the day’s session. The word is “joy.”
After the debrief, Madison leaves feeling lifted up and has a great deal to integrate. A few weeks after her session, Madison writes to share that her chakras are still abuzz, and she feels grounded and much more herself. She’s more comfortable with life and interested to see what lies ahead. She felt inspired and has since completed training in energy work as the healer in her has been awakened.
_ Soul-Minded Exercise _
If you feel that you are tired and worn out and have lost your connection, find your connection now. There are many beautiful places in nature for you to sit, unwind, and reconnect. If you especially need a boost, then finding a spot by water or under a full moon can be nice to synchronize your energies with nature. Remember to stay hydrated too. Water helps the emotions in the body to flow.
Sit under the full moon for twenty minutes, gazing up into its light. Bathe in its luminous glow, appreciating the healing properties of connecting with the moon’s magnetic forces.
For the first ten minutes, just connect to the moon’s energy. Breathe it in as you let go of the distractions and chaos in your mind that affect your ability to “feel” what you feel. With each exhale, release the feelings or thoughts keeping you from having peace of mind or the ability to stay focused and present in your life. Release the pent-up energies and worries keeping you feeling keyed up or affecting your belief in yourself or blocking you from being compassionate with others.
Let it heal old wounds in your heart. If negative emotions come up, let them. Tears are a therapeutic release mechanism designed to help the emotional body release pent up emotions that are blocking your connection.
For the next ten minutes, set your intentions for the coming weeks/month. Use this time to problem-solve or look at a situation from another perspective. Bask in the light of the moon and let the moon’s energies shed light on whatever is on your mind. Let the moonlight rekindle your childhood feelings of amazement looking up into the moon. Feel it opening your heart.
Learn to be still as you sit quietly under the full moon. Where are you in your thinking—the past, present, or future? Bring your thoughts into the present. Listen for important messages from your soul.
Each night following the full moon, sit under the moonlight for a few minutes and make this connection stronger as you feel the moon’s energies and your connection to it growing. Notice how your load gets lighter and new solutions to old problems come to light. Notice new messages in your mind opening you to intuitive guidance. Ask the moon to light your path to show you a way to move forward in the darkness.
In addition, place your gemstones and jewelry in a windowsill under the light of a full moon to recharge them. Once charged up, wear them to keep this connection open.