So I did just as my doctor had said, I went home. Home was in California with my partner Sage and his beautiful daughter, Gaia. We were relocating together to the Santa Cruz area. Within days of our arrival in Santa Cruz, Sage found a wonderful job and we found a temporary place to live while we looked for a more permanent place. The grace, that I spoke of earlier, followed us to our new home. Synchronicity was our ally. We met the right people at just the right time, which had just the right information for us. People who we recognized as soul mates just started appearing in our lives. We really felt as though we had found our tribe.
Sage and I continued to do our healing work. I transferred from the University of Hawaii, and began my studies at Goddard College in January, 2000. The information about sound healing continued to flood into my life. Once I committed myself to this path of healing through sound, the opportunities came from everywhere. Our healing journey began accelerating at a very rapid pace. Sometimes it seemed like too much, and tried to slow it down a little.
According to Vicky Noble, author of the Motherpeace Tarot Deck, "Most shamans are called...The calling is uncomfortable at best, and often involves tortuous or near-death experiences through which the initiates' inner sight is opened to the world of unseen spirits and helpers. The ego-personality is dismembered, shattered, dissolved, or emptied. The person feels vulnerable and raw. The new self gradually begins to emerge from within, as the apprentice-shaman learns the secret ways of nature and the hidden allies. It is a dangerous and delicate process for the psyche, with self-mastery needed before one can move safely through the realm of the unseen."
Several months after my return to California, Sage and I were just entering into a healing process and I was in the middle of meditation. Suddenly, I began to feel an energy starting to move in my heart. It started as a feeling and then moved into a physical sensation of light and sound. The energy manifested as a looping energy from my heart up to beyond the top of my head and down to below the bottom of my spine simultaneously in a figure eight shape. Then the energy came back into my heart just as in a figure eight. Next the energy changed direction to horizontal and moved to beyond the tips of my fingers and then back into the heart again. During these energy movements the sights and sounds I experienced were very profound and purely ecstatic. The color was something between yellow and pink.
The sound is more difficult to describe. It sounds like something I would imagine from outer space. The closest thing I can relate it to is the sound of the space ship in the movie Contact. It is interesting that I watched that movie only a few days before having the mastectomy two years earlier. I remember a line from the movie that became my mantra as I went into surgery to remove the cancer, "I’m ready to go…I’m ready to go." The sound of the looping is a high pitched frequency that almost has a metallic sound to it. I realized later that the sound was like the sound of the crystal singing bowl I had experienced several months earlier in the healing session with Sage's daughter. The sound would intensify as the "loop" neared the heart center where it would also speed up and gain momentum for the movement outward again. As the movement approached either the vertical or horizontal apex, it seemed to slow down before it returned to the power center that appeared to be in the heart.
I sat with this energy movement in meditative posture for what seemed like a long time. I stayed in this mesmerized, energized and hypnotized state for awhile, and felt astounded by the sensations that continued to move through my body. Sage tried to talk to me, and I could see his lips moving, but I was just in a suspended state of bliss and couldn't respond to him. I felt as though the Goddess had blessed me with the most beautiful feeling I could imagine.
Eventually, Sage and I started to do some synchronized breath work. As we breathed together we harmonized our spirits, and moved in a deep healing space like we had many times before. Only this time, there was a third energy with us. Even though I had never met her, I knew that the energy that was there with us was the spirit of Sage's former wife and Gaia's mother who had passed away two-and-a-half years before. As I was laying down, I felt her sitting behind me with my head in her lap. Somehow she communicated with me that she had given me a gift, and that I was to share it with Sage since she hadn't been able to share it with him because of her physical illness. While she was cradling my head in her lap almost like she had just given birth to me, I started to feel a profound energy moving down my spine through the top of my head. As it entered the lower part of my body, my abdomen became quite distended. Sage even remarked that it looked as though I was pregnant. I don't know how much time lapsed during this whole process. Time during these sessions does strange things. Sometimes it seems to speed up and compress simultaneously. This was one of those times.
After awhile there was pain in my lower abdomen, similar to what I might imagine labor pains to be, although they were not as intense. I began to push and release. As I did this, Sage began to gently push on my abdomen and stroke it in a downward motion. Eventually is was quite clear to us that energy was being born through me. It was palpable, tangible and very real. I could feel it moving through me as though it were a physical being. Sage said that as it was released from my body he could actually feel it in his hands. What was this energy? No one can say for sure, but I think it was the energy I felt during the meditation in a more tangible form.
This energy has stayed with me for many months. For the next week, I had a hard time functioning in the physical world. The energy was so strong in my heart that at times I thought I might be having a heart attack. I could feel the looping energy almost constantly, and then eventually I was able to feel it during meditations and call upon it at will. About a month later, Sage and I were spending an evening with some friends when an interesting thing happened to me. I was in a very loving and open-hearted space when all of the sudden the looping started and moved outward from my heart to my friend's heart, and then back again. It was almost like having an orgasm, except that we were five feet apart and the orgasm was centered in my heart. It was sweet, powerful and safe. I began to experience this energy at other times and with other people when I least expected it. Each time I felt the same sweetness and connection with a very deep part of them. I believe I was communing with their essence.
Several times this experience came over me while I was talking with someone on the telephone. I could feel the energy swelling in my heart, and then the looping would start when we began talking about spiritual things or healing. It is interesting to notice that the "loop" didn't take any longer to loop back than it did when I was with someone face to face.
I have gotten to the point where I can use the energy with other people when I decide I want to instead of it just looping on its own. One day I went to our local bookstore to peruse the books and listen to new music. When I came into the store I read a sign advertising psychic readings that day. I looked over at the table where the reader was sitting and I felt the urge to connect with her. She was busy with someone, so I decided I would just try looping energy out to her instead of talking with her. I felt the energy swell inside of me and I began to send the energy out to her, but there was no immediate response. Since it was just an experiment and I was not attached to any particular outcome, I went on listening to music. Within a few minutes I heard someone behind me attempting to play a Tibetan singing bowl.
I turned around and there was a young man with his son. The man was trying to show his son how to play the bowl, but he has having difficulty. I offered to demonstrate, and took the bowl in my hand. The bowl began to sing beautifully and the little boy’s eyes got huge. I said to him, "You have angel eyes." With that, I decided to send energy out through the loop to the little boy. He looked at me and walked over and put his head on my shoulder. I was so touched. He then asked me, "Are you magic?" "Some people think so," I responded. His father looked at me and said, "Well, you must be, he never is so friendly with strangers." With that I turned back around and resumed listening to the music. A little while later I noticed a woman who came into the store and walked over to the man and his son. They walked over to the where the bowls were and I saw him play the bowl for her and then she gave him a big hug. My heart was so full of joy at that moment. I realized that I could really use the energy of the looping for healing in ways that were very subtle.
Later when Sage and I were leaving the store, I related the story to him. Just as we were approaching our car I was telling Sage the part about the angel eyes and I heard someone say, "You are the one with angel eyes." I turned around and looked, and the person who had made that comment was the psychic whom I had sent the looping energy to about two hours earlier. Without another word, she got in her car and drove off. I was amazed, because it didn't even appear that she had looked at me since she was so busy with readings. But somewhere in those two hours, she got the energy and had looked at my eyes. I took this as another confirmation about the power of connection through our spiritual essence.
During the months since the "transmission" of this looping energy, Sage and I continued together in working with each other. Often during these sessions we would trade off giving and receiving. This gave us an opportunity to develop our abilities to work with other people in a safe and controlled setting. It also allowed us to really "go into our stuff" because we had the safety of the love in our relationship to go deep into our own healing. I am amazed sometimes at the power I have and can use in a deeply spiritual way. I find myself doing things that I have never learned, but are just the right thing at the right time. The secret is to step out of my logical, thinking brain and allow spirit to work through me. I find that when I stop the ego from judging if sounds are pleasing or sounds are awful is a difficult task. Sometimes the sounds that come out of me do sound off (by some standards), but they are healing sounds, and they can either evoke my healing or open the way for someone else’s healing.
I am reminded of the first time I experienced such a shift in consciousness. I believe now, in retrospect, that the experience was a type of initiation, which took me to new levels of awareness. This experience happened in 1990, when I was attending a weekend-long workshop in North Carolina, on heightening intuition with my friend Barbara. This was my first conscious experience with shape-shifting and multi-dimensional travel.
The first evening, we were in a condominium, preparing for a group healing meditation. Barbara asked me and a friend of mine, David, to hold the energy across the circle. She had placed a white candle in the middle of the group. Almost immediately when David and I locked our gaze with each other, my reality shifted. David and I were Native Americans in a cave. We were sitting across a fire, and were wrapped in buffalo hides to keep us warm. Above his head were drawings of animals. There was chanting in the background, possibly from outside the cave. Within a few minutes, I began to breath very deeply, almost as though I were in a re-birthing experience. I entered another dimension and traveled throughout many galaxies and realities. I went completely out of my body, and I believe, at this point, I stopped breathing. It was a blissful experience, and there was no fear for me. A part of me had remained as a witness to my own experience. The group experience, however, was another story. Many people had never witnessed anything like this, and they were afraid that something terrible had happened to me.
It was quite a long time before I returned to my body, and when I did, I was a bit confused. The fear and anxiety from the other group participants was very pervasive. Barbara was right by my side, and I knew that she understood what had happened. She and I had had many healing sessions together, and we knew the power of what had just transpired. It was late in the evening at this point, so I just went off to bed. The next morning when I got up, and I went to put on my glasses, I realized that they didn't fit my face. It was interesting, but when I looked in the mirror, my face seemed narrower, and I needed to adjust the tension on my glasses in order to wear them. I felt lighter that day, and it was all I could do to "stay in my body" each time we went into meditation. Later in the day, we participated, as a group in a sweat lodge on property that was near a Cherokee reservation. I had to keep laying with my face down on Mother Earth in order to stay in my body. Part of me wanted to return to the other dimensions, and re-capture the experience of the evening before. Since I had promised the group, to "stay in my body", I never did return to that place for the rest of the weekend.
During the years since, I have re-visited that experience many times in meditation, although I didn't have an out-of-the-body experience that I remember. But, during the healing sessions with Sage, I often would "go out." He and I had an agreement about how he would bring me back. These were very blissful experiences, but I noticed that they came almost immediately after I had a memory of some trauma from my past. I began to realize that leaving my body was familiar to me, it was a way that I coped during my childhood. I had learned how to disconnect my body from my experience. While this may have been helpful at times, I soon realized that I was no longer in danger, and that I could feel all the sensations and survive. This realization was powerful to me, and I began to see how I had set up patterns of coping with things in my life. Over the next few months, I made a conscious attempt during our healing sessions to "stay in my body." I found that having "in-the-body" experiences was actually more powerful. I learned that I could control how I experienced the trauma and the bliss of the memories during healings. I was more able to work through the feelings and release, rather than go away and just let the experiences happen to me.
There came a period when Sage and I had worked through a great deal of our own personal pain, that things started to really intensify. At this point one would think that we would feel very close, and things would be running smoothly in our lives. To our surprise, this was not the case. We entered into a very black time where we both felt uneasy, uncomfortable, unloved, threatened, attacked, criticized, unsupported, and many other undesirable experiences that we thought didn’t belong in a loving relationship.
My dear friend, Joan Gattuso, writes about this state of healing in her book A Course in Love. She calls this the emotional iceberg. For a moment, think about the physical make-up of an iceberg. Only ten percent of the iceberg can be seen above the level of the water. That means, of course, that ninety percent of it resides below the surface. We can apply this to the realm of our emotions as well. We work on ourselves, and clear up all that we can see, and even acknowledge what we know is below the surface. Guess what? We find out that usually there is a lot more. We may know consciously that there are additional levels of our inner space that need to be healed, but it can still sneak up on us and blindside us when it erupts to the surface. Joan says, "We need to clear up this surface stuff, but nine-tenths has been carefully hidden by our ego. It is disguised and denied, but it hasn’t gone away on its own, and it can’t go away without intensive inner work. That is why, when you really get down there into it, you may discover bits and pieces of negative energy wrapped around your soul."
During this period Sage and I found our work with sound and music particularly beneficial. We recognized that the "stuff" was coming to the surface. We couldn’t help but notice when we were arguing much of the time. Shamanic work is about shattering old ways and stepping into new paradigms. Consciously, we knew that these buried events were probably not going to happen again, at least not in the same context as they had before. Unconsciously, we created scenarios that supported the negative beliefs we had developed from our initial and subsequent woundings. At times I felt as though the healing we had been experiencing was coming back in on itself, and we were right back where we started. I like to think of it as a spiral of healing. We moved through the healing and it appeared that we were right back where we started. But in healing we are always in a different state when we come out the other side. Just as a spiral moves in a circle, and the circles never touch where they have been before. The spiral can be inward or outward, but there is always movement.
Gabrielle Roth, in her book Maps to Ecstasy, addresses the path to healing as a five-step process from inertia to ecstasy. The steps are:
1. Inertia-the first layer of consciousness. It can be described as the feeling when you first begin to wake-up in the morning; when you know you are waking up but don’t really want to get out of bed just yet. It is the moral and intellectual laziness of just "getting by." This is the life of the victim, where life just happens and you do nothing about it except complain. Abuse of all sorts thrives in this level of consciousness. The phrases that people stuck in inertia use are: Don’t rock the boat. Why bother? Be careful. Plan ahead. You’ll regret it. You’ll be sorry.
2. Imitation-the first step in escaping inertia. This is the phase where you begin to realize that there is a problem and that there may be something you can do about changing it. Unfortunately this is also the place where many people become involved in cults and identify with gurus. Imitation is not the means to spritual growth in and of itself. It is, however, a good start. Imitation is a way to learn and can be a strong catalyst to change. One point to be aware of is that imitation can lead to security and that is often just a "cover" for inertia. It is important in this phase to develop a strong sense of self and not being concerned with what others think of you. Cultivate a strong sense of authenticity and truth for yourself.
3. Intuition-a giant leap from imitation. Inevitably you must leave the comfort of imitation and listen to your own inner guidance…and follow it. At this point, we must ask the question, "Who am I?" This can be described as wandering in the dark, and it is scary and invigorating, intimidating and delicious. Suddenly you want to break out of yourself (or the self you were) and become more (the Self). This entering into the experience of intuition resembles an initiation, a rite of passage, or the birth of the Spirit. It is what remains after the lecture is over, and all the books and notes are taken away. We are left with just ourselves, and our inner wisdom. Intuition is about knowing without thinking. It is the difference between knowledge and wisdom. This can be a painful, and edgy time, but it also moves us into a sense of being fully alive in body and spirit. Once this state is fully embraced, there are flashes and insights that cannot be ignored. Creativity and inspiration begin to stir within us replacing hesitancy and doubt. This phase is about courage and fortitude to trust our own guidance.
4. Imagination-putting it all together. While the phase of intuition caused things to be torn apart and paradigms to shift, the phase of imagination allows us to build new paradigms that are of our own making. Imagination is about allowing all of the parts of ourselves to come into harmony with our own divine essence. It is about showing up, being real and sharing our divine gifts with others. This is the phase of our healing where we really get in touch with our warrior self. We feel fully alive and engaged in the expression of our sacred creativity. We move ahead with assurance, we try new things, go new places, sing new songs, dance like we have never danced before. Living from our imagination allows us to take the inner work that we have done and manifest it in our outer world.
5. Inspiration-pure energy. This phase deals with moving from conscious creation, emptying the self of ego gratification, and allowing divine spirit to move through our lives. People who are living in this phase often find themselves accomplishing things they never dreamt were possible before. Athletes who perform feats of unbelievable achievement, writers who let the pen flow without having to effort over their writing, and artists who allow the visions to transform into material form are examples of the manifestations of this phase of healing. Ritual and myth are an important part of inspiration. At this level, intentions are pure and powerful. Meditation and prayer transform from disciplines into the ecstatic experience. Solitude and silence are sought after and no longer thought of as times of loneliness. Visions are welcomed experiences and no longer something that is feared.
We are usually not completely in one stage or the other at any one time. We may also cycle in and around these phases throughout various areas of our life simultaneously. Usually, however, there is a predominant area where we can easily identify the phase we are passing through.
Sage and I knew we were at a critical point in our relationship. The issue of commitment was up. When we knew we had to do something drastic, we consciously decided to become each other’s facilitator for release of these long buried hurts. Sometimes the release would come through weeping and wailing, sometimes we were able to release just through toning and making music. Whatever the circumstance or the process, our commitment was the same. We would create a safe container for whatever needed to be worked out. We would stay neutral, just as we would in working with other people. We would be supportive and come from a place of unconditional love. Having this type of arrangement, made all the difference in the level of healing that transpired. Sage and I were both able to reach inside to deep levels of grief and pain, and release them through the power of sound. Once released, we filled the space with the essence of pure love and light through sound. Richard Gordon, author of Quantum Touch: The Power to Heal, says, "From DNA to the bones, all cells and systems effortlessly respond to the resonance of your love." We have found that through this process, we feel lighter and more available to feel our own feelings, and feel deep levels of compassion for others. This deep and powerful healing is not only for us, but it extends to people whose lives we touch through this work with music, into our community, throughout the world, and beyond.
I am becoming more aware of the healing power of shamanism, and how I am being called to carry out this work. I have come to learn that shamanism has been around for tens of thousands of years, and that our ancient ancestors all over the world discovered how to maximize human abilities of mind and spirit for healing and problem-solving. The remarkable system of methods they developed is today known as "shamanism," a term that comes from a Siberian tribal word for its practitioners: "shaman" (pronounced SHAH-mahn). Shamans are a type of medicine man or woman especially distinguished by the use of journeys to hidden worlds otherwise mainly known through myth, dream, and near-death experiences. Most commonly they do this by entering an altered state of consciousness using monotonous percussion sound.
Music without words means leaving behind the mind. And leaving behind the mind is meditation.
Meditation returns you to the source. And the source of all is sound. — Kabir
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