[Blog (Non-channeled) March 2010]

The other day a client asked Polaris in session about coffee. She wanted to know whether coffee was good for her since she had heard conflicting reports from various spiritually-oriented sources. In the split second between the client's question and Polaris' answer, I had time to wonder myself. After all, I've been off coffee for two months. In part, it was because I had run out of the "good stuff" (organic, free trade, shade-grown, light roast — none of that burnt stuff for me!). And in part it was because I had heard messages for myself at the beginning of the year to lay off coffee for awhile. And while kicking coffee could almost be a blog post in itself, it wasn't a big deal.

In that split second I figured there'd be judgment about coffee. Maybe to support my own decision to lay off for a while.

But the split second only lasted a, well, split second.

Surpisingly, Polaris said coffee can be useful. One or maybe two cups a day, they said, but get this:

Think of your coffee as a sacred spiritual beverage that connects you to its aboriginal origins.

Ooo. I hadn't thought of that. Sacred spiritual beverage? Aboriginal origins? I'm liking that idea. Suddenly I have visuals of groups of people around a central fire. They have warm skin tones and are passing a vessel around the circle, each taking a drink. The drink and the fire warms them, and the drinking together connects them. It is good.

Having procured some more of the "good stuff" (I get mine from Origins Coffee Roasters in Vancouver, but Camano Island Roasters in Washington is good, too), this morning I decided to drink a cup while connecting to the sacred spiritual aspects of it.

I thought about drinking the coffee pure, that is, black. After all, the aboriginal origins of coffee likely didn't involve lattes. But bleh. I wanted to enjoy the experience. I don't use sugar, but I do bow to the gods of dairy, at least as much as I need to for a tablespoon of organic half-and-half.

Mindful eating can be a wonderful experience. Polaris suggests it often. It involves threading your way back to your food's origins and all the hands it has passed through to get to you, including yours. You also regard the soil that the food grew in, and the sun that warmed it and the rains that fed it. You meditate on that for a while and then when you finally eat, you really explore the explosion of sensory experience that eating is: smell, taste, texture, emotional connections.

Drinking coffee mindfully is much the same. Think of your coffee as a sacred spiritual beverage that connects you to its aboriginal origins.

I held my cup and looked at it, admiring the color of cafe au lait. I brought my face closer and took a big inhaling breath. Instantly I saw the fire again, the people gathered around it, chanting. I saw people picking the ripe coffee beans, singing. There's a song for the ripening, and a song for the harvesting. There's another song for the preparation of the beans, the shelling, roasting, and grinding. I took another deep breath of the aroma wafting from my cup and remembered my own past as a warm-skinned, barefooted person, climbing rocky hillsides, grateful for the warmth of the fire at night when the air is chill.

I sipped the coffee and felt memories course through my body. I feel them still. I am remembering. My past, our shared sacred past, is in my veins now. A part of me forever.

Are you a coffee drinker? This experience is highly recommended. Leave a comment about how it goes for you if you try, too, regarding your morning coffee as a sacred spiritual beverage. Your mornings might never be the same.

[Blog (non channeled), Feb 2010]

Sometimes your past comes back to you like an old friend.

Several months ago, I noticed I had a resumed interest in examining the Michael teachings. This has been reflected in part by newer channeling, some of which you can see here in pages about energy dynamics like Martyrdom, Arrogance, Greed, and Self-Destruction. It's also been an internal journey. The Michael teachings have been a basis for and integral part of my personal spiritual cosmology since I was 18. And while that cosmology has expanded exponentially with my work with Polaris, the Michael teachings are a sort of spiritual home for me.

You may have noticed some changes on the site. Some are little but (to my esthetic Artisan heart) vast in feel. Some are a little bigger, and there are more to come as I evolve as a human and as a spiritual teacher. Life is more fun when you allow things to change, you know?

It's my pleasure, then, to call your attention to a couple of smallish but truly huge changes. If you have absolutely no familiarity with the Michael teachings but are curious, or you're just dabbiling your toes in it (or even if you're an old Michael hand), there's a series of pages beginning with this one that explains everything. And on that page is an interactive glossary feature that explains the wonderful and rich lexicon that is particular to the Michael teachings body of work. You can also explore the glossary just on its own. Go ahead, click! You know you want to. Polaris uses some of these terms as well at times, so please explore. Like with every body of spiritual teaching, take from it what is yours, whatever parts resonate for you.

It's our gift to you.

[non-channeled]

Like many people whose eyes, ears, and fingertips are connected by the vast Interwebs, I heard the news of yesterday’s devastating Haiti earthquake via Twitter.

7.0. I’ve been in a 5.5. I know that 6-point-something is pretty damaging. Every point-something is a factor of 10 in magnitude. So this 7.0, in a country where most people are painfully poor and (I imagine) live in the kind of rickety shack housing I’ve seen elsewhere in the Caribbean, is huge.

And it is. According to what little I have read (and I avoid TV news like the plague), 100,000 people could already have died. And the inevitable deaths from disease due to damaged water systems, lack of food and shelter, could raise the figure precipitously.

I am trying to figure out how I feel about this. What I feel.

In 2001, when we all saw surreal footage of airplanes flying into tall buildings that had become part of an iconic skyline, I felt something. That night I lay in bed and imagined helping herald 2000 confused souls into a warm light-filled embrace, and helping tens of thousands more through those first days of shock and outrage. In the days that followed, it became easy. All that shock and outrage got funneled into hating someone and something that someone else decided we should be hating anyway.

That’s how wars start.

But how do you hate an earthquake?

We can’t hate the earth, because it’s our home. It sustains us.

Less than two weeks ago I channeled information about people — many people — choosing to exit their earthly lives this year. In working with this kind of information, I try to remain a little distant and not feel the pain and grief associated with such an eventuality. When just one person dies, many grieve. I’ve protected myself from feeling that on a grand scale. My fear is that I’d be overwhelmed by the immensity of such pain on that large a scale. Many people transitioning? There are 7 billion or so on the planet now. A few thousand here or there doesn’t make much difference overall. Many people would have to be … many.

People.

100,000 beautiful, alive, loving people in Haiti died yesterday, ending lives that had love and pain and laughter and tears. And it wasn’t an ethereal Rapture, where they simply got lifted up into some alternate reality. No, a good many of these people likely died in pain. That’s twice as many people as live in the small city that is my home, and it’s pain that I am afraid to feel.

What is compassion?

I think about Haiti, just as I thought about the Christmas tsunami a few years ago. I hear a big ’should’ in my head. I should be feeling this, because I can. It’s my job, my livelihood, to tap into a global consciousness, or into the energy body of a single person. To me, it’s all the same.

And yet, I don’t.

Last night I approached a woman, older than me, who I knew had been having some physical issues. I asked how she was. I could see how she was, could see where there were energy blockages. I asked her permission to touch her, and I briefly touched points on her shoulders and down her back. I asked about her feet because I could feel immense pain there. I wept, not from the pain but from the sense of it.

I can feel pain without feeling it. Strange, that.

And yet I don’t go to Haiti. This makes me smaller somehow, less human, I fear.

Last night I also wrote a column in which I cried about some of my fears. Fears of my own fragility. In the light of the new day I can see that this was, in some way, an expression of my response to Haiti. I know we all process everything that comes into our being — from near or far, it’s all the same — through our personal perception lenses. That’s not being selfish, it’s being human. We can’t help it. So I transferred the cries of tens of thousands of throats into one cry from a single throat, crying, “Who will help me when I have need?”

I could rationalize that just as children are better off when you let them make their own lives and their own mistakes, that I should keep my virtual hands of Haiti and let things transpire there as they will. I am not Atlas and I cannot hold the world on my shoulders. I have trouble some days with my own piece of the world.

At the risk of sounding trite, or incomplete, I can love. In the end, that’s all any of us can do. For some, love will be a $10 donation to the Red Cross. For others, it’s being airlifted along with dogs and rescue teams to pull people out from under buildings. For still others, it’s prayer. And for others, it’s a blink in the daily crush of living. Who am I to determine which facet of love has more merit?