It's All In the Playing (20 page)

“Yes,” someone answered.

“Well, why didn’t somebody tell me?” I asked.

“Because,” someone answered, “you just seemed so self-assured.”

I was struck dumb. Was this the price of leadership and taking charge? Then again, perhaps I
wasn’t
taking charge. And finally, why was I creating all of this in my reality?

What should I do about it? I didn’t want to expose the fact that it bothered me. Worse than that, I was feeling guilty that I was feeling negative. I was supposed to be this advanced positive-thinking person, yet with other people’s insecurities I was really feeling terrible.

The Christmas holiday finally came. I had ordered some fabulous UFO books, six months previously, for Christmas presents, so lack of shopping time wasn’t all that serious for me. The Christmas spirit was upon the land but not upon me.

As I felt the negative emotion building up in me, I called Colin and went to see him. He had been working on another project and had not been around much.

He said the same negative frustrations were building up in him. He had noticed it in some of his relationships, personal and professional, and he, too, was having trouble expressing his feelings about it.

The two of us stood in his kitchen outlining scenes that had occurred in our lives which were contributing to the pent-up feelings. Then we’d act out what we’d really like to do about it. It was fun—also revealing. I then made a decision to go to every Hollywood party in town during the holidays, even if it meant I would sleep only seventeen minutes every night. Colin and Sachi and I decided to pal around together, crashing parties, believing that anyone would be happy to have us.

There’s nothing like a $250,000 party to make you forget your back, your responsibilities, and your anxiety over realizing the reality you create for yourself.

The first home we invited ourselves to (Colin had an
actual invitation) belonged to a very successful Hollywood agent. Never mind who his clients are—that night he had ten percent of Santa Claus and heaven.

The house was an open bank account of affluence, made not for living but for parties. Upon entering the front courtyard, we saw a black gospel choir (he handled them too), and as we glided through the open expanse of the marble-floored living room, surrounded by flower arrangements, we heard an all-white heavenly choir dressed in black tie, singing in the back courtyard around the swimming pool.

There was chamber music and an opulent bar on the other side of the pool, seen to by more black-tie attendants. In the dining room and kitchen was enough soul food to replay the Civil War: mustard greens, black-eyed peas and ham hocks, ribs, chicken, hominy grits, mashed sweet potatoes with marshmallows, plain mashed potatoes with soul food gravy, corn bread, bread, various green salads, and iced tea. The dessert counter was instant sugar shock just looking at it: pecan pies, Key lime pies, apple brown betty, bread puddings, sweet potato pie, blueberry crumb cake, chocolate fudge, homemade ice cream, and for the northerners, New York cheesecake.

Everyone was there, from Barry Manilow, who was on his own spiritual search, to Elizabeth Taylor, who had painted her square-cut Burton diamond like a candy cane to match her red-and-white striped fingernails.

   As I touched on personal issues with some of my friends, it became clear that many of them were going through their own personal Armageddons. “The energy in life is moving so swiftly,” became an oft-repeated refrain. Relationships and personal dramas were coming to a head, and values and principles people had never addressed before were becoming impossible to ignore. All of the insights people were having related to self-worth, self-esteem, self-love, and self-reflection. Suddenly
the study of self wasn’t indulgent—it was all there was. Some were using traditional psychological Freudian therapy to achieve self-knowledge; others were becoming more religious. But most had come to the conclusion that they themselves were essentially spiritual beings who had not recognized the power within themselves to bring about whatever they desired in their lives.

In discussing anger and repressed hostility, it also became clear that to feel guilty about those emotions was as self-destructive as the anger itself.

Around about this time Kevin Ryerson and Jach Pursel came into town. Colin and I discussed the question of repressed anger with Lazaris (the entity Jach channels) and I discussed it with Kevin and his entities.

“Don’t hold the anger inside,” they said. “Release it and forgive yourself and you’ll find it’s not as frightening as you think it is.”

They went on to say that the honesty of the release carries with it a shift in consciousness in other people, enabling them to breathe easier when it’s finally out in the open. They said that from then on, as events occurred in life, we should examine how
we
might have created the reality of things going wrong to begin with. The anger is really only the soul recognizing that it is responsible for creating the dilemma in the first place. And the most difficult aspect to admit is that we do it in order to learn.

While I enjoyed and learned from Jach and Kevin during that period, I felt the need to trace back some of the reasons inside myself for feeling so conflicted.

A year earlier, with the help of Chris Griscom, the spiritual acupuncturist, I had touched an incarnation of so long ago that it had defied identification for me. I do know that it was during a time period when advanced genetic experiments were taking place on the planet. It could have been Atlantis. I couldn’t tell.

As I had lain on the table with the needles quivering
from my throat, third eye, shoulders, and behind the ears, the past-life incarnational pictures had begun to swim in.

And what I saw then was more than bizarre. I had seen myself lying on a cement slab of some sort. It seemed as though I were dead, but I wasn’t. Then I realized I had agreed to some kind of experiment in which I had allowed my body to be processed into a state of suspended animation. My body wasn’t moving, but it wasn’t dead either. This was the simple part.

I had also agreed that I would participate in a “consciousness” experiment whereby my own soul would leave that body on the slab and enter other bodily forms in order to experience life. This process occurred over a period of centuries, and in that time I had innumerable incarnations while my original body remained on the slab. I could enter the original body any time I wanted, but I felt trapped and imprisoned because it was in a state of suspended life.

As I had lain on the table with the needles in my body, the sensations became more uncomfortable than I could bear; the dead stiffness of the joints and a kind of frozen inactivity of my inner organs were stifling. It was as though my body “today” had a cellular memory of another body eons before, when it had been involved with something I had agreed to, but thoroughly disliked.

As Chris and I had worked on the bizarre images coming up for me, I tried to pinpoint why my higher self was showing them to me. At the time it had become so physically uncomfortable that I had terminated the session.

But I knew this was an area I’d have to come back to.

Chapter 13

   N
ow, one year later, I thought I might try again. I knew from experience that when things get rough, a breakthrough is just on the other side of the pain.

Chris had come into town from New Mexico to administer several treatments to various people. She stayed with me and we did a session. As a result of that session, several things became clear.

It wasn’t long after Chris inserted the needles that the pictures began to appear again. There it was—the same familiar stonelike body lying on a slab. I knew it was me. The associated pain occurred again. I was imprisoned and entrapped inside the body. It was horrible. Chris guided me through it.

“Breathe light into the needles,” she suggested gently.

I breathed evenly, visualizing light coming from the needle points. I felt myself relax a bit.

“Now,” she said, “ask your higher self why you are having this pain.”

I questioned my higher self. I did it in words, in English. I waited. I didn’t hear anything come back. I questioned again. Nothing happened. I could feel myself
resisting, as though I didn’t want to hear what it had to say.

“Breathe into your third eye,” said Chris. “Take light-filled breaths and tell me what you see.”

I did what she said. Through my third eye I breathed light. Then I saw a picture form in the front of my mind. I was lying on a desert surrounded by lavender flowers. I was trying to beam light to another soul in the universe. I followed the light as far as I could see, but then I lost it.

On the table my right forearm began to throb with pain. I knew it had something to do with the other soul I was beaming to.

I told Chris what I was seeing.

“Okay,” she said. “Ask your higher self to tell you the story of that soul and your right arm.”

I asked. This time I got an answer, in English.

“The other soul wanted to depart,” said Higher Self. “You wouldn’t honor the desire. You attempted to hold on physically with your right arm. The soul departed anyway. You are still holding pain over the occurrence.”

Suddenly the picture in my mind became very specific. I saw myself in a temple with people languishing around in white robes. The temple was made of peacock-blue marble. I asked my higher self who the people were.

The picture swam back to the desert, where I saw vases of some kind. I asked what was in the vases.

“They are cremation vases,” said Higher Self.

“Who is in them?” I asked.

“Both child and grandfather,” said Higher Self. “You were both.”

“I was both?”

Higher Self nodded and said, “Yes.”

I couldn’t figure that out.

“Don’t try,” said Chris. “Just allow it to come.”

Okay, I would. Then Higher Self said, “They were your brothers.”

My brothers? That was even more confusing. I waited for a moment, becoming agitated and impatient.

Then I saw the slab again. There was my body on it. As I watched, a woman came over to my body with a small sculpted bottle in her hand. It was Tina Turner, looking almost identically as she looks today! She held the small bottle aloft, as though to show me I had drunk from a similar bottle. I couldn’t understand. I asked Higher Self.

Immediately the picture changed to what looked like palm trees turned to stone. They were alive and standing, but stone. Then I saw the word VIOLENT spelled out. Immediately after that there was a forest of trees on fire. A terrible chest pain stabbed me. I saw little people with bald heads running around with earrings in their ears. Animals were stampeding, trying to escape from the forest fire. They were headed toward a city.

The next thing I knew I was in the city (which was more like a templed community). And an elephant was tracking me down. (I seemed to have an affinity for elephants. They were always popping up in my visualizations.) The elephant was angry with me, as though I had caused the fire. Then a previous psychic visualization occurred again. I was living with the elephants and decided to leave and head toward the city. I don’t know how the fire began, but the herd leader blamed me.

The scene shifted. The pain in my chest became intolerable. I got very frightened lying on the table. Then I saw myself on the ground, unable to escape from the elephant. I looked up at him. He reared up on his hind legs and came down on my chest, crushing me. I let out a moan. It was awful. I felt I was reliving the actual event. But the most bitter memory was that I had loved the elephant and he had not understood why I left him or the herd. My chest and back were so painful now I could hardly breathe.

“Now,” said Chris after I had related the story to
her, “ask your higher self if there is anything else for you to know relating to this before you release the memory for good.”

I did. And Higher Self said, “The elephant lives today. He is white. He is looking for you in order to make peace and to lead you somewhere.”

White elephants had been a haunting passion of mine as long as I could remember. I asked how he would find me.

Higher Self said, “He will.”

I began to cry. I didn’t know why. You never really do know why you’re crying when working with past-life psychic energies, but you always do. I think it’s because your soul finally makes contact with truths it only
sensed
before. Since we have all lived so many lifetimes over so much of the planet’s experience, it is very emotional when you finally remember something that you know belongs to your experience, but which you have been unable to integrate before. I think we are all haunted by
knowing
that we are only a subtotal of much more than we realize and actually more than this life’s experience. We are often touched and reminded of passions and events from some long-forgotten time and place, but we don’t know how to identify them or whether we can even call them real. When you finally begin to scratch the surface of who you really are, it is overwhelming. You are never the same, nor do you want to be—and you are, whether you realize it or not, on the path of self-discovery, self-knowledge, and self-revelation.

The session didn’t terminate with the elephant.

“Breathe in through the needles,” reminded Chris. “Breathe into the solar plexus, so you can release the painful images and we can get on to touching more.”

I breathed in and out through my solar plexus.

“Allow the past image to release, so you can draw in the future image of the white elephant bringing you peace.”

I breathed. The pain in my back and chest and shoulders was worse. It went up and down my arms, throughout my whole body. I explained it to Chris.

“Ask why,” she said.

I tried. The answer came back: “Suffering from love congestion.”

“Why?” I asked. “What is the source of love congestion?”

“Smoke and polluted air,” said Higher Self.

I began gasping for breath. My breathing was so labored I couldn’t get enough oxygen.