Journey Work

This Blog entry is about my first experience being led through a form of drumming meditation called a journey…

“She spoke about the middle world, a grassy meadow of a place with a lone tree in the distance. We were coached to approach this tree and recognize it as our personal tree of life. I saw the glowing form of a human being standing next to a large oak tree. I knew this spirit was safe as I approached him, and then I was touching the tree. I, or the tree, was moving, as if I had walked through a revolving door of a city’s department store, and then I emerged in a different place, where a forest of many trees was all around me.

I felt so small amongst the trees. And wondered what I should be doing here when I heard the woman leading this workshop suggest that an animal from the lower world will show itself. Then she cautioned that we should not judge what animal appeared. She coached us to trust our imagination to bring in an animal. I looked up at the trees and saw a squirrel that chirped at me like the ones I’ve seen behind my horse barn. I was emersed within a memory of watching a squirrel just that morning. I thought I was reliving that memory, when the memory shifted to a perspective that I didn’t understand. I wasn’t me watching a squirrel. I was the squirrel, climbing a tree, then effortlessly jumping from tree to tree.

The longer the drum’s beats continued, and linear time clicked forward, the deeper my confusion of reality fragmented into being with this squirrel…and then I almost fell asleep, and dreamed, or I imagined, this alternative reality as I became a squirrel, jumping from tree to tree, running around the ground, and thoroughly enjoying myself.  I heard the workshop leader suggest returning to the tree to follow an eagle up to the sky, but my mind was stuck with the squirrel, running, jumping, playing. I think I fell asleep because I was surprised when I heard the drumming stop.

After that first experience, I knew the path. I had already developed the ability to still my mind to meditate at home, all I needed to do was to imagine listening to a drumbeat, or my own heartbeat, and think of the meadow with the lone tree in it. This is how I practiced traveling into the lower world to greet Animal Spirit Guides.

Yellow Dog fills me in: It was more than this woman’s words that you followed that evening, little one. It was the drumbeat. The beat of the heart is a way to help align the awareness of the mind with the experience of traveling within. Follow the beat, listen to its rhythm, and allow the memories of long, long ago to flood your perception.

Once you reach that altered state, you are in the Shamanic middle world, the place in between, where you can greet your personal “tree of life.”  For Suzy, this landscape is one of a lone oak tree growing within the swaying grass of an open meadow. Don’t force a landscape to appear, for whatever landscape you see is the proper one for you to experience. Don’t analyze your “imagination,” just follow. Keep your thinking-mind at bay and imagine as a child would through play.

Imagine walking to whichever tree it is that you see. Trust. This “tree of life” is your doorway to one of three alternate planes of reality that are known as the three worlds. At this point your intention might allow you to explore the world the tree exists within, the middle world. Or you may choose to crawl into the tree to experience the lower world. Or, perhaps, you will be guided up, up, and away up into the upper world? For this text, I am leading you into the lower world that one usually enters by traveling into the tree. Once there, you may be greeted by a Keebler Elf from your cookie commercials, or you might slide into the root, or you might simply walk into a looking glass of the tree and emerge into the lower world. The path will be up to your awareness…trust.

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The following is part of another conversation with Yellow Dog. One that explains the value of “imagination.”

This is imagination. Allowing the joy and purpose of the individual to shine through in thought.

This “silent” language of imagination is one seen through venues other than language—what you would call the primitive mind. But what is really the advanced mind of the heart? For when you are “thinking” from the center of your tennis-ball self, your heart centered self, you are not worried about self. Rather, you are functioning as an individual, reaching out to be part of a whole.

            Ego is a two-edged sword. Ego is the more primitive mind—that part of the human that feels the need to react to stimuli instead of allowing the imagination to guide. Ego is the “thought” worrying about pleasing a leader, or fearful of impending danger. Ego doesn’t consider the whole of all the other imaginations around. For the whole, the group of individuals involved will oftentimes create a reality, or what you call a scenario, greater than the ego alone can achieve. So, allow your imagination-mind to develop. Allow your tennis-ball self to emerge. And then you will understand the meaning of being psychic.

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The next Chapter in The Pet Psychic expounds upon more than the ego, but the components of what makes each individual human different, what Yellow Dog calls, Your Human Frequency, the topic of my next Blog entry.