I tend to stumble into the big teachers in my life. I find the shortest distance and take it. Most of the time I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m not consciously aware that I”m chasing something or that there is anything of import. I do follow the signs though, pretty much always.
Many years ago, I was actively pursuing spiritual knowledge. I was starving and hadn’t known it. Moving to my country farmhouse with all that land, all that green, those ever present Red Tails circling, those dragon and damselflies landing on me, the smell of the apple orchards and late summer grapes infusing everything with earthiness and the sense of ‘enough’.
I was of course reading everything I could get my hands on, especially the old school Metaphysics teachers from the 20’s and 30s, especially Florence Scovell Shinn. But also Ernest Homes, and some whose names i can’t pull up in this pre dawn moment. I was also following Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way which I found deeply enchanting, and all of the Machelle Small Wright Perelandra materials, also using all of her flower essences daily ( I still adore them).
I had a partner in crime, an old college friend. A friend who is still in my life in strange ways and to whom I often say when I see her at the local Farmer’s Market or elsewhere, “Man we must have a powerful Sacred Contract”…. to say we have been through a lot together, to say that we have triggered the hell out of each other and caused major psychic eruptions in the other over the years is to put it mildly. But that’s another story, and who knows if it will ever be told.
This friend and I were seekers… actively fascinated by everything we read, learned, we were passionately enveloped in every new idea, in every sense of the non-physical reality that we touched into. Everything was ‘amazing’ and ‘weird’ and we were literally high from it. We saw signs everywhere… enormous tortoises walking down the big paved hill where we strolled, violent rainstorms out of clear blue skies, dreams that played out in living color, more… so much more. I felt like Alice living in this magnificent country wonderland… my own house and land fertile with magic and mystery… I couldn’t get enough (typical.. addict that I am).
One spring day, we found ourselves at a 3 day workshop with some woman we’d never heard of, something we’d signed up for months before on the urging of a male friend. The weekend came and we could barely remember what it was about… we went anyways.
There she was.. My teacher of a lifetime. Sharon. I can’t even describe to you how hard the whole thing hit me. How deeply I loved her at first sight. How every fiber of me said ‘yes’.
Only about 5 feet 4 inches if that. Probably around 60. Long blonde thinnish hair. A face similar to Helen Mirren. And those clothes.. Every weekend for my four years with Sharon (and at my wedding to Andy which I flew her in for.. I wanted true ceremony, I wanted the holy and the sacred and the beauty of it all). She dressed in the feminine and the lush, the velvets and the embroidered and the flowing and the small jackets. Long dresses and capes and gorgeous jewelry. She looked the part of Priestess. She truly was the High Priestess.
Two things that we heard over and over and over from her mouth were 1. Trust your own information 2. Get back in your body. Honestly she could be standing in the midst of our circle at school, 35-40 of us, and not even be looking at you, and she’d know the second you had ‘left your body’.. meaning you left the present moment, and were drifting in thoughts of past or present or whatever. And without looking at you she’d bark “Lisa, get back in your body’. It was shocking and kind of cool.
Anyways, at this introductory workshop, she “opened Ceremony” with sage, with holy Native American music, with prayers, with invocations, with a shriek to ‘open the dimensions’. I was flooded with tears for the visceral experience of it.. it took me over, something I’d longed for without knowing it. A deep remembering without memory. I was overcome and cried through most of the morning.. more purging. We were taught to clear out each of the chakras, to program them with energy, to ground the room and ourselves, to yawn and ‘explode’, to keep our energies to ourselves, to “leave our teacher-selves at the door”, to bring in our spirit-body…
All these new instructions that intellectually nobody really knew how to follow and yet she taught us to trust and feel our way. And doing it that way made it so easy. Some part of me knew how to do all of this. This probably wasn’t my first time at this rodeo. I felt like lifetimes were converging although I wouldn’t have said it that way then. She called us to her. I know this to be true. And she taught me to live and die by my intuition, and it has thoroughly changed my life. It would change yours too if you decided to live that way.
At the first coffee break we learned that Sharon had a school. Two actually. One near Seattle for half the year, the other at an old and beautiful (haunted) monastery on Long Island in a beautiful town. We learned each school ran one long weekend per month for 6 months and that you could attend for as many years as you chose.
Before I knew it I’d written a check. I was going. I was clear. My two friends did not sign up. I was not surprised… dilettantes who never quite dove into the mess that pretty much always awaits. Happier at the edge talking about it. Yes I have some judgment for this pattern mostly because when I have been in the proverbial mess, I have been painfully judged and hurt by this soul friend. But again.. for another time. Maybe.
So “Clairvoyant School” was beginning in about 2 weeks. I had just put my whole life on a new trajectory…This was not fluffy new age angels school. This was blow it all up and see what’s left school. This was the losing of my 1 year old dog Stevie by the second month, losing of my boyfriend by the third. This was a big fucking deal.
I was never able to think of it as Clairvoyant School mostly b/c my sight is not my strongest form of knowing….I often felt like the Dunce of Clairvoyant School. We would be having breakfast in the monastery, and somebody would say “Did you see the dead monks last night?”. I would pause my oatmeal to wait and listen. All sorts of my class mates saw those dead monks, among other things. Not me. I saw nothing. I didn’t really want to see the dead monks but I was aware that I was surrounded by highly ‘open’ classmates that had been seeing all sorts of things since they were babies. I was not of those inclinations and actually believe that when I was small I did see something… got scared and shut the door. I do not want to see apparitions.. not ever. No thank you. I don’t even like Halloween.
Once feeling a little bruised within that belief of “I can’t see anything” I talked to Sharon. She told me “Your ‘information’ skips seeing and goes right to knowing” which in the many years since I see is true. I just know. Mostly things come out of my mouth. I do now see more clearly, and frequently have visions that I am learning to trust more and more, but I am more of a channel… what I know tends to just come through me and out my mouth during sessions or conversations. I don’t know the source of it, there is not a specific being that I hear or channel. But somebody once said to me about my work, “You are at your best when you’re channeling” and I think that’s true although the word is still a bit confusing to me and not always easy to claim.
Anyways… it was the week before my first weekend of my first year at school. And this really happened. And the weird thing is that I knew exactly what was happening. It was a truly perfect early spring week. The air soft, the lilacs everywhere in my town, big flowering branches stuck in jars alll over the house. Outdoor dinner parties on the grass. It was the most gorgeous spring.
And then for 3 nights, I was violently horribly ill. Beyond sick. Glued to the bathroom floor, purging all night. Burning in my gut, needing to empty everything in whatever way it wanted to move out. And then morning would come, and nothing. I was fine, I ate, I did my days, I was fine. And then again, in the middle of the night, the thorough purging.
One of those nights I had a dream. Of a witch with long black hair in my garden. I forget the details although I can still see part of the image. I knew it was Sharon calling me into school. I knew for sure that I was being emptied, cleared, cleansed in preparation for what was coming. To be made wholly open to receive that massive download that was coming in.
Honestly, it was one of the most mystical events of my life. And I knew exactly what was happening. And i was all in.
I will write more about this but what I want to say as I close this piece is that it’s been 11 years since our last class together and since she married Andy and me. My marriage has ended, Sharon has died, but what she taught us is still landing for me. Deepening, becoming more powerful and useful. She told us it would happen that way, that it would take us years to master what she taught us. And it has. I think of her all the time. I talk to her, pray to her, send her love and thanks. I choke up writing this because I can’t begin to convey the depth of feeling and gratitude I have that I found her, followed her, trusted her, loved her. Follow your knowing, trust your information, get back in your body. You are Divine Holy Woman/Man… you are sacred ground. I have learned so much and I am so deeply grateful.
In closing, if you are ready for deep transformation, if you’re following your own breadcrumbs and know that you want to see more clearly, trust your own ‘information’ more deeply, become more powerful and more of who you are here to be.. let’s talk. I can probably help. This is the work I’ve done for over 33 years and if it’s the right match for you, it will change your life. xo Lisa
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