© Copyright 6-14-2007 By Dana Shino, The Purple Phoenix, LLC www.thepurplephoenix.com In the early morning hours of a gloomy spring day, I woke abruptly, long before my alarm rang. This was remarkable considering I never woke before my alarm. The dawn was dimly glowing, but not much more. Even more remarkable, I was incredibly clear headed. Usually I woke groggily and shuffled to shower, waking beneath the water streaming over me. This particular morning tripped my curiosity with my early, clear headed wakefulness. Without moving, I consciously padded through my thoughts: Why am I awake? This is odd. It’s so still and quiet. This is beautiful. The beauty in the feeling was even more remarkable than waking early and clear headed. Beauty was not a feeling I was used to experiencing at that time in my life. I was used to waking to the closed space of 500 square feet, two cats, my now ex-husband, and our entire cramped lives in the same cramped space for seven cramped years. Looking back now, the oppression of the space, the marriage and my job felt overwhelming, though at the time it was something I lived submersed in and used to... in an unknowing unhappy way. I was a ghost to my own life. Which made the beautiful feeling I awoke to that early Spring morning in 2004 even more remarkable. I thought about going back to sleep, but I felt the tingle of something. Something was up. The one lighted opening in my life at the time was my channeling. Long before I knew I could channel, I wrote free-form poetry until a new co-worker at the insurance agency I was employed at identified it otherwise as channeling in the spring of 2001. I was ripe for the secret revealed as I had read Betty Eadie’s books about her near death experience, Raymond Moody’s research “Life After Life” recounting hundred’s of others near death experiences, Laura Day’s intuitive coaching through her book “Practical Intuition” and “Conversations With God” by Neale Donald Walsch was sitting on my shelf. So, when Linda, my co-worker, told me I was channeling, and Neale’s book showed me it was okay to talk with God and the Universe and The Other Side, a whole new world opened for me. On warm weather days after work, you could more often than not find me perched on a favorite rock out in the middle of the Cache la Poudre River (Cash-la-pooder) north of Fort Collins, Colorado. The river ran through the valley about 100 yards from our apartment. I would frequently visit the river and channel, slipping into a semi-transcendental state, letting words, energetic messages and sweet light pour through me (as much as I was able), feeding me, while the rest of my life hemmed me in and weighed me down. On several occasions, after I returned from the river, my ex-husband remarked how I glowed with light, though I couldn’t see it myself. So, when I woke that early spring morning in 2004 and felt beauty, felt the tingle of energetic resonance, so closely resembling my river channeling experiences, I understood in the far corners of my soul something intrinsically exquisite, a high loving intelligence was profoundly at hand. I felt the significance of light presences near me in a soft, subtle way, hovering. Then gradually, at first, but then very quickly, I felt myself fill like a vessel, from outside in, with light and love. The two words ‘light’ and ‘love’ seem so simple here on the page compared to the profound effect of experiencing my being, my body spontaneously filling through and through with their energies. I felt surprised how simple it was, how I did nothing, and yet, I felt so alive and soundly filled to overflowing with the depths of love and the intricate layers of brilliant, soft light. In those moments, I lived in pure forgiveness, pure non judgment, pure love, pure patience. I felt complete, whole love, and the weightlessness of it, like I never had before. The healing sensations that softly reverberated through me were a great relief. As I basked in the sensations, a conscious thought was held in my mind from the presences surrounding me: "This is pure love. You can create this inside yourself for yourself. This is how things truly are. You can create this. We are here for you." The presences dissipated, the energy gradually faded, and I was once again in a cramped apartment with Joe sleeping next to me, the pressed and burdened and structured feeling returning. Initially, I felt to cry from relief. Then I felt to cry because I’d tasted a beautiful energetic exquisiteness, only to have it slip away. Then the gap between myself, what my life had become, and recreating this recent visitation of Spiritual love energy felt unimaginably too wide to bridge. My alarm finally rang, I collected myself, shed the bed, showered and dressed for work as if nothing had happened, keeping my experience a secret to myself. I crunched through the endless, mind numbing world of insurance that day, wondering. Wondering what was happening to me. Wondering what the experience was. Mostly, though, all I could think about was how to retrieve and recapture that feeling. How could I bottle it? I thought. How could I hold it? How could I have it again? Knowing little about energy or light work practices at that point in my life, my best logical solution was to keep replaying the light filling experience inside of me over and over. I felt so lucky that residual energies from the experience held for several days. Then, gradually, as I replayed the energies from the experience through me, it all turned into a game, a practice. My only real personal time with myself in my own personal space was inside my car commuting too and from work. So, it was through commute time that I began practicing how to feel love for myself. Some mornings, I felt so corny and awkward standing on the physical shore, looking to attain the shore of elusively flowing love energy. It frequently felt distant and unattainable. Yet, over and over I’d start with saying to myself, "I love myself" and then practice the energetic and physical memory inside myself from the experience of Spirit feeding me light and love. The more I practiced this cryptic, secret code, the more I woke to the ways I 'unloved myself' through the day. How I tormented myself. How I beat myself up internally, emotionally. How I kept myself ‘propped up’ within the acceptable traditional daily structure of our culture to survive, and in doing so, blocked the natural flow of my self love. Turning towards loving myself and engendering a sense of flow of love in the face of fear, in the face of the physical tumbling inside the clothes dryer of life, and in the face of old habitual emotional and psychological blockages was a greater challenge than I realized. Yet, I discovered my energetic and ethereal bodies (though I did not know that’s what they were at the time) responded strongly and swiftly to conscious energetic and emotional changes, just like my physical body responded rapidly to physical exercise. I began noticing subtle, spontaneous moments of good feeling, love, bubbling through me briefly at random moments. Over the course of several years, a divorce and multiple moves, the silver thread of random bubbling love gradually grew into a stronger, more sustained flow, letting me know I was connected to a far larger universe than the limited physical world before my eyes. In these moments, I didn’t just know, I could reassuringly feel that I was not alone. The parallel and evolutionary experiences connected to this conscious ‘light/love’ practice continued to grow in my life. Spirit visited me multiple times after the initial ‘light’ experience and wonderfully helped me energetically at critical junctures in my life. I began energetically deciphering and experiencing the flow of love between myself and my cat Winston. (Winston is the ultimate bundle of love, heart chakra kitty, whose full throttle purring is audible across a room, complete with drooling.) His frequent visits to my lap, with unadulterated purring, never failed to open my heart to the more and more familiar feeling of flowing love energy. As I began visiting healing practitioners, I was aware of and could identify the experiences (and began to happily anticipate) of flowing light and love through my body as they worked with me. It was inevitable that when I spent time with my family, I began to experience the sensations of realizing the flow of love between some family members and the blocked flow between others. I began to painfully realize who was able to authentically share their love with me and who couldn’t. It seems when I lose the strand of this so simple, yet powerful and profound theme, Spirit always comes through, reminding me with, “Dana, do you love yourself?” When I focus on it and emphatically say, “Yes,” I can feel the flow begin again.  Your contributions help support The Purple Phoenix Press.
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