I feel as though I was experientially discovering Incarnational Spirituality long before I met David Spangler. My life processes led me through a personal discovery of the basic tenets of IS and, although I did not name them until David did with Incarnational Spirituality, I was finding many of the same truths.
Like many who are long standing Lorians I began a conscious spiritual journey in my late teens having been raised by a mom who studied The Infinite Way with Joel Goldsmith and read The Magic of Findhorn and a dad who loved the earth and all of nature deeply and profoundly. At 17 I decided I was Buddhist although I didn’t really know what that meant other than I wanted to look for the Christ Consciousness within people and I did not follow the beliefs of the traditional Christian churches.
Nonetheless, by age 25 my personal life was in shambles having gotten married at 19 to a man who soon became emotionally distant and often angry. I was also a happily employed school nurse teaching wellness and health classes. Through a series of workshops and classes I became exposed to processes that introduced me to the multidimensionality of consciousness including psychic connections and the power of beliefs to shape our world. Through one such process I experienced an inner calling and with tears of joy and singing I dedicated myself to the Great Mystery of the Sacred.
Soon I was learning Reiki from Hawaya Takata and also a meditation form that taught how to ground oneself in Spirit and connect to one’s higher self in order to find answers to the practical questions of life as well as deepen one’s inner connection. And thus I began to explore Sovereignty and the Subtle Realms. I also began to integrate my knowledge of physical wellness from my professional education with the ideas of consciousness and healing I was learning.
From Reiki I learned that each person is a sovereign being and that my job as a healer was to offer the Universal Life Force as it came through me and let it connect with the receiver’s energy field and wisdom. I also learned what it feels like to have energy pouring through my hands and to believe in something completely invisible.
The most profound event in my life was discovering how to make the inner shifts that allow me to connect with the part of me that is connected to all the universe. Through a meditation process taught by James Craig Ewing I learned to do inner guidance in such a way that first I acknowledged the power of my individuality as a sacred being (akin to what I.S. calls “Self Light”) then created a “Grail Space” (without naming it as such) using guided imagery processes calling in light, love, and Christ energies, and then learned ways to ask “yes/no” questions so to get answers about my life. I combined these skills with those learned from American Academy of Guided Imagery about using guided imagery to connect to the wisdom of the body and what illness may be communicating.
I began to formulate my own inner processes to interconnect and create communication between by body, my emotions, my outer life, and to what I called at the time “God” during my thirties (what I now would call my higher self or a dimension of my Soul). From James I had learned that ego or personality was an ally, not an adversary, so I started with my interests and talents. As a health educator I developed a conceptual model called a “Wellness Star” to describe that health and well being had five spokes: Physical, Emotional, Mental, Social and Spiritual. I posited that each has importance when working to create wellness instead of illness and helped people explore each of those areas in the classes I taught. As a stress management consultant I learned to teach a variety of self care techniques including setting boundaries, valuing and loving self, and a variety of relaxation techniques that were essentially ways to slow brain waves down, lower blood pressure and heart rate, and created a shift in consciousness of deep relaxation and inner connection.
I experimented on myself. Every day I meditated and explored how to deepen my inner connection and to how to recognize the different “felt senses” of different states of being. I experimented with breathing and imagery and a variety of techniques for traveling inward. I experimented with asking questions and then testing the answers in life to see if the answers I received bore themselves out in my every day experience. In David Spangler’s words I was working with “Vertical Sovereignty—the axis of connection, identity, and self-regulation and governance between the soul and the incarnate personality and body.”
I experimented with communicating with my physical symptoms to find out what they were about. I was able to heal my seasonal hay fever when I listened deeply to my body’s messages and discovered that hay fever was related to childhood experiences that were now in the past. By repetitively reassuring my body that those circumstances were gone and using relaxation exercises I eventually eliminated the symptoms. An ovarian cyst disappeared when, again asking it what it was trying to communicate, I discovered I needed to create a nurturing home nest for myself and spend more time there. In other words I was learning about my identity, appropriate boundaries, and how to emerge a more whole self.
Early on I had no sense of angels or guides or other subtle beings although occasionally people would mention sensing Angelic energy around me or see or feel Jesus the Christ nearby when I was giving Reiki. In retrospect I can see that I was learning how to trust myself and my own inner processes first; that I needed to learn to stand in myself and my own Self Light before I engaged with subtle beings.
Although those early years set the stage it was not until I had my cancer experience that I more fully incarnated. For many years I was able to feel at home–that is, safe and content–only during my meditations. Prior to having cancer, during a dark moment I asked beseechingly in meditation “Where is my home?” and clearly heard “inside yourself, you carry your home with you” and was shown the image of a turtle. In Incarnational Spirituality, Home is defined as “an inner and outer state of safety, empowerment, and nourishment, a loving state of being that enables us and others to discover and grow into our deepest selves. Home is a state of consciousness and connection that promotes the incarnational process.” And further, “The Sacred is the ultimate state of Home.” I was able to first find Home in my meditations for that is where I was able to connect with the Sacred. Having and healing cancer was my conduit for discovering being Home in a physical body on a physical plane and to continue to discover and grow into my deeper self.
When I discovered I had cancer I went into meditation and asked the same question I had asked my body’s symptoms before: “What do you want me to know?” I clearly heard back, “Let the anger out and let the Love in.” I also looked at my life from the perspective of the Wellness Star: Physical, Emotional, Mental/Intellect, Social/Relationships, and Spiritual. And I used my inner guidance meditations to explore and answer what and how to address each of these five areas of my personal Wellness Star. I did not perceive the cancer as a threat, but rather as a message. As David Spangler has said, “Challenges, imbalances, and difficulties can arise from any part of the incarnational system, not just from the personality. Likewise, wisdom, blessing, and skillful insight can arise from any part of the incarnational system, not just the soul.” From an Incarnational Spirituality perspective “the Personality is a dynamic blend of influences from the Emergent Soul, the Incarnate Soul (or “High Self”), the Body, personal psychological processes, and information from the environment, such as from parents, friends, society, autobiographical events, and so on. The main function of the Personality is to “particulate” the soul and enable it to connect with the particulate nature of the physical plane. In this sense, the Personality is understood in Incarnational Spirituality as a function rather than as our identity.” My experience is that one can say the exact same thing about the Body. And my body had cancer so something was out of balance and I set out to decipher the message knowing the process would bring me closer to wholeness or in IS terms Holopoiesis.
I also knew I might die from cancer although I intentionally set out to manifest health. I did not fear death as I intuitively understood and believed in life before and after this earthly life. Having read Autobiography of a Yogi by Yogananda and sensing the truth in it and other writings about a soul’s journey, I simply wanted to get the most juice out of my cancer, clear as much baggage as possible, and use it to become more connected with God. For me manifestation was formulating and imagining the goal, yet holding it with lightness and freedom and then following my inner guidance step by step, day by day, and trusting that the highest and best outcome would be created. Since my inner guidance comes from that soul part of me that is directly connected to the Sacred, and with testing had never been found to lead me astray, I trusted the process.
“Manifestation is the art of using consciousness and subtle forces to shape one’s life. Like the power to bless, it is an incarnational and spiritual skill innate in each human being. Using the five principles of Incarnational Spirituality (Identity/Intentionality, Boundary/Holding, Connection/Engagement, Emergence, Holopoiesis), Manifestation becomes more than just a simple act of “magical” acquisition using methods of attraction. It becomes an expression of creative and spiritual awareness that deepens an individual’s inner connections and presence within the world.”
–David Spangler
“Let the anger out and let the Love in” meant there was emotional work for me to do. I supported my body with a Macrobiotic diet because it understands the energy and life force of food. In many ways it expresses Incarnational Spirituality because of its emphasize on food and nature as being alive. I used daily Reiki treatments from my Reiki Master colleagues because it was about receiving (which I had not been good at) and community and worked energetically on the mind/body/spirit unit. I meditated every day because it was the source of inspiration and hope and also brought my psychoneuroimmunologic state into balance. Physicians and healers both alternative and western were utilized as seemed appropriate at the time and approved through my inner guidance meditations.
The layers of anger and pain started peeling off, first at my parents, then the abusive men in my life, sometimes small things that had happened with childhood friends, and then in past lives. I was surprised when I started to see how afraid I was of life and how little I respected myself. Beings from the Subtle Realms started appearing with support and love–Mother Mary inviting me to stand tall in my Female form, Mrs Takata reassuring me I was on the right path, Babaji with an immense and amazing Love requesting me to stay embodied, and Jesus holding me in his arms with such Love and tenderness that I cried and cried with amazement that I was loved so. And eventually the memory of being sexually abused by my family doctor as a young child surfaced with nausea and dry heaves. Here was shame and denial and broken boundaries and a clear reason for breast cancer and a history of abusive partners.
It took a total of seven years to clear the cancer and become a being who doesn’t create cancer anymore. It included working with Flower Essences, a team of subtle beings, energetic healers, counseling, oncologists, experimental immunotherapy drugs that were in clinical trials, and many friends supporting me through difficult times. In once process I actually had the experience of incarnating into my legs more fully completing a process that I had stopped when I was four years old because I didn’t want to be here. I learned to receive as well as give, to become even clearer with my inner guidance, develop more fully my sense of self/identity, to express my feelings, and to set boundaries more easily.
I have held myself in my own lap many times to allow the pain of the past to express and resolve. I was guided to simply “tell my story” when others with cancer inquired about how I healed and to offer them my support and skill as a healer if they chose to do emotional spiritual work. “Incarnational Spirituality calls us to deeper interconnectedness and engagement with the world around us. Incarnation is not just a personal act but a communal one as well.” The more I healed emotionally the more sense I had of being present, fully here, and engaged with the world.
My post cancer life has been the last ten years. During this time my daily meditation practice has continued, I married Ron Hays who also lives into Incarnational Spirituality, I was guided how to find our land, we built a house collaborating with the spirits of our land, I explored the work of Dorothy Maclean and Machaelle Small Wright more deeply and started working directly with the Devas of nature as well as nature elemental spirits more indirectly. I plant trees, I communicate with trees, and sometimes I energetically become a tree. My garden is now co-created with nature spirits as they guide me in choosing what and where and how to plant. I am a healer who uses inner guided healing processes along with the energy of Reiki to clear past trauma, and I often find that subtle beings appear to help a client directly or help me with a client.
I have only begun my exploration of the inner realms and myself and look forward to many more experiences and learning in the future. Incarnational Spirituality offers me inspiration, collegiality, and new insights. It is in many ways an exploration with guideposts. Many years ago when I read the book Every Day Miracles: The Inner Art of Manifestation by David Spangler I knew he knew something most people didn’t recognize about manifestation. Ron and I used the book’s exercises to manifest buying the beautiful acreage that called to me with the words “you can heal here” and in the process cleared many issues between us. When I read David’s Blessing book, I resonated with an author who viewed life as I did and who also called me to do more. I continue to learn from IS teachings as it offers ideas and processes that stimulate me. Some of these processes I adapt and use with clients in my private healing practice. Many I use in combination with my meditation/inner guidance practice to further my development of my Self Light. I am currently engaged in an exploration of my Sidhe connection and what this means for continuing to co-create a nature sanctuary on our land.
I am supported and strengthened by Incarnational Spirituality. The collective IS community and teachings respect and value inner work and this in turn validates and supports me in the life choices I make as a contemplative. My personal reflections with IS teachings and becoming a Lorian priest have furthered my sense of self and strengthened by ability to stand in myself. It affirms me.
I am led to explore more realms through Incarnational Spirituality. While the teachings of IS resonate in me as a reflection of what I know on a soul level and with experiences in my life, it also provides a larger conceptual framework that makes it easier to articulate and communicate with clients and friends and invites me to explore more of myself and life. It expands me.
Incarnational Spirituality provides a community of Love and inclusivity. My friends and colleagues in Lorian are diverse, laugh and hug a lot, and are dedicated to furthering their own deep connection with Spirit and Gaia. Through IS I am given the privilege of being engaged with people who have a multiplicity of personalities and lifestyles yet all whom resonate with exploring the Sacred through their identity, boundaries, connections, and emergence in the “outer” and “inner” realms. I wrote a sign and posted it on my bedroom door when I was a teenager that said “Love Life, Live Love.” More than anything the essence of Incarnational Spirituality and of David Spangler is Love and it is this Love that continues to call me to IS as I move into my sixth decade.
“Creating ‘collaborative mind’ or a ‘partnership presence’ in which energy, spirit, life, intelligence, and blessing may circulate between both sides of the ‘veil’ for the benefit of both” is an active exploration for me at this time. I am curious to see what kind of new field, presence or awareness develops for me in my garden, my healing practice, and my life. Will you join me?
In the last decade I have continued to be a part of Lorian and practice the principles of Incarnational Spirituality. I am a Healer. My role now is to assist with the emergence of the New Gaia and the New Human. For me this means much inner work—subtle activism and world work as I’m called to help heal the pain and fear in the world. I do much holding of the Light and being a portal for the unseen subtle beings of many realms to enter human consciousness and experience. In many ways I and all the Lorians are part of a “transition team” who will likely not see the earth bear the fruit of our current work. We are called, however, to be present now. Present with the Sidhe, the Angels, the Devas, the post mortem beings, Nature, each other, Christ Consciousness, the divine feminine, and so many more we don’t know or have names for as yet. The personal healing and work I have done with myself and the insights of Incarnational Spirituality have led me to a place where I can stand strong in my sovereignty and be a blessing in the world.