This week we are celebrating our first six months as an up and rolling podcast. (Hooray!) You are the reason I do this … so I want to thank you for listening and adding your comments. This week you’ll hear fun snippets from our three most popular episodes.
In my interview with astrologer John Marchesella, he shares the astrological dope on the current political situation in the U.S. and what the overall trend is for the next 8 years. Then hear from Michaela McGivern, a California shaman, about how she does her work by crossing to the other side. Finally, inspirational author, life coach and happiness blogger, Shannon Kaiser has some relevant words to say about how to go a whole lot easier on yourself. Don’t forget her new book, Self-Love Experiment.
So … in honor of all of this … I’m sharing an essay I wrote about how the podcast came to be. Which is, not surprisingly, a magical but true story. One that taught me a lot about right timing.
Thanks so much for being in the game with me!
I drove up to Sebastopol on a foggy Bay Area morning last fall because something was pushing me. I just kept feeling the urge to go back to this sweet town where I once lived. At the time, I felt stuck. I couldn’t move forward, though I badly wanted to.
In my meditation, when I asked what was next for me, the image of Sebastopol’s main street and its intersection in the middle of town was shown to me. It was an image that had come to me repeatedly since Teal’s death, at one point prompting me to live there for a year and a half.
Although I moved away, Sebastopol still calls to me and invites me in …this is a place where I resonate and where Teal’s spirit really comes alive for me. Especially as I drive up there.
While I was driving on that particular day, I felt so lost. I was at some kind of crossroads with my work. The novels were being published but I felt incomplete. I submitted an excerpt from my memoir to an agent and was waiting for her feedback. I was ‘on hold’ and I didn’t like it.
So I prayed to Teal as I drove. “Please show me what I’m supposed to do. Make yourself apparent to me. Help me know what is next.”
After I got to Sebastopol, I did what I always do … I went into Infusions, ordered a cup of tea and a peanut butter chocolate chip cookie, and put down my backpack. Then I looked through the big glass doors of the tea shop.
Standing there was a blonde woman talking to Magick, the psychic who usually sits outside. I studied her. I was instantly drawn to her though I really didn’t know why. It could have been because she is beautiful, but there was some other, bigger reason I couldn’t put my finger on. I thought perhaps I knew her.
Then I realized it was Michaela, the shaman who Teal had done a session with her only a week before her death. It was Michaela who’d gotten Teal so very interested in shamanic healing in the first place.
It was in this very spot that I’d run into Michaela several times over the last four years. I said hello to her, we hugged, then spontaneously sat down to tea together.
Ninety minutes later, I had a clear sense of my purpose moving forward.
Because Michaela is a shaman, she ‘travels between worlds’ and often talks to beings such as Teal who inhabit the other side. We started chatting and inevitably Teal’s essence began seeping into the conversation.
We talked about life and then moved on to the topic of organ donation. Teal’s heart was donated to another young woman about her age whose life was saved, and who moves through this walking life right now because of Teal.
Michaela began to receive all kinds of information from Teal, then, about what happens to the stored memories in the cells of the transferred organ. She went on to channel Teal at length, ending with these words.
“When my heart stopped I was shocked. I couldn’t believe it. My soul was ready to go, but I was not aware that my heart had a different trajectory … when I was young I didn’t understand the pain that my heart was in. And I didn’t know if I could sustain it. There was an aspect of denial that is part of being young, which prevented me from expressing the pain and working with it in a substantive way.
And yet, my heart’s journey was really to impart information from another dimensional aspect, so people could hear the wisdom of my heart and other hearts. I was not capable of doing that psychologically in my body, and with the personality that I had. I wasn’t evolved enough to understand that in order to heal the heart, I had to experience what the heart was harboring.
Now when I look at it, it’s more like I had to learn how to play the chords, so that I could improvise in a major way. I’m now improvising in a major way, but I didn’t have the tools to do that when I was young and alive.”
Then Michaela looked at me. “Teal says, ‘To be continued,” she said.
Michaela had no way of knowing that that Teal was a musician … a musician who loved to improvise. Nor did she know that when Teal was dying, she came to me several times as thoughts in my head. When I asked what she was doing, she told me, “I’m trying to reconcile my heart and my soul.”
At the end of our conversation, we both felt great. Uplifted, serene, content, happy. And energized in an entirely new way.
And suddenly I knew exactly what I needed to do next – the path was crystal clear. I knew I was to create a podcast and have Michaela as my first guest … and a repeat visitor. It was to be an exploration of the Afterlife, and whatever we can learn from this side of the divide.
I got my confirmation on the drive home. Sensing Teal around me once more, I turned on my iPod which is always set to Shuffle. Immediately, I heard Teal humming the beginning of the introduction I’d recorded a few years earlier for a podcast that never happened.
Of the nearly 2000 songs on my iPod … this was the first one I heard Now it all made perfect sense.
RESOURCES:
- An Astrologer’s Take on the Trump Era — with John Marchesella
- A Shaman Explains How She Travels Between Worlds — with Michaela McGivern
- How to Find Your Happy even if You are Not Happy with Your Job — with Shannon Kaiser
- Shannon Kaiser’s New Book, The Self-Love Experiment
Won’t you please let us know in a review on iTunes how you liked this episode? Thanks so very much!
