Her friends were excited to hear about the land, and were keen to investigate for themselves. They asked her to draw them a map to guide their journey and to show them exactly where the land was. She refused, saying: “No, you must set out and find the way for yourselves. There are many different routes and I only know one of them.”
However, they insisted and, after a time, she relented and drew a map for them. Her friends were intrigued by the map and spent days planning for the journey, discussing which route they would take, and what the land would look like. But they delayed, deciding that they had first better prepare thoroughly for the trip. Perhaps, too, they needed to know more about maps, how to read them, how to understand what picture the map showed. Years passed, the map was studied, then copied and passed on to others. Schools were set up in map-reading.
The explorer was sad and went away. No one visited the land.’
In my opinion, this little story highlights how we allow an over-organised approach to life to overwhelm and even obliterate our spirit of adventure. Our conditioned analytical processes get us nowhere in our efforts to achieve the intrepid open-mindedness needed in effective communication with guides.
I like the following quotation from George Bernard Shaw: ‘Man who listens to reason is lost. Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.’
Handing over
At a relatively early stage in my communication with guides I was offered a simple way of giving and receiving help. This was the gist of it:
Imagine yourself in a circle with your guides, who are channelling into the circle all the unconditional love of the universe. Suppose you’re concerned about relatives or friends or people who are either living or have passed on, or material matters, or whatever. Imagine them all in the middle of the circle with all that love flowing around them. You feel yourself in alignment with that love. Imagine it also flowing all around your immediate environment, your country, all the continents, spreading peace and harmony around the world. Stay with the feeling as long as feels comfortable for you.
When I do that exercise, which can be done anywhere, at any time, I can feel loving energy flowing around the circle, and it usually rocks me gently backwards or forwards or round and round. In doing the exercise I release all need for worry, and I’m cooperating in sending unconditional help to whomever and wherever it’s needed in the simplest and most effective way.
I’m told by Shebaka that if only one person in a thousand was to do that exercise or something similar on a regular (i.e., daily) basis, the effect would be so powerful that within a relatively short time span – say, about fifty years or less – there would be no wars, no crime, the freedom of the individual would be respected, and planet earth would be a wonderfully harmonious place. Why? Because of the flow of unconditional love around the universe and the consequential raising of global consciousness.
Since I was given that exercise, I have been doing it with the people I have met in individual sessions, in courses and in talks. To me, it’s the best form of communication I can recommend. One of its most appealing aspects is that it involves no effort at all. I’m all for making things easy. An important feature of it for me is that I can feel the presence of my guides and let my analytical side take a rest.
One of the most common pleas that I heard from people during individual consultations and working with groups is that they needed to change their current situation and didn’t know how. The first, and most important, answer is that there is nothing – no situation – that cannot be changed. The phrase ‘thinking outside the box’ has come into common usage and it is actually a remarkably apt way to describe what we need to do in our lives on a daily basis in order to open our minds and effect change. We need to let go of our linear ways of thinking and allow solutions to manifest – solutions at which we would never have arrived through our conditioned analytical processes.
My approach tended to be to ask people to suspend temporarily all thoughts of their present difficulties and then to make a list of what they enjoyed most. I suggested that they ask themselves how much those items featured in their day-to-day lives. In making their lists, I asked them to bear in mind that what they enjoy (or might enjoy, if they felt they had the opportunity to do so) doing today, they might not enjoy tomorrow.
The reason why I suggested making the lists is that by doing so they were focusing their energies, and looking at how they were living their lives. If, for example, they saw themselves as being trapped in a continuing round of duties, responsibilities, financial pressures, relationship problems, non-stimulating work, job worries and so on, they were locked into a negative pattern of energy that is self-perpetuating. My guides have always stressed that, no matter how much we may seem to be victims of circumstances, we still have the power to change our lives. That power is within us; we can exercise it positively or negatively. One thing is certain – there will not be positive direction in our lives unless we decide to make it so.
I next suggested that once they had made the decision to express themselves – focusing on how they could live in a manner that would provide them with creative fulfilment that would satisfy all the things they had outlined in their lists – they hand over the lists to their guides, symbolically, through their thoughts.
The handing-over process involves setting the wheels in motion to achieve support from the infinite, universal energy (unconditional love) in three ways. First of all, when we focus on what we want and need, and then take steps to hand this ‘list’ over to the guides, we are exercising our own free will. We are making decisions and choices. Secondly, we are providing positive direction to our energy, by outlining how we would like to express ourselves. We do this in the understanding that we are acting on our present perception of what we want, and allowing ourselves the flexibility to respond to our changing perceptions in the knowledge and trust that our guides are keeping a constant overview of our (soul) purpose. Finally, when we hand over, we are acknowledging that we need help. This is a liberating admission in itself, and literally opens us to receiving it.
It’s important to remember that when we look back at our own physical journey on earth in our review of it, we are unlikely to be concerned by how many possessions we acquired, how much recognition we achieved or, indeed, our status. I am told that ultimately our only concern will be the extent to which we were able to release and enjoy our creative potential; in other words, our divinity.
When I ran my courses I could see very clearly how well the handing-over process worked. There are a few examples that stand out in particular.
Michelle was working in a business that she liked. She wrote on her list that she’d like to own the business. At the time, she knew that her financial situation was such that there seemed to be no hope of realising her dream unless the cost of the business would be no more than a certain amount that she wrote on her list. In a nutshell, she trusted in the handing-over process.
The course was spread over eleven weeks. One evening towards the end of it, she couldn’t contain her excitement when she arrived. The owner of the business had approached her with an offer that he’d sell it to her for the exact amount that she had written on her list. She had handed over, and her dreams had been answered.
Another woman who achieved her dreams in the process of handing over was Carol, who longed for a baby. She put this on her list, and handed it over. On the last night of the course, at the end of the eleventh week, we had great cause for celebration. Carol was pregnant. Her husband was also on the course, and it may well be that his own aspirations combined with hers to make it an even more powerful process.
Another incident that springs to mind started with a long-distance call I had from a woman called Louise. She told me that she and her husband were due to pay a substantial debt by a certain date, and they had exhausted every means of finding the money. They had also looked for an extension of the deadline, but without success. It shouldn’t have made any difference, but I felt more pressurised by the fact that she was ringing from another continent. I could only