April 2023 - Deborah King

Becoming an Energy Healer: Do You Feel the Call?

The world seems to be in a state of constant crisis. Between wars, pandemics, political unrest, job insecurity, and environmental trauma, the toll on our bodies and spirits is profound.

Environmentally, culturally, and spiritually, we know that there is real pain in the world today. It is easy to give in to the forces of darkness and cynicism. There is much work that must be done to heal our planet and many people are crying out for positive and uplifting solutions to their individual and shared trauma.

More than ever, our world needs people who want to be of service to others. The power of energy medicine not only heals us as individuals but enables us to bring light and compassion to those in need of spiritual transformation. As energy healers, we learn to help others open the door to their higher selves.

Positive change begins with you

One of my esteemed teachers, may she rest in peace, Louise Hay, often liked to say, “The power is within you!” I passionately believe this. Every time an individual chooses kindness and love over division and hate, the world begins to heal.

Do you sense that you have intuitive gifts that could be cultivated to help others find their spiritual path? Are you drawn to the light of spiritual transformation? If so, I invite you to consider becoming an energy healer.

My own journey with energy healing has taken me to many countries and I have learned from sages and shamans around the world. In my mid-twenties, I found myself adrift as the hard-charging life as a lawyer I had been living ground to halt. I knew there had to be something more to life and within me than constant struggle and pain.

When I chose the path of energy healing, I connected to my authentic self and aligned with my soul’s true purpose. Could this be your destiny, as well? If you feel a yearning to awaken your inner light and nurture others, then I think you may have your answer. Your higher self is calling you to help create peace in the world.

Here are three ways you can begin to shift to a higher energy frequency and activate the gift of healing that is within you:

See Yourself Clearly and Awaken Your Higher Self
Over three thousand years ago, ancient Egyptians inscribed the instruction to “know thyself” above the entrance to the Temple of Luxor in Ancient Kemet. Thales of Miletus, in the sixth century BCE, believed that self-knowledge was the key to enlightenment, while the Upanishads advise Atmanam viddhi, “know thyself and be free.”

This wisdom reverberates across the millennia to us today. A true energy healer must first see himself or herself clearly. The spiritual practices of meditation, journaling, prayer, and devotion can assist you to clear away trauma and ego so that you can stand in the clear light of your divine essence and gifts.

Compassion for Others Begins with Compassion for Yourself
So many of my students first come to me convinced that they are ready to change. They are “high” on the prospect of moving forward and want to see results immediately.

Yet with just a bit of digging, we soon find energy blockages that are holding them back from the full life they are meant to lead. When we begin to address these lower vibrations, blockages, and trauma, emotions start to tumble out with the force of those flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz.

Anger turned inward is one of the most toxic emotions that I deal with as an energy healer. When you release self-hatred, and forgive your mistakes, you open a channel to universal love and compassion. You also create a space within which your inner gifts can reveal themselves and thrive.

As Buddha tells us, “Every experience, no matter how bad it seems, holds within it a blessing of some kind. The goal is to find it.” To see yourself with compassion is to understand and to forgive; and, when you forgive, you begin to change.

Cultivate your connection to Source Source is the primordial origin of unconditional love, compassion, and the healing light of the universe. When you cultivate your connection to Source, as you understand it, you become a vehicle for the spiritual transformation of both yourself and others. Your life’s purpose is revealed, and your divine essence is awakened.

We each have healing gifts that can be cultivated to empower ourselves and others. I would love to collaborate with you to activate your inner healer.

Please join me for a FREE event that I will be hosting in partnership with The Shift Network this Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 8:30pm EDT / 5:30pm PDT.

Space will be limited, so you’ll want to reserve your spot as soon as you can.

You can do that by clicking here >>

The Power of Lucid Dreaming

Today let’s talk about the power of lucid dreaming — it is such a powerful tool when it comes to activating our intuition. Some of you may be lucid dreaming already, even if you aren’t familiar with the term. But even if the idea is foreign to you right now, it’s possible to learn how to step into your dreams, change your story, and orchestrate your destiny, right here and right now.

First, what is it: lucid dreaming happens while you’re asleep but aware that you’re having a dream. You fully realize that your conscious mind is hovering over your dreamscape, and that you can think, act, and change the things that happen in your dream to get an improved outcome.

Learning how to lucid dream can take time, but once you know how to do it, you may well find that your creativity — even during the day when you’re wide awake — starts flowing more easily. You may also feel an arising sense of calm permeating your soul.

Anyone can benefit from opening this pathway to greater awareness and self-knowledge. What happens is that when you have a lucid dream, you become the director of your subconscious.

You are familiar, I bet, with daydreams. During a daydream, your mind flies off to some imagined place and you engage with it as if it as if it’s actually happening. Daydreaming is a lot like immersing yourself in an unfolding movie. It’s an act of imagination while you’re fully conscious but you become unaware of your present surroundings.

You can get lost in a daydream. Some people live their lives there, content to imagine wonderful things rather than taking real steps to make them happen. “Get your head out of the clouds and your feet back on the ground,” is something a lot of daydreamers heard as kids.

Daydreaming begins with a compelling thought, memory, or fantasy. From there, the daydreamer’s imagination takes flight. The longer the daydream, the deeper the dreamer becomes immersed in his or her private fantasy land.

People who daydream a lot generally find it easier to become lucid dreamers. That’s because daydreaming is a lot like practicing lucid dreaming while awake. In fact, visualization is one aspect of a robust lucid dreaming practice.

When you experience lucid dreaming, you can confront challenges, fears, and hang-ups to become happier in your own skin. Lucid dreaming has the power to release repressed memories and even cleanse bad karma. This is one of the reasons that the Vedic sages were so keen to develop their lucid dreaming abilities.

So, let’s start our journey through lucid dreaming with the Vedic sages, who have practiced the discipline for thousands of years. The Upanishads describe four states of consciousness. The first three are waking (jagrat), dreaming (svapna), and sleeping (suṣupti). Dreaming (svapna), resonates most closely with our Western notion of the subconscious. In Vedic philosophy, both dreaming and sleeping are considered more important, in a spiritual sense, than waking (jagrat).

While dreaming, a sleeping person frequently is required to acknowledge the vibrations emitted by past deeds and karma. Psychic unrest, events of the day, and other intense experiences may also give rise to dreams. Generally, good dreams correspond to dharma, the path of rightness, while bad dreams are adharma, that which is evil or wrong. In Vedic culture, extending from ancient times, the world itself, or what we all think of as reality, is an illusion—that is, nothing but a dream—made by the God Vishnu.

The fourth state is pure consciousness, called Turiya, which is reachable through meditation and good works. To reach pure consciousness is to truly understand the infinite and to cease from suffering and reincarnation. Turiya exists beyond dreams and beyond time.

Every culture has tried to understand the meaning of dreams so they could trigger their power to change mindsets, perceived limitations, and unhelpful life trajectories. Tibetan Buddhist monks, for example, practice Dream Yoga to strengthen their mind’s ability to detach from their bodies and move fearlessly through their dreams as active participants.

Ancient aboriginal cultures throughout the world have embraced the spiritual and divinatory power of dreams, too. Many of you may be familiar with dream catchers, the traditional Native American artifact that catches bad dreams and allows good dreams to pass through.

Here’s another example: the Māori in New Zealand, also known as Tangata Whenua, the People of the Land, believe that your spirit leaves your body during dreams, and your dreams can warn you of omens and deliver premonitions.

The Ancient Greeks and Romans believed that dreams give us insights into the past, present, and future. Aristotle talked about lucid dreaming in his Parva Naturalia, which was written in the 4th century BC. He wrote, “often when one is asleep, there is something in consciousness which declares that what then presents itself is but a dream.” In other words, we often know we’re dreaming, and that we’re caught between two worlds, neither fully awake nor fully asleep.

Several centuries later, Saint Augustine, the Christian theologian born in Algeria, believed that lucid dreams happen when the soul briefly leaves the body to get a glimpse of the afterlife.

Early psychotherapists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries took lucid dreaming seriously, considering them a key to unlocking the human personality and desires. Sigmund Freud believed dreams let us process fragments of memories, repressed anger, and sexual impulses that hang around in our subconscious. Things that might be too painful or destructive to express in daily life can be set free in a dream. By entering the dream as an active participant, he felt that patients could rewrite the early scripts of their lives and release embodied trauma. Though many of us in the energy medicine world today have moved away from Freud, his early dream analysis was an important step along the road to understanding the mind-body connection.

Before we leave Freud, I also want to mention his notion of free association. Freud believed that letting patients make their own connections between their dreams and real life was a far better method than forcing interpretations on them.

As I mentioned earlier, your dreams reflect your unique journey through life. This is important because, as you begin to lucid dream, you might need some gentle guidance to help you interpret your flashes of insight. There are many pathways to understanding lucid dreams. But with practice, you can learn to trust your inner wisdom and intuition.

Ultimately, you have the power to make choices and to influence how your story ends in the dream state and when you’re wide awake. This is another reason that the Vedic sages paid attention to dreams; they are an aspect of karma.

Unfortunately, as they so often do, scientists initially distrusted the idea of lucid dreaming because it was hard to test. Many scientists thought of dreams as more-or-less a neural garbage disposal unit that “cleared out” our brains while we slept. But by the 1970s, technological advances for sleep studies helped bring Western science around to the idea that our brains are doing important work while we dream.

Scientists now know that lucid dreams usually occur during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, a period of very deep sleep with lots of observable brain activity. Current evidence strongly suggests that lucid dreaming therapy will soon be incorporated into Western medicine.

Today, popular figures like actor Leonardo DiCaprio and novelist Stephen King talk about their practice of lucid dreaming, which suggests that all of us will want to give it a try. The Nightmare on Elm Street movie used the power of lucid dreaming to help terrified teen-agers overcome evil. And in the recent television hit, Evil, a scientific skeptic turns to lucid dreaming as one way to try and beat the devil. We might call this a “lucid dreaming uprising” in which our modern world is reaching for ancient wisdom to reconnect with our intuition and spiritual essence.

So, by now you’re probably wondering how to activate the power of lucid dreaming into your life, right?

Swami Satyananda Saraswati originated a twentieth century school of Yoga Nidra. In 1976, having founded the Bihar School of Yoga in the 1960s, he built a system of guided meditation that helps devotees enter the lucid dreaming state. His system draws on the ancient tantric practice of nyasa, which combines the power of touch along different parts of the body with specific Sanskrit mantras.

Satyananda’s approach isn’t directly connected to traditional Vedic texts, but it does have historical precedents in the Vedic philosophy. It’s interesting to note that the United States Army and other big organizations have used the Yoga Nidra approach developed by Satyananda to treat soldiers who experience post-traumatic stress disorder.

There are some foods that can enhance your ability to lucid dream. Foods rich in vitamin B6 are linked with greater dream recall and intensity. One of the roles of vitamin B6 is to convert the essential amino acid tryptophan into serotonin and niacin. This conversion helps your body regulate appetite, sleep patterns, and mood. Foods that help enhance lucid dreaming include chicken, soybeans, turkey, tuna, venison, lamb, salmon, halibut, shrimp, and cod. If you’re vegan or vegetarian, good lucid dreaming foods include kidney beans, pumpkin seeds, tofu, cheese, and soy sauce.

It’s best to eat these foods and take vitamin B6 during your evening meal, just a few hours before you retire for the night.

Here are a few practical steps to enhance your ability to experience lucid dreams.

Make a dream pillow and infuse it with a meditative essential oil. It can be any comfortable pillow, and an essential oil like bergamot, clary sage, lavender, mugwort, orange, rose, roman chamomile, or sandalwood. You can also diffuse essential oil into the air using a diffuser instead of putting drops on your pillow. (Some people have adverse reactions to essential oils that touch the skin, so a diffuser may be best for them.)

Sleep in a cooler than normal room. To keep from feeling hot or too warm and uncomfortable during sleep, throw open a window or run a fan to keep your body temperature feeling exactly right for you. Studies have shown that sleeping in a cool place improves the frequency and duration of REM (dream level) sleep.

Exercise/Yoga Exercise and yoga several hours before sleep has been shown to enhance REM sleep.

Turn off all electronic devices with lit screens one hour before bed.

Regular meditation is another way to prepare your mind for lucid dreaming, as does setting your intention to lucid dream. For example, you might write in a notebook beside your bed your intention to lucid dream just before going to sleep every night as a way to prepare your subconscious. A nightly routine can also help signal your brain that you’re shifting from the waking to the dreaming state.

Lucid dreaming is powerful, so it can also be unsettling because there is no way to cleanse past karma in just one or two lucid dreaming sessions. So, please recognize that this technique, just like meditation, requires time, practice, and devotion. If your past trauma is intense and/or painful, it’s especially prudent to find a teacher or spiritual guide who can gently guide you through the process. Those of you saddled with post-traumatic stress disorder will want to make sure you have support in place before you try out lucid dreaming.

Finally, I must mention that the renowned inventor Nikola Tesla, mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, and author Lewis Carroll are among the many creatives and mathematicians who have drawn upon the power of lucid dreaming to unlock creativity and access the wisdom of their subconscious minds. In the final analysis, lucid dreaming, like meditation, opens our hearts to what is timeless and lets us see things as they really are, stripped of the half-truths and lies we often tell ourselves when we’re awake. In the words of Carl Jung, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” Becoming a lucid dreamer activates your power both to see the darkness and to move beyond it into the light.

Lucid Dreaming is just one skill that you can master that can help you see beyond the physical bounds of time and space and obtain wisdom from realms beyond ours. And it is one of the skills taught in our bestselling Astral Wisdom course. Learn to design the life of your dreams by mastering the out-of-body experience by accessing this course here >>

Seeking Sacred Space: Where’s Your Natural Cathedral?

“The place seemed holy, where one might hope to see God.”
— John Muir, “My First Summer in the Sierra,” 1911

Conservationist John Muir was known for his ability to find spiritual connection in the natural world. Yosemite Valley was sacred space for him, and he called it “the grandest of all the special temples of Nature….” Is there a place in nature that makes your spirit sing? Maybe you love to be in the mountains, at the beach, or in a quiet garden filled with roses. Summer is underway as the solstice ushered in the season of greatest warmth and light. Summer brings more opportunities for us to get out and connect with the natural world and grow in spirit. Contact with Nature renews and refreshes us and gives us the comfort of knowing we belong to something much larger than our small selves.

It’s our nature to seek spiritual joy in the natural world. From ancient times, people have gravitated toward places on Earth that are graced with high-vibration spiritual energy. There are many such places around the world, and people often built their holiest institutions over such power spots, vortexes or places of spiraling spiritual energy. They recognized that bathing in these elevated vibrations was beneficial to raising consciousness and facilitating spiritual development. Ojai, California, my home, is a beautiful natural setting known for this kind of spiritual energy. Many visitors feel recharged and uplifted after visiting there. North America is brimming with places that have been held sacred by Native Americans for thousands of years. Some research may reveal a number of sacred spaces in your locale.

What Makes a Sacred Space?

Beyond natural places that communities of people have found sacred over time, each one of us has a personal sacred space in nature that we love. We know it by the joy it brings. So many of us love the peace we find swimming in the waters off the western shore of Maui. Here in the silent blue world of the ocean, we delight in meeting sea turtles and sharing swim space with them. My friend, Louise Hay, loved San Diego’s mid-city urban garden, Balboa Park, with its vast array of trees and flowers from around the world as well as her own backyard garden where she grew vegetables, fruits, and flowers.

Novelist Susan Straight finds beauty in her seemingly stark hometown landscape in Southern California. For her, the date palm trees of the desert city of Indio, standing in stately rows and catching the golden sunlight and silver moonlight, are beautiful. Lines of trees that make up the date farm landscape are “like a cathedral” she says. For many people, forests of any kind, whether palm trees or giant redwoods, are a natural temple. Our eyes are drawn upward by the great height towering above us. Looking at the sky our hearts open.

Great mountain peaks also draw our eyes toward heaven. Photographer and environmentalist Ansel Adams was another admirer of the Yosemite Valley and its “vast edifice of stone and space.” President Theodore Roosevelt said of camping in Yosemite, “It was like lying in a great solemn cathedral, far vaster and more beautiful than any built by the hand of man.”

Maybe the desert is a landscape you love. The desert has always been a place of spiritual connection and reflection, a place of open space and silence and starry nights.

Artist Georgia O’Keeffe loved the northern New Mexico desert for the pure light, the clear air, and the astonishing colors of the hills and the sky. The Grand Canyon is a place of pilgrimage for millions. Sunrise and sunset paint the desert cliffs for anyone who would like to watch.

If water is your love, Crater Lake in Oregon, the deepest lake in the U.S., is an especially beautiful site considered sacred by Native Americans of the region. The lake is used as a site for vision quests and other ceremonies. Lakes, rivers, and waterfalls may be part of your vision of a spiritual home.

How to Enjoy Your Sacred Space

From early childhood, I’ve had a special connection with Lake Tahoe, one of the deepest lakes in the world. The energy there is profound, and when I visit there, I sense that its water is sacred, coming from the original source. Maybe your beloved natural place is your traditional family vacation spot. Take a moment and picture your sacred space.

If you have a chance to visit a sacred space of your own this summer, intend to connect with your heart, mind, and soul. Experience the place with all your senses. Feel the ground beneath you (or the water surrounding you). Look up at the sky, the clouds, the stars, the mountain peaks and the treetops and give thanks for the beauty and the peace. Give thanks for the gift of life and the field of loving energy that all of us share.

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Deborah King

Positive change begins with you

What Makes a Sacred Space?

How to Enjoy Your Sacred Space