Opening to Channel, pt 2 – why channel?

This material is copyrighted by M. Kirby Moore.  Reproduction without permission is prohibited.  Thank you for visiting!

So in my previous post introducing this topic, I mention that I might be a bit of a pioneer.  However, I do want to assure my readers that I do actually have one friend who acts as a bit of a mentor when it comes to channeling.  He even has experience with process-oriented emotional healing and energetic healing as he graduated from the Barbara Brennan school and he does Pathwork process work.  Anyway…  Why would I want to channel in the first place?

I already have quite an established Buddhist practice.  Even if my dedication waxes and wanes, I tend to come back to at least a once a week serious practice session.  Plus I have been working with Tibetan Buddhist teachers and lamas since 2005, so hopefully some of their wisdom has rubbed off on me.  Although, judging from days when I am really stressed and stretched, I have light years of work ahead of me!

Considering I am already intuitive, and I work with Western (and Spiritual) Astrology and I have cultivated a relationship with the I Ching, why would I want to add another layer of intuition?

Well this same friend from above said it best.  When we raise our frequency to a certain point (above any commonplace human wisdom – so I am talking about going up to frequencies where light-beings and angels “reside”), we are immersed in wisdom.  And if I am presently light years away from attaining any kind of meditative realization or enlightenment, why would I baulk at the idea of incorporating additional wisdom into my life?

And if you are a religious practitioner, you might have at least one or two rigid beliefs left in your body-mind (I sure do!), and you might be wondering, “Kirby, how the hell can you continue to call yourself Buddhist and start to work with non-Buddhist wisdom beings at the same time?”  Well honestly I don’t know the complete answer to this question.  However, I do believe it is these same Buddhist wisdom beings who support me and contribute to my budding intuition, so if they are directing me to work directly with my guides, then by all means, it would be a disservice for me to rigidly turn them down!  Yes I have taken refuge in the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, but I have been expanding the definition of Sangha over the past year (unconditional loving support is hard to find, so if it happens to arise from non-Buddhist sources and it truly feeds and nourishes you, then you should definitely stick with that community!!!).  And yes I ask the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas to bring myself and all beings under their protection on a daily basis.  But I also believe that to expand myself and to grow faster, I need some kind of direct guidance from any source who is wiser than I.  And I will take any beings who are of the light and who want all beings to grow and mature and to benefit human-kind across the board.

So that is my rant against anyone whose rigid beliefs tell me I should not be attempting what I am describing in later posts.  And guess who my toughest critic is?  Yep – me!  🙂

Therefore, I am continuing on my path of self-knowledge and again I will take advice from any being who has a broader, wiser perspective than I do.  And considering I am stuck at present in a human body (sometimes even joyfully!), and considering that at present the average human on this planet is at an extremely dense, materialistic frequency, I will gladly ask from assistance from higher-frequency beings.

Opening to Channel, intro

This material is copyrighted by M. Kirby Moore.  Reproduction without permission is prohibited.  Thank you for visiting!

If you happen to be a Buddhist practitioner, or have been raised in a religious conservative family, this subject matter might raise ambiguous or negative mental reactions.  However, I will explain how the past eight weeks for me have included at least one day a week of working through the book, “Opening to Channel” by Sanaya Roman.  I am also going to explain how I came to be working through this material.  🙂

If you had asked me twelve years ago, or more, if I would be pursuing the ability to channel high-frequency guides and light-beings, I would have told you promptly to go to hell.  Because that was where I thought I would be going if I continued down that path.  I could easily write two or three books about the bazillion different ways I have changed since then, but to keep this on topic and succinct…

I now know that one only goes to a (relatively temporary) hell realm if one commits horrendous actions.  So I no longer have that irrational fear (this religiously imposed, conditioned belief that I might arbitrarily go to hell for having a wrong belief is now gone from my repertoire as it were).  But when a friend of mine mentioned back in November that I should consider channeling my guides, I still encountered stiff inner opposition and resistance.  I still had to work through layers of fear, false beliefs and some conditioning around the topic of channeling.

Nonetheless, I wanted to give it a try because something in my life felt missing or I felt a literal or figurative vacuum in my heart which could only be filled by something on a spiritual dimension.  And this was after years of doing Buddhist retreats, meditation and practice.  So I knew I needed something potent and efficacious!

So I went ahead and bought the book.  Honestly it took at least two weeks to convince myself that it was worth a try.  In other words, this process has not been entirely easy for me.

Anyway, I bought the book and started reading from the beginning.  I have a tendency to try to read books from beginning to end.  Rarely do I skip to the juicy sections.  I think I like to “do it right.”  And in this case, I tried reading from left to right, but eventually I would listen to my guidance and I did skip around a little.  More on that exact process in a later post.

For now however, I need to share a little bit of back ground info.  Yes, I will attempt to keep this short and sweet, but you can imagine that to go from being grossly averse to the possibility of channeling, to be thoroughly exploring and attempting it on a weekly basis is quite a turnaround.  So I need to explain a little about this initial process.

First of all, back in 2002, I had my appendix removed.  I knew at that point that I might have some kind of relatively unique intuition, but it kind of frightened me, when I had a dream that told me explicitly that I had “appendicitis” and that I needed to go to a doctor about it.  Then, during the surgery, the doctors had to stop my heart as I was put on life support (which prevented obvious brain damage).  When I was told about this later on, despite my recovering from surgery on morphine (and dreaming about rainbows and butterflies as a result), I knew there was a red flag when he told me that fact.  But I did not realize the full extent of what had happened to me when my heart was stopped.

It took 3 years, almost to the day, for me to start having dreams about what had happened in that operating room.  Here I was, nearly completely divorced from anything alternative or outside of mainstream knowledge, having dreams about having been out of my body, among light-wisdom-beings and then being urged quite forcefully back into my body which had been lying prone on an operating table.  Needless to say, these dreams shook me up a little (back in 2005 when they occurred).  It took several months for me to put two and two together and realize that I was dreaming about the surgery which took place in March of 2002.

Anyway, I share this brief anecdote because it is these same loving light beings and guides who I am starting to work with now.  Back in 2002, I did not have a choice in the matter.  I was a young man (at least in age and in body development, certainly not yet in maturity) who had been put under anesthesia and suddenly I am out of my body, loving life and not wanting to re-enter my body.  But I did wake up in my human body and tried to sort things out.

Obviously my life started changing in wonderfully alternative and frequency-heightening ways, but the process to go from parroting your parents’ Christian right views to sitting on a meditation cushion doing Buddhist meditations and interpreting astrology charts is not always easy or comfortable.  And most of this journey I have had to feel through myself, because let me tell you, it is the extraordinarily rare teacher or mentor who practices emotional healing, process-oriented bodywork, spiritual astrology, Tibetan Buddhism and now to add to this list, channeling his / her guides.  In some ways, I see myself as a bit of a pioneer – and I am still on my journey of self-discovery and empowerment as I blindly navigate the waters of channeling my guides.

Support Kirby’s blogging efforts!

Hello, yes, every once in a while, I will post something gratuitously commercial.  However, in this case, these books and other products which I recommend on my amazon store are awesome!

I just updated my Amazon Store to include a category on Somatic Therapy books – which should also be called books on understanding early trauma and how to heal it.  The titles do not allow for such comprehensive descriptions.  But check it out (link on the right).

For instance, the book, “Scared Sick” details an enormous peer-reviewed, empirical study done by the Kaiser Insurance group where they discovered a significant correlation between early childhood (and infant) trauma and the occurrence of inflammatory diseases later on in life.  Then the authors go on to discuss this study’s results and other strong correlations to the health impacts of early trauma.  An awesome read which I highly recommend.  And you should buy it from my Amazon store (see link to the right).

Or another great read, for anyone dedicated to healing or at least understanding their healing process is the book “Healing Developmental Trauma.”  This and other great reads are available in my store.

If you want a fascinating read about the “science” of reincarnation, read “Old Souls” by Tom Shroder (illuminating the evidence from psychiatrist Ian Stevenson).  This is on page 7 of the sublime books category in my store.  This is especially fascinating because Dr. Stevenson did most of this research while employed at the University of Virginia (a very conservative school to say the least).  It is amazing how many little alternative research projects are on-going,even in traditional, conservative establishments!

I have a private practice in Charlottesville where I offer healing facilitation including working with the polyvaggal system (healing the central nervous system), Craniosacral Biodynamics as well as offering Spiritual Astrology interpretations both in person and over the phone.

If you have any comments for my blog or my amazon store, please let me know.

More about astrology to follow very very soon!

Thanks for reading.  ~Kirby

End of Year review

This material is copyrighted by M Kirby Moore. Please do not reproduce without my explicit permission. Thank you for visiting.

This is a post about taking stock of my life. Where am I at? How content am I? What can I change to manifest my needs?

As an astrologer, there is a nice structure already created, which represents a person’s life – a birth chart. Therefore by going thru the areas of life represented by my chart, or more specifically by its houses (each astrological house represents a broad area of life), I can become clearer about where I am content and where I’d like to make some changes.

Let’s get started:

1st represents relationships, inner hidden personality, conditioning from our parents, etc. This is a very complex area for some people as it is difficult to change fundamental aspects of ourselves (like inherited health). Personally I think it is possible to change these areas, but it takes time and dedication. So let’s move on to an area that is more “outside” of us.

2nd house is what we value most. This is a very subjective category – but in our materialistic culture, most people value money, so that is included here. Personally I value my family, and more, I value my sangha and community of supportive friendships. I also value intimate relationships, so I have already mentioned several things potentially “outside” of myself which I want to change in this new year.

First, I am tired of being lonely and of waiting for my karma to manifest an appropriate partner for me. Therefore I am considering using a Buddhist online matchmaking service. Second I want to be able to be more joyfully social this upcoming year, so I really need to look at whether or not I can keep my 40 – 50 hr / week job. If I am too exhausted to meet any of my extracurricular needs, then I may need to change!

3rd house has to do with several things, like our non-parental family members, our community (neighbors, our neighborhood, our city) but mainly the strangers around us – friends show up later. The third house has to do with our local transportation as well – our cars and other vehicles. Finally, this is the house of communication, including dreams (here is a subconscious communication). How am I doing here? Pretty good, although I would love to be in a monthly process dream group. Here again though we come back to time.

4th house is our parental family (usually mother), our feelings and needs around domestic wants, and this is the most hidden of houses (midnight of the soul), which means any planets in residence in our 4th houses need to be analyzed carefully. This is generally the house of the maternal lineage. Am I content here? My family (mother and step-father really) are doing some incredible healing work right now, so I am quite pleased here.

5th house is self expression, creativity, children, speculation and love affairs. I’m doing okay here except I don’t have time for creativity. But if I did, what would I change? And love affairs are fun, but I am looking more for an appropriate partner. Therefore no more need for any “love at first sight” craziness. I’d rather gradually build trust and lovingness.

6th house is work, discipline, personal choices about health / exercise, and service. This is where a lot of my energy is these days, so I am working tons. I would prefer to not feel a sense of deprivation though which tends to cause me to stick with a job even if it is time to move on… need to ponder that one.

7th house is the capital “R.” Relationships! I want an appropriate one. appropriate age, appropriate life experience, appropriate grounding and practicality, appropriate vocation. But if I have to wait another year, it’s okay. 🙂 goodness knows I easily distract myself from feeling my heart’s yearning.

8th house is extremely complex for some people (including me) but I feel I am doing a good job of changing, transforming and purifying my negative karma. It is also the house of our partner’s money, and it represents an underworld journey of sorts. No problem! (says this ascetic yogi)

9th house is higher education, learning foreign languages, cultures and traveling to new worlds. It represents stretching the mind. This is where I need to persevere and not waiver about. It is my intention to attend JFK University in the fall, so I need to get that application in the mail. Then once I have an advanced degree, then other goals are more realistic.

10th house is giving back to the tribe, our vocation, our profession and our reputation before the public. At present I am working a ton, but I would like to offer more astrology interpretations to paying clients, as well as more bodywork treatments. So I’d like to work smarter not harder.

11th house is a closer community than the third. This is friendships, sponsors, patrons and community organizing. It is a very progressive, interconnected area of our lives. I think I’d like more time to cultivate this domain but otherwise I am doing just fine.

12th house is service and work with charities or large institutions (prisons, working with mentally disabled or physically disabled people, hospitals, etc). This is also the house of self undoing – do we work against ourselves in any way? How are we our own worst enemy? Finally this is also the house of inappropriate fears. My only inappropriate fear as far as I know, besides my fear of heights, is my feeling of deprivation or my sense of lack. Do I have a fear of making an easy, sustained income? Who did I inherit this from? How can I change it? I’m working on it and I have some good leads – someone recently recommended the book, “The Artist’s Way” which I am looking forward to getting into.

So all in all I am doing okay, but I hope some of my intentions for 2013 come true (and I am dedicated to making real changes to ensure they do). Yay! 🙂

Thank you for reading.

Dancing my shadow on retreat

This material is copyrighted by M Kirby Moore. Reproduction without permission is prohibited. Thank you for visiting.

Yet again, just dipping my toe into this powerful cauldron of healing wisdom, if even for just an hour or two has resulted in a cathartic visceral shift.

During the evening hours on the retreat at the Sanctuary in Charlottesville, there is one hour when we Dance our Dreams or do Dream Play. What is this? It is a powerful method for exploring and embodying our dreams. Here is a brief description of the method – someone volunteers a dream, tells it in the first person present tense as if they are re-experiencing their dream, they slowly go through it so everyone in the group understands, and any time they mention a noun from the dream, they say the [noun] part of myself. So for instance, whenever they say the blue corvette, they would also say, “the blue corvette part of myself” or “the suspicious character part of myself” or “the dirty dusty basement part of me” etc.

Then the person who volunteered the dream chooses if they just want to do the parts themselves with everyone else as witnesses, or, and I prefer this option, the dreamer assigns group members to play various parts. When it comes to a juicy part of the dream, the dreamer should ideally play those roles. So there is switching from role to role occasionally.

If there is someone in the retreat who has experience with counseling and leading people through a healing process (experienced doing this work themselves too), then they might also ask questions such as, “As blue corvette, what do you need?” or “As the thief part of you, what do you need to feel complete?” Etc.

Therefore this work can be extremely powerful. And as I danced my shadow parts (of myself) from a potent recent dream, I experienced a huge visceral wave move up from my dan tien (hara or energetic body location below and behind the navel) through my solar plexus and then up through my chest. I had rarely ever felt such a powerful wave move through me, and all I was doing was speaking as my shadow parts. The question which triggered my healing was, “As shadow part, what do you need in relation to Kirby? What does Kirby need to do or need to know?”

It was awesome! I said that Kirby (speaking as shadow) needed to recognize me, then he needed to accept me, he needed to embrace me and finally he needed to fully understand me which would ultimately liberate me. Well, in a sort of crazy wisdom manner, we cut up the shadow parts of me (I played both roles as shadow being cut up and then switched to being Kirby doing the cutting), boiled these parts in a cauldron and then offered them to the wisdom beings to liberate. Woof!

And this all happened in less than two hours… I would say I don’t think this retreat could go any deeper, but I continue to be surprised. So I’m not going to hold my breath.

Thanks for reading!

re-membering, on retreat (?)

I am in the midst of one of the busiest periods of my life. Waves of opportunities and troughs of shock have been experienced lately. In the midst of it all, I am committed to attending at least one hour per day of a dynamic retreat.

I feel like I say this each year, when I do a juicy dive into Bodhicitta filled somatic bliss, but how can I forget so easily that my fluid body is potent, resilient and ever so playful??? To escape from that playful potency is a bad habit of mine… perhaps it is out of fear… or due to imprinting on the tense rigid bodies around me everyday at work. But I need this juicy medicine.

In just two hours this early morning, I chanted some mantras in as present a mindset as I could muster. Then it was contemplating the Eight Verses for Training the Mind. But the juiciest part for me was the Zapchen Somatics that we did for twenty minutes. How did My body forget that I can have warmth comforting fluid in my back, behind my heart, soothing my brainstem? Good golly! I don’t want to have to rediscover these precious nuggets every year 🙂 But if that is the case, it is just fine! Because at least then I would have the inner adventure of a lifetime, all over again. MMMmmm!!

Thanks for reading! This is copyrighted by M Kirby Moore. Please do not reproduce without my permission.

Astrological Whammy(s)

This material is copyrighted by M. Kirby Moore. Reproduction without permission is prohibited. Thank you for visiting.

Has anyone been wondering why I have not been writing much recently? Well I have been busy processing many things – grief, old terror, new fear, etc. I figure I am now ready to share a little bit of what I’ve been experiencing.

Over the past month, I have witnessed too much suffering, sickness and death. And this is more personal than the recent school shooting in CT, although that was also very tragic and quite frightening. That news definitely hit me hard. And just as a disclaimer, I’m about to mention some heavy stuff, so read on with caution. 🙂

Beginning around Thanksgiving, one of my friends from work cut himself really badly and another was hospitalized. And actually he was in a coma with only a ten percent chance of survival, so I started grieving for him days before he died. Then on the day that he was taken off life support, I learned two pieces of bad news simultaneously. First, another friend went to the ER, luckily only for a minor procedure, and second, one of my family members, a loved one was going in for tests because they feared they might have cancer. Then a week later, while I was at the wake of the early friend’s passing, we found out it was cancer, albeit with a treatable forecast. However, in the coarse of two to three weeks, I faced more suffering than I had over the entire prior year.

So what was happening in my Astrology chart which might indicate this overwhelming amount of suffering?

Well (obviously), several things. One generally does not go from loving an easy life to immediately facing many types of suffering unless one or more major aspects are happening (usually difficult transits will “bring” the most overt suffering from the outside world). Again, just to reiterate, the transits do not bring anything. Rather they are a reflection of our karma. The seeds are already planted. The degree to which our karma manifests is contingent with our frequency (choices, spiritual awareness, devotion to a spiritual path, etc).

With that said, let me get back to my above question. We all went through the brief but intense aspect of Mars conjunct Pluto – whether any afflictions came to us or not, we probably wondered why there were more accidents over that two to three day period. Personally, I was lucky and did not experience anything too difficult personally. But in my chart, Mars and Pluto were both squaring my Natal Mercury. At the time, I brushed this minor planet (Mercury) aside saying, “Oh, it is just the mind-oriented planet, thankfully it is not the Sun or Moon.” Yeah, well, I made a mistake in doing so. This error in judgment came about because every planet operates on multiple levels in Spiritual Astrology.

On the gross level, Mercury has to do with the nervous system, with cars and local transportation, with communication with others, siblings aunts and uncles, and with electronics (computers and especially with communication devices). So a couple of these were affected for me personally. But I was fortunate to, knock on wood, avoid bodily harm. And I thought, I’ve dodged that bullet, I am fine! Yeah, not so fast. Here’s why:

Every planet functions on many levels. The gross levels are the planets in signs and houses. This info is very personal and obvious (to anyone perceptive enough to notice). Then, still on a gross level, the planets make aspects to each other. These aspects can play vital roles in determining how that planet’s energy will manifest. But now let’s go to a subtler level. The planets also act as subtle barometers for each house and sign. What does this mean?

Each planet rules one (or two) signs. This is where Astrology becomes complicated, so if I lose you, don’t worry, you are not alone! Anyway, Mercury rules both Gemini and Virgo – its diurnal and nocturnal manifestations respectively. So no matter where Mercury falls in your birth chart, it will still play a role in the houses with Gemini and Virgo on their cusps. I realize I am using a lot of challenging astro-jargon, so thanks for trying to keep up. Here’s an example of what I am talking about:

I have Mercury in my 9th house in Aries. This is the gross information I was talking about above. On more of a subtle level, Mercury also plays a role in my 11th and 2nd houses because these have Gemini and Virgo on them (I am a Leo rising after all). Therefore, when Pluto and Mars made the difficult square aspect to Mercury, in addition to activating my nervous energy and affecting my computer, the issues reflected within the second and eleventh houses were also activated!

Plus, transiting Saturn is in Scorpio very close to my Nadir (4th house cusp). So I will discuss this as well. And we cannot forget that Uranus is still in orb with Pluto, making the Mars / Pluto conjunction even more intense.

I need to mention too, that I still stand by what I wrote previously about Saturn in Scorpio and about Transiting Mars conjunct Pluto. These can both be whammies, but it depends on where they fall in your chart and what they are aspecting.

More to follow, thanks for reading. Hope this was not over anyone’s head!

2012 Winter Retreat at the Sanctuary

Several people have expressed interest in the upcoming retreat in Cville, so here is more of a specific schedule:

From Dec 22nd thru Dec 31st, this is the daily schedule:

6-7 am resting in alignment, mantra, silent sitting
7-8 verses for mind traing, vispashyana, Fun yoga for wellbeing (Zapchen)
8-10 breakfast, tea, yoga, walk, rest

10-11 calm abiding meditation
11-12 noon shamatha and long life prayers
12-2 pm lunch rest nap

2-3 pm Zapchen exercises and napping
3-4 silent sitting
4-5 metta loving kindness or guided Tong Len
5-6 light dinner rest

6-7 pm group dreamwork
7-8 shamatha meditation
8-9 calm abiding and closing prayers

We ask that you register ahead of time so we know how many people to expect and how much food to prepare. To register, email Janet Evergreen at janetevergreen [at] cs.com

Thank you and we hope to sit with you!