Women Who Channel ~ A Preliminary Community Inquiry by Alison Newvine (Image by Veronica Leandrez)

Content Warning- This post contains references to childhood sexual abuse. This post does not contain descriptions of any type of abuse.

Channeling is having a moment right now. There are hundreds if not thousands of individuals sharing publicly via video, audio and written word the messages that they believe have come from a source beyond their individual human consciousness. There are many more who privately experience this type of inter-dimensional or spirit communication either spontaneously or through intentional practice.

Artists, writers, musicians and other creatives often describe what they do as channeling. Healers from a variety of different traditions and disciplines report channeling healing vibrations or consciousnesses beyond their own while working with their clients. Many people report communication with animals, plants and nature spirits. We have access to a plethora of books, online courses and trainings to learn how to channel.

There is much controversy over this phenomenon. Some people dismiss it outright while others will believe anything a self-proclaimed channel says. Many of us acknowledge that channeling does exist but believe that much of what is publicly promoted as channeled material is something else.

I began this inquiry by reaching out to the RTM and greater Mago community to hear your experiences. I intentionally did not define channeling for us at the outset. I want each person I connect with to share their definition rather than funnel their experiences into my or anyone else’s definition.

In hearing back from the community, several key themes emerged that I will begin to explore below. For the sake of brevity and coherence, I have shared only fragments of the deep wisdom each respondent brought forth. There is space for further discussion in the comment section below and there will be further installments forthcoming in this series.

My intention in this inquiry is neither to discredit nor promote any individual who claims to channel. Undiscriminating belief and judgmental rejection are two poles I am endeavoring to steer clear of in this exploration. I do not know the ultimate truth of any individual’s experience with channeling and I am endeavoring to speak from my own experience as well as to weave in the voices of others who have generously shared theirs.

BODILY SOVEREIGNTY

One issue that arises around this topic is bodily sovereignty. Trance channeling involves offering one’s body, brain and voice to an external entity in order for that being, whether angel, deity, deceased love one or extraterrestrial, to deliver messages to those of us here on Earth. Poet Louisa Cailo stated, “As a yogini I was guided not to give over my body to be used by an entity.” I appreciate Louisa brining up this important point for us to examine. Unfortunately, I have witnessed survivors of childhood sexual trauma become caught up in a type of channeling that brings much distress, retraumatization and chaos to their lives because. In these cases, the channeling is a reiteration of the loss of control and confusion experienced during the original traumas. There is a desire to believe that this “greater” entity is there to support them and that the presence of the entity is a sign of their worth and specialness. This belief is often instilled by perpetrators of childhood sexual trauma. It is psychologically protective for children who are dependent upon or can’t get away from their perpetrators, such as when the perpetrator is a parent or caregiver, to construct a belief system that preserves their worth and sense of safety in a deeply unsafe and abusive context. If this protective mechanism is not reworked and healed in adulthood, it leaves the individual vulnerable to exploitation by humans and non-humans alike.

Our basic human need to know our value and importance, especially profound in childhood, is manipulated by predators- by human sexual predators preying on children and by non-human low vibration interdimensional beings preying on adults. Veronica Leandrez, artist and holistic practitioner/educator, writes, “I have tried to embody my own body as much as possible and I stay away from this sort of unconscious channeling because we can tap into the information of the universe ourselves without another entity… I think that there’s a lot of lower dimensional beings who want to get our attention because they don’t have bodies of their own to play with and they feel important by making us essentially into a megaphone for them, they feel more powerful doing that.” I would add that there are also entities who will feed their channels the information they want to hear, information that on the surface seems benign or even helpful, in order to maintain access to the person’s brain, body and voice.

All of this is certainly not to say that trance channeling is inherently disempowering or exploitative of the channel, only that it can be. We will be coming back again and again in this exploration to the diversity of experiences that fall under the channeling umbrella. In subsequent installments, we will look at how unique circumstances and contexts determine whether channeling is helpful, harmful or neutral, both to the individual doing the channeling and to those with whom the information is shared.

DISCERNMENT

As already eluded to, discernment is necessary in understanding who or what one is channeling and whether or not the information is genuine. Discernment is also important when taking in information that is channeled by others.

Several times, I’ve had the experience of encountering someone channeling, usually via a youtube video, sometimes in person or in writing, and I initially feel a strong emotional response that can lead me to conclude, prematurely, that this channeler is bringing through exactly the entity or entities that they claim they are and that the information is pure. Predictably, as I spend more time taking in the content of the particular channeler, my experiences of their work become more mixed and I start to see more of the individual’s personality and inner conflicts seeping through. The way I’m understanding this at present is that these channelers have the ability to access high vibration frequencies, unconditional love and/or information from the universal field and when first encountering these vibrations it is incredibly moving for me. Then the human mind, their mind, my mind, tries to pin it down and define it. “This is the pure channeled information of such and such archangel, or biblical figure, or divine feminine archetype.” That’s were the validity and emotional resonance with the channeling starts to break down for me. My working theory is that who the channeler believes they are channeling often says more about their own psyche than it does about objective reality.

Many years ago I heard singer and songwriter Alanis Morissette differentiate between being a channel and being a filter. I believe the interviewer was trying to pin the label of channel on her/her work and she was very clear in her response. She said that while she does access something that is greater than herself when creating and performing, what she accesses is funneled down through the filter of her own psyche, personality and life experience. She doesn’t claim it to be a direct, flawless transmission from source or any other entity. That humility and discernment is something I would love to see more of among self-proclaimed channels.

Artist, researcher and healer Anna Tzanova writes, “Accessing levels of the universal consciousness or the field of information, etc. (whatever one would feel comfortable calling it) is different and I wouldn’t necessarily call it channeling. This is retrieving information that involves one’s own abilities to obtain certain level of information. Those could be deliberate acts of contemplation or epiphanies. It could happen in a dream. In my experience, mostly at those in between awake and asleep times or spontaneously, when one least expects it. Yet, those happenings are when one is ready to receive the information and their only source is the field, not a particular person, entity or a group.”

We all know that so many layers of psyche are outside of our conscious awareness. I think a completely “pure channel,” is quite rare. Many of us can and do access a greater love, consciousness or field of information through the practices or states that resonate most for us. This information is often beautiful, supportive and deeply healing.

ART and NATURE

Not surprisingly, many women in our community experience expanded states of consciousness while engaged in the creative process and while connecting with nature.

Founder of Creatrix Studies and scholar, activist, and advocate of Ceto-Magoism, Helen Hye-Sook Hwang writes, “If channeling can mean the sonic tuning orchestrated by whales on the planet, there might be some common ground for our understanding. When humans can join the ‘singing’ of whales, riding the dragon collectively, there is Paradise on the Planet.” I love this reframe of channeling not as an individual bringing through an entity but as a way we can come into deeper communion with the nature world and with advanced beings incarnate here on our planet, within our oceans.

Naturalist, ethologist, ritual artist, dreamer, researcher and writer Sara Wright shared with me a beautiful metaphor of nature and human as two interpenetrating circles separated by cultural constructs, and the magic that happens in their overlapping. “It’s in that space that all kinds of unusual things happen. Plants speak. Animals communicate. Dreams forecast the future. I have never considered channeling as something I do. I am present to what is and spend a lot of time listening. I think of myself as a receiver. Some experiences are positive, others negative – both sides are always present in nature.” Being present and receptive certainly doesn’t sound as sexy as channeling and I love that. There’s a groundedness and humility in what Sara is saying as well as the encouragement to be in our bodies and of the Earth, where so much wisdom resides.

Artist Sanna Poyhonen shares, “I realized I’ve been personally channeling ancient entities in my art. I’ve started to think that perhaps all ideas are actually coming from somewhere Unknown, and art making itself is channeling.” I resonate with what Sanna shares, as I’ve often felt as though I’m not really the one writing the music that I’ve written, especially with certain songs.

The topic of art as channeling will also be expanded upon in subsequent installments but I want to share one more insight on this subject from Veronica Leandrez.“After having experienced real moments of possession (via Voodoo and Santeria practices), I learned that sometimes this happens as well when making art, and in those moments I wonder what I am connecting to, or who is ‘working through me’ because it does sometimes feel like possession, this is what artists also describe as being in the zone, it’s like you are no longer thinking, you are watching yourself ‘do’. It is hard to say in those moments if it is channeling something from or if it is the artist being fully present that in fact allows him/her to access information without the need of ‘channel.’”

SPECIAL vs. UNIVERSAL

This was an interesting theme to emerge from our initial community inquiry. It has me wondering, does the label “channel” divide women or unite us? We ALL know what it feels like to want to be recognized for our uniqueness, our gifts, something that makes us special. And we ALL know what it feels like to be in the presence of another whose need to be recognized as uniquely gifted can suck the energy out of a room.

Glenys Livingstone is an Australian author, Greenblood, and one who has been shaped by the Wild. She comments, “Every being may participate directly in the creative cosmos: that is, we all ‘channel’. Indeed it is the nature of Creativity. I get so tired of people who claim to be special – we all are, or at least may be.”

Sara Wright states, “Every woman’s story is another thread to follow and one that attaches us to Woman’s Way…For me this is what’s important about focusing on personal stories which I am doing more and more as I age.”

Prophetess Mary Ayodele is a Community Herbalist and Africana Folk Medicine Scholar shares, “I have been surprised at the proliferation of tarot card reading and the deep struggle some have made to force it to fit into different niches and to answer certain truths in a mainstream-book kinda way. I first read tarot over 40 years ago, and it was so far from mainstream that it still required extra explanation.” I appreciate this perspective. There is a difference between tacking on “channeling” to one’s spiritual offerings as a business gimmick vs. years of practice with this modality before going public.

There is a beautiful trend at the moment of women carving out spiritually based businesses for themselves, shedding the reliance on patriarchal institutions to survive. Yet, there is a thread of pretense that I do not think is intentional or even conscious that Prophetess Mary Ayodele and Glenys Livingstone are pointing towards. Fitting spiritually into a business model is fraught. Packaging up even the most loving messages as “channeled truths” from this or that defined external source holds a vibration of insincerity and ego that I think can be difficult to pinpoint or name, but is often felt. I would love for us to just let it be that and not need it to be the channeled voice of Mary Magdalene or Archangel Micheal or whomever else can create a buzz, boost our subscribers, followers, patrons or simply make us feel more important, evolved, chosen, etc. I feel some discomfort in naming this because it is not my intention to try to dim anyone’s light or cast judgment. I want to be gentle in talking about this and I also want to be sincere and advocate for a higher level of discernment. I could be wrong. It could be a projection of my own ego. But I think it deserves more thoughtful inquiry and discussion and I’m grateful that we as a community are willing to engage with that inquiry.

Of course, special and universal are not the binary that the heading of this section suggests. It is simply that we are still SO LIMITED in our mental capacities to hold a nondual awareness. How we think about things has been strongly influenced by academia, a system based on hierarchy, reductionism and categorization of information as right or wrong.

There is so very much to explore with this topic. This article is the tiniest tip of the iceberg. I look forward to diving deeper into individual concepts and with individual women in subsequent chapters of this series.

(Meet Mago Contributor) Alison Newvine