(This text was first written and published about a month ago. It has been slightly changed)

Today yet another of my Heart Sisters was declared mad (“psychotic”), apprehended against her will, drugged into a zombie state of compliance (“She’s much calmer now”) and incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital for an undetermined period. She is the fifth of my close acquaintances to be subjected to this kind of experience.

 More and more of us are waking up to expanded awareness and what were once considered extra-sensory capabilities. As we peel off the shrink-wrap that has kept us small – tightly-swaddled infants, secure in our imprisonment – we open to other-dimensionality and all that this implies.

Courses in Shamanism, Trance-Mediumship, Working with your Totem Spirits, Talking to your Guardian Angel, Connecting to the Angelic Realms, etc, etc. have proliferated exponentially over the past decade, seeds sown in the fertile ground of a collective consciousness finally ready to breach the illusion of separation between Spirit and Matter. All the Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, et al who attend their houses of worship and enter into prayerful connection with the Other Realms are lauded for so doing. They are considered good, moral people.

So how can it still be justified to violate a person’s free will and impose on her a materialistic, what-I-can-touch-is-what-is-Real definition of “Normalcy”? 

It is when our deviation from the norm disturbs the Clan – when it attracts too much attention and becomes a source of embarrassment to the social standing of The Family – that we find ourselves in peril. We are led by a kind of social mafioso, with a duty to bow to the Rules or suffer the consequences of exile or death.
But who among us does not hear that Little Voice – or maybe even many of them! We are having to learn to discern between all the voices that have been recorded inside us (that of Mom, Dad, Church, School Teacher, etc.) and the voice of our own sovereign Truth.

There, but for the grace of the Multiverse, go I – when I went through my most intense spiritual openings, it was in the 70s and I was living on the edge of Chinatown in San Francisco, separated from anyone who might have been frightened for me and easily melding in with the thousands of others experiencing alternate realities for a variety of reasons.

Today, I am infinitely grateful for having had the freedom to walk my own circuitous path to my Self. I am incensed and deeply wounded for my Relations who do not.

The members of our Heartroot community have often heard me say that we’re a flock of black sheep, each of us accustomed to an identity of The One Who’s Different, who sticks out … who disturbs. We have often comforted ourselves with the certainty of being Special.
If Heartroot is a place of refuge, it is not necessarily just to escape the deep solitude of The City and find commune in Nature. Here, people tell me that the greatest relief is to feel safe and free enough to really share what they’re thinking. We may talk a lot about the weather 😉 but there is also, in the silence of the forest and the starry darkness of the night, the space to express all that we have in our hearts without feeling weird and different.
  Perhaps this feeling of acceptance could help you better navigate the life you have been bequeathed – the fortress you have continued to build. Maybe it could even inspire you to find the keys to open the door and leave in peace, free and sovereign ….

AHO….