Early in October, I talked about my regression / trance experience as part of an intuitive business planning retreat with Carmen Spagnola. (I tried to find the entry, but maybe it’s the podcast? Can anyone else find that link???)

Anyway, during the second trance, something very interesting happened: I met a new spirit guide. Maybe “New” is not the right term. New to me, unrealized until now. I received this detailed background of her last incarnation, the sense she was in Mongolia, and was incredibly tall not just for a female but for the humans of that region. She towered over everyone, and took absolutely no shit. She worked with the horses, and saw herself as the “lead mare”, presiding with ever-vigilant narrowed eyes, constantly scanning the horizon, tireless and fearless.

At this point in the trance, Carmen suggested that if we wanted something removed from us, something that is holding us back, we identify it now.

I knew the one thing that holds me back the most in my life, is fear. I don’t consider myself a fearful person, really, but it’s the “what if worries” that have the biggest impact on my day-to-day life. All that energy imagining disaster scenarios, I need that energy for actual productive things. I asked for this fear to be taken from me. There was something about the trust I had in this woman scanning the horizon, this mother-figure who was part of me, an ancestor maybe, or maybe even myself in a past life, I just knew I didn’t *need* the fear anymore. It was silly, in fact, to hold on to it. I asked it be removed from me.

And it was.

Simply, completely.

I marvelled at the feeling for days. I wondered out loud to Sweetie whether the feeling of relaxed confidence would last, and if not, I wanted to remember how it felt to BE in a fear-free state of mind, so I could invoke it at will.

It’s been a month, and the fear hasn’t come back.

What’s really interesting is I’m able to sit with Sweetie and watch her ghost story shows for the first time EVER. I never really liked watching the scary ghost story shows as a teenager, and in my 20s I cut myself off entirely after watching the “Blair Witch Project”. The stories of apparitions appearing in mirrors, objects moving on their own, the sense of being watched and disturbed from sleep – this all reminded me too much of the weird and scary things that happened when I was a kid. I didn’t find that stuff entertaining because it hit too close to home. It reminded me of the Fear.

But now? No fear. Really, none. Now I can watch those shows with interest and tune out the creepy music and sensationalist story-telling to tease out the real story. How did it really happen? What’s this spirit really trying to say? Sweetie and I like to watch these shows and try to anticipate who the ghost is and why they’re behaving in this way.

Here are some often-stated quotes as we watch these shows:

“Why would they buy a house that’s so obviously haunted?”

“Why would he buy a house without even asking her if she liked it?”

“IF IT’S TOO CHEAP TO BELIEVE, research BEFORE you buy!!!”

“Why would they STAY THERE after that shit happened????”

“That’s just evil. That’s just gotta be pure evil.”

The “evil” end of the conversation is an interesting one, because it parallels a conversation thread I’m having with a dear friend. We’ve unearthed ideas together to try and understand the nature of “evil”. It’s been described as “drips” and shown to me as an oil slick that is added like baking powder to a cake.

And then I remember my initial conversations with an angelic being called Lucifer, who talks about tending to the dark gardens on earth, the eco-system of low-vibration creatures that feed on stuck, shitty energy. The energetic composting system.

It’s interesting to think about all of this. I do still believe that there’s nothing to fear or worry about on the other side. There’s no retribution or punishment, even for jerks.

But those jerks, sometimes, often actually, punish themselves. I’ve found relatives of clients who refuse to come forward to talk (which never surprises the client) and historical figures suspended in time and space, refusing to do their life review and begin to move on.

Just yesterday, we found someone who asked to be regressed back to a spiritual child, so that she could start to develop again from the state of innocence. She’d committed some reprehensible acts in her last life. When I heard that, I understood for the first time the Christian / Born Again / Catholic notion of absolution and forgiveness. It’s not something that makes sense intellectually, but on the other side, what do you do with “evil”? How do you stop that cycle of “there’s no saving me now, I may as well…”

These ghost story shows are so interesting to me because it often starts a conversation about what happens when someone truly cruel and evil dies – where do they go? What do they do with themselves?

Sometimes, they just stay put and haunt the hell out of their old digs.

I also see psychics on this show, priests as well, who show up and do inevitably failing house cleansings. You can’t just come in one time and exorcise a house that’s been haunted for hundreds of years. It just never seems to work.

The first house Sweetie and I lived in Ucluelet was haunted as heck too. We worked diligently for six months before it started feeling better, and we were able to use the second bedroom for anything but storage. Some very sad things and some really nasty things went down on that property, as well as some industrial accidents. There were a lot of spirits rattling around. It is probably the place with the most paranormal activity that I’d ever lived in, and I needed to live there in order to get my butt kicked into gear and start talking to people spirits again, start this blog, get the hell over that useless fear already.

Sweetie and I were able to live in that house for nearly three years, and it got a lot easier once we were informed of *some* of the history of that place. We were at least able to clean it up enough, energetically, that the next people who moved in don’t seem to notice or mention anything. They’re nice people, too. If there were any problems, they’d talk about it or else move.

On these ghost story shows, you watch people get terrorized, and STILL say nothing to their significant other. They dismiss their fear and let it rule them as well. They live in fear and refuse to take action to change their situation. In most cases, the paranormal activity has to escalate to the point where people are being physically harmed, or at least severely sleep-deprived, before they’ll do anything to protect themselves!

It just reminds me of that one line I hear from most people who “don’t believe in that stuff.”

I don’t believe in ghosts or any of that stuff… But there was this one time-

I wonder if it’s these people who are more likely to end up in a severely haunted house. And who are they going to call when things get scary? That psychic they don’t believe in, or that priest from the church they’ve never attended. Maybe the reason why those house-cleansings never seem to work is the energy of the *belief* behind it just isn’t there. It can’t be powerful if the people living in the house are terrorized and wondering whether this freaky religious / psychic person is going to be able to fix their house.

But then, maybe some houses just can’t be fixed. My parents purchased a log house I call “The house of Woe” which they lived in for several years before selling up and moving further into town. This house was so freaky, my mother and I did a cleansing once. We ran salt around the perimeter, across all the entranceways and windows. We struck matches and wafted the rising smoke into every corner. We blessed the house with our faith and will, declaring it to be a place for love and family. For a while, my mother said it worked. Unfortunately, all the creepy stuff started to seep back again.

The basement was the worst. I slept down there once and refused to do it again, opting for an air mattress on my sister’s floor. The one night I did spend in the basement, I woke up in the middle of the night, freezing cold. The heat was on full blast, and an additional oil heater was plugged in and on. But the room was icy, and I kept feeling a “wooshing” over my head, like a cold wind was blowing across the top of my head.

During my stay, my cell phone broke, my electric toothbrush broke, and a florescent light hurled itself from the ceiling to the floor, right outside the room I’d slept in. My mother and I were very matter-of-fact about it. I just slept in a different part of the house, and we said, “Okay, you can have the basement. We just need it for storage.”

One thing that consistenly happened in the haunted place Sweetie and I occupied, as well as my folks’ House of Woe, was the pets we had at the time insisted on urinating and pooping in the space where the energy was the worst. This is how the pets try to claim the space, tell the spirits to leave. It doesn’t really work, it just makes the humans want to go in there less, or it makes the humans frustrated with the animals. It’s just funny that cats and dogs, they can’t smudge their house, they just pee in it!

Well folks, I’m not really sure what my point is, writing about this. I guess it’s just to say that fear is optional, and don’t mess around with ghosts.

Hey! Do any of you guys have any scary encounters or haunting stories to share? I’d LOVE to hear them. You can always start off with “There was this one time…”