Interview With Diane

In this next interview I have a sit-down with local artist, healer, and family friend Diane to talk about her experience with her kundalini awakening.  Recorded several years ago, this interview was transcribed but had gotten swept up in a computer crash that only recently was recovered.  Her interview can also be found in the section at the top of the blog.  I am including the events surrounding her awakening first and I will have a second part of the interview, which was the earlier portion, in a second post a little later.  The format for the interview is different from the other interviews as it was a more open conversational style.  My questions and comments are all italicized and her responses are in normal type.

Today I talk with Diane who lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and who, coincidentally, is a close family friend. She is a wife, mother, artist, and mystic of some note. Diane’s artistic talents including writing, photography, sculpture, and performance art. She is part of the artist group Web Six who have, over many decades, produced multimedia performances that are part visual art, poetry reading, and performance centered around their experiences as women. Their performances have covered the trials and triumphs that they face in their day to day lives. Made up of musicians, writers, poets, photographers, and painters, the troupe has performed throughout our region over a thirty year period.

Diane is a gifted healer who has, over the years, brought her insight into her work through workshops and retreats on issues related to the shamanic journey and spirituality, to name a few. She also owns a business as a masseuse and has directed Yoga Nidra classes. I sit down with Diane to discuss her experience with her awakening.

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Can you identify anything that triggered your awakening?

I had been to the first workshop for the Institute for Shamanic Studies with Mary North. It was always a vivid experience for me, and I had power animals…

Was this based on Harner’s work?

Yes. I went to this workshop and just jumped into it. I think I need to work on that. I did these workshops, I just jumped into them. Well anyway, that’s maybe beside the point.

Well did you feel like a tension had built up over the slow loss of your mother might have triggered anything?

Well, she was my friend, we said we were soul mates. But she would be sitting across from me having coffee and she’d ask, “Do I know you?”

Did this make you feel lost?

Well my father had already died, and I felt like I was losing my rock, yes. The daily grind of care was hard because she did not sleep like she used to. My sister and I would trade her off so we had some time off, which was a blessing. So it was during this free time that I decided that I would take a workshop on developing your psychic ability. Mom and I had actually had psychic things together. And she was psychic, but she never developed it. She introduced me to Wayne Dwyer. So she introduced me to that world. She would say that someone was coming, and we would need to clean house to get ready, and sure enough, later, a cousin would show up knocking at the door.

One night as I was lying in bed, after she had died, I had a dream where I saw this sphere in the room, it was this pulsing sphere that looked like water. Then I heard a voice that said to me….and now I am going to cry….it said, “This is her last gift to you, and someday you will understand…” Then I woke up and the ball was still there, and I was awake. I even pinched myself, and I could still feel it coming into me. I think it gradually dissipated. That was one of the reasons why I wanted to take this workshop to develop my psychic abilities. But then this whole thing happened with this person named Tom. So….

So was your awakening a clearly defined….was there a galvanizing moment..

Oh yeah. [laughter]

Yes. [laughter] So what was that?

I went to the workshop. I was so relieved to be there, I walked on the beach. I didn’t need to take care of anybody. I went to the center and was sitting down, and we were having this introductory meeting that gave us the bones of the thing. I heard someone laugh, this was like some enchanted evening, except it wasn’t. I heard someone laugh, and I turn around, and there is this huge guy, big big neck, the kind of guy I am like “Eeew! Get away from me!” Had a pony tail pulled back. He was squatting down and he was talking to people, and he turned around and looked at me and it was like….it was like on point…like a bird dog. He was looking at me like, “Oh my God, there she is!” which was what he was thinking when he talked about it later when I found out that I was in a dream of his.   I was looking behind me, thinking “What the hell?” So I was pissed. I was having this great time and there was this guy looking at me.

Later I decided to join a sharing group, people you would eat breakfast and lunch with and you could share your experiences. So when I went in the room where the list of the sharing was, I didn’t want the guys name on it, and I was relieved to find his name wasn’t on it. But as I was there a woman erased a name and put his name, Tom, on the list. There was this feeling of inevitability to it. So I found that he was actually quite funny. He had this self-depricating humor, and it was mostly about himself. He worked in sanitation for the city of Philadelphia. And one day after our meal he asked me if I wanted a ride up to the conference center, and I said no, and then thought, “Well that was kind of mean…” so I said that I would take a ride with him and we rode up to the conference center together. And I thought I was getting a lesson on not judging a book by its cover, because he was quite nice and funny. And it was while people were talking there that all of a sudden there came this feeling that came up from my spine to the top of my head. And it was like a wave of emotion. It was very emotional. Tears came to my eyes. It was like someone divulged some secret of the universe to me. It was like awe. And I began to shake. I even looked under my seat. I thought there was electricity under it. I started sweating. I had to hold onto my seat; I was rocking. I looked over at Tom and he was shaking. He was rocking. He was holding on to his seat. I thought, “Holy shit!” I wondered did we eat something? Did we have food poisoning? We both wound up leaving when the break came. We fled. I asked if he was okay. I asked “Is this you, are you doing something?” I walked around thinking, “what the hell is this?” I thought maybe it was a blast from the past, was this an issue raising up? Maybe it was something we ate. I decided “I am not doing this, I came here for R&R…whatever it is, it is going to have to come get me because I am not doing this…” Later, I came out of the meeting and I was going to walk on the beach. The parking lot was empty. But Tom was sitting there on the hood of his car. He looked horrible. He looked sweaty, he looked pale. So I thought, okay, I am going to talk to him. I asked him how he was doing. He said “I feel like there is a pillar running up from my bottom to the top of my head and it’s going to explode.” I remember reading something about that pillar, I had read about it and I thought, hmmm….okay. I felt like I was on automatic, ”do you want me to take you to the hospital? Do you need me to drive you?” He said he didn’t think he could be around people. He was kind of staggering around. So I said, without even knowing I was going to say it, “Give me the car keys. I will drive you. I will get you some Advil.” When I got him to my room and I gave him the Advil, I felt like I was seeing this almost outside of my body, like this was something we had agreed to do this before.

He sat down on the chair and then he went berserk. He starting yelling and screaming. He tore up the bed! I had been to enough workshops, so I knew that this was something you were supposed to do, just let it happen, so I said, just let it out. When he calmed down I asked him if that was a seizure. He said that it wasn’t a seizure. He was walking down the hall and I thought, okay, something weird is happening.

The next night, I hadn’t seen him, I had been doing some yoga, and there was a knock on the door. I knew it was Tom. I answered the door and it was him. He was carrying some flowers. He said, “Whatever you did last night, it really helped me, and I wanted to thank you.” I said well I wonder how my husband would feel about this, and he said, “ That isn’t what this is, and you know it”…and I thought, shit, he was right, it wasn’t.

He asked me what I knew about my work. He wanted to pick my brain, he wanted to do work with me. So we sat across from each other and looked at each others face. As we did this, I saw this young man in his face with the turned up bangs, and I drew the picture in my notebook. Very innocent and young looking. He saw my fear of growing old, which I do, because of my mother. That night, I woke up and I thought that there was an earthquake! I had the same thing he did. I had to get up and go out on the beach. And I ran.

So did you feel like you had this build up of tension and movement helped?

Oh yes. I wanted to move. I wanted to feel my pain, I wanted to feel my breath , I was on the edge of the surf. I wanted to feel it all because I couldn’t stand it. Later when I was in my room, there was this flickering inside, like something was crawling that went up and down from my solar plexus and my head, up and down, up and down. I took a shower and held my pillow and fell asleep. Later, we would do work together.

I did this shamanic journey and I saw the image of this armadillo and I saw all these cracks on its back and I could see this image like it was written on the sky that said, “Pain” and when I saw that and told him this, he said I have to show you something, and he showed me his back. There were all of these scars that were like these hands that were reaching for his spine. He would have been like Quasimodo if he hadn’t had his spine broken, so he had been in a body cast, it had been in a Catholic hospital where they didn’t let his parents visit. He had just had a horrible time. So somehow, we had come together to work on this.

Okay, so I am going to ask you something that I know about personally about nearly all of the people….no….all of the people I know who have awakened together. They might be sitting across from one another or across the miles. They all have this unsettled karma together. And a lot of time there is this experience of revelation, or apocalypse where there is this sudden revealing where all this stuff comes up, all this stuff….you don’t even know what the name is for this experience, but its this energy that needs to get out. And then in the midst of this you sometimes can have this little “Aha” moment. Did you ever have that?

I did.

Did you have that moment where you understood what it was that was not finished?

Somewhat. I think it was somewhat.

When I went to do the whole holotropic breath work, which I wanted him to do, but he didn’t want to do it. That was when I felt a goddess moving up through my body. At the time I didn’t know it was Shakti, you know, the goddess they speak about. It was definitely female. Then I saw myself. I was both outside myself and in my body. I saw myself sitting in a circle of stones. I knew that I was a willing sacrificial woman. I had red hair and was wearing a white dress. I was coming down into the scene. The stones had runes scratched into them. I had always thought they were Celtic, but they were Viking. And he [Tom] looks like a Viking. I saw my throat being cut. And I saw the blood coming out of me and I became very white. He was standing at the end of the circle. Then I turned and asked who he was. He was standing there, like a shaman with a metal helmet, with fur. Then his face changed and he turned into an old man with a wolf head on his own head, it was this headdress. Then he turned into a woman in a long white dress in sandals standing on a dais with white columns with a really blue blue sky behind. I asked, “Well, who is he?” And the voice said, “He is a gatekeeper.” I have learned that this sometimes refers to the person who helps you with your psychic life, who is the gatekeeper for entering your psychic life.

I had this incredible dream the night I felt the…thing…I dreamed….I am going to cry. I was sitting on the porch of this ancient building with columns were crumbling and the steps went down into the ocean. And in the ocean, walking out of the ocean, was this wolf girl. She was part wolf and part human. And I knew she was me. She pointed behind me, and there was this ancient door with these rusty hasps and she pointed that I needed to open the door. And I couldn’t open the door. I woke up and thought, I have got to open this door! So I went back to sleep and had a dream about a crowbar, but I could never open the door.

I have had shamanic journeys about the door, and I have had experiences where I have been led to what is behind the door. Some people have said that it is love, but I am not sure. So anyway. [laughter]

How has your awakening progressed?

I had different….I have written about the whole thing what happened to me with Tom about that. I had it for about three years, before I could not feel it in my body. I was terrified a lot of the time, and even though I went to the holotropic breath work, but I would have movements of extreme ecstasy and then extreme fear. I had all kinds of things happen to me, like a snake coming out of my throat chakra. But I also had amazing synchronistic experiences. I had an amazing experience with reclaiming my relationship with Jesus. I would go to workshops and would feel drawn to them and would start talking to them and would find out they had had an opening. I went down to Greensboro to study hypnosis. I met this women who was doing this work and she wanted to do this work with Mary Magdeline and she laid me down on the table and began touching me where Jesus’s wounds were and I found I just opened like a flower. I found that I was meeting others who had this same opening, like you, who also had this same thing. One day while I was meditating, I felt like I was going to give birth, so I moved into the birth position and felt as though I was giving birth, and afterwards, I just rolled around on the floor lauging and feeling great.

You know, it’s interesting, but this is an experience I have read about many women who have had. Men don’t seem to have it. Maybe its an archetypal Jungian kind of experience where we are dealing with higher order energy within our psyche about creativity, and birth. So its interesting.

Did you have any physiological effects related to dealing with the fear in this? This whole shadow and the light…

Sometimes I would have the shaking. Oh my god there is an earthquake. Oh, and I also had a spontaneous orgasm, which I hear is normal, which was great! I thought that was pretty cool! I am standing there at the edge of the bed, and there is no one near me.

I am not trying to pigeon-hole you, but I am interested in how people are dealing with their shadow stuff. How did you deal with releasing this energy?

Well I would have this shaking, and at night I would have this feeling like I was just full of fear and that there is this darkness. Darkness was upon me and darkness would be upon me. I would lie in bed with Richard [Diane’s husband] and would just shake. But he does not go there. I would sometimes say, “I am running some energy today” and he would say, “Okay, don’t want to get into it, but it’s okay.”

I often had this anxiety about myself, why I was feeling this way. I would often sit and pull some runes and would think about it. I began to see that a lot of what had to do with Tom was about the male dominant energy. I saw that he represented my own male energy that I had been dealing with for lifetimes. But it was a real issue dealing with this male energy which when it comes into my life has always wanted to be dominant…..but the fear of it was overwhelming sometimes.

How did you get through this?

Well let me think about this. I would read and do a lot of shamanic work. I always felt like it was a place I could go and feel solace. I don’t know….it gradually died away. And as I did that, Tom fell away, too. He was my….he awoke….he was my gatekeeper, I guess.

You know, this gatekeeper….this is not a monodimensional…

Yes…

But its this thing, I mean, who knows, but it might be more than just here and now, it could be many places and times. Sometimes when we step back and let our intuition flow sometimes we get this “Oh….why didn’t I understand that before?” I also see how so many relationships point to the nature of this, and it leaves me seeing patterns that exist in them. Do you feel the same way about this man and the experience?

No. I feel like I reached a different level of consciousness. It also had to do with my having cancer recently. That was in 2010, so this has been going on for a while. I think I didn’t know what I did, but I just kind of held on and it happened in a different kind of way.

I always felt calm when I was tapping into some kind of energy. When I do massage I know I always felt calm. I just felt like I could tap into something that makes me feel more at peace. But sometimes when I think about the shaking I feel like I can bring it back.

So with all of the “violence” of the stirring of kundalini do you feel like you are more at peace?

Yes. I don’t feel the fear like I did before. But sometimes I will wake up in the morning and will sometimes have this thing where I have this reaction…and there is this moment of bliss as I wake up but then feel like there is something yet to do and I will feel that sense that causes you to react, [quick draw in of breath] you know.

Occasionally, I will have this experience, recently I looked at a tree and I just saw it shimmering and I was….wow! Sometimes I find that when I go into the Witness, I feel this amazing sense of peace. I was ironing recently and as I did this, I could feel how I was a physical being having a spiritual experience. It was so perfect.

Once while I was with Tom, we were sitting by the water and as I sat there I could hear this voice behind me and it was a woman’s voice. It was Sheila’s voice! And she said, “You are done! You are done!” And I knew that it was time for this to end. I turned to see who it was, and there was no one there. And who knows, it could have been my own psyche doing that.

And maybe it doesn’t matter, whether it is you or her, I think the soul doesn’t care what face that is put on it. So yeah.

I think about how we got over the fear. Sometimes we would sit and pull the runes. Tom was able to work with this and sometimes he would just fall to the ground sometimes and go into convulsions. So during this time, having him in my life, helped a lot. We would share our experiences throughout it. I think that helped me move through it into something calmer. And I went to workshops and did readings. I had you, and Vicky.

Do you employ any practices like meditation or yoga?

[laughs] I am pretty bad at employing a practice. I find that I don’t like to do anything regularly. I am very spontaneous. I go here and there, where I feel drawn. Sometimes I call on my spirit guides, spirit animals, and they help me.

Do you find that you reach a state of deepened meditation anywhere, anyway….like at a grocery store or wherever you are?

Yes. I can often feel this pulsing of energy and I will see this blue light.

How has this impacted the work that you do, your creative work? Have these changed?

Well I wrote that book about my mother. I think that I am able to focus on that kind of thing better. But there was a time when I wanted to be well known, but now I am more interested in just making the work and finding the right world. My relationship to all of this is changing and I am going more inward. That’s what’s more important is my inner life. What I love is talking one on one with people. That is my true love in my life now.

I recently read the book Goddesses in Every Woman, and that is Aphrodite, and I never thought of myself as an Aphrodite. I always think of her as the young beauty on the shell. Actually Aphrodite is the one who likes to talk deeply about the deeper subjects…you know….she likes to sit and talk deeply with people. That is what I love. I love this.

What are your thoughts about these mass awakenings happening?

You said it best at the beginning of this, which is that it is the return of the Goddess. And I think she is returning right now to the earth. I know popular culture doesn’t see that but there are people like Sera Beak, have you read her book Red Hot and Holy?

No…

It’s wonderful. She is a young goddess lover. Went to visit Mariom Woodman and you know, she is a little too much for me. I am a little too old for all the sex toys and stuff but she’s bringing it back in its full vitality and richness. And I think there is a whole movement out there. She calls it the Red Volution, instead of the revolution. I like her because when she speaks, she doesn’t try to be on top of it the way men often do, she is just up there with her trembling voice saying, “This is me. This is me. I am a goddess, and so are you!” You’d like seeing her. She is very beautiful.

I think we don’t need to go back to matriarchy, either. Patriarchy is changing, too. I think we can go to the balance. It’s a mystery. It is a deep mystery. I have learned to trust the mystery and not try to control every little thing.

This energy that is kundalini. How did you relate to it? Did you feel like it had sentience?

Oh yeah!

Did it feel like it was a part of you or it was separate?

At first I thought it was separate, but later, I felt that it was me. When I felt the goddess, I knew it was me. But before that, I felt this thing that was like a devil in me that I wanted to just cast it out….but I think that is what is happening, it is the goddess touching you. But because the patriarchy was so long in power that it has to be the goddess coming back now to balance it. And with Tom he was such a powerful form of the masculine that I had to touch that to balance that, to bring balance to its opposite.

Thank-you, Diane.

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