It could be the feeling of being an outsider, an observer.

At home I’m not aware of being an observer because I’m in my personal domain, my “private” habitat, busy taking care of my life, being focused on my work, my relationships, and so actively engaged in my surroundings that I rarely question them.

It’s different when I’m outside. Outside, walking along the familiar streets of my neighborhood, I don’t have to think about where I’m going or how I’m going to get there because I am in well-known territory. If I’m relaxed, not in any hurry and nothing is troubling me, I allow my mind to wander.

And wander, it does. It wanders to pretty much the same place of late. The place in the back of my head on the inside.

This might be because the film The Matrix, which I’ve seen many times, is so ingrained in my consciousness. But lately, the reason I am more aware of being plugged-in / not plugged-in – is because of the you tube video I watched not long ago called, The Holographic Universe. The video, in five parts, explains with great visuals, how it is that this world we live in is really an illusion. Here is a quote:

The external world is inside our brain. Everything we see touch hear and smell as matter in the world or the universe, is only the brain’s interpretation of electrical signals.

This knowledge has been floating around to the general public for decades. I was hearing about the unreality of our world back in the Sixties when we were experimenting with hallucinogens like LSD. In the Eighties in my consciousness-raising group, we accused one another of being “plugged-in” or “attached,” and reminded each other to “let go.” Also in the 1980s I began reading books on quantum mechanics written for non-scientists, and became familiar with terms like “parallel universes.” But for me it was pretty much theoretical, and not something I could apply to my daily life. LSD wasn’t theoretical, but it was too scary after I was told it might change my chromosomes. Then I read the book about the holographic universe by Michael Talbot, and went downtown to the Museum of Holography in Soho, which sadly has closed. Still, pretty much all theory, though fun to speculate on.

So, what has changed? Well for starters, it’s 2012, and the energy has changed, the frequencies have increased, the higher vibrations are more “available,” shall we say. And I see how my ease with visualization, the techniques I’ve been developing since childhood, and a life-long devotion to all art-forms, has enabled me to quickly make the leaps in perception which are so vital in helping me to comprehend where I am and what I am. And how it’s all in my head.

It’s still theoretical, but now I am visualizing it for myself. I’m aware of watching a screen inside my own head. My own personal movie, aka reality. Which is only real insofar as I believe that it is.

I remind myself of this as I mosey along the streets of my neighborhood. I picture the little box in the back of the inside of my head like I saw in the video. This head of mine that is completely dark inside with no light whatsoever filtering in. And yet it is this very head, this dark solid squishy mass of matter nestled inside my skull that I call my brain, which offers me incredibly glorious visions! Also the grievous suffering of so many souls.

But what I think about when I’m walking along, what I remind myself over and over to please remember, is that I am walking in a “made-up” world. And that my real self, my true self, or my soul, resides on another plane. Taking it all in. And guiding me, for as much of the time as I am “unattached” here, and willing to listen.

~

Reblogged from The Alchemy of Memoir:

I’ve moved on. Really.

Really? Where did that expression, “I’ve moved on,” come from anyway? I seem to remember it from Seinfeld. Seinfeld was a comedy. That should tell you something right there.

Seriously though, where are we moving to when we move on? Our next best thing I suppose.

Well, I don’t mean for this to be a downer, and it isn’t, in my opinion, but I don’t believe we can move past things.

Read more… 670 more words

Taking another look at the difference between moving on, and moving through.

But how can that be, you ask. It’s your story! It’s what you lived – it’s a memoir!

Sure, I lived it. I even took notes. I can tell you what happened when. And sometimes I can tell you the whys. But that’s not the same as knowing what the story is. What it means on the inside.

Oh, I knew it was about how I got into art and why it became my life’s passion. I saw how it changed me, and how it changed the way I saw the world and saw myself. And I knew that it led me to a particular mind-bending, mind-altering awakening that took years to fully understand.

But what actually happened???

Well, I told myself to keep writing. Just keep going with it and see what came out. Because I knew that Surrender happened, in larger and larger ways. This surrender was the opposite of giving up. The kind I’m talking about brought me deeper inside. It was more like allowing myself to be guided by an inner voice that took me beyond the ego. It was like I had to find myself first—through painting—and then I had to let go of that dearly won Self—in order to find my Soul.

That’s sort of it in a nutshell. But it was the story behind the story that I needed to understand and find a way to communicate.

I knew the process had to do with ascension. I spent a number of years writing blogs and doing a radio show called Art and Ascension. I think I was hoping I would come to a deeper understanding of what the two had to do with each other. Art was my life when I transcended my life, (if that makes sense) so naturally I thought that art had done it for me. But now that I’m writing the story, I see that art was just the particular medium that I was working with in those days.

What I am seeing now, is that the bridge I had to cross, the gap I had to leap across, was none other than my very own neck. Those five inches or so between my head and my torso—or my head and the place where my heart was located. What was in the way was the passage through my neck.

Or shall we say, the fifth chakra. The throat. The Voice.

As long as I was drawing or painting I could bypass the throat, bypass speaking, because visual art is a silent medium. It all happens inside.

I’ve told the story of why I was mute in my

first memoir. Now I’m writing about what had to happen in order to find that connection between heart and mind. A connection that led to bridging the gap between body and soul.

It’s interesting how every day brings us new stories as well as the continuation of the ones we are already familiar with. But there is always only the one story that matters, the one that stands out, the one that we came here to live. For me it started with bridging the gap between heart and mind.

Tuesday, March 27, 2012 BRIDGING WORLDS WITH POETRY

LINK to SHOW - 

oil on canvas by Nancy Wait 2008

When I went through a crisis back in the 70s, I surrendered and had a breakthrough that led to a spiritual awakening, that led to a doorway, that led to the inner world, that led to a voyage of discovery through writing and painting in order to know this inner world through the portal that was now open, that I was led to when I surrendered and had a breakthrough…

And ever since that vision of the doorway, I sought to cross the threshold so beautifully laid out before my eyes. And cross it I did.

I crossed it through my willingness to keep on going, to keep writing and painting my innermost feelings, bringing them to the surface and acknowledging them. I crossed it with my willingness to keep loving, no matter what. And letting go of results.

It sounds so simple. We’ve all heard it countless times. But I don’t think we know what it truly means until we actually do it ourselves.

As with everything else, there are levels of surrender. And practice makes perfect. But the greatest surrender has to be that willingness to just let go. Allowing something else to take over. The Higher Self. The Soul. And saying good-bye to all that we knew, all that we thought of as our “life.” It’s the only way to really have that life – by letting go of the need for it.

It is what living in the Now moment really means.

Channeler Gillain MacBeth-Louthan has this to say about the Doorway, the Trans-portal, in her current Newsletter at Quantum Awakening: http://www.thequantumawakening.com/current%20QUANTUM%20newsletter.htm

You stand at the sacred portal.  Upon this portal is placed a mirror. The key that unlocks the portal is your own reflection.  The key to unlock the reflection is self-love. In your mind’s eye, see this Trans-portal doorway and the mirrored effect of it.  As you look deep into your own reflection, how do you feel?  Is there joy that stands in front of you?  Is there remorse?  Is there distaste?  Is there love?

It is imperative that you do everything that you can to place yourself in a garment of self love, for it is the raft that will take you to a safe harbor. It is a solitary paddling that you embark upon in the misty morning horizon. As with Alice and the Looking Glass, do not be afraid of new dimensions of self and soul as you fall down the inter-dimensional rabbit hole. Look into the mirror that is void of reflection and see all the possibilities. 

 The next phase of momentum takes the form of a Fibonacci spiral moving toward the center nautilus of you.  At that point of inner centeredness you will create a bend in your future light.  At that position of bending, you will be offered an opportunity that comes only when you have initialized the codes of self-love.  Then and only then will you be allowed entrance into the center of the heart of light.  

Within you is a time safe trigger that is waiting on particular dates and number conjunctions to activate.  The doorway is you.  The entrance code is the energetic signature of your love for you. It is not a handprint.  It is not an eye-scan.  It is a heart-print that allows you entrance.  Not the imprint of your love for your neighbor, or your father-in-law, or a parent, but your love for you.  This is how you gain entrance into this doorway of time unseen.

Each of you has called upon a ‘Light’ that will give to you what you seek.  Until you come fully into all of your heart pieces, there will be no peace. You are diversified filaments of holy Light.  You are emancipated octaves of Creation that has expressed itself in all ways. There are no Karmic contracts unless you decide it is so. 

Everyone that you meet has the potential to be in your heart if you decide it is so.  Open up this doorway as you enter the subterranean chambers of the Ancient You.  The portals separate those who will and those who will not.  They separate those who choose to move forward and those who choose to be in stasis.  This choosing is not something decreed by the finger of God, it is something decreed by each individual.  Stop waiting on your lives.  They are here now.

]]> http://nancywait.com/2012/03/16/the-doorway-is-you/feed/ 0 nwait Door Underwater http://nancywait.com/2012/03/13/bridge-of-enchantment/ http://nancywait.com/2012/03/13/bridge-of-enchantment/#comments Tue, 13 Mar 2012 15:40:17 +0000 Nancy Wait http://nancywait.com/?p=418 Continue reading →]]> The Bridge of Enchantment is Love.

Love is a bridge.

Love the bridge.

Love bridges everything.

Love is the bridge to enchantment.

Tuesday ~ March 13, 2012 on Blog Talk Radio ~ with The Nancy Who Drew ~ LINK to Show 5pm EST

The Sound That Gave Me The Colors

A voice is a bridge

is a resonance, is a bridge

is a sound, a vibration

is a bridge

to the inner being of You.

 A bridge to somewhere else

I know not where

though I crossed

with such willingness

I crossed the bridge of You.

That led to more of me

this voice I followed that rang

is sound that led me to You

and gave me the colors to see

 more clearly.

H with Hollyhocks

Continuing with our theme of Bridging Worlds with Creative Imagination, we look at the letter H as the perfect representative of BW with CI. Holistic is from the Greek holos or whole, in reference to the theory that regards nature as consisting of wholes.

I like to look at the H as two vertical lines with a horizontal in between. As in, you, me, and what flows between. What flows between is the bridge of Heart. This is the bridge to Heaven. The bridge Home. Welcome to our first hour-long+ show on March 6, 2012.

LINK to Show

The Angel Bridge - This is a must-see, beautiful video poem by Trinity Bourne of Openhand.

The word ‘holistic’ was only coined as recently as 1926. The modern version of holistic medicine has only been around since 1960. This show only concerns “holistic” in terms of left-brain – right-brain consciousness. (No small matter!)

Participating in A Month of Letters challenge, has brought back not only my love of letter-writing, but my love of actual alphabet letters. All the different shapes and sizes and ways to write them. And meanings to ascribe to them – on purely visual terms.  Holistic, indeed.

One way to bridge worlds is by not only seeing ‘things’ – but the patterns they make, the designs, in space. This is a form of detachment from objects as only ‘objects.’ You might see a suitcase – but I see a rectangle too. Of course you know it’s a rectangle, but you only see a suitcase. A thing is not only what it is, it’s what we see that it is.

When my son was little I fed him shapes. You may have seen a Ritz cracker with a piece of cheese on top, but I told him it was a circle with a square. He loved tofu, so I cut it into triangles. I said, “Would you like to eat a triangle now?” And he said, “Yes!” We had fun.

Bridging worlds is fun too. I like to think of it as bringing a bit of enchantment into everyday life. (But of course it’s much more than that too…)

Pegasus (watercolor 11x14) by NW

Continuing “Bridging Worlds” on Blog Talk Radio (Feb. 21, 2012) LINK to Show Feb. 28, 2012)

In the physical world of 3D if we want to get to another place we can jump. We can stretch. We can ride an elevator, take the lift, climb atop an animal or step into a vehicle, boat, plane, or even a rocket ship.

But what do we do when we want to go to an invisible, unseen place?

Well, we can go to sleep, have a dream, but we will remember it as a dream then, and it won’t seem quite real. It won’t have happened in our waking state. We can also simply close our eyes and have a vision. Visions are wonderful, especially when we can bring them through into our reality.

Others take a pill, a drug that will transport them to another world, and that’s certainly an option. But drugs are an artificial inducement, and no matter what the insight they provide, the source hasn’t come from our own being, or our own being-ness in the world. It is not something we have earned through our own efforts. And that does make a difference.

It starts with dreams. Dreams are our first gateway to the inner realms. I’m not an expert, but I know there are cultures who value dreams much more than we ever have—ancient cultures, and indigenous peoples have known how to use dreams to enhance and expand their waking life. It is a type of experience that can seem very odd and foreign to technologically advanced, right-brain societies.

Dreams can often be frightening, especially to children. I remember a dream I had at the age of two, and another one at the age of eight, that had such a profound effect on me that I’ve not only remembered them, but I’ve managed to incorporate them into my life-story, the memoir I call The Nancy Who Drew. I believe these dreams were messages from my soul, instructing me on who I really was, or who I was above and beyond this particular life in this particular body. And I believe that part of my mission in this life has been to connect the dreams to my experience here, and further connect them to an intuitive knowledge I came in with, was born with.

Creating from the imagination, whether it’s writing stories or painting pictures, is very much like entering the Dream World. When I was little I used to tell stories to my younger sister and brother at night when the lights were off. I made them up as I went along, and never wrote them down. But when I was thirteen I decided to write something down. I story I hadn’t told anyone yet. I didn’t get very far. I think one of the reasons was because my father was a writer and I felt intimidated by his vast intellectual knowledge, never feeling I would ever be able to catch up or know as much as he did, or write as well as he could. But the other reason was the story itself. I could only go up to a certain point of the action, and then I had to stop because I didn’t have a clue as to what came next.

This is how it began. There was a boy and a girl taking a walk down a path. The boy was named Andy, the girl was Andrea. They came to a house. They went up to the house and stood at the door. Now here is where the problem began. Should they knock? If they knocked, would anyone answer? What would happen then? And if no one answered, would they try the door knob and see if it was open? What if it was, what then? Or maybe it was locked. Would they leave then? I didn’t know where to take the story, where to take Andy and Andrea. So they stood there, paralyzed on the threshold, and that’s where I left them.

Door Under Water, oil on canvas by NW 2009

I’ve always felt bad about that story. It seemed to mark a creative failure in my young life. A lack of imagination. The door carried great significance in my dream-life, and would soon become very significant in my waking life. And maybe some part of me knew that. And that was why I was frozen. Frozen at the sight of the door. Frozen at what to do with the door, whether to open it or not. Should they go in or shouldn’t they?

To hear more, tune into Blog Talk Radio: LINK to Show, Feb. 28, 2012

Twenty-five years ago I had a vision of a bridge in consciousness. I had taken the leap across, and now I was back. An inner voice prompted me to build the bridge, so that others might see it and make the crossing.

I knew I possessed the tools to build this bridge. I was a full-time artist, living in a studio filled with colorful paintings. Many of them were quite large. I’d had to learn to build stretchers. So the first thing I thought of then was my hammer. It had been given to me by a friend when I’d inadvertently left mine at a gallery when I was hanging pictures. This new hammer was old and beat up, but bigger and heavier than my original one. When I thought of this hammer in connection with the bridge, I was also thinking of the song, If I Had A Hammer. I knew the song well. It was a protest song, a freedom song. It begins with the hammer, and then it goes on to if I had a bell and then a song. But it starts with a hammer. The hammer for smashing things and breaking them apart, or nailing them together.

As a painter, I had done more than my share of putting things together. Aside from stretchers, four pieces of wood with slats at the ends that fitted into one another, making a frame for the canvas to then be stretched upon with special pliers that gripped the cotton or linen so it could be stapled to the wood, I had put colors together. Forms and shapes together. I had cut and ripped things apart to make new things – always images in my case – by sewing or gluing.

But this hammer,  this hammer was a tool for a builder. A carpenter. A creator and destroyer. When I thought of how I was going to build that bridge, I didn’t think of a brush, holding a brush in my hand. Or one of my palette knives. I thought of the hammer, perhaps to hammer the message home. Home. That’s where the bridge was leading to. It was leading me home.

Home was nothing less than Heaven, of course. It was a place far away—or at least it had seemed far away until that day in 1987 when I had reached a crescendo. Now I felt I was sort of there. Here, but not here totally. I was between worlds, actually. Between dimensions. And now this inner voice was telling me to construct the path. Build the bridge across, not only in order for it to become more solid and more real so that I would be able make the crossing at will, but so that others could see it. So that I could say, here—here is the bridge. Let’s go!

But first I had to build it. And this did not mean make pictures of it. Though Art is certainly a bridge to realms in the non-physical world, making pictures was all I had been doing for a decade. This time I had tried to write about the pictures. From time to time I would sit at my typewriter and compose poems or prose poems, explaining what the paintings meant. But they always came out very abstract. I didn’t think much of my writing skills. And yet this inner voice, before it told me to build a bridge, it told me to write how I got to this place. It said I had painted enough, and now I had to write how I got here. To this heavenly place, which was still my studio, still New York City, exactly as it had been the day before, and the day before that, and yet now it was different. Now it was alive. The air was pulsing with energy. I was pulsing with energy.

Yet at the time I was very confused. Imagine, you are going about your life as you always have, and suddenly things change. It begins with feeling more alert, more sensitive. You find yourself reading meanings into what people say. Everything you hear seems to have a special meaning that pertains to you. Words have become symbolic. Even the letters of the words are now symbolic of something else. You find you don’t know what anything means anymore because it all seems new to you. You begin looking words up in the dictionary, even the most simple words, because you don’t know what anything means anymore. The dictionary helps, because now you are breaking things down, taking words apart, and you feel you are getting closer to the crux of the matter. But how can you, because you don’t even know what the crux of the matter is at this point. All I can say is that I had suddenly stepped out and away from where I had been, and I didn’t know where this new place was.

I had a couple of large houseplants in pots on the floor, and the pots were in baskets, one wicker, one cane. When I was thinking about how to make the bridge, aside from looking at my hammer, I was also looking at the green plants. They had both been given to me as gifts. One had been a cutting from a larger plant that I had nourished lovingly, and the other had been delivered to my door, robust and healthy, fresh from the florist. They both had big, waxy leaves. The leaves on the cutting had solid, unbroken edges. It was a sturdy plant. It was this one my attention was now focused upon, because it had come from a woman in the office I had worked at some years before. The boss was a man named Greenspan. Greenspan. The color green, and the word span, as in a bridge. A green bridge, that was what I was thinking. Something green, spanning the gorge or the gap.

I was fixated on the color green, on plants, and on spanning, or bridging the gap home.

The gap appeared to me as a break at the horizon, a tiny, almost invisible crevice—or visible only to one who was aware of it in the first place—between earth and sky, or sea and sky. A crack in the normal appearance of things. I knew it was there. I had been there already, sort of. It gave me an inkling that all was not as it seemed. And another world lay just beyond this one.

            The people who have been there in the place in themselves where words, patterns, order, dissolve, will know what I mean and the others won’t. But once having been there, there’s a terrible irony, a terrible shrug of the shoulders, and it is not a question of fighting it, or disowning it, or of right or worn, but simply knowing it is there, always. It’s a question of bowing to it, so to speak, with a kind of courtesy, as to an ancient enemy: Alright, I know you are there, but we have to preserve the forms, don’t we. And perhaps the condition of your existing at all is precisely that we preserve the forms, create the patterns…”  Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

LINK to Blog Talk Radio Feb. 14, 2012

On Saturday, the day that she died, I was feeling sad all day. The weather outside was cold and the sky was a gloomy gray that cast a mournful spell over everything. I felt groggy, as if I couldn’t quite wake up. It wasn’t until that night that I heard the news of Whitney’s death. But then my mood made sense to me. Because we have the ability to be as tuned in as we want to be, to anything that is happening on the planet (or off – if that’s the case), and I think I may have tuned into the mournful cries of the angels out in the city of Los Angeles.

And yes, as someone mentioned on Twitter, Whitney Houston and quite a few Syrians died on Saturday. This is not to diminish anyone’s death, but Whitney was an icon of the music industry and her voice and what she did with her life affected millions of people.

I felt very sad about what I presume will be called an accidental overdose. But as I began watching some of her videos, the older ones as well as the newer ones, I realized what happened. Or what didn’t happen, I should say. Because she never got beyond her personality. She didn’t make it to soul consciousness. And then I listened to her song, “Where Do Broken Hearts Go,” and I knew it was going to be the right thing to address on my show Tuesday. Where in fact do broken hearts go?

My show is called The Nancy Who Drew, which is the title of my memoir, and the theme is Sacred Betrayal. My motto is, Betrayal is Sacred when the Heart can encompass the Whole. And I mean that. I mean that with all my heart. It’s a deep topic, a complex subject. It’s the kind of consciousness that doesn’t happen overnight. How could it? The heart has to encompass the whole. Which to me means the smaller self has to let go in order to discover the Higher Self. The Higher Self, or the Soul, the part of us that knows everything. That knows why we chose a certain kind of life. Why we chose the particulars of what happened.

We have to see ourselves as powerful beings. We need to develop a healthy ego. That too, is part of our journey. As Whitney sings the lyrics, I will never walk in anyone’s shadow. That was obviously important to her. Part of her knowing the I AM. But she sings about her personality surviving, dealing with setbacks. Sure, the body survived. And the psyche survived, intact in some ways, not so much in others. But unless the higher light is allowed to filter in with all its Grace and Power, and unless the Personality surrenders to a greater force, God, or a Supreme Being, or Source Energy – or whatever you choose to call it – there can be no healing. No getting over it or putting it behind you, because these falls, these betrayals, this pain that seems unbearable, happens for a reason. We have called it to us. As Khalil Gibran so beautifully puts it in The Prophet:

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for you pruning. Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun, So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

We have called it to us.

It was last week when I decided to call my show The Rose in the Fire. I was looking for material about dealing with the pain of love. I knew my show would be on Valentine’s Day, and since my subject matter is not the usual kind of happy love we like to think of on that day, I went to Marion Woodman’s book, Dancing in the Flames. “The Rose in the Fire” is the title of one of her chapters.

Whitney Houston was a rose in the fire, and she allowed it to consume her. Her beauty and her voice will remain with us always.

Song to Jung (detail) by Nancy Wait

Mental hospitals, prisons, and the graves of suicides, are filled with the betrayed. With those who got left out somehow. Those who were born into the light and found only darkness. Or found too little light to keep them going. Or didn’t have the tools to spark the flame of their own inner light.

For those of us outside of institutions who are dependent upon psycho-pharmacology, we are just as imprisoned.

I believe it all starts with the feeling of having been betrayed somehow. Maybe it’s by your parents. Or maybe it’s by the bank, or the government, or the system itself. Or your lover, your spouse, your child. The weather. TV. The media.

Whatever it is, it’s not the way you thought it would be. It’s not the way you expected it to be. You feel led up the garden path, as they say. Duped. Betrayed.

This is your wound. This is where it hurts. But there is another way. There is seeing the wound as a gateway. An opening. An opening into more Light. More understanding.

The other way is a path into hopeless or revenge. Into anger or destruction. Into more darkness.

My book, The Nancy Who Drew, The Memoir That Solved A Mystery, is the story of how I turned around my own experience of betrayal. It is the story of finding the sacred in the betrayal.

Through opening up my heart, and never losing hope, not completely.

Today I am beginning a new show on Blog Talk Radio on the theme of Sacred Betrayal, and finding the Blessing in the Wound. LINK TO SHOW

I cannot think of any more important topic than healing our wounds and letting go of everything that has held us back in any way, from being the true Divine selves that we are.

I begin, and will carry on with my theme of Sacred Betrayal, finding the Blessing in the Wound. We can go to all the healers we want, but in the end, we have to be willing to heal ourselves.

“What people actually need is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of them.What they need is not the discharge of tension at any cost,but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by them.” Victor Frankl

Welcome to The Nancy Who Drew pictures. Pictures that pointed the way to her soul story.