
In a prior post, I mentioned that I was going to attend a conference entitled, The Channel Panel, in Sedona at the beginning of this year. It was filled with some of the more well-known luminaries in channeling including Darryl Anka (aka Bashar) and others whose transmissions have jogged insight within me. And ultimately that is the point for me, that any source material be able to contribute to the expansion of my awareness. How it is perceived within the current consensus mentality is irrelevant. Because in my fifty-plus years on this earth, I have seen that not only do most things take time to be digested, understood and accepted en masse, but that many valuable mental constructs (and their associated tangible corollaries) are initially dismissed, disregarded and maligned. Of course, we also see this when something is associated with more marginalized categories of identity, such that only now that some “reasonable men” are talking about aliens and other esoterica is it starting to be seen as warranting serious consideration.
In any case, I have been delaying in writing about the conference because the gist of my experience was… well, it mostly didn’t quite land with me. And that is okay. I am used to finding myself not really vibing within various encounters in this world. I’m sure some of you know what I mean, that whole “stranger in a strange land” feeling that is essentially my home base. I still believe in trying, experimenting and exploring. As the writing instructor Brenda Euland once wrote, “Consistency is the horror of the world.” So I give myself permission to dabble and dip my toe, with no regrets.
Though I did not entirely resonate with the energy of the gathering, I do not believe in denigrating what I do not connect with. Life isn’t personal like that. I wish that lesson seemed easier to access in our day-to-day lives, but our egos so often get in the way. Existence is a kaleidoscope, and I do not subscribe to the pointless “my way or the highway” mentality. I’ve been on this merry-go-round enough times now that when a feeling arises that something is more of a miss than a hit for me, I simply surmise that my consciousness was meant to focus elsewhere and then pivot accordingly.
Something similar happened when I attended the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) conference when it was held in Berkeley in 2012. Around that time, I had heard a distinct voice tell me to, “Change the channel,” as I was emerging from sleep one morning. My first thought had been literal: that it had to do with altering my media intake. Yet at the time, I hardly consumed anything outside of material related to grad school, being that I was preoccupied with academia and mental health practica. My next impulse was to examine sleep-related phenomena, since the message had come during a dreamy state. Hence, I had begun to attempt to induce lucidity in my own dreams as well as study dream-related books (this was how I eventually came across my first channeled material in Jane Roberts’ Seth works, as she had two books with “dream” in the titles). Yet it was at that dream conference that I realized I wasn’t actually interested in dreams per se. At least, not in the sense of wanting to operationalize or codify the mechanism of “waking up” within a dream or other facets of the phenomenon. Rather, I was interested in what dreams, lucidity and other non-ordinary states could convey about our deeper reality. It was a subtle distinction, but enough of a difference that I just felt off within the community of that conference. The Channel Panel felt similarly.
Back to Sedona, I want to share a bit about the adventure of getting myself situated at the conference, as it provided its own source of amusement and reinforcement of the peculiarities of my path. I had landed in Phoenix late the night before and headed to the car rental facility. Having booked an electric vehicle, I was told that I couldn’t take one out of city limits. Instead, they handed me the keys to a Dodge Charger. It was a gas guzzling beast but magnificent to drive for just those few days, its engine flexing with a decadent roar that made me understand the term muscle car on a whole new level. Not being used to handling such power in an internal combustion engine, I found myself embarrassedly screeching out of the rental car parking lot.
I had reserved a room at an economy motel on the outskirts of Phoenix so that I could get an early morning start on the two-plus-hour trek to Sedona. I had heard it was a beautiful drive, and didn’t want to miss the scenery doing it in the dark. As I pulled off the freeway, I saw that my chosen accommodations were surrounded by a prison-like black metal fence. Outside the lobby, an obviously intoxicated sex worker and her male companion loitered, awaiting entry into the motel reception area. Damn, I forgot to check reviews for this place and obviously erred on the side of too cheap, I thought to myself as I pounded on the bank glass of a transaction window to see if there was anyone inside. Displayed on the glass was a rather large sign (think 24”x18”) depicting a handgun with the red circle and strike through it to indicate that no firearms were allowed. Indeed, this sign had the opposite effect of mollifying me.
When the motel employee arrived to check me in, I asked him, “Is it safe for me to be here?” He insisted it was. Seemingly to emphasize the point, he told me, “If anyone tries anything, I’ll kill them.” Oh my! I then noticed that he was a rather imposing man himself. We made small talk, and he asked me what I did. I told him that I was a therapist. “I could use some therapy,” he said as he processed my reservation. I muttered that my license didn’t work in the state. “That’s what my lawyer in New York told me too,” he said.
The room was the worst I’ve ever had in a developed country, with a mini-fridge whose door wouldn’t shut and everything from the furniture to the curtains and carpet stained and disintegrating. I tried to lie down, but couldn’t sleep as I was preoccupied by the thought of bedbugs and roaches. I lay in the dark looking at my phone, then started to feel itchy. Lack of sleep was starting to get to me too, such that I couldn’t tell if my skin irritation was psychosomatic or an actual issue. It didn’t help that other motel-goers periodically shouted and stomped along the walkway outside the room (over and above the deadbolt, I had pushed a chest of drawers against the door for extra security).
Nerve-wracked and sleepless, after a few hours of tossing and turning I decided that perhaps there really was some kind of infestation on the bed. In the dark, I patted at the undersheet. It flickered with static electricity. I smacked it again and it lit up—in the same pattern! My groggy head tried to make sense of it. Was it like those crime scene lights showing invisible biohazard? Was there such thing as bioluminescent bedbugs? My mind felt wild, playing tricks. The thud of a headache came on as my tired body warred with hypervigilance. That’s it, I can’t take this. I jumped out of bed, flicked on the light switch and decided I needed to see what the mattress looked like. As I pulled the corner of the fitted sheet off, I saw a large hole in the side of the mattress edged in a disturbing rusty brown. Like, big enough for a rat to crawl out of. Nope! It was 4:30 in the morning and I hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep. But it was time to call it. As I left, the motel worker showed up again and asked if everything was good. “Yup, just time to go. Thanks,” I said as I high-tailed it out of there.
I drove in the dark, bolstered by coffee and no longer caring about the missed scenery. My borrowed beast gamely revved up the altitude-ascending roads, mind and body locked into a steely focus to get to my destination in one piece. At last, in a trance of what felt like endless driving, I pulled into Sedona. Blasted from the relentless, dissociated push through a blackened, winding desert road, I yearned to decompress from that singular, zombie-like fixation to just get there. Like attracts like, and my surreal, coffee-fueled all-nighter inflamed a junk food craving within me. I stopped at the local McDonald’s, a tourist spot in and of itself because it purportedly is the only franchise allowed to have a non-yellow “M” in its Golden Arches (Sedona having decided that teal blue is more harmonious with the landscape). Inside, a gray-haired woman in Southwestern garb had me memorize her website (sprucetree.net), which she said was about how the moon was influencing the earth’s energies. “These men, they’re still playing at the same game. Trying to divide up the whole world between just a few of them,” she said, shaking her head. Yup, I felt like I had arrived in Sedona, famous for its vortex of ley lines and New Age denizens. I asked her for a good hiking trail nearby and she pointed me down the road.

By the time I got to the trail, the sun was starting to rise. A smattering of other folks had their cameras out, taking in the breathtaking 360-degree view of red rock mountains as a gleaming pink-orange sunrise burst through the horizon. Further along the trail, I watched a handful of hot air balloons in the distance, their burners glowing against the twilight-turning-to-dawn sky. I breathed in the chilly crisp air and at last felt myself downshift into greater easefulness.
Later that day at the conference, I sat near an older woman who turned around and chatted with me after the first speaker. It turned out that she was trans and from Texas, a drug addiction counselor and military veteran. Go figure, I had instantly bonded with a fellow player on the fluid fringes of identity, mental health, substance use and martial discipline. It felt completely natural to share with her that I had formerly been a professional dominatrix. She laughed and said that in her former life as a drug-addicted man, she had visited many dommes. She and I would spend the whole conference hanging out together, two errant peas within a more homogenous New Age pod.
I did find myself trancing out during some speakers’ channeling sessions. Even as their words seemed lacking in any new information, when I closed my eyes my body would twitch as my mind drifted into a dream-like state. Visceral associations, strings of words and experiential tangents flowed along the peripheries of my conscious awareness. Yet somehow, the outward theme of alien “disclosure” felt more in the way of any wisdom that I hoped to glean—it felt too literal, too outwardly focused for my taste. And the idolatrous tone of many of those asking questions after each sessions jarred me as well. No more religion, please. At the same time, I found a sense of liberation in how openly weird and far out the topics and mannerisms of many of the speakers were as they channeled. To be in an entire auditorium where suspension of disbelief was a welcomed norm felt refreshing, exhilarating and like one less impediment to having all of us who were present open our own channels into further multidimensionality. Part of me wondered why, yet again, I did not entirely feel at home. But another part of me understood that this is my role: to straddle worlds and be a bridge, rather than subsume myself completely within any one perspective.
I made sure to play hooky for chunks of time each day to get out and hike around all that powerful natural beauty. Not surprisingly, I found that the most impactful places I visited were off the beaten track, away from the bustle of picture-taking crowds. In the silence and solitude, I began to understand just how special Sedona was.
Mind you, I have always been of the belief that my adopted hometown of San Francisco has very powerful energies as well. Hiking up to the Corona Heights slickenside or the top of Bernal Hill, seeing how you are surrounded by water, hills, greenery and historic architecture—I have no doubt that the geography plays a part in the fountainhead of manifestation across so many realms from creativity to social movements to innovation and more. To me, there is no contradiction in all these things…