by Dr. Alberto Villoldo: Following your journey to the Upper World, use your journal to engage in dialogue with your celestial parents and to learn the gifts of your winged power animal…
These journal exercises can be conducted in the same way as those you’ve done with your lost soul parts and your power animals from the Lower World. The purpose is to create an ongoing dialogue with these archetypal beings as they reveal their energies. Ask for their lessons and to hear their voice.
Start by creating sacred space, and draw a line down the center of a blank journal page. On one side, you’ll be asking questions of either your celestial parents or your winged power animal; on the other side, they’ll answer. Begin by asking simple questions, but allow enough time for a full dialogue to emerge before closing sacred space.
Repeat this exercise to learn as much as they’ll teach you. It’s preferable to dialogue with your celestial parents and your power animal in separate exercises so that the voices don’t crowd each other out. You want to be able to receive their wisdom without feeling that there’s more information than you can absorb.
Begin by holding this dialogue with your celestial parents. Ask them questions such as: “What did I come into this world to explore and experience?” “What lessons have I had to learn through suffering that I might have learned through love?” “What lessons do I still have to learn?” and “What gifts have I come to express?” When you’re done, repeat this exercise with your spirit animal.
Remember, in your dialogue with your celestial parents, that just because you may have embraced a new destiny, this doesn’t mean that you’ll necessarily understand all of its implications. Understanding follows healing—the mind gets things long after your heart and your body comprehend them. But even if you don’t grasp it just yet, your body will have a reference for it, and you’ll be able to find this destiny in your heart, and this will guide you to its fulfillment.
There will be a knowingness that comes from this journey: You’ll realize, consciously or not, that a high destiny has been installed in your future time line. All you have to do is walk toward it. You no longer have to go through all the mind-befuddling choices and alternatives and options, but you can be guided by a choice that you’ve retrieved in your soul. The most essential part of you will know and remember, and it will help you surrender to this new path.
Next week you will journey to the Fifth Tier of the Upper World to clear the energy from three former lifetimes, releasing you from past suffering that continues to inform you today. The Fifth Tier is where the Laika go to consult the lineage of medicine men and women who guide them to their destinies. Similarly, you’ll be guided beyond your genetics, ancestral, and personal histories, as well as childhood traumas and the cultures and beliefs with which you were raised; beyond your experiences from previous lifetimes to embody whom you’re becoming, both as an individual and as part of the species.
You’ll ask to see the lifetime in which you suffered the most, the one in which you had the greatest knowledge and power but used your gifts poorly, and the one in which you had great wisdom and used your gifts well. And as you look at these lifetimes, you’re going to drain the energy from each of these former lives—even the lifetime in which you used your gifts well, because even then you were no more developed spiritually than you are today.
You may wonder why you should visit only three of your former selves instead of them all. Well, you don’t need to. You see, by working in the Timeless Now, it’s enough to visit only these three and help them return back home to your celestial parents. When you do so, you’ll be set free of their karma, and the effect will domino backward, clearing all your former lifetimes.
In the Timeless Now, you have multiple simultaneous lifetimes that aren’t sequential—that is, who you were 2,000 years ago, and the bardo or purgatory you entered into after that death, is still being experienced by these former selves and subtly informing your life today. For the Laika and the physicist, time runs in a linear and nonlinear (or concurrent) fashion. We can also think of these former selves as memories or even genes (which is the way our ancestors “live” within us) that continue to inform us.
