I remember clearly the time when I started to receive messages. They came in beautifully succinct phrases, sometimes single words, with a clarity so sure that I was honestly a bit startled.

It was about 14 years ago, and a couple of years after my reiki training, while still in my corporate job. I had started giving reiki healings in the evenings and weekends in my newly created home-based therapy space. I was following the training I had received and duly transmitted the energy using mostly a ‘hands off’ approach, as this way I could feel the energy more strongly. Without fail, every time with every client, periodically during the healing, a message would come through. At first, I did not share these messages, fearful that they were tantamount to ‘advice’ or even worse ‘diagnostic’. But as I tuned into this, and my own inner guidance, and as my confidence grew, I started sharing them as ‘intuitive guidance’. And guess what? The guidance was always not only gratefully received but made perfect sense to the client in terms of what was currently going on for them in their lives.

It has become clear in several initiations to me over the past 4 years that my 1:1 work is at root about facilitating a meeting of Higher Selves. And that these messages are the voice of the ‘Higher Self’.

So what is the Higher Self, and is it the same as soul, spirit, the real self, or even God/Goddess?

I am not totally comfortable with the term Higher Self, with its connotation that there is also a  ‘lower’ maybe inferior self.

My work is to be a bridge. On one side of the bridge is the world of the ego with its attachments to the past and old narratives. On the other side of the bridge is the letting go, the merging with nature, the divine, energy, pure being (to me all the same). It is ON the bridge that we meet, to explore the world which exists beyond the ‘small’ self or ‘person’ that many believe they are and have become identified with. This is the world of the transpersonal, the moment, the imaginal, the space beyond space and time. This is what some call the ‘Higher Self’. It has also been called the Deep Self (Starhawk), the Noos (Victor Frankl) and the Soul (James Hillman).It is a potent space of transformation. It precedes and prepares us for spiritual metamorphosis. It is the realm of everything that I love and love to play with – creativity, imagination, intuition, vision, unconditional love, the Muse, the archetypes, humour and the witnessing self accessed in meditation.

I prefer the term Deep Self after Starhawk, acknowledging as it does that connection with and honouring of the primacy of the body as the precious vehicle for our unfolding. It is indeed also what the ancients revered as what we now call ‘Goddess’, that sense of transcendence felt in direct contact with the earth, the oceans, the cycles and the elements.

How can this help us now?

We been hearing talk about Sovereignty (not without good reason!) and the Imaginal Soup out of which we will emerge post-old reality. What we are sensing, desiring, is nothing short of rebirth. We are beginning to remember and yearn for sanctuary, unity and and end to all dualisms. That sense of utter knowing that we had when we were one with the mother, that pre-verbal jouissance of being when we planted, harvested, created.

The bridge to this is to listen to, and hear loud and clear, the messages of our Deep Self – which will lead us to spaciousness, simplicity and stillness.