The Call to Soul
Michelle realised at the age of 12 that any belief system that uses fear to manipulate the commitment of its followers had nothing to offer her. She recorded her first dream at the age of 14, and formally left the Church at the age of 16, when she realized that yes, perhaps she was seeking to arrive in Cape Town from Port Elizabeth via Johannesburg, but following an authentic path to Self- and God-realization is more important than the destination itself because, in the end, everyone bows to the Life, Love, Light, Power, Peace, Truth, and Beauty of the Divine, even Lucifer himself. Everyone reaches Home, and like the man who walked as the Christ, she knows that the house of God has many mansions. There is no man, woman, or child who will not find a place there.
Michelle's journey as a Truth Seeker led her into the hallowed halls of a wide variety of religions including Christianity, Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism, Greek Mythology, and Taoism as well as Native American Indian, African, and Celtic belief systems. Her intensely self-disciplined curiosity allowed her to formally explore a wide variety of meditation practices including transcendental meditation, breath work, visualization, chandelling, and hermetic contemplation as well as various knowledge bases (including psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and language), and various forms of energy work (Tai Chi, Reiki, and Metaphysical Healing).
Michelle's seeking led her to the profound knowledge that there is only one God and that each religion sees but one facet of the prism and religiously holds to that aspect of Truth. She also saw there are as many paths to God as there are people who have walked this earth, and that the Cycle of Life is not complete until the last person chooses God over his or her ego and the materialist ideologies that support the ego.
Michelle also realized that God has a sense of humour. Our greatest fear, our most intense angst, is associated with our material finiteness: the fact that the body dies. The Western lifestyle is funded on this fear. Death, from a Spirit-Soul point of view, however, is a false teaching. Only our bodies can die--Soul simply lets go of the Mind-Body dialectic and returns, permanently, or until one acquires another body, to the same realm in which it participates when dreaming. Every night when we allow ourselves to fall asleep, we temporarily suspend our bodies--every night, by design, we face our greatest fear: we temporarily die to the world. Dreaming, or the temporary suspension of the Time-Space dialectic, allows human beings to practice holding their centres; in dreaming we learn to stand as ourselves in Soul without dissolving in panic or losing consciousness.
In the course of her search, Michelle managed to complete two master's degrees and a Doctorate in the Philosophy of Psychology. Her dissertation used lesbians' dream series as a means for entering the hermeneutic circle for understanding how individuals construct and live forth their gender identities and potentials. Her doctoral took her beyond psychology and its practice; for while psychology literally means "the study of the psyche" or Soul, for the most part, conventional psychology, like much of Western culture, studies and honours the ego. Dreams, even in psychology, are used in the service of the ego rather than acknowledged as messages from the Higher Self or connection to God. Michelle's understanding suggested the rightful role of ego is service to Soul.
After completing her doctorate, Michelle set about righting the inversion within herself, and like the Hanged Man of the Tarot, her vision turned to the value of the Sprit-Soul dialectic and the realms that exist beyond what can be measured and observed. In taking this leap of faith, she also realized that one should choose one's Master carefully. In being initiated into the secrets of human being and how consciousness expands, she embraced the Christ and adopted Love as the First Principle. Her choice meant the sacrifice of ego in order to reclaim Self or her identity in Soul. Others might choose the grace of Buddha and laugh their way into the stream until their heads disappear beneath the water, for any path leads to Self- and God-realization if the initiate's heart is sincere. She also learned that nothing that belongs to Self can ever be lost: In the course of reclaiming her identity in Soul, she discovered that she had given up nothing except the prison and chains that bound her to a system that denies the existence of God.
Michelle has worked with her own and other's dreams for over 25 years and honours Soul's process by appreciating dreams and the realms from which dreams arise. She is consulted about dreams on an ongoing basis via e-mail, telephone, and workshops. She considers herself a wordsmith in service to the Divine, and her Soul purpose to be that of understanding and facilitating individual human beings' expansion of consciousness in all three dialectical aspects--Mind-Body, Spirit-Soul, and the dialectical relationship between the Mind-Body and Spirit-Soul axes. When not contemplating dreams, she grounds herself in her garden, walks her dogs and horse, plays and writes her own New Thought folk music, and teaches people to express themselves more elegantly in English.
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