The minute you open the door, the heat antagonizes you.  It picks on you like a mean older sibling that throws you to the floor and sits on top of you motionless while you writhe around underneath it.  The heat is so heavy it is crushing.  It literally preys on your energy.  

I have come here in response to the invitation to attend the Illuminate Film Festival.  The documentary by the Italian director Paola Marino (which was made about my life) made its first appearance in the world as a ‘work in progress’ here at the festival.  It was greeted by two completely sold out audiences.  I had not seen any of the footage before sitting in front of it myself in the first showing.  It was much more intense than I had anticipated.  It is very different to live my life in my skin and to see my life from the outside.  Watching this film allowed me to see myself and my life as if I were on the outside looking in.  The film creates such a mix of emotions; from despair to shock to awe to total inspiration.  Seeing this version made me very excited for the official full version, which is being submitted to film festivals around the world this fall. 

After each showing, Paola, Blake and I got up with Sheron Foster (the lead programmer for the film festival), to answer questions the audience had about the film.  After the Q and A, working with the raw emotional state that the film leaves you in, I offered a 50 minute long supplementary healing experience for the audience.  It was an awesome idea proposed by the festival organizers called “reel healing”.  That is just one example of the awesome things that happen at this film festival, which I have fallen in love with.  The Illuminate Film Festival is amazing.  It is a film festival for awakening and transformation.  It is a film festival for conscious media.  They select the best of the films and documentaries that feed body, mind and soul.  The film festival creates its own kind of vortex drawing forth the most amazing people, information, projects and products.  It feels a bit like an atom bomb of progression.  I am so looking forward to coming to it again.

Sedona, like the film festival that calls it home, is intense.  There is no in-between to Sedona.  Sedona either claims you so you can’t leave or tries to spit you out, making your stay here super uncomfortable.  Synchronicity is amplified here; both positive synchronicity and negative synchronicity.  Sedona isn’t just home to several vortexes.  It literally is a vortex.  It is a vortex in the middle of a barren Arizona desert, cradled by mystical red rock monuments.  It is full to the brim with people whose life experience had made it so they simply could not make it work in the mainstream world.  The concentration of them has made Sedona an alternate new age reality.  People here are awake.  They are engaged in all kinds of methods of escaping, but they are awake.  Awake people are always more intense than those who are asleep.  I feel welcomed here.  I have yet to make an outing into town where I am not recognized by the majority of the people instead of the minority.  And what has struck me is that when they come up to say hi, they reveal to me that their interest in my material is not recent.  I have not met one person walking around the city who has been watching me for less than three years.  I do not belong in Sedona myself.  It is not my ‘home’.  But I feel welcome and wanted here. 

The dominant negative vibration in Sedona is: Shirking.  To shirk is to avoid or neglect something that one considers to be a duty or responsibility.  And Sedona is absolutely teeming with people for whom moving here is a part of avoiding a sense of responsibility and duty.  Sedona is like the unofficial new age/modern hippie capital of the world.  Obviously, there are so many things I love about the new age community.  It is the community I resonate with the very most.  But like everything, there are shadows inherent in the new age community as well.  One of those shadows is shirking.  In general new age people want freedom of spirit and free agency more than anything else.  They tend to be hypersensitive to anything that feels like a restriction such as a perceived burden or commitment.  Their spiritual beliefs have become a way to justify avoiding anything that makes them feel restricted, whether or not that restriction is in fact ‘real’.  This creates a situation where all the responsibility inevitably falls on someone else’s shoulders.

The dominant positive vibration in Sedona is: Vortex.  With regards to the positive vibration in Sedona, a vortex is essentially a place that is irresistibly engulfing.  It draws to its center all that surrounds it.  Energy is amplified in a vortex.  The law of attraction functions much more intensely in a vortex.  It acts as a way to draw to you, all you have been subconsciously asking for and all you are a match to.  Every unresolved thing in your life will blow up in your face in a vortex.  It will instantly manifest.  The things you have been trying to manifest, to no avail, manifest in a vortex.  This makes for a superbly intense place.  Don’t let the serene scenery fool you.  There is nothing peaceful about the energy in Sedona.  Acclimatizing to it is bound to make you feel dizzy for days.  The only hope of finding peace in a place as energetically intense as Sedona, is to fall in love with the intensity and allow it to do whatever it wants to with you.  Sedona is home to a collection of some of the most active vortexes on the planet.

During this trip, I also held a synchronization workshop in Phoenix.  I drove the nearly two hour drive through the arid desert between Phoenix and Sedona back and forth 4 times during the trip.  It's hard to believe that anyone could live in Phoenix.  I can honor the fact that some people love the desert.  I have found a beauty in deserts as well.  In fact, I was born in one.  But this desert is the kind that evokes images of starvation and isolation.  Being there feels like being incarcerated via banishment into the Sonoran desert.  Two of the days I spent there, it was 116 degrees F.  It nearly killed me.  For those of you who only understand the metric system, that’s 46.7 degrees C.  The emotional conditions of the city are a perfect match to those geographical and weather conditions.

The dominant negative vibration of Phoenix is: Coping.  At first when I arrived to phoenix and began observing the general population there, I immediately noticed the dominance of purposelessness in the collective energy field.  It felt like the ‘land of spinning wheels’.  I knew that finding purpose would be a dominant theme for the workshop.  But as I observed the general demographic in the city, I realized that the lack of purpose most people felt had something else underneath it.  That thing was coping.  In general, the people of Phoenix are all just coping with the conditions of their life.  To cope is to deal effectively with something that is difficult.  When all of your energy is focused on coping, there is no space to really find your joy and passion so as to move forward in a different direction.  When I told the group of people I was with about this ‘diagnosis’ they reminded me that the people here even have to cope with the heat.  I cracked up laughing…  How true!

Another thing I noticed that stood out like a sore thumb in Phoenix was that so, so many of the people in phoenix had lungs with an energy field that glowed in an unhealthy way.  At first, I thought it may be the result of a bacteria or virus.  But when I got closer, I realized that the vibration was actually fungus.  I do not know whether this fungus is growing in the air conditioning units that everyone is using to stay alive in the city, or whether it is the result of breathing in the desert dust.  But the condition is so widespread it could be called an epidemic.  The immune system in the average phoenix citizen is absolutely preoccupied with their chest and skin.  For an extrasensory like myself it makes for an interesting visual appearance.  It looks like a war going on inside nearly everyone between the bright, white energy of the human immune system and the many ‘irritants’ that make life in phoenix difficult.  It is wearing the people of Phoenix down.

The dominant positive vibration of Phoenix is: Modification.  Ironically, this dominant positive vibration is a split off of the dominant negative vibration.  When we must cope with something difficult, we are forced to get creative.  We are forced to make changes.  We are forced to adapt or create adaptations in ways that improve our situation.  To modify is to make minor changes that improve something or make it less extreme.  And I did not see a single person in phoenix who has not mastered this vibration.  Even the young children have mastered this vibration.  Phoenicians do not make radical changes.  The stay in situations where they have to continue to cope.  But they cope well by modifying themselves and the world around them to decrease the discomfort they experience.  Just like the plethora of desert animals and plants around them, they modify themselves to survive.  Modification is the heart of entrepreneurship as well.  So it is no surprise that Phoenix is such a hub for entrepreneurs.

I was able to bring both Winter (my son) and Mark with myself and the team on this trip.  Mark is Winter’s daddy (my ex husband).  I had an official entourage.  It was really wonderful to experience a new place all together.  Usually, when I leave everyone at home and travel, I feel pulled in two different directions.  Mark is a bit of a recluse.  He and Winter have been the two most anonymous members of the community.  It was ironic that on the very week that the documentary first aired, (which featured them both), they also both made their first physical appearance in my work sphere.  I love the fact that as a group our intentional community represents what is possible if people are willing to be conscious enough and work through conflict together.  Relationships change over time.  We are a group of people whose relationships have all evolved into what they are today.  A tribe, an intentional family that is integrated.  We support each other.  We love each other.  We have been through so much pain and joy over the years together.  Our mutual conscious care for one another and interdependence creates a secure nest for the child who has come to us.  It will serve as the fertilizer which will allow him to fully actualize his potential.  It is the foundation for what he intended for this life, whatever that may be.  It is what I would wish for every child.