Less than 2 months ago, I visited Portland.  When I was there I wrote that life on the non-physical plane is so strong that its contents can be felt by even the most spiritually cut off people. The astral dimension of the area is so deep that I said I could spend a lifetime exploring all of the non-physical energies that are identified with the area.  Well last night, out of curiosity, I decided to go back.

When your consciousness begins to transition from awake to asleep, there is a window of blackness.  In that window, thoughts begin to distort.  You can feel them stretch and shrink and magnify.  If you watch the thoughts, they cease to make any rational sense.  This is one of the easiest ways to get out of body.  The minute you notice this window, you think about going into the darkness deeper and deeper and deeper.  You will find yourself standing in the fourth dimension.  If you turn around, you will see your body on the bed.  You will see a brilliant pearlescent filament connecting you to your body.  You will feel as if you are outside of a ‘reality’ that your body is limited to… imprisoned in even. 

I got to Portland by thinking of a specific tree that was in the backyard of the place I stayed at while I was there.  When you connect to something that you want to astral travel to, there is a moment where the connection with that thing causes you to entrain with that thing.  You can feel yourself shifting until the moment you have phased with it enough that it ‘hooks’ you.  You are pulled as if inescapably to it.  The brain interprets this as extremely intense movement.  Many people wake up at this point out of the resistance they feel to being out of control.  But if you surrender and just let it do with you what it will, you will experience yourself arriving at whatever it is that you intended to arrive at. 

Portland was asleep when I arrived there.  Through the root system in the tree, I could feel the deep rhythm of drumming in the distance.  I let myself dissolve into the drumming and found myself traveling again, this time through the soil.  When the drumming felt to be coming from above me, my speed slowed and I began to rise up through the soil and up through a river that was above the soil.  It was day time.  I had traveled into a residual thought form that was left over from another time.  On the bank, there was a group of 4 Native American men.   They were from a tribe native to the river itself.  One of them, the oldest of the men was talking about the river for a while.  And then he began to tell a story.  He was speaking in a language I could not understand rationally.  He was telling a story about a Sawaxii (Pelican) and a Wa is (Gull).  I asked to see the story in pictures instead so I could understand what the man was saying. 

The story the old man was telling the younger men was about a pelican and a gull meeting.  The gull used to live with the river until the gull asked the pelican why he lived with the ocean and did not ever come to the river.  The Pelican told the gull it was because there was so much food at the ocean.  He told the gull that he just has to talk to the ocean and the shore to know how to find the food.  And so, the gull followed the pelican and began to live with the ocean instead and never went back to the river.   And as a gift, the pelican gave the seagull a mountain to raise his children on so he never had to go back to the River.  Anytime the seagull was hungry, the pelican would tell him to stand by the wave break and he would dive into the waters and carry out fish for him to eat.  They were friends forever.  The old man was telling this story to try to get the young men to get along.  He was trying to teach them to be like the pelican. 

He told the young men to stand back a certain distance.  When they did, his image began to distort.  His clothes fell to the floor.  He shape shifted into a large, white pelican.  He took off in flight above the river, leaving three very large feathers behind, one for each of the men.  He flew past me towards the ocean.  His heavy wing strokes vibrated the air. 

I went to the place where the old man had been standing.  There was magic in the space he left behind.  The 3 young men could not see me.  They simply watched the old man pelican fly away until he was out of sight. And then, they each took their feathers and dispersed into the shadows beneath the pine forest. 

Mentally, I asked my astral body to shape-shift. Immediately, I began to shrink.  As if from inside my own heart, a remembrance from a past life rose to the surface and I began to hear the word “Sungila” over and over again.  The sound was only drowned out when my hearing became so incredibly acute that I felt like struggling to get away from it all.  I knew instantly that I was a fox.  Many native tribes that actively practiced shape-shifting believed that everyone has an animal spirit residing within them.  And that this would be the animal that one would shape shift into if they began to practice shape shifting.  The animal spirit that resides within me is a red fox.  I have known this since I was eight years old.  My abuser took me to a Blackfoot reservation in Southern Idaho and I was given a peyote tea and led into a ‘journey’ to find my spirit animal.        

I started running.  I was on all fours, watching the momentum of my black legs and paws devour the damp soil.  I was aware that no one would be able to notice me unless I let them see me.  It was a powerful feeling of contrast compared to my experience in this human life.  I do not have the power of camouflage in this life.  I stick out like a sore thumb and everyone notices me no matter where I am. 

I stopped running in response to a scent that was so strong I could not avoid my desire to go over to investigate it.  A type of fungus that was growing out of the side of a fallen tree.  My senses felt so much more alive.  Every smell would begin in my long sinuses but would not stop there.  They would go up over my head and ears and continue over my spine.

Having stopped to smell the patch of fungus, I became aware that I could hear everything that was under my feet.  It was as if beneath the soil was a whole other world that I was not a stranger to.  I could hear earthworms and other insects.  I could feel and even at times hear the rather electric feeling of the communication taking place underground between trees.  If I dipped my head low to the ground, the whiskers on my face felt the vibration of the activity beneath the surface of the earth.  My mind would convert the vibration into pictures that would show me what the vibration was coming from.  I did not have to see what was underground with my eyes to see what was underground.

My eyes would adjust so fast to light it was incredible.  In my human form, it seems that my eyes have such a limited capacity to deal with changes in light.  In the dark, I cannot see.  If it is too light, I spend the whole time squinting in discomfort.  I could feel my pupils contract and dilate with impeccable precision by the second as I wandered in-between patches of shade and light.

In the distance, I was startled and then lured in by a high-pitched scream.  Like a bark that carried on through the vegetation.  I knew it was another fox.  This might sound strange to a human, but I felt ‘sex’ inside myself in response to the sound despite the fact that it had not occurred externally.  The other fox was nowhere near me and yet, I felt the irresistible urge to conjoin and become fused. The orange energy consumed me like an excited fire.  I felt a sensation close to rage as a result of being burned up by the energy.  I wanted it and yet I didn’t want it.  To a fox, sex is like war.  A passionate magnetism mixed with desperate fury to escape and destroy the other.  I was becoming lost in this war. 

I decided to morph back into human perspective.  I asked my body to become human.  When I asked this, the transition did not happen slowly.  My senses went mute.  I could feel my astral body first and then see it naked and smudged by soil.  I couldn’t quite feel any sensation of temperature.  I sat like that for a time and decided to return to my body.  This time, I went by the sky.  I retracted through the low hanging clouds, back past the pelican, who was still in flight; back into the darkness of night and current time. 

I re-entered my own room and my body inside the room.  Instead of waking, I decided to try to deepen my consciousness within the darkness behind my closed eyes.  I hovered there, as if in presence meditation inside my body for what seemed like a very long time until deciding to allow my consciousness to diffuse into the body’s capillaries and nerve endings.  I was awake for the rest of the night full of energy in the moonlight room, full of creative energy. 

It seems that no matter whether I am out of body as a fox or whether I am in my human embodiment creating, I am consumed by vitality.  I can’t help but think of a quote by the mother of modern dance, Martha Graham.  It goes like this:  “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action.  And because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.”