Except from Writing the Divine: How to Use Channeling for Soul Growth & Healing, by Sara Wiseman

Chapter Three: An unexpected receiving

My first experience with channeling:

By the time I received The 33 Divine Lessons from Constance, I’d been practicing channeled writing for some time. But the first time it happened, it almost knocked my socks off.
It all started in the summer of 2004—on the very morning that I moved into my new home as the first step of divorce. You’ve heard of hitting bottom? I’d long past hit bottom and was hurtling into the abyss.
After 18 years of marriage and four kids, this was an unbelievably painful process that involved loading everything deemed “mine” from the family home into a rickety rental truck. Two burly movers, mouths dark with tobacco and reeking of beer and sweat, were there to did the heavy lifting.
I spent that morning in a state of numbness and disbelief, watching the movers haul things out my old house and dolly boxes into the gaping yaw of my new house. One mover even had the audacity to ask me out when “he was done working.”
“I’m moving here!” I felt like shouting. “I’m getting divorced here!” I wanted to scream, but I was too tired, too fragile, too heartbroken. I simply shook my head.
No.
After the movers left, I stood with my meager furniture in disarray, stacks of unmarked, unidentified boxes, black plastic trash bags stuffed full of toys and clothes after I’d run out of boxes, beds not only unmade but without mattresses (the kids and I would sleep on the floor tonight,) everything piled in the wrong room.
Complete chaos.
Absolute pain.
Regardless of how I felt, I knew it was crucial to create some semblance of order before the kids came home from school—but I didn’t know how to begin. The knife or scissors I needed to open all these boxes was packed in one of the boxes—but which one?
As I stood shakily in the living room, trying to get a grip on my roiling emotions, I looked out the front window and saw a man walking along the sidewalk. To my surprise, he headed up my driveway, and began climbing the steps to my front door.
He’s in sales, I thought ungraciously—I certainly wasn’t going to let him in.
Yet this man didn’t ring the doorbell or knock. Instead, he stood there patiently, hovering outside the front door. And finally, as I stood in the living room not breathing, hoping and praying he’d go away, he opened the door and stepped inside.
Let me explain.
He did not "open" the door in the same physical way that you or I or another human being might. I did not “see” him as a physical person exactly, even though I could easily describe what he looked like. Back then, I didn't even know enough to recognize him as a spiritual entity. But there he was, as clearly as anyone might be—my sense of him was overwhelming.
I was pretty sure he wasn’t a ghost. He wasn’t a trickster, either. For although I knew very little about this kind of thing, having spent the last decades of my life at kids’ soccer games, not séances, I knew enough to understand this “being” was the real thing—I just didn’t know what kind of real thing he was.
This “being” walked or floated or moved across the floor of my living room, and it was then that I met my spirit guide, Hajam, for the first time. He was a dark, slender Indian or Asian man, much smaller than me. He looked like a guru might, but without all the drapery and turbans. He looked like a guru, I might add—except at that time, I didn’t know about gurus. I knew about angels, of course, and Jesus, and God the Father and the Holy Spirit—my Judeo-Christian upbringing had made sure of that—but this “being” had no wings. No halo. Nary a beard or pair of sandals in sight!
I dropped onto the sofa, partly for fear my legs might buckle underneath me, and he sat near my shoulder. To further clarify, Hajam didn’t exactly “sit” either, but sort of hovered patiently near me, until it dawned on me that he was going to say something.

Cheer!

Reviewed By Stuart Nachbar
 

Last week, as research for a new book, I attended the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Association boys and girls basketball finals at Penn State. Sitting courtside near the spirit squads and cheerleaders was an eye-popping experience I had never gone through in my non-athletic high school days. The quality of play, as well as the quality of cheering was beyond my expectations. 

I never got to know any cheerleaders in high school outside of school and I never met any who cheered for the universities where I received my undergraduate and graduate degree. I just thought they were in a different world, and that I would only be an alien presence inside it. 

Cheer! by Kate Torgovnick, a former journalist for Jane magazine introduced me to the inner sanctum of competitive college cheerleading. Cheer! follows three college cheerleading squads: Southern University, Stephen F. Austin State University and the University of Memphis in their quests for a national cheerleading championship. 

In Torgovnick’s story, it is interesting that colleges become confused as to whether cheerleaders are athletes or entertainers. There are anecdotes in Cheer! about split scholarships and cheerleaders asked to support revenue sports that their schools do not invite them to cheer in. And while cheerleaders are subordinated to the athletes in the events they do participate, they must raise their own money, or rely on their competitive association—the NCAA does not recognize cheerleading as a sport—to go to cheerleading competitions.