How did I open up to channel?
One of the most common questions I get when I attend psychic and spiritual expos is:
“How do I open up to channel?”
There are many ways this can happen. I’ll share how it unfolded for me—not as a prescription, but as a reference point for your own journey.
For as long as I can remember, I hated my job.
I made several career changes and even went back to school to earn a master’s degree to broaden my skill set. I was deeply passionate about what I studied, and I discerned my major and advanced degree with sincerity and care. But I struggled through college and graduate school because I have ADHD that is comorbid with dyslexia.
When I entered the workforce after earning my advanced degree, I found that corporate roles in finance, economics, and accounting often operated in competitive, dog-eat-dog environments. I genuinely felt punished—punished for working hard, for overcoming significant obstacles, and for being passionate about the “wrong” things.
In my frustration—and partly to manage my ADHD symptoms—I began silently meditating every day.
At the time, I had no idea that this simple practice, started roughly ten years ago, would change my life.
I’m not someone who sticks with things unless I see results fairly quickly. When I first began silent meditation, I would often cry profusely around the 10–20 minute mark. Sometimes I cried almost immediately. Back then, it startled me. I didn’t understand that trauma stored in my body was releasing through the practice.
But I was seeing results.
So my silent meditation practice evolved into guided meditation. Then I took courses in shadow work. After about three to four years of consistent meditation and shadow work, I was surprised to begin hearing my guides. And a couple of years after that, I was surprised again—this time to discover that I was a direct voice channel.
So why does shadow work lead to awakening to channel?
When the nervous system resets and brainwaves naturally slow down, it becomes much easier to access the channeling state—and, just as importantly, to hold it. The ability to hold the channeling state is what creates stability in connection. The depth and clarity of channeling emerge from the healing of your own energetic field.
This brings me back to why I started by telling you that I hated my job.
It’s easy to assume that what needs to heal are the “big things”—the major traumas, the moments of abandonment that rewired your nervous system. And yes, those things do matter and will need to heal. But that’s only the beginning.
What truly opens you up is healing what the Guides call the hidden self—the aspects of you that are part light and part shadow.
Let me give you an example.
I didn’t like my job as a community college economics professor at a campus in an at-risk community. I loved my students, but I had little appreciation for the structure of higher education and the way it favors certain types of learners over others. But, I worked incredibly hard. I showed up on weekends. I called students who never came to class. I received emails saying I had changed someone’s life. My evaluations often said my class was the hardest—and also the favorite.
By all external measures, I was doing well.
So where was the shadow?
The shadow was in the dishonoring of myself by doing something I hated. I had become comfortable with my discomfort. The work brought out light in me, yes—but it also concealed a shadow: I didn’t believe I was worthy of having a job I loved.
This is why being a channel—and being stable in your connection—requires what the Guides call radical authenticity.
The things you dismiss with “that’s just how it is” need to be addressed. The discomfort you’ve learned to tolerate needs to be addressed. In short, you have to love yourself enough to be as authentic as you can be.
And we don’t often talk about how daunting that is—especially when you’ve spent years masking your discomfort just to get through life.
So if right now all you want is a job you don’t hate, like I once did…
or a relationship that truly honors you…
or a family life that feels less triggering and overwhelming…
That’s where we all begin. And we all start somewhere.
And that beginning—if you decide you are worthy of what you truly want—can become the doorway to discovering your soul note in channeling.
Seraphim, my angelic guides, have a message about why they have decided to teach The Art of Becoming a Channel – A Beginner’s Guide to Shadow Work this month. In keeping with the convention of our blog, the text in italics below is the directly channeled message as I hear it in my head, verbatim.
Seraphim: We want to begin by thanking the channel for her story because it gives us a framework for teaching you about the hidden self. The hidden self, as the channel has alluded to, are those aspects of self that are not pure shadow. They are also part light. The reason healing the hidden self opens people up is partially because it is a test of awareness and discernment. Can you recognize that when you get that email from a student saying you’ve changed his life, and you feel elated and then guilty, that in fact a positive occurrence is pointing you to a shadow? We are not suggesting all positive things are shadows, but we are suggesting that your feelings through your body often does not lie.
So, when you get that promotion, and it feels heavy rather than exciting, that’s the hidden self. When a romantic relationship is progressing, but its progress makes you uncomfortable, that is the hidden self. We are not suggesting that life should only be positive, for that would be engaging in toxic positivity. However, we are suggesting that healing of the hidden self requires honesty about how you truly feel about some aspect of your life. That honesty, ideally, will lead to shadow work and when you heal the shadow, allow your healed state to tell where to go next. Do you understand this?
So, for the channel, once she owned up to how much she masked her discomfort of all the things she needed to make her students do and learn, she lost her job and the universe assisted her with this because she wouldn’t have done it on her own. But, not everyone will lose their job, or break up that relationship, or go no contact with that family member. Sometimes when you heal, you stay exactly where you are but experience it differently. Other times, when you heal, like the channel did, your life gets turned upside down, and you begin a business you would have never dreamed of a few years before. Each blueprint is unique, and you have to honor the present moment and what it is telling you.
We are going to end this message by telling you why we are teaching this class and why we are teaching this class in this manner. When you heal, you are stable in your channel. When you heal, your depth of field in channeling deepens. When you heal, you feel peaceful within yourself and feel neutral in your experience. It is in a healed state that you can be stable in your channeling for as a channel you become very magnetic and that magneticism can often send humans off kilter if they do not heal first. And, so it is.
