Channeling is the practice of bringing a spirit through you to give you insight and guidance, most often performed by a psychic medium.
Invariably, someone is going to ask me if I believe in channeling. I do believe in channeling, but I do not see it like some people would. Remember in “Amityville Horror” when the new-age chick wanted to see the haunted house and suddenly some dark voice was coming out of her body? Nope.
The process of channeling is really a form of psychic reading. I read the dead very often, but I don’t necessarily believe that their soul is showing and telling me things. I also have had past life dreams that are extremely detailed, waking up speaking a foreign language fluently. But, as a psychic, I know what a reading is like. For whatever unexplained reason, we occasionally run into information that is out there in the universe and we read it if we’re psychic and some folks just feel it in the form of déjà vu or other sensations. Because I’m reading a past life, it seems as if it were my own, but that is not true. I am simply remotely jumping inside of the life and looking around, feeling, having memories, and seeing things through someone who once existed’s life.
So, as far as channeling goes, I believe we can link onto information about a person and read it from their point of view, but I do not in any way believe that the spirit of the person is actually in the body of the channeler or taking over the controllers like the man in Wizard of Oz behind the curtain.
On a superficial level, we channel every day and don’t realize it. Did you ever watch a reality show and then later on find yourself sassing back at someone with a phrase you heard on it? If I go to visit relatives in West Virginia, I start having a drawl. Ever hear a song and it gets stuck in your mind like an “ear worm” you can’t get rid of? How about the most famous one of all, when you find yourself telling your kids, “because I said so!”
On a more biological level, we channel all those ancestors before us who contributed to our gene pool, from our preferences for colors and mates to talents and intelligence. Occasionally, I see my son use my mother's hand gestures and he had no contact with except when he was a baby. I also hear him phrase things the way my father did. All of these things are at a very basic level in our gene pool, distributed and shared to continue traits that perhaps helped our survival and breeding choices.
On a spiritual level, ministers, counselors, parents, friends all have an effect on our way of approaching life so that we are channeling the lessons they have taught us by words or example. Sometimes, we pick someone we believe was a good example. For some it might be Jesus, for others Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. As well, psychic mediums “channel” the spirits of the dead and spirit guides to assist us in finding answers we seek.
On a social level, we channel by acting as one of the crowd. You see this playing out at sporting events when the entire crowd mimics each other’s cheers and boo's. You also see it in gangs and clichés in school; they channel a “collective” of what their leader says they should or should not do. This power can create some horrifying results, such as Jonestown Massacre and the Waco Compound event. It can also produce some beautiful moments like those scenes in New York when residents were standing along the roadways feeding the workers at Ground Zero.
On an artistic level, I have done oil paintings in which I put on an album and listened to it while painting and found myself painting something I would never normally paint in a style I would never attempt. I become so focused that I am completely lost in the process and, in fact, without that album on, I cannot finish the intent of the painting. Many artists believe that at some point in the process of creation, something takes over that is calmer, wiser, less judgmental and picky. This aspect creates something that when they look back they wonder “how did I do that?” I find that a lot in my writing. I look back and think “I wrote that???”
Channeling is perhaps not as mystical as we think but as you can see it is very prevalent. We may not be aware of it when bits of information and psychic thread run through us during the day, but every now and then we channel without the least bit of realization we’re doing it. It’s like being a radio picking up stray signals and tuning in for a brief second only to change the frequency and lose the path…
There are bits of influence from modern-day life, biology and spirituality that create little buds of channeling that can "take" when we are receptive. I believe this is much like psychic information. I recently did a reading on something that was not alive and not associated with a living person. I simply did a read on the area around which this object had existed. Some may say I was channeling this object's perspective--even though the object has no eyes or ears. No matter what people say about psychic skills and it being new age or woo-woo or spiritual or God-given, to me it's simply a matter of biological function that we all have, we all use, and we either realize it's there and utilize it or give it no name and ignore it, but either way--we're all wired for it and thus wired for channeling.
In essence, we are all channelers.