Lately, everybody seems to be channeling…
Let me begin by saying something that may complicate what you think I am about to say: I believe in signs. I pay attention to synchronicities. I work with dreams, symbols, intuition, oracle cards, essential oils, Reiki, subtle energies, and all manner of things that might make a strict empiricist clutch their pearls. I have spent a good portion of my life wandering around in that liminal territory where psychology, spirituality, and mystery meet, and I rather like it there.
So no, this is not going to be an argument against channeling or an attempt to explain away mystical experiences. I am far more interested in what happens when we have those experiences—and what we do with them afterward.
Messages arrive from Spirit, guides, ancestors, ascended masters, extraterrestrial councils, the collective, and various other sources from beyond the ordinary neighborhood. We receive downloads and transmissions. Astrological events arrive carrying messages about what is happening to all of us. Seeing 11:11 means something quite specific. A repeating animal, number, dream image, or song lyric becomes a message from the Universe, and somewhere nearby there is often someone ready to tell us exactly what it means.
I sometimes joke that channeling has become the new Dear Abby. Human beings have always looked for someone to help us make sense of uncertainty, and perhaps that hasn’t changed nearly as much as we think. Once we sought out the village elder, priest, spiritual teacher, therapist, or advice columnist. Today we may consult a channel, intuitive, astrologer, oracle reader, TikTok mystic, or Instagram priestess.
The longing underneath it is deeply human. We want reassurance. We want meaning. We want to believe the strange little synchronicities of our lives matter.
I happen to believe they often do.
But I also believe the meaning belongs, first and foremost, to the person having the experience.
What Does Your 11:11 Mean?
Suppose you begin seeing 11:11 everywhere. You glance at your phone and there it is. A few days later it appears somewhere else. Then again. Eventually you start wondering whether something is trying to get your attention.
I’m not going to tell you to dismiss that. I’d probably become curious right along with you. What was happening when you noticed it? What were you thinking about? What is unfolding in your life right now? How do you feel when you see those numbers? Do they feel comforting, playful, unsettling, sacred? Have they held meaning for you before?
What I’m much less inclined to do is tell you what 11:11 means before you’ve had an opportunity to discover what it might mean for you.
This doesn’t mean symbols have no shared meanings. Of course they do. The butterfly carries longstanding associations with transformation and metamorphosis. A snake might evoke renewal, healing, danger, sexuality, kundalini, death and rebirth. Certain plants, colors, planets, dreams, archetypes, and sacred images have gathered layers of cultural and spiritual meaning over centuries.
Those associations give us wonderful places to explore. They don’t necessarily give us the answer. The butterfly appearing in your life is still your butterfly, and I think we lose something important when someone else gets to it first and announces what the Universe is trying to tell you.
I Channel, Too—Sort Of
Here’s where this becomes particularly interesting for me: I teach contemplative writing, and I’ve sometimes referred to the practice as channeled writing.
I haven’t stopped believing in it. If anything, writing has become one of the most reliable ways I know to move beneath the chatter of ordinary consciousness and listen for something deeper. Sometimes I begin with a question. Sometimes an oracle card, dream, essential oil, image, or feeling becomes the doorway. I get quiet, write, and allow whatever wants to emerge to emerge without immediately trying to organize or explain it.
Call what answers Spirit. Call it Soul. Call it God, intuition, psyche, the unconscious, or the deeper Self. I’m not particularly interested in policing the vocabulary. I’m interested in the relationship.
For me, channeled writing is a spiritual practice. I am reaching toward Spirit for my own purposes—not positioning myself as the person through whom Spirit needs to speak to everybody else. What comes through may illuminate something I have been struggling with, deepen a question I’ve been carrying, or occasionally surprise the socks off me. But even then, I get to sit with it. I can question it. I can return to it tomorrow. I can decide six months from now that I completely misunderstood it.
Mystery gets to breathe. And so do I.
Listening to Spirit—or Speaking for Spirit?
This is where I think we need to be a little more discerning, particularly those of us who guide other people.
There is a subtle—but important—shift between:
“Something came through in meditation that I want to share…”
and
“Spirit wants you to know…”
Those statements may sound almost interchangeable, but I don’t think they are. In the first, I’m telling you about my experience and inviting you to decide what, if anything, it stirs in you. In the second, I’ve invoked Spirit as the authority behind what I’m about to tell you. Whether I intend to or not, I’ve given my interpretation considerably more weight. After all, disagreeing with me is one thing. Disagreeing with Spirit? Well, that gets a little trickier.
And this is where my therapist self and my salt-lamp self sit down together for coffee.
The person delivering the message may be utterly sincere. I don’t think most people who describe themselves as channels, intuitives, mystics, priestesses, or spiritual teachers are sitting around plotting how to become authorities over other people’s lives. They may genuinely believe they are passing along exactly what they received.
But sincerity doesn’t erase the power dynamic.
Once I tell you that Spirit has a message for you, particularly if you already regard me as a teacher, healer, therapist, coach, mystic, or intuitive, my words carry weight. If I tell you that an astrological event explains your emotional upheaval, that seeing 11:11 means you’re being called toward a particular path, or that Spirit has already revealed what your experience means, I may have stepped beyond offering a symbolic lens and into interpreting your life for you.
That’s where I become cautious.
A spiritual experience is not automatically spiritual authority.
If I receive something during meditation, perhaps my first responsibility is to ask what it means for me. If I feel compelled to share it, perhaps I can offer it as an invitation rather than a proclamation: This came to me. See whether any of it resonates. That leaves considerably more room for the other person’s soul to answer.
Because isn’t that what spiritual practice is supposed to cultivate—a deeper relationship with the sacred, rather than a deeper dependency upon someone else’s relationship with the sacred?
That question matters to me whether we’re talking about channeling, astrology, oracle cards, dreams, intuitive impressions, or any of the other ways human beings have tried to listen beyond the surface of things. An astrologer, for example, may bring a rich understanding of planetary symbolism and offer a map of what themes or energies might be particularly active. A Jungian may recognize an archetypal pattern in a dream. An oracle reader may understand the traditional symbolism within a card. Knowledge and experience can offer us extraordinary lenses through which to look at our lives.
The distinction, for me, is whether the lens helps me see more deeply or someone else begins telling me what I am supposed to see through it.
Give me the map. Teach me the symbols. Tell me what you know. Then leave enough room for me to discover where I am on the map.
Maybe We Need More Wonder
I don’t want a spirituality scrubbed clean of mystery. Good heavens, no. Give me the synchronicities, dreams, candles, oracle cards, inexplicable knowings, moonlight, incense, essential oils, and occasional goosebumps when something lands somewhere deeper than thought. I simply don’t need someone else to explain all of them to me, and I don’t want to explain all of yours to you.
I would much rather sit beside you in wonder.
Perhaps that is the kind of spiritual mentorship we need more of—not teachers who become our permanent interpreters of Spirit, but teachers who help us strengthen our own capacity to listen. Not guides who hand us meanings, but guides who know enough about symbols, traditions, archetypes, and the mysteries of being human to offer possibilities while leaving the door open for something neither of us has considered.
That doesn’t diminish the role of the mystic, priestess, healer, therapist, spiritual teacher, astrologer, or wise elder. I think it makes that role more sacred. The guide doesn’t need to stand between another person and Spirit. The guide can hold the lantern while that person learns to find the path.
So by all means, notice 11:11. Pull the oracle card. Write down the dream. Pay attention when the same animal crosses your path three times in a week. Read your horoscope or have your natal chart interpreted. Sit beneath the moon. Light the salt lamp. Ask Spirit a question and fill ten pages of your journal with whatever tumbles onto the paper.
And if someone shares a channeled message that gives you goosebumps, listen. Sit with it. Notice what stirs. Take what resonates and leave the rest without worrying that you’ve somehow declined a memo from the Universe.
Then ask yourself what you hear.
Perhaps the most empowering spiritual teachers aren’t the ones who become our interpreters of Spirit. They’re the ones who remind us that we can listen, too.
