Listener channelling ... a voice in my ear

The first time I experienced listener channeling was when my marriage was on its last legs in 1995. I was standing in my kitchen, the grief of another unresolved argument welling up inside me. Suddenly a voice in my ear commanded me, “Go to your computer!” Without thought or hesitation I went into my study and sat down, fingers poised over the keys. Suddenly words flowed into my ear and down into my hands. What I was creating with the help of this disembodied voice was a poem and even the title was given to me, ‘If I Ever Get’. After the final syllable was spoken, I looked over what I’d received. It was beautiful.

After that, more poems came, spoken in mostly male voices. My favorite spoke in an Appalachian twang and what he gave to me were mainly story poems. I called him my ‘hayseed voice’. He talked of farming but also talked of lost love, regret and sorrow. I was so happy when I heard that voice. One was a woman, a farmer’s wife who expressed her dreams of early courtship days, how she wished she could go back to re-live those moments her man saw her as a sensual woman and not a work horse who sat on the porch snapping beans.

When I moved on my own, I continued to receive these voices. But suddenly one night, another voice with an ante-bellum, Southern American accent began to talk. He first said that this was not a poem and only gave me a pseudonym, Beauregard. I ‘listened’ to his story and compiled it into book form.

It seemed that my powerful emotions opened up a secret door. Could it be that these ‘entities’ were part of my soul, were perhaps me in a past life?  Could it be they were drawn to the sense of loss I felt when I knew my relationship was at an end? Loss, regret, sorrow. Yet when Beauregard came to me, I realized he was a cad and a murderous manipulator. Undaunted, I continued to listen because I knew intuitively he was looking for redemption, a non-judgmental receptacle in which to pour his prolific guilty sins. I loved and hated this man in equal parts.

During a talk I gave to my metaphysical group on listener channeling, I introduced Beauregard and  soon after, the room temperature dropped quickly, leaving me shivering and my teeth chattering. One of the members said a prayer that would send this entity into the light and as soon as she finished, the atmosphere changed and the room grew warm again. This was my sign that my ‘friend’ was real but to this day, so many questions.

I grew cranky and depressed after I finished the book about my Southern gent, Confessions of a Civil War Ghost. My husband said it was time to start another. And so I did. I immediately knew the title: Black Harvest. This was more of a 50-50 proposition in that half was me and the other half channeled to me. For example, I wrote a chapter in which one of the characters finds herself in medieval Glastonbury. I thought I had made it up until I happened into a book store and learned there really was such a place. In my book, I described it as ‘Stonehenge, but not Stonehenge.’ This was true in that it was a smaller version of the famous standing stones but no less mystical.

Listener channeling is not like trance channeling. Trance channeling is when the medium is not conscious, and it is like the discarnate entity (or groups of entities) ‘shares’ their mind and soul. Often when verbalizing, the voice is not that of the medium and can be entirely different in tone, cadence etc. Edgar Cayce was a famous trance channeler and his diagnoses of clients were startlingly accurate, even when from a great distance.

Many writers have described ‘being in the zone’ where it seemed the book was writing the writer. It was like the inspiration came from somewhere else. In a sense, that is like listener channeling. I have had other inspirations to sit and write a voice, but it seems the timing was wrong and I have a file folder of mere beginnings of what could have been a very interesting book.

My difficulty is that I don’t wish to take credit for the poetry, for what Beauregard gave me and for what I received in Black Harvest. I must remember, though, that I am the ‘receiver’ and instead of voices speaking into the ether, they spoke into my  ear.

And through me, others will listen.