Matthew Krajewski's Blog: Magical Heritage Musings

When I was writing my second book, The Golden Sherpa, it became increasingly apparent to me that I had to take the time to truly communicate, in as simple a way as possible, what it felt like to experience energy through your subtle senses. The way most people are first introduced to this concept is through the Eastern concept of chakras. And many people are baffled by what chakras actually are. So I usually explain: these are the vital organs of your energy body, and where your own energy is exchanged with the energy fields throughout the universe.

Charkas have become so integral to my understanding of energy, that when I am experiencing any sort of problem, or working with a client with energy work, I tend to rely on what I am sensing from the chakras first. All disease arises out of imbalances in your energy, and will usually manifest in a chakra center. Your intuition will usually arise in your yellow or third chakra for instance, a strong feeling in your gut. Emotional pain can feel like heartburn in your green or heart chakra. When I am asked to heal energy for clients my first impulse is toward where blockages exist in their seven primary chakras. But today, I started to glimpse into the world of our six cosmic chakras.

The crown chakra is at the top of our head, and is our portal to interact with the divine, the Source, and universal energies. But the next six chakras are above our bodies, and are receivers for celestial energies. What I have learned is that:

The 8th Chakra: Is a sort of satellite or cup that focused celestial energies into our crown chakra.
The 9th Chakra: Is related to energies of the moon.
The 10th Chakra: Is related to energies of our sun.
The 11th Chakra: Is related to energies of our own solar system.
The 12th Chakra: Is related to the energies of the Milky Way galaxy.
The 13th Chakra: Is related to the energies of galaxies beyond our own.

Our root chakra grounds us to Mother Earth, and the other traditional chakras orient us to the complexities of unifying our physical body with our energy body in harmony. But, as I point out throughout my first two books, we live in a porous universe of energy. Communication with other realms, traveling out of body in spirit form, having innate knowledge of complex subject matter, and being offered assistance by other spiritual beings can and does operate through the 8th-13th chakra system.

Throughout my continuing education as a modern mystic and shaman, my guides have taken me to many fantastic places, from being out of body and viewing the Earth to taken far across the galaxy to other worlds. As with preparing for a marathon and starting small before you can tackle the full distance; energetically aligning our seven primary chakras prepares us for much more than we could imagine. We can continue our spiritual journey through the charkas that connect us to the heavens with the cosmic chakras. We don’t have to wait generations to explore the stars, we can do it now through our advanced chakra system.

Something I have said for years regarding specifically sexuality and spirituality is, “Do you really think your soul has genitalia?” Seriously. Consider it. Why would your soul, your energy body, need genitalia? Why would it need any type of sex organ? It is something we have as part of this physical incarnation and seem to require when occupying physical bodies. But since we are actually energy, are actually light beings, why would we have any use for genitalia in our true state?

It is a dangerous idea. And it should be. For too long all types of individuals; gays, lesbians, queer people, bisexuals, and transgendered individuals; have been ostracized from mainstream religions and spiritual pursuits because they do not conform to gendered or sexual “norms.” But when we begin to look at all life as energy, it is these exact same people that expand everyone’s minds just a bit, open people up to the possibility that these physical bodies are not our true substance, nor do they come with any universal laws of the “right” ways to express gender, sexuality, or love. I believe this is part of what has fueled the success of the wildly popular RuPaul’s Drag Race. It has shown the mainstream, as RuPaul would put it, “the new shamans,” those that show that nothing need be taken so seriously, especially how we view our physical body.

I have trouble identifying with a physical body. I always have. My weight fluctuates, as does my tendencies toward masculine or feminine behavior. I always complain about bodies, and physical incarnation, “being too dense,” and there is something in me that longs to just be light again. But therein lies the clue as to why people like myself are here. There is too much misunderstanding between people’s bodies and their energy. Most people see things in reverse. That their gender or sexuality somehow defines them. That somehow it is the true part of themselves. When in fact it is just one quality of many they just happen to feature in this particular physical incarnation.

Your physical body is not your true self. Your energy is. How much more empowered would we all be to know that our physical bodies are just a shell. We are not man. Or woman. Or straight. Or gay. We are much more than that. We are energy. And we have infinite possibilities.

We are light. Sounds simple enough, right? It is central to my first book, and my second book even features a light being on the front cover, but over the last few months, I was getting more and more signs that this was not just an important message to share, it was something that I needed to internalize, at not only an intellectual level, but an emotional and spiritual level as well.

I struggle with positive affirmations. I know how to treat others as I would want to be treated, so I tend not to create negative ripples in the energetic currents of the universe. But it is maintaining a positive energy field, at all times that seemed hopelessly out of reach to me. As a shaman I know all too well that we are comprised of light. That we are light. All things are light in fact. Science has started to document biophotons, and how all living creatures emit a measurable amount of these microscopic lights constantly. I believe the more positive, heart-based, and compassionate our own energy fields are, the more light we emit, and the more love we can bring into the world. It is how we can directly affect reality and create a mor positive reality in our world. But how?

Recently, I came up with what I call the “light affirmation.” I think of it as a super-charged manifestation affirmation. The platinum card of spiritual transactions. Because the more I do it, the more light I visualize, the more positive energy appears be flowing directly into my life. I did not heed messages from guides and angels over the last months, imploring me to just be “light and love.” It is such a pure message, and one that I assumed was incompatible with my own energy. But I was wrong. Being light and love is the key to unlocking a true magical spirituality. It is so simple because it is supposed to be: a user-friendly state of being that connects us to our own energy and the energy of all creation.

I understood intellectually that the true nature of the universe, and ourselves, is light. But I did not feel this intimately. What I have started to do is repeat, “I am light,” and visualize myself glowing. Sometimes this is a green light coming from my heart center. Other times it is a huge starlight, shards of which are huge and extend in all directions. Sometimes I just see myself glowing, emanating light softly. But it all comes back to saying and feeling that I am light.

Saying the affirmation isn’t enough. Feeling the affirmation is required. A little imagination. A little visualization. And a lot of feeling. When feeling this affirmation in myself a genuine feeling of love washes over me, and all the troubles, the worries, and the negative energy seem to have nowhere left to set up residence. The light casts no shadow, forcing negative energy to dissipate.

I’ve shared in previous blog posts that I felt blocked in some ways, that things weren’t moving in my life. Ever since I have found the light affirmation, that has changed. Now things are moving at the speed of light. It is invigorating, but also humbling. No matter where we are on our spiritual paths, there is always more to learn. And our light will always illuminate our path.

Learn more with the new book: The Golden Sherpa: Ascending Into Magical Spirituality

After Jen and I walked the grounds at the Land of the Medicine Buddha in Soquel, CA (described in my previous blog post) we decided to have a little lunch. Little did I know at the time we would be hosting a special energetic guest over the course of our meal.

Every magical person has a special talent, and at this point in history, they may manifest many different abilities. This unusual plethora of abilities manifesting in younger magical people is part of what prompted me to write my first book, “Modern Magic: Reclaiming Your Magical Heritage.” All the spiritual books I had read focused exclusively on one thing: psychic abilities, divination, shamanism, etc. But what I was experiencing, and seeing others go through, was an explosion of latent magical abilities suddenly coming forward. When we embrace our magical heritage, explore our souls and bring credence to our past lives, so many wonderful things are possible. The ability that Jen has, that I do not share, is the ability to medium, or talk to those that have passed on and exist in a dimension very close to our own.

As we ate lunch we were talking about a client she was working with, where the spirit of his mother actually made contact with her, and she was prompted to communicate with her friend the messages his mother had for him. He was not someone that was particularly looking for this contact, but the messages Jen had for him brought him to tears, and brought him a personal contact with his mother, something he had not experienced for years. What we were discussing at length was to maintain integrity, how not to get too close to clients while still opening a channel of trust and compassion. We talked about it at length, and then I asked for something I had never even thought to ask Jen in all the years I’ve known her.

My father passed away when I was a child, over 20 years ago. Given that I believe in reincarnation, and believe the Other Side is a complex amalgamation of different dimensions and levels, I never thought to make contact with him via a medium because I was afraid he may be unreachable. Gone to far onto the Other Side, or maybe already reincarnated into another form. But, what I learned that day was that asking, just asking, is the key to opening up to any type of magic. I asked that we explore it someday, and no sooner had I asked, then Jen was relaying messages from my father to me.

She laughed and giggled a lot, and I knew it was him because my father had a great sense of humor. He played catchup in the time we had at lunch, telling me things I had always dreamed about, but always thought would never be possible. That he liked my partner. That he was proud of me. And personal revelations about my friends and family that showed me he has been hanging around and paying attention to the lives of those he loved most.

It may be weird. It may be unconventional. But it has brought me a tremendous amount of healing. To interact with my father again. And this is the gift that magic can bring into your life in any form. It shows us how compassionate the universe truly is, and how all things are always possible.

Learn more with Modern Magic: Reclaiming Your Magical Heritage

When you get out of your head, and let your heart do the thinking, every day gets easier.

December and January were hard months for me, and ones where I had to really explore the darkest recesses of my own energy, and clean house so to speak. One thing that helped immensely was just being open energetically to the world again, especially to my close friends. In particular, the last couple of days I have been spending more time with a dear friend, and fellow shaman, Dr. Jennifer Baker. Just being open to your friends, those that love you, can bring more healing into your life. Today, my friend Jen and I went to a local Buddhist sanctuary and walked the grounds together: Land of the Medicine Buddha. We found ourselves in what is referred to as an Enchanted Forest, and could feel the positive energy, the sacredness, of the grove acutely. We decided to journey shamanically. Not for ourselves, but for one another, to see what messages the Other Side may want to communicate. Sometimes we are too close to our own problems, our own energy, and it helps to bring in another magical person to help you navigate what is so close that you can’t see it.

She had questions about her work as a spiritual teacher and writer, and I had my own questions about a job opportunity on the horizon, combined with how my books would continue to grow and touch people. Our journeys for one another were not only positive but enlightening. The imagery we touched upon for one another brought us comfort and the affirmation we were both looking for at that moment. I don’t know if we would have found such powerful affirmations if we were not joined in the spirit of friendship, with the genuine heart-based need to help one another.

The spirit of friendship, especially among magical people, can be very healing. Too often we can sit and complain about our “problems” to our friends, digging ourselves deeper into a self-imposed rut. But magical friends are empowered in their own right, and that empowerment can help us, help our hearts open, our energies relax, and inspire more trust that all is as it should be. Because in nearly all cases, it is.

When I went to Sedona in the fall of 2013, something the healers and shamans I met often referenced was how we could be running bad programs that are preventing us from reaching our full potential. Much like a computer, we can be running old software in the background that is no longer compatible with our best selves. As a shaman and mystic, I am well versed, and have even written a couple of books on the reality of our spiritual energy and how it determines the state of our own lives. But something about running programs stuck in my head.

We are complex beings, both physically and energetically, and one of the only models we have to really understand the complexity is the computer. Much like the computer, we can be running many different programs and operating systems at any given time. Some of these are recent updates, positive affirmations that boost our energy fields. Sometimes there are very old programs, old hurts and traumas that are still running in the background, and could be affecting our lives negatively. Even more interesting is how we could be running programs from past lives, things that have stayed with our soul blueprint into this life, and could also be affecting us negatively. Personality is something we tend not to explore but rather accept us unique to each one of us. But where do these personalities spring from? Our programs. From this life, and our past lives. I also call this our magical heritage, the energy fields that make us multidimensional beings. But sometimes, not all the programs are helping us in this life.

It is important to recognize when you might be running bad programs. Often times it is when we are stuck. When we wake up in the morning and just don’t feel like doing much of anything. We know better, but it is just like running old programs on your computer: it slows you down, and it may be incompatible with who you are today. Don’t get lost in your programming. Explore it. Name it. Identify it. This will help bring distance between the true you, and the programming you may be running in the background.

Running bad programs is unique to each person. But recognizing that we have such programming, that we are even more complex than the computers we use everyday, can make dealing with these programs head on that much easier.

Learn more with Modern Magic: Reclaiming Your Magical Heritage

So I’m a sitcom addict. I love sitcoms, and have watched the complete series of Golden Girls and Will & Grace many time over. But one that I’ve been watching recently, and found to be even more relevant to the spiritual work I’m doing now, surprisingly, is Roseanne.

In my new book, The Golden Sherpa, I briefly talk about Roseanne the character as a pop culture Goddess figure representing the Hearth Goddess as empowered yet down-to-earth role model. In the 9th and final season of Roseanne, her character dabbles in Eastern thought, meditation, crystals, and exploring the true nature of the universe. In a particularly touching scene when her daughter Darlene gives birth to a premature baby, she talks through how she believes the baby can survive because, to paraphrase, “All those spiritual books say the same thing. Our bodies do not have souls. Our souls have bodies. We are 1% physical and 99% spiritual.” This pop culture realization, while it does repeat much of spiritual thought that many people are well versed in, stresses a crucial lesson that we fail to internalize in our lives. We are not physical. We are spiritual beings having a physical experience. Too often, we forget that we even have a soul. To put it another way, that we are a soul.

Finding wholeness in your life can be hard when the soul is not the centerpiece. There is nothing bad, nothing negative, nothing dark in the nature of our souls. When we encounter negativity, in ourselves or in our environments, we need to remind ourselves that it is not truth. It is a challenge. A path for us to grow, learn, and evolve. The eternal parts of ourselves that cannot be damaged are our souls. Like going to wedding reception, the beautiful floral centerpieces are reminders of the beauty and love being celebrated that day. The table we set in our own lives is comparable. Our souls are the centerpiece, the gorgeous display of flowers and art that can set the tone, be the reminder, and show us how beautiful our true nature truly is.

Make your soul the centerpiece. It never dies. It is a thing of beauty. Nothing can damage it. Let it be the light to keep returning to, again and again, especially when darkness challenges you on the spiritual path. Light up your soul and let it illuminate your life. The centerpiece of your life: your soul.

So you know how to meditate. So you do positive affirmations. You’ve been able to manifest positive change in your life. Maybe you do yoga. Or maybe you work with crystals. There are so many different aspects of magical spirituality that people cultivate in their lives successfully. But too often we schedule these spiritual activities into our lives. We put them on our calendars, and then move into everything else in our lives, and fail to extend that same positive energy field to all other parts of our lives: at work, at a job interview, in our homes, spending time with loved ones, and even making important decisions in our lives.

Why? Why do such spiritual people fail to bring their highest self to the forefront of their lives? It’s so simple that we can tend to forget it. We just need to get out of our heads.

Our minds can be very deceptive and self-serving. Our mind will tend to run a program of survival, of protection, and oftentimes, a program of anxiety and insecurity. It is an illusion of disconnection, of not believing we are connected to the energy of all living things. Also, spiritual pursuits of any kind can be at odds with our very scientific, rational world. We tend to hide how bright our hearts and souls can truly shine. But when we schedule our spiritual pursuits, we flex the energetic muscles of our hearts and souls. And it is crucial to recognize that it is a type of energetic workout. Strengthening the others tools available to us, the tools other than our minds, so that we can be more balanced and secure as we engage with the great, wide world around us. Our hearts are about connection, it is through this energy field that we can become more attuned, more sensitive, and more stable in all other parts of our lives. It is key to get our of our heads, and get into our hearts.

Hold that feeling of connection. To the true part of yourself. When you engage in any spiritual pursuit regularly, be conscious of how different that energy is compared to how your life may typically look and feel. You are exercising a different part of yourself, especially the energy field produced by your heart. Bring that energy to the rest of your life. Consciously. Spirituality isn’t just about making time and scheduling it into your life. It is an exercise, a strengthening, so you can bring more balance and stability to every second of waking reality. Recognize when you are in your head. And move that energy to your heart.

Patience is not my virtue. Flat out, no way around it, I have always been an impatient person. Since my spiritual awakening in 2012, I have artfully dodged having to be more patient in every way imaginable. I’ve always had a knack for personal manifestation, becoming accustomed to easily bringing positive change into my life. And I came of age in a technology career in Silicon Valley, an extremely fast-paced industry where patience is an unknown word. In short, I had no reason to be patient. I assumed patience was for other people, or for people that didn’t know how to make things happen in their own life. Boy, was I wrong!

Fast forward to the present, and the series of challenges I’ve faced in my personal life to cultivate patience. I’ve started two part-time businesses with my partner, published my first book, have a second one slated to hit shelves within a month. I also have two manuscripts that just require a little polishing before they too are ready to share with the world. My years in technology taught me how to always keep things moving, but looking back now in the throes of impatience, I also had to learn how to release and just let the universe do its work. I assumed I would sell thousands of books immediately, that our businesses would grow exponentially, and that I would somehow struggle to keep pace with the future I manifested. But the universe had other plans. Instead, I’ve learned how to be grateful for all those that have read or are interested in my book. I’m putting myself out there more, connecting with other people that hunger for a new message of modern spirituality. And I’m learning to not be so hard on myself. When we want something, it is hard at times to give ourselves credit for everything else we have done, instead focused on the distant goal that we have trained our vision on. Humility is intimately tied to patience. Sometimes the universe needs to know you are able to conquer your ego before your ideal future can come to meet you.

Patience is an art form. It is a frequency of love. Sometimes you just have to take a deep breath, and bring yourself back to the now, to what you do have in your life, and be grateful for all that you already have. This energy of gratitude can lead you to patience more readily. You start to see that everything is as it should be, and everything will blossom and flower in its own time; not your own version of when things should happen.

This can especially true of finding a job. With the New Year I pledged to bring myself back to work, while not forsaking the important creations I have already birthed. Instead, I’m learning how to nurture myself and my work, while still recognizing how much of me I can still do out in the world. Finding a job can be intimidating work, especially if patience is not your virtue. I’ve had to pull back a number of times and remind myself, “Hey, you are a valuable, you have incredible work experience, the right thing will line up, in the right time.” So while some rejections come through, the opportunities that do line up are exciting me. And I’m learning to trust that the right thing will happen in the right time. For a job. For my books. And for the life I most want to live.

Learn more with Modern Magic: Reclaiming Your Magical Heritage

“P. Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney,” is the affirmation that Dory from the Pixar film Finding Nemo uses to connect to her authentic self. As a spiritual writer, and a young one at that, I tend to find inspiration everywhere, especially in pop culture. While many spirituality teachers speak of the importance of affirmations, they can at times feel too forced, too positive, and just plain not connect to who we are, and what we are feeling at any given time. Cultivating a positive energy field, no mater where you are at in your spiritual development, is a challenge. The reason I love Dory’s affirmation is it reminds me how personal, and how magical, affirmations can truly be.

Dory has a pretty positive attitude, and knows how to live in the now. In fact, she has no short-term memory, so she has no choice but to live in the now. But within that, she always approaches life with trust and excitement, ruffling the composure of her companion Marlin. Toward the end of the movie, when she is lost and despondent, it is the mantra she had been repeating throughout her journey with Marlin, “P. Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney,” that brought back her memory, her purpose, and elevated her consciousness out of despondency and fear.

It may seem silly, but sometimes I have to tell myself, “P. Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney.” It makes me smile, and reminds me that it is sometimes the simplest affirmations, reminders of ourselves, that can help us most when we seek to be aligned and cultivate a more positive energy field. As RuPaul would say, “Know who you are and deliver it all times.” You are not your fears and insecurities, you are infinitely more. Who you are is personal, and how you remind yourself of that can be silly and irreverent. In fact, it should be! Remember yourself, remember your history, and celebrate the unique you, however you can.

Learn more with Modern Magic: Reclaiming Your Magical Heritage