“This is the song I sing to you as I beat moment by moment in your being, in your heart. Bringing wholeness out of sorrow, bringing longing into fruition, bringing love into the earth of your body, into the cauldron of becoming, into the life of the spirit, bringing love into wholeness in every way, bringing fullness into being so that no part of the path is lonely or neglected, so that no being formed by desire along the path is left to wonder without experiencing fruition.”
This was how a message from a client’s heart chakra began as I attuned my awareness to that energy center in a recent SoulJourney Energy Portrait session. You can listen to the message titled “Message from a heart” here: https://www.lightspeak.com/souljourney-energy-portrait-gallery
I had already tuned into her crown chakra, ajna chakra, and throat chakra. I had seen, heard, and recorded, in pastels on paper and with my voice recorder, their songs, chants, and messages, all throbbing with her authentic resonance. And now I heard my voice take on a quality of gentle authority as I channeled her heart’s message.
The search to know who we really are and what we are here to do can be frustratingly elusive, and yet we cannot escape its insistence as we grow from childhood into maturity. As Henry David Thoreau wrote, “We are constantly invited to be who we are.” The “invitation” can feel like a pull or a push, less inviting than foreboding. The uncertainty of who – or Who – is inviting us can be daunting.
For many years, I had asked myself over and over, “What’s my job? What am I supposed to be doing?” I felt that I was about to take and fail a test for which I had not studied, and that this failure would prevent my sails from ever catching the wind of lasting joy. Then, just as the 20th century was about to roll into the 21st , a thin ray of light illumined the answer I had not been able to see before: I was here to offer inspiration.
A lifelong artist, I had rarely, always hesitantly, and only because I knew I was supposed to, approached art galleries with slides of my work, hoping but doubting that they would be interested. In 1998, I stumbled upon the ability to create a trustworthy mirror offering a view of people’s authentically radiant souls using pastels on dark paper. I could see, hear, and feel the flow of others’ multidimensional soul energy and when I worked on them I felt that was in heaven. Because I was recording people’s energy flow, I called my new art form Energy Portraits, since renamed SoulJourney Energy Portraits.
As soon as I had created about ten of them, I slipped photos of them into a pocket-sized album and whipped them out whenever I saw someone I hadn’t seen in a while or met someone new. These were my greatest joy and I couldn’t wait to share them. These Energy Portraits came straight from my soul, my authentic creations. My clients told me and showed me through tears of recognition that these portraits were true mirrors of their souls and helped them heal emotional wounds. I had never dared think that I might facilitate others’ healing.
One of my first clients was a young Reiki Master living in another state. Because of the geographic distance, I created her Energy Portrait remotely, working only from a brief phone call. It was the first time I had created one in this way, and although I thought it would work, I was prepared for the possibility that it would not: that she would receive the portrait, listen to the audio tape that I sent with the recorded channeled songs, chants, and messages from her soul, and find nothing relatable. If that happened, I would refund her payment without hesitation.
A few days after I had mailed the portrait and the tape, my inbox included an email from her. She wrote that she happened to have been home when the mailman delivered the portrait. She withdrew it from its cardboard mailing tube and “…before I had got it even halfway unrolled, I began sobbing, and thought, “FINALLY! Somebody sees the real me.”
What a relief. The path that had beckoned opened wide. I knew I could trust that when I attuned my perceptive mechanism to my soul’s highest, most compassionate and appreciative aperture, what would appear would be truth: that my client’s truth would recognize and respond to my truth, and that what I would create as a response would be a mirror of authenticity.
Leiah Bowden
