I really enjoyed sharing with the people of Lake Superior Interfaith Community Church last Sunday. They are truly running an interfaith church––with inclusive language and an obvious interest in loving, open-minded, spiritual exploration. Rather than hire a minister/rabbi/leader, they run the church as a community and invite a new speaker every week to do a sermon/lecture/talk. If you’re ever near Duluth on a Sunday, I highly recommend you check them out. The service is at 11:00.

Below is the text of my talk:
(apologies for the limits of blog format, which prevent the use of paragraph indents)

Hello. My name is Jennifer Shoals, and I am a Spiritual Health Advocate. In my work, I encourage contact with the energy that moves our spirits on the path of Being. One way to do this is through channeled writing.
In channeled writing, I begin by placing myself in a meditative state. This means that I center my energy in my body and then simultaneously expand it into all the space around me. I am in five-sense reality and also beyond it, expanded into the Spirit World.
While I am in this energy state, I place my hands on a laptop and write what I am told to write. This is more than just a stream-of-consciousness exercise. Beings from the Spirit World come to me and provide spiritual guidance. Some people call these Beings angels, or spirit guides. I refer them to as The Teachers. I have been doing this for over ten years.
The Teachers would like more people to be open to this kind of information. For anyone who would like to learn to do this, I will be offering a Channeled Writing workshop here on November 19.

The Teachers have asked me to write, so that I can share their information with others. Our first book, Grandmother Dreams, Conversations Across the Veil, was published in 2012. I have also just finished a second book and started a third.
Writing, publishing, and speaking is not something that I have done before. I worked for 30 years as a Community Health Nurse. But right after publishing the first book, I was diagnosed with two cancers, and I went on a cancer journey that forced me out of my nursing career. This shift allowed me to focus more on spiritual work. That is how I came to be here today, sharing with you the information that I have been given by the Teachers.

My theme today is “We are the journey of our spirit walking the earth”.

I want to start out by talking about the ego. A lot of self-help books want us to believe that our ego is in the way of our spiritual development, and if we would just get rid of it all would be well. But the ego has an important place in our lives. What we really want is a life where ego is in balance with our spirit.
In Grandmother Dreams, the Teachers describe this relationship between the ego and the spirit using a train metaphor. In this train metaphor, our ego is the engine. Our ego is our body, our physical presence––the physical organism that is the vehicle for our time on this planet.
Like a train engine, our body is useless without something energizing it. We see this when a person dies, and only their physical body remains. What animates our body while we are alive is Life Force. This is the energy that animates all living things.

The train, our ego, our physical presence, requires energy to run it. If we allow the ego to choose the type of fuel we will run on, we will end up with an ego-driven life. We will choose things that either give us immediate pleasure or help us to avoid pain. We will use things like alcohol, drugs, food, work, relationships, social media––we will use these things in a way that blocks our connection with our True Self, and limits our connection with Life Force.
The preferred fuel for our physical presence is spirit. We know when we are choosing spiritual fuel because we feel ourselves opening to the larger world, the world that includes the five senses but also goes beyond it. Then we make contact with the realm of spirit. When this happens––in connection with Nature, with ourselves, with others––we feel Life Force in action.
We feel Life Force in action when we marvel at a full moon rising over the Big Lake, or a maple tree in full fall bloom––when we are amazed at the beauty of our planet, and are grateful our opportunity to be a part of it. We feel Life Force in action when we play with children, or sit quietly with them reading books. We are inspired by their Life Force and feeling unconditional love for them. We feel Life Force when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable and accept Love into our lives. This is the job of the ego––to enjoy, in the physical world, the Life Force energy of spirit.

So: We are the journey our spirit walking the earth:
We are a physical body—we are walking the earth.
When we choose to embrace Life Force, it is our spirit that is doing the walking.
And when we lead a spiritually-fed life, we are traveling the journey of our spirit.

When a train engine is running on high-grade fuel, it will travel well along its track. When our body is fueled by Life Force, we will travel well on our Soul Path. We will be traveling along with the Universe as it unfolds.

This is the Purpose of our lives as humans.
We have a specific niche in the Universe. We have a physical body, which makes us capable of feeling and expressing a specific vibration which we know as Love. I’m not talking about little-L love, which is a sentimental state that we refer to when we say “I love baseball” or “I love chocolate”. I’m talking about big-L Love, which describes a state of spiritual connection. It’s the kind of Love that Mother Teresa expressed––it is inclusive, compassionate and unconditional. It’s what we feel when we feel life Force in motion.
We are able to feel and express this Love because we inhabit a physical body. “Feeling” is the sensation of energy moving through us. When the energy moving through us is Love, then Life Force is nurtured. When we practice the energy of Love and share it with those around us, we are manifesting our purpose.

In everything we do, we need to ask: “Is this moving me along my spiritual path”.
We need to ask: “Am I honoring the journey of my spirit walking the earth?”

Thank you.