Alan Seale is a highly sought after leadership and transformation coach. He has led workshops and keynote presentations at the Kripalu Center in Lenox, MA; the International Coach Federation annual conference in St. Louis, MO; the South Bay Organizational Development Network in Silicon Valley, CA; and similar events nationally. He is the author of Intuitive Living and Soul Vision;Life Mission. He lives in Rochester, New York.

CHAPTER 1

Finding the Path

Welcome to this wondrous journey into you. Me, you might ask? Yes, you. For ifyou want to find Spirit, if you want to find God, if you want to know Love andhow this marvelous universe works, you must take the journey into you. As youdo, you will begin to uncover extraordinary parts of you that you never knewwere there. And you will come to much more profound understandings about partsyou thought you already knew very well. The deeper you go in spiritual self-discovery,the higher you can fly in conscious awareness of all that surroundsyou, seen and unseen, heard and unheard, known and unknown, thought andunthought. Sounds simple? It is. Sounds difficult? It is.

For now, welcome to the path—your path. It belongs to no one but you. Sometimesit will feel like you are creating it as you go, and other times it will appearto have been created for you. This is the mystical path, plain and simple— apath of co-creation, serendipity, miracles, and day-to-day, moment-tomomenthuman experience.

We all have experiences of Spirit and intuition in our own way. There is nosingle way. What is important is that people who so desire find their way, findtheir own sense of spirituality and its unfolding journey, and come to knowtheir own intuitive process, their own sense of Love and its movement throughtheir lives. This book is a result of my own spiritual and mystical journey todate. It has been a journey of awakening to the essence of who I am and thetruth that is me, leading to the constant and powerful presence of intuitiveunderstanding—profound communication with myself and with Spirit.

The words on these pages and the ideas they present all have come from someaspect of "doing the work"—daily meditation, Spirit Circles, teaching classesand workshops, clairvoyant counseling sessions and readings with individualclients, long and solitary drives from my country house to my city office andstudio, walking the earth, and living with and in Spirit. What I want to sharewith you is the richness of life that can come from developing your intuitivegifts through a more acute awareness of Spirit, a process that involvesself-discovery and leads to self-empowerment. This journey moves far beyond thefascination level of "psychic phenomena" and enters the domain of the soul.Developing intuitive gifts is an in-depth process of journeying to the core ofyour being and removing any and all obstacles that might separate you from thefullness of Love. The more we work through and let go of our own excess baggage,the clearer and brighter the soul shines out, and the easier it is for us simplyto become one with Spirit, the Universal Mind or God-force, granting access toall of the knowledge and wisdom that is there for us.

I certainly can't say that my journey with Spirit has been without doubt,skepticism, frustration, or conflict; but I must also say that I can't imaginenot taking the journey. From my earliest years, I was a child of curiosity andvision, always seeking the next step, the next place to go in order to perfect askill or to find out who I really was. Growing up in Kentucky and Indiana, Ifollowed my father through many of his daily activities as a Protestantminister. As active as I was in all the church affairs, I found myself searchingfor more. I knew that there had to be a bigger picture. It wasn't until manyyears later that I would begin to see into the other realms of possibilities.

My conscious awakening began in the early 1980s. I had completed graduatedegrees in church music and voice performance, joined the voice faculty of awell-known college conservatory, and had begun serving as organist andchoirmaster in a church. As I taught singers and dealt with some of my ownpersonal issues, I began to realize that I was embarking on a journey thatperhaps not everyone was actively pursuing. I realized that I was searchingdeeper inside myself and striving harder for an understanding about life and itsmysteries than most people I knew. I began seeing many parallels between thefreedom of singing and the freedom of life; yet I was still trapped within theconfines of a former belief system.

Over the next several years, I began reading books, practicing meditation, andtaking classes and workshops. I began to embrace the possibilities of otherrealms of awareness, and of the validity of experiences which had no rationalexplanation. As my daily meditation practice developed, I began to feel asthough somehow I was being "taught." I would perceive thoughts or understandconcepts that I had never considered or understood before. I received a lot ofguidance for helping a friend, Mac, who had recently been diagnosed with AIDS.Spirit helped me understand the powerful spiritual healing that was occurring inthe midst of Mac's debilitating illness. For many years he had been a very angryman. Through his illness he was able to let go of his anger, so that when deathcame two years later, he was a very peaceful man. Walking that difficult dailypath with Mac was much easier with the guidance and insight from Spirit. As wesat and talked and struggled with his anger, fear, depression, and sadness, Iwould often think, "How can I possibly help him—I have no words or answers." Andthen Spirit would give me the words or lead me to a deeper place of compassionfrom which to listen.

As time went on, I began to understand the unfolding of my own life from a muchlarger perspective. It was as if...