Going Within (3 page)

The seminars were continuously productive of in
sights, humor, warmly touching experiences with thousands of people—a constant ebb and flow of energy that was always rewarding. What was most interesting was that I was
never
tired. As a matter of fact, the residue of the weekend-seminar energy stayed with me until Wednesday of each week, whereupon the dissipation left me bereft and I longed for the next weekend to come sooner. A description of the “energy” is difficult. I can only say it had something to do with feeling I was inside a “spiritual, God-source vibration.” I knew we were collectively accessing the spiritual realms when we meditated together, but it was as though we each acknowledged that our guides and teachers were present and helping us in a way more gently powerful than we had previously had the nerve to admit.

Before embarking on the seminars I was concerned about conducting them without benefit of a degree or a license of some kind. There wasn’t much I could do about it, however, because there are no degrees or credentials in spirituality or metaphysics, which is interesting in itself. Actually, some courses in philosophy, physics, mathematics, and transpersonal psychology come close—which is also interesting. I remember how my father talked about discussing “unseen truths” when he was a student and a professor of psychology and philosophy at Johns Hopkins
University. “We all respected traditional education along these lines,” he would say, “but we also
knew
there was something more.”

Just before the seminars began, my father passed on. He had been a teacher all his life. I considered canceling the first few dates but I knew he would have wanted me to carry on.

So I found myself, by no small coincidence, in Virginia Beach, staying in the same hotel to which my father had brought us on vacation during a summer that provided a self-conscious twelve-year-old with a traumatic experience. It had to do with public humiliation.

I was swimming in the Atlantic, having developed a crush on the lifeguard, when a surging wave knocked me over and the top of my two-piece bathing suit came apart and was washed away. I climbed to my knees sputtering but glad to be alive, until I looked down and saw that I was exposed to the lifeguard in all my teenage splendor. I was so embarrassed I wanted to die. He smiled, which made it even worse. I ran back to the hotel. For years, Virginia Beach and a pounding surf were a combination that made me inwardly cringe.

As I stood looking out at the same beach, the same surf, from the same hotel, I realized I would, as an adult, be dealing with the same issue—potential public humiliation.

It was all tied in with my father somehow. He had been an innovative teacher but had also been concerned
with what people thought. In fact, “social appropriateness” had deterred his growth and blunted his courage. I wasn’t going to let that happen to me. I wanted to be myself regardless of what anybody thought. I turned away from the window and went down to the hotel ballroom. The seminar was a great success. All the time, I felt that my father was with me, helping me from the other side as I embarked on a new form of audience participation. There were moments when I felt him guide me as to what to say next, how to make a transition, how to express my thoughts. It was as though, from his vantage point, he now realized there was no point in worrying about what others thought. He was telling me to be true to myself. At the end of the weekend, Virginia Beach was snowed in and as a result no one could get out of town. Mini-seminars sprang up in hallways and restaurants. I stood at my hotel window looking out at the windswept beach where I had been mortified at losing my bathing-suit top. I felt my father beside me. “So much for humiliation,” I said to myself. I felt him nod in agreement.

Each city had its own “feeling,” its own rhythms, its own pace—and its own peculiarities.

In San Diego my own people wouldn’t let me into the ballroom because I wasn’t wearing an ID badge.

In Seattle a woman swooned with ecstasy during a meditation, whereupon one of our Facilitators called
the paramedics, who brought the police. TV cameras were outside waiting for any bit of cosmic scandal, but Midge Costanza, my able administrative assistant, put herself in front of the door and said, “You’ll go in there and ruin the meditation in progress over my dead body.” She didn’t need to die. They left.

In San Francisco we were at the Moscone Center and someone put up flags flying outside that correctly matched the order of the chakra colors we visualized as an exercise. “Cosmic patriotism,” someone said. After the first chanting meditation, my driver, who sat in on the seminar, remarked, “You know, I believe Om is where the heart is.”

I, in the meantime, was experiencing the rigors and discomfort of a temporary bridge that had fallen out of my mouth (times for visits to my dentist were few and far between). A local dentist from San Francisco showed up in my hotel room. He was gay, but was wearing rubber gloves. That night I spoke at an AIDS dinner (trying to hold in my bridge as I spoke), associating and interrelating with many people who were suffering from AIDS. San Francisco provided me with an opportunity to test my own spirituality and trust that there was nothing to fear and that my teeth would stay in besides.

In Boston we had union problems with workers who wouldn’t set up the room in time. They said it shouldn’t matter to us because we could just levitate
through the day. A reporter who was attending from New York City wrote that his experience in connecting with his Higher Self had been intriguing, since it occurred at two-thirty in the afternoon and he hadn’t yet had lunch. His Higher Self turned out to be a thick steak and some french fries.

Along with the other problems we had a group of “Future Citizens of America” in a convention room next to our meditating spiritual seekers. They were young adults (whatever that means) and thought it was amusing to rap on the doors of our ballroom and try to crack our concentration. “We thought you’d be out of your bodies and wouldn’t hear us,” said one future CIA operative. I told him maybe I was out of my body, but he was out of his mind. He ceased and desisted.

In Albuquerque I forgot all my notes. I left them on the airplane. Even though I hadn’t used them, they were there for me to refer to as support and preparation. I panicked and became very depressed until I finally got myself together and realized I must have forgotten them purposely, for a good reason. From then on I worked
entirely
spontaneously and found it a very pleasurable experience and the people responded even more.

In Chicago there were so many people (nearly fifteen hundred) that we couldn’t seat them all in festival fashion on the floor. There was a jovial Bar
Mitzvah going on next door and the celebrating and music filtered through the walls. I didn’t think anything would work. I suggested that everyone go into a meditation and ask for help. The music immediately stopped and somehow there was room for everybody to either sit on the floor or find chairs along walls. Judeo-Christian guidance, you might say.

In Los Angeles there were many journalists attending who were there not for reporting but for personal learning. One of them, from the
Los Angeles Times
, stood up and said, “Since I’ve been working with my higher power I’ve changed my life and my journalistic work has improved.” She added, “So I think newspaper editors would do well to rely more on the Source rather than their sources!” She got a big hand.

New York City (both times) was the most serious and committed group. It was always the largest and the most quiet. Bella Abzug and some of her political staff were there, the press following them around saying, “You believe all this stuff now?” She responded by saying, “Shirley’s my friend and I always consider seriously whatever she does.” Several journalists wrote good, well-informed pieces.

In Dallas something incredible (even from my viewpoint) occurred. The water in the Fairmont Hotel was cut off due to a break in a water main. Water
was gushing out into the street. I suggested to my crowd that we do a meditation visualizing the water backing up so that the workers could find the break. Right after that collective visualization the electric power went out. I had no microphone, the air conditioner shut down, and there were no lights. Since I was running late anyway, I brought that day’s seminar to a close and went outside to see what was wrong. On the street in front of the hotel the workers said, “The strangest thing just happened. The water out here suddenly stopped flowing, then it backed up and flooded the basement of the hotel until it covered the electrical transformer, which caused the power blackout.” I nodded and said it was all too bad. To me this was an example of the power of collective visualization. I was careful, after that, about how I used it.

The following week, in another Los Angeles seminar, every time I came near an elevator the power went out. I kept the crowd waiting fifteen minutes because I couldn’t get into an elevator that worked! I do not know why this happened and continues to happen to me on some level with electrical equipment. In fact, the night I saw
Phantom of the Opera
in London, the chandelier that was supposed to “fall” over the audience and crash onto the stage didn’t work! The manager of the theater said that had never happened before.

On reflection, I think that every time electronic
equipment fails around me it is because I am feeling distorted and out of alignment. I
am
developing my power but I also have a long way to go. Hence, developing one’s inner power requires the responsibility to go all the way. Each of the times electronic equipment became distorted was a time when I felt out of “sync.” I was either anxious or nervous or worried.

In Washington, D.C, I sat in my hotel room with Senator Claiborne Pell (chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee), the Duke of Liechtenstein, Bella Abzug, and several people from Congress as we listened to Whitley Streiber
(Communion)
and Bud Hopkins (The
Intruders)
talk about their experiences with UFOs. Hopkins had brought a girl with him who claimed that she had been impregnated invisibly by an extraterrestrial. She said she had brought the baby to term, only to have it dematerialized by the ETs before she could see it. The doctors were as shocked as she because the fetus
had
been there and disappeared. However, they weren’t as shocked as the politicians listening to the story, who were perhaps beginning to realize that there was an entirely separate reality occurring in America that could somehow impact on the political system. I was amused as we sat there listening to the story of a disappearing fetus. “I wonder how Phyllis Schafly would handle that,” said Bella. She added, “Congress was never like this.”

During the seminars, I was learning to work with my feminine spiritual energy, learning to trust it more than I ever had. And I knew the experience would profoundly affect my approach to my profession as an actress and performer. The feminine energy was that of allowance, trust, and tolerance. I was
letting
myself trust that everything would go well if I just got out of my own way. I consciously caught myself feeling anxiety and stress, and
stopped.
That meant giving up old professional approaches to public appearances. As a result, I had a love affair with the “moment.” I had read so much about living in the moment—appreciating the NOW. I finally challenged myself to understand what that was all about. And I loved it. Life itself was all about NOW, I came to realize, not about the past or future. If I worried about what I might have done in the past, or what I might do in the future, the NOW suffered. So I set about expanding my concept and boundaries of NOW. Because of that perspective, I never got tired. Exhaustion was foreign to me. I could have gone on for hours. Of course I loved the material and never lost interest in it, because of the deep concentration on what was happening in the moment and because it was such a loving involvement. Many business executives told me that their therapists had encouraged them to attend because meditation itself was so helpful in reducing stress in their lives. Allowing themselves
the fulfillment of the moment helped them to relax and become more productive.