ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jo Ann Levitt, author of ‘Channeling the Sacred: Activating your Connection to Source’ is a longtime spiritual counselor and teacher. In her most recent book, she sheds new light on the ancient spiritual practice of channeling. As a prolific author, Jo Ann was a senior Kripalu faculty member for thirty years and continues to teach meditation and provide spiritual counseling. She is a licensed RN and as well as a Healing Touch practitioner. Over her years of channeled writing and spiritual practice, Jo Ann has learned that each of us is meant to be partnering with Spirit and participating in the co-creation of new and beautiful works for the benefit of humanity. Jo Ann considers herself one vehicle among many, as the work of co-creation is eternal and continually evolving.
CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
Visit Jo Ann Levitt online! – joannlevitt.com
ABOUT THE BOOK:
More and more, people are searching for ways to explore their knowledge of the Divine. ‘Channeling the Sacred: Activating your Connection to Source’ is a step-by-step guide designed to engage and deepen your relationship with Source. Along with a number of gifted mediums and channels, Jo Ann Levitt introduces a variety of methods and exercises that inspire readers to discover the delight of channeling and the power of their own transcendental experiences. As a formal introduction to channeling and a practical guide for those who want to deepen their practice, this book helps you to cultivate your connection to the Divine, while tapping into your infinite wisdom and endless creative capacity.
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Full Transcript
Michelle
Hello and welcome. Thank you so much for joining me. I am Michelle Vandepas, you host, and with me today is Jo Ann Levitt. Who has this great new book, Chanelling the Sacred. I love this cover. It’s just beautiful. Welcome to the show. I’m so excited to dive deep.
Jo Ann
Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me here, Michelle.
Michelle
Yeah, so this is not your first book, but we’re going to dig into this one. Let’s start with just the word Chanelling the Sacred. So channeling. I’ve been in in sort of that world for a long time. But even to me, it sounds real woowoo and mystical. So and you’re you’re a nurse, right by training. So you got the science side. So talk to me about the, you know, what is channeling, really.
Jo Ann
So channeling is something that we all do, and we’re not we don’t recognize that we’re doing it. It is our capacity to access information, understanding, intuitions, light, knowledge, from the Divine, from all that is around us and within us. But that we often forget or hesitate to tune into, we all have access to a much deeper state of knowing. And that’s what channeling is.
Michelle
So when you say channeling, you’re not necessarily talking about the type of channeling that we have heard about for years were even in the 1800s the eyes roll back in their head and you go into a trance, and there’s a whole nother entity that comes through you or are you talking about that?
Jo Ann
Well, I would say both. And that is a subset of channeling. Not given to all of us, I certainly don’t channel with my eyes rolling around. But channeling is any kind of access that we have. So someone deep in prayer, deep in meditation, someone cooking an amazing meal, someone designing a composing a piece of music, they’re all channeling, if you understand channeling to be more of a co creative event, a partnership, then we’re all doing it, you do it too. You do it, Michelle in terms of your access to your own excellence to your own knowledge, you partner, but it just may not be so much of a conscious or deliberate effort. And yet you are constantly bringing in information that’s new, and important for us to have. Thank goodness.
Michelle
It feels it feels to me, what you’re talking about is maybe when I feel real in the flow creatively.
Jo Ann
Yes, that is very much what’s going on. And so in a sense, then your ego, your the limitations of your own mind and knowing are temporarily set aside. Because you have the ability to open to and receive a much greater download of information from the universe.
Michelle
Okay, so if we set aside the word channeling for just a minute, it’s, you know, it’s the title of your book. So we’ll come back to it, but for just a minute, and I’m thinking about myself, being in the flow with a creative project, say writing and it’s just like coming through me, right? We all feel that sometimes. And you say, we all have access to it, well, then what happens when we don’t have access to it? Like, it feels like we can’t get in that flow, right?
Jo Ann
Happens to all of us, myself included. If I wake up on the wrong side of the bed, I know this is not going to be a day for me to write a good chapter, I better go out and take a walk or take out the trash. So you know
Michelle
I love that answer, that’s so grounded, go take out the trash, right?
Jo Ann
But you see, we move through different layers of consciousness. If you understand that, when you’re really high energy, like if you’ve been out jogging, or if you’ve just been an amazing conversation with your beloved. You’re in a high energetic space. That’s when you’re channeling you’re receiving from all different parts, not just Earth, but all over the whole universe is like a big radio station we can tune if we know how to turn the dial.
Michelle
It’s so hot. So when we’re in that space where we got off the wrong side of the bed or whatever, we’ve taken out the trash. How do we get back into that dial? How do we what do we need to do?
Jo Ann
So there’s a couple of things one is to establish a deeper focus If so that would come through a meditative practice or yoga or Qigong, or being out in nature, something that helps you tune in, in a more narrow way. Although I say narrow, it’s actually opening, to receive more. But first we have to focus in and concentrate, and let go of little distractions and things we tell ourselves or a little low energy. Really, to make this very simple. It’s a question of your energy level, low energy, hard to get out of bed, hard to channel or attune. attune is a good word, high energy, easy to get out of bed, easy to do stuff and easy to attune, or channel to what’s waiting to come to you. Because you see,
Michelle
Ooh, that’s really good. That’s really good. I want to say that, what’s waiting to come to you.
Jo Ann
Because you see, if I say to you, we’re in divine partnership, then you have to understand that as we are beings of light, but we’re in a body, but there are lots of beings and light guides, whatever you want to call them, who work with us, at the level of being unseen and yet tapped in. And so they they partner with us, that’s part of their job, we’ve got our job on Earth, but they got a job. They have their own job descriptions, and that’s because they love to help us access and bring here new knowledge new understanding new life.
Michelle
Alright, Joanne, that just begs the next question, who is they?
Jo Ann
Well, it’s different for different of us. You know, you have your own guardian angels guides, or those who may speak to you in dreams or meditation or through the process of writing or creating is how they often come through. And then there’s some famous ones like Jesus, Mother Mary, Muhammad, it depends on your persuasion, but they’re all there, if you understand that they didn’t just pass on and pass into oblivion, but passed on into a higher realm, which is still accessible to us. Because as humans, we have the capacity to move through multiple layers, or dimensions, as they’re called. You’ve heard of three dimensions. We live in a three dimensional world. Okay, a child tries to put it on paper, that’s only two dimensions. But in physical form, were three, but there’s four, five, six, 20, 30. And we have the capacity, when we’re calm, when we’re quiet when we’re focused, to access many different realms.
Michelle
I love how you say it could be like guardian angels, or whatever. It doesn’t have to be like this big spirit in the sky that we’re dating, though. So that that sort of makes me also think that that’s what we sometimes think of as our muse.
Jo Ann
Yes, Muse is an excellent, beautiful word to describe.
Michelle
And that’s a lot less scary than channeling.
Jo Ann
Right. And the Muse capacity to be amusing.
Michelle
Right, doesn’t have to be so serious all the time. Right. Right. So in reading your book, which is great again, I’m gonna hold it up again channeling the say, Great, there we go. Available on Amazon, everywhere books are sold. You talk. So you have other guests in here talking about channeling and one of the words that came up for me was Claire cognizant. Can you so why would that
Jo Ann
HR shout so the word Claire just means clear. Okay. So if you put together with cognizance of someone who’s clear, cognizant, has thoughts or downloads of thought that come to them concepts, understandings, now under No, no, that these are slight gradations. Because someone who say Claire audience hears things. I’m very often clairaudient. I tell a brief story in the book about how when I was doing energy work on a woman, yeah, I suddenly heard a voice saying, Tell her to sing. Right? I thought, what is that? Are you serious? Tell her to sing. And so at the end of a meditative session, I approached the woman and said, Here is the information. I don’t know where it’s coming from. What I was told to tell you to sing, at which point she set up and she said, Who told you that? I said, I just heard it in meditation. She said, That’s my sister. During my, gone, and she, she wants me to keep singing, but I stopped when she died. It turns out she was an opera singer did go back and begin to sing again after her sister got the message through. So that’s clear audience. But it’s also Claire cognizant, because it’s a thought process. Someone who’s Claire’s sentient, gets feelings, sensations of feeling like like,
Michelle
oh, it’s creepy in here, or it feels really good in here, those kinds of breaths.
Jo Ann
And then of course, the most common is clairvoyant. And voient comes from wire, which is to see. So someone clairvoyant, has the ability to see sometimes into the future. Mostly that but sometimes clairvoyance can just see things that have happened are about to happen, or might happen if you’re not careful. So, but all of these blend into the Claire the capacity of receiving clear insight in information, which is not a part of our normal machinery, like I don’t go around thinking about people should be singing, you know, as a thought process as an understanding.
Michelle
Right. Right. So it sounds like from what you just said, you, you’re your first way to bring in or maybe your preferred ways audio, but you also have access to all the other ways. Yes, that when I heard you say, because so my preferred way is I get like, mine dumps of information.
Jo Ann
So that will be clear, cognizant. Okay. But then
Michelle
sometimes I’ll walk in the room or, or talk with someone else, because something’s kind of off
Jo Ann
clairsentient. And like I said, there’s a blending. It’s not it’s one thing, although some of this, the channels that I know, like, like Jan, Dr. Jen Seward likes to, she likes to define herself very specifically, because she really does receive packets of information. So she calls herself Claire cognizant. But she’s Claire everything.
Michelle
Right? And so what’s the difference between this and intuition?
Jo Ann
Good question. So they’re really just gradations. They’re not differences. It’s just you get a good quick intuition. And sometimes that intuition can be great. Like, back when, in the spring, when I was still working Gen. Since I wasn’t booked at work that I needed to leave right away and go home. What’s up with that? What’s the rush, I left, I got home. And no sooner did I walk in the door, there was this enormous downpour. And it didn’t stop raining for like two or three hours. Wow. That’s an intuition. And that’s a little piece of information that lands for us. Because we are tuned in to different levels, that tells us do this, or go that way. But instead of going the normal route, you get the idea you should go this route. And then you discover there was a traffic jam, or there was an airplane crash or something. We get intuitions all the time, there are little bundles of information. But when we channel we actively begin to open the pathway or the portal to receive information in a more conscious and continuous fashion. But they’re basically part of the same process.
Michelle
So I just have to ask you this because to me, it’s I get information downloads, right? So someone will come to me about a book idea or business idea. And I’m like, Okay, I got it. It’s like, okay, I got the answer. But if you tell me, I should have gone, you know, My intuition tells me to go this way on the road instead of that way. I always get that after the fact, like, oh, I had that thought. What I knew it should have gone the other way. It’s always that I knew I should have gone the other way. I knew I should have taken the other car. I knew I shouldn’t have gone into this restaurant tonight. But it’s always after the fact right?
Jo Ann
Well, but you have the knowing before the fact is, it’s just a question of, of honoring that and beginning to listen more for it’s it’s a question of paying attention and trust when you get those instincts or those those little messages that there’s a reason for them and that you’re actually already tuned in to greater understanding. But then we just, you know, we’re creatures of habit. So we follow the pathway. We’re used to following ah, it’s easier to go there. Forget it.
Michelle
I think I just don’t recognize the thought. And I think I’m not alone in this right. I don’t recognize the thought because I haven’t slowed down enough to hear all my own thoughts because my brain is like, right.
Jo Ann
Well, that’s something interesting that you said slowing down. Yeah, I think that’s critical to the process, whether it’s intuitive, or channeled or simply attuning to different sources of information, we’ve got to slow down. And it’s a kind of a paradox, we’re slowing down, we’re slowing our breath, we’re slowing our focus of attention. We’re tuning in. But when we slow the works that are going on here, our vibration lifts, so we’re getting a higher vibration, which means we access information more readily, more easily. And the more we do that, it becomes a practice. That’s why they talk about yoga practice or meditation practice is something that as you do, and you do more and more, you see the efficacy, you see the power of the attunement, you see how it’s basically guiding you to more Optimal Living to better choices. So it’s worth the effort. You’d have to channel a book, just channel into your own your own news report.
Michelle
Yeah, right, right. You’re gonna get out of the rain or connect with your own muse. I really liked the idea of channeling the sacred. There’s something very yummy about that word about channeling the sacred like we can bring that in. It feels very nurturing and loving to me, like sacred is a beautiful word. So how did you come up with that title? And how how do you view channeling the sacred? What does that mean to you?
Jo Ann
It’s a great series of questions. Yeah. So I have to say that the title itself was really not my thought the title itself got channeled to me. But you have to understand that I had been, I had been working in that domain for a couple years, in a sense, developing my own capacity to listen, and my own capacity to receive. So when I was in southern France, I was attending a series of retreats workshops, and made it mostly meditation where we, in fact, channeled. But it was not consciously laid out, this is what you’re doing. But we began receiving information. And so that was when I channeled a book, which was a gospel, a more updated version of a gospel. And where I became more familiar with, wow, I can receive I never thought that me, you know, who am I, okay, I’m a writer, but to receive sacred information or information channeled from guides that we might consider, holy, holier than us. That was a revelation truly, for me. But then I began to understand as I received this information, it wasn’t just make me special. It’s because we are all special. And because we can tap into this, though, it takes some discipline, it takes quieting down, and it takes becoming a readiness to receive other than our normal thought process, which is very belaboured. I think one time I heard a social researcher say that most of us had no more than say, I don’t know what it was 500 different thoughts that we repeated over and over in different variations, that our thought process was fairly contained. But to channel we have to step out of the 500 or so whatever the number is, and be ready to receive information unexpected or lofty or different from our usual meanderings?
Michelle
And that’s often how, you know, brilliant ideas come in. Exactly right. Like, sure. Steven Jobs was just channeling, right.
Jo Ann
I’m so and so was Mozart and all the greats. You know, they they were able because of their great love of the material of their own profession, great love and willingness and desire to develop that that material further. That was what helped them to receive information from the guides. Going back to what I said to you earlier, which is, this is a co creative process. Yeah, it’s a partnership. So we got plenty of partners, we just don’t know where they are. Maybe you and I should start a dating agency. not romantic, but dating your guidance part.
Michelle
Right? Well sounds like something you can help people tune into for sure. Yeah. You got some other people in the book, right. And I forgot how many I was gonna look up before we talked, but there’s
Jo Ann
seven others.
Michelle
Thank you seven. Thank you. Talk to me about how you chose these people and their experience and so forth.
Jo Ann
I think the number one prerequisite for me was that I myself had been in their presence on the receiving end of their own channeling like my friend, Dr. Suzanne Dewees. Florida is a healer and a psychic and medium. So she is one of those channels, who does bring in information from ancestors from those who’ve passed. And I found her, you know, her readings for me to be very powerful, they helped me move in different directions. In my life experience, Dr. Jen seaward is also an astrologer, but not the ordinary kind, when she looks at the configuration of your birth chart, the planets and so forth, she can give you sort of amazing readings about your spiritual direction, based on what she receives from you. And from the information on your chart. Marty Benjamin is an acupuncturist. And when he worked with me, I thought, wow, he’s doing way more than acupuncture. In fact, we never even put one needle in. Because when I went to see him, he helped me move through some difficult challenges in relationship. And that was through a process of tapping and accessing information, through working with his guides me and mine was so it’s an interesting little party that we go to when we work with these channels.
Michelle
I think there is something to be said that for people who are highly gifted in their area of expertise, whether you’re a healer or a writer, I think there is something to be said for you’re, you’re very connected to that other realm where you are guided to be excellent. Oops, excuse me, turn off that. Phone, they’re weird. This one’s turned off, I will pause the video, okay. So when you are really gifted, you can totally just channel in. In it, maybe in a more flowing way is a good way to put it right, if you’re a healer or a writer, and it looks like oh, this person is highly gifted, because they’re so good at what they do. But it is probably because they’re connecting with that other piece that may be a guide or another piece of themselves or their muse or whatever you want to call it.
Jo Ann
And it happens through energy and through light. Because you see we are light beings and we receive information very often in light in packets of light. That’s how it comes through to us. But we ourselves channel or shall we say we’re, we’re like radio receivers we receive and we transmit out, we translate whatever the message that has come through in the light. But that’s the medium through which we are deeply connected to all parts of the universe. So when we do a spiritual practice, whatever it is breathwork yoga, meditation, we’re opening ourselves to be present to and to receive more light. And that is also synonymous with the ability to connect to channel.
Michelle
That’s beautiful. It’s just beautiful. Thank you. So the book is channeling the sacred Joanne love it and you have a website. Tell me your website again.
Jo Ann
It’s joy levitt.com
Michelle
Okay, and that’s with two T’s love it at the end. You can get this book at amazon you can go to Grace point publishing and get the book or anywhere books are sold any bookstore. Just ask for it should be available. And any last words to leave more audience with?
Jo Ann
Well, I would say take take it on. Even if you are skeptical, the best way to deal with skepticism is to have your own experience. Because as long as you’re hearing it from me who am I, but when you hear it from within yourself and you recognize, Whoa, where did that come from? All of a sudden, it becomes tangible and real. And you you realize you you have so much more available to you to receive, to learn to understand in relationships, about your health, about your own work or enterprise. There’s so much more to have and hold. It’s very powerful practice. And I’m grateful to have been able to receive and develop it myself. So thank you for this time. Thank you.
Michelle
Beautiful. Thank you so much for being with us here today. And I wish you lots of blessings on your own journey.
Jo Ann
Thank you, Michelle. Same for you.