People love the healing story of the twelve lights that Bonnie Horrigan shared on my radio show this week, and which I wrote about in my previous article here. I have received lots of email and Facebook messages from people eager to know more.

So I thought I would share a brief account of what we have discovered so far in a group shamanic journey in search of the twelve lights. The explorers were members of an advanced circle I have been leading for many years; we have journeyed on many interesting itineraries together, with the help of focused intention, shamanic drumming, and the extraordinary energy that is generated by a circle of active dreamers who are willing to call on higher powers.

We began by singing an ancient song, a song intended to facilitate direct contact with the sacred guide and healer that was sung in the Asklepian temples of dream healing for a thousand years and is still valid today.

I described Bonnie’s beautiful experience of healing with the guide who turned her lights back on. I suggested we should approach the journey without limiting ourselves to any received energy anatomy. While we might find that the 12 lights are related to the chakras, or the sephiroth on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, or the energy meridians, we did not want to travel with any maps that might limit our ability to see beyond the maps.

We shared very rich experiences. Here is a sampling of the travel reports that our journeyers brought back:

“The lights were swirling, never still, moving around the body.”

“I saw clearly how, when lights go out, holes open in your energy body and you are vulnerable to illness.”

“I saw a brownish, dim light that seemed to be guttering out. A guide appeared to me and said, ‘You don’t need to fix that yourself.’ She placed her hand over the dim light and it flared up, strong and bright. My guide then took me back to my infancy, to a time when I was close to death because of a congenital heart defect. I saw her working to turn up my lights. I heard her say that I would survive because my lights are strong.”

“I saw pairs of lights in the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet.”

“I journeyed inside my body, in search of the lights, and was surprised to find myself in a desert scene, watching patterns rippling in the sand. A crater opened in the sand and a being I saw as the Dragon took me down to a world below. I saw hundreds of raised hands, working on something huge, and realized that these were builders maintaining and reconstructing my body.
“I focused my intention on learning about the lights. A Little Person who has guided me before appeared and told me, ‘Each of us has twelve life stories. We have life and strength as long as the potential of these stories is strong. When the stories die – because we give up on them or because we are truly done with them – we move closer and closer towards death. Our strength depends on how much story potential we are carrying.'”

“I asked a guide, ‘How are my lights?’ I was immediately taken to a dark, murky place where the light was dirty brown. There was a very young boy there eating something. I realized he was eating my light energy in this place inside me. I was shocked when I recognized him as an infant version of my son,  a part of my son that refused to be born and has been inside me since the difficult C-section that got him out.” (We discussed and agreed on a ritual for soul return to get that part of her son where it belongs).

“I was surprised and saddened to find that my heart light was dim because it was shut up inside something like a lantern with sides of smoky glass. I felt my heart-light needs more room and more air, and that the container needs to be cleanse because it has been allowed to become dirty and has suffered from events that burned me emotionally.”

“I am dazzled by an immense light blazing around the head. Below it are many fast-spinning spheres of light. There are more than the conventional seven chakras, and they do not all stay fixed. Their patterns of color and vibration are constantly changing.”

“I kept counting the lights I found, trying to get to the magic number twelve. I was excited, after much searching, to find a light that was carefully hidden. It is associated with the thymus. I also thought of it as Daath on the Kabbalist Tree of Light. It was a deep blue, contained in something like a glass globe. I want to learn how to work with it.”

Just a sampling of first sightings for now. We will go deeper with this in longer shamanic gatherings that I am leading later this month. In the meantime, those twelve lights are spreading hope beyond my circles and my readers. One of my dreamers told me today that she quoted Bonnie’s story at a large meeting of cancer survivors and a despondent elderly man – blind for several years – was immediately wreathed with smiles. He said, “When you spoke of the lights, I felt you had given me my sight back!” He declared he was going to work with the twelve lights in meditation every day.

Stay tuned, and leave your lights on.