© by Elisabeth Hallett
Angels We Have Met Within
by Elisabeth Hallett
It is a beautiful summer morning. Sheltered by oak and cedar trees, a circle of
women sit quietly on the grass. They have been together for three days on this
mountain ranch, relaxing and enjoying each other's company in a women's
retreat. Today they are gathered for a workshop called "Talking With Your
Angels."
The teacher steps forward, a woman with smiling eyes. Praying for each member of the group, she asks the angels to come and give them the messages they need. She burns sweet sage and calls in the six directions, honoring the powers of spirit and nature. Speaking softly now, she begins to guide the women into a meditation. "Imagine that you are surrounded with a beautiful light, protected and safe. Feel yourself resting securely on the warm ground, and bring the energy of the earth up into your body. Above your head, a golden light is pouring down on you. Invite the gold light into yourself..."
A soft breeze plays over the peaceful faces. One woman, Jane, feels herself slipping into a light sleep. Her busy life as a career woman freelancing in the television field seems far away, as the instructions ripple on. Never a meditator, Jane has been drawn to this workshop mainly because the teacher is a friend. Deeply relaxed, some part of her mind still listens to the familiar voice. "Call your angel to come and be with you," the teacher is saying, "and when you meet your angel, ask for a healing message that you might need at this time in your life."
Jane wakes up, and with eyes still closed she gazes almost in shock at the clear form of an angel within her mind's eye. As she watches, the vision changes, portraying different angelic forms, from a classical Victorian angel to a Christmas angel and still others, finally becoming an image that stays longer. A beautiful angel with long, flowing hair holds a basket in the crook of one arm. And in the basket is a baby.
After the meditation, the women take turns sharing their experiences. When Jane describes her vision, the woman beside her exclaims, "You're going to have a baby! I knew it when you sat down next to me!" "Ah, no," says Jane. "I don't think so." She becomes quiet, pondering the event. She knows she is not pregnant. In fact, she believes she will never be able to have a child.
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Jane: "I tried many years ago to conceive a child with my fiancé. I even went on fertility drugs but I could not get pregnant, so I gave up. That relationship ended - thank God I did not conceive! I met my husband three or four years later. When we married, I told him that I probably could not have children. I did not want to go through the heartbreak of trying again and not being successful, so I convinced both of us that we did not want or need children in our relationship. He accepted it, but was a little sad."
It was around the time of her first wedding anniversary that Jane attended the women's retreat. Meeting her "angel within" was startling enough, but another surprise soon followed. She recalls, "At the end of the workshop, the teacher had 'Angel Cards' spread out on a blanket for each of us to take. These are miniature cards with words on them like Peace, Love, Forgiveness, and other virtues. They were upside down so we could not see what word we were choosing. All the women were reaching for cards and I just waited till everyone cleared out. I saw a card by itself and decided that if no one chose it, that was mine. Well, no one took it so I picked it up and turned it over expecting to see a word like those I mentioned.
"My card had the word 'Birth' on it. That gave me a huge adrenaline rush! I almost started to cry because the whole experience was a little too weird for me."
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At the time Jane entered the "angel meditation," she believed herself to be infertile. The vision of angel and baby was like a gentle knock on that closed door in her mind. Was it a knock from within, from her inner wisdom? Or from beyond herself? This is the kind of experience where we cannot really say that a message has come from the child-to-be or from a guardian spirit; but something profound has happened. Something has opened a way between the worlds and brought the child-to-be into the mother's awareness.
Once tuned to the presence of a child, that awareness is so powerful. A startling example of its power is recorded in David Chamberlain's book, The Mind of Your Newborn Baby. Twenty-six pregnant women were taught an hypnotic technique called "ideomotor signaling," which allows a person to access the unconscious mind by answering questions with simple finger signals. Asked about the gender of their unborn baby, twenty-five of the women identified it correctly, before any "external" information was available. In the one case where the mother seemed to be mistaken according to the ultrasound, it turned out at the birth that her response had been right, while the ultrasound reading was false!
Driving home from the retreat, Jane couldn't get the uncanny experience out of her mind. "I picked up the card again while driving, thinking, 'Birth can mean a lot of things, birth of a project, a spiritual birth...' I looked more closely at it and next to the word 'Birth' was a picture of an angel (as on all the cards), and this angel was holding a baby, just like in my vision.
"I got home and told my husband all about it. We both kind of went, 'Oooh, spooky!' and agreed that if I got pregnant in the next year it would be too weird. Well, you guessed it, but it happened in only three months! According to our calculations, our daughter was conceived on Christmas Day! We now have a beautiful, healthy, ten month old baby named Bryn Evelyn. My husband and I always joke about how her birth was announced to us by an angel."
We know so much more than we realize. Perhaps the "angels that we meet within" are the messengers of our own deep knowing. Or perhaps they are something more? Says Jane of her own angel encounter, "It was definitely a powerful affirmation to me that there are other forces at work out there..."
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Special thanks to Jane Richmond and Jane Owen, respectively the teacher and the mother-to-be.
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