Welcome to the Otherworld Patreon. This is a bonus episode that comes from a woman named Liz. After finishing college, Liz decided to take some time to go backpacking across the United States while doing something called WOOFing. WOOFing is an acronym that stands for Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms. Doing this, you essentially get to work on organic farms across the country in exchange for meals, free lodging, and a chance to learn farming skills. She ended up doing this for about two years, and during that time, she landed in Boulder, Colorado. While she was in Boulder, she decided to take some classes at a psychic school that was in the area. And although she learned some interesting techniques at the school, that's not where her experience takes place. That actually comes after the two-year journey while staying with some friends in upstate New York. That's when her roommate asked if she wanted to try a healing meditation with him. This was a pretty simple meditation that they were doing for fun, very casual, but she ended up having a very unusual experience that led to even more strange occurrences. By the way, for anyone who is unfamiliar with simple guided meditations like this, I just say usually the best case scenario is that you feel a sense of calm and relaxation. Maybe time might jump by quickly the same way it does when you take a nap. That's the best case scenario. and for many, including myself, you might find yourself struggling to sit still and focus, feeling the time go by very slowly while your mind darts around to all the errands you have to run later and the other pointless noise that bounces around in your mind all day on a daily basis. That is all to say that most of the time, nothing extreme happens. That is all to say that what Liz ends up experiencing during this simple guided meditation is highly unusual, which is why I find it so interesting. I think you're going to like this one. It also has many similarities to the episode that is coming out on Monday, so I thought it would be fun to put these out back to back. This is a short preview. If you want to hear the full episode, it's up now at patreon.com slash otherworld. This episode is called I'm Here For You, and you're listening to the Otherworld Patreon. My name is Liz. I'm 35. I live in the Hudson Valley, New York, and I currently work in finance, in civil service local government At the time of this story I was in a very different part of my life coming off of living out in the woods and working on like farming and permaculture Right after college, I was really inspired by the movie Into the Wild to take my backpack and go out into like the wilderness of the West, basically. And I went to Colorado and California with just my backpack. And I went to different farms or like off-grid permaculture communities at first, woofing a worldwide opportunity for organic farmers or on organic farms. And so I was like woofing for a little bit. And my goal was to help the environment and to become as sustainable as possible. I ended up also finding that like Buddhist retreat centers or like yoga ashrams were some of the places that would have a little garden that need attended. And so they would let you stay there and sort of do like a live work experience. So I had gone into that, into the wild experience with certain ideas in mind. And then once I was in the wilderness. I definitely learned a lot of lessons, some more tough than others, but anyone who's kind of like hoofed it in that way, I feel like could relate. I bit off a bit more than I could chew and I learned a lot along the way. And I found myself wanting to live like back in society. I had found that living in the middle of nowhere and learning how to like just feed myself through like permaculture and farming was great and cool. Like there were all these little communities, but I felt like I wasn't helping like other people in the city or like in society. So I was just starting to feel differently about all this. And I, through learning meditation, um, at some of these like, um, retreat centers where basically like you could work and then learn through them or do like a teacher training or anything like that. Um, I was like, okay, I'm kind of interested in this stuff. So I definitely want to pursue this. But I also kind of want to just get back to like a town with people and be like around people again. So I moved to Boulder and I started working at a restaurant and I was like, okay, I kind of thought that maybe I was going to go off grid. But I didn't. I came back like two years later. And that's when I found the Boulder Psychic Institute, which basically had like a sign out front. It said like free readings every Thursday, come on in. So I went in. Basically we would take classes, the students that were in this introduction classes, and it felt like we had all had psychic experiences, like when we were little or like even just some people had like one experience and came there because we were always curious about it and like wanted to know like what would it be to sort of hone your psychic skills which is sort of how they marketed it at the time and it was also very focused on like healing like doing like energy healing sort of similar to Reiki but we had all come there feeling like kind of weirdos who had had experiences or like were always told that we were intuitive or had ESP, but didn't know what to do with it. And suddenly we had these teachers that were like very grounded and not dogmatic or religious or anything. And we're just like, yeah, of course, you've had psychic experiences. Of course you can. Of course you can pick up on when someone's thinking, it's no big deal. And here's some meditation techniques to help you continue to do that. So I really liked that approach and everyone just felt very like comfortable and it was very validating experience because we would sit there and do visualizations. So basically they'd be like, visualize your aura three feet around you, visualize a grounding cord so you're connected to the center of the earth and all these other little tidbits. and it's all started with like yourself, like reading yourself and healing yourself and all that kind of stuff. But then we would start to read students, fellow students. And then that led to reading Strangers Off the Street when they did like the Thursday night free readings. And when it came to like reading other students and then especially reading Strangers, I had the experience and I know other students had it as well of seeing something or knowing something that made no sense to me as I was like reading this person in front of me. And then I would say it and I'd be like, I don't really know what this means, but I would say it. And the person would be like, oh my God, how do you know that? And that was such a cool experience to then be like, yeah, like this can be real. Like, why not? You know? So they would do a reading with like everyone in the room and they would choose. The teachers would like be choosing psychically. So you'd see them kind of like look at a student and then look at someone who was sitting in the queue. So they chose someone and then brought them over to a chair that was in front of me. And I had the option. They didn't, you know, say you had to do it anyway. I had the option to move all around the chair, But there were multiple chairs in the room. So there was multiple readings happening at the same time. This woman was sitting in front of me and I started the reading. And we would always start it by doing like three different things. We would ground the person. So imagine that there was like a grounding cord at the bottom of their aura, which is like three feet around them, connected to the center of the earth and then look at their aura and see if we noticed anything and then ask that aura to clear and anything like in their energy space or their body to just like clear out and so they can be grounded to the center of the earth and then we would imagine that we were filling them with some kind of intention through this I forget what it was called but it would like imagine like a sun right above their head that could radiate like light like healing energy down to them So you know we would ask what their intention was we would do that and then we would start to do the reading I liked the method of reading people by imagining that there was a movie screen in front of me in my mind eye and just asking it to show me images And that's what I was like learning and just practicing at the time. and so I did that and immediately on the screen of my mind I saw three colors and I remember just thinking these three colors it was green red and blue and I didn't see them in like a flag shape or anything I just saw the three colors green red and blue this is what's coming up for her reading green, red, and blue. And then immediately after that, I saw the image of an orangutan. And it was all like on this white screen. It wasn't like I was seeing a movie of like an orangutan or anything like that. It was like these three colors and an orangutan. And I remember in this experience when I saw those three colors thinking, what does that mean? Like, is that like chakras or should I like try and fill it in with some kind of meaning? Like, why am I just seeing these three colors? That's not like a story or that's not like a message that I can give someone. You know, I felt a little like this can't mean anything. Like I did feel a little embarrassed or uncertain. in. And then with the orangutan, I thought, oh, okay, like maybe that does mean something to her. And there's like no way for me to know. Let me just go ahead and tell her what I'm seeing. And I told her the three colors and that I was also seeing an orangutan. I told her like those two together and she immediately broke down crying and was like, oh my gosh, like that's, Those are the colors of the flag of the province that I'm from in Indonesia. And she said that she used to like work with orangutan conservation. And I thought, whoa, that's wild because I was thinking these three colors mean nothing, you know. Or I was thinking that I had to fill them in with some kind of meaning and like have more of a story or like a message to give her. But that within itself was the message she needed. She was homesick. It made her think of home. It was validating for her that this stranger just off the street was like, hey, home, like think of home, you know? And so that was one of many experiences where I would receive a message that seemingly I couldn't understand what it meant or why it was coming up. but it wasn't really for me to understand because then when I would say it to the person they would say oh my gosh how did you know that that means xyz that reminds me of this person I think you're talking about this you know like they would have their meaning to it so it helped me get confident in just reading what I was seeing and not questioning it
