Britany

Aloha!

So good to be here, and so good to come together with all of you! I am very excited to be a part of this group and to share in the cre­ation com­ing from it. I’d love to share with you some sto­ries about the influ­ences in my life so far.

Reli­gion

My story starts in Utah. I was born into your aver­age LDS (Mor­mon) fam­ily, at least aver­age to me. Chris­tian­ity was the only thing I ever knew, and because Mor­mons believe that their way is the only true path to God, every­thing else must be from another source. I was raised in the church, and to this day I am the only mem­ber of my extended fam­ily ( both sides!) who is not Mor­mon, save one cousin. There are many parts of the LDS reli­gion that I think are absolutely won­der­ful. But from the time I was about four years old I remem­ber hav­ing ques­tions that the reli­gion just couldn’t answer. As I grew into a teenager my depar­ture from the church began. But instead of trust­ing myself I believed that my trial in life was that I didn’t get the same con­fir­ma­tion of the church that every­one around me did, includ­ing my fam­ily, friends and the rest of my com­mu­nity. Although in my late teens I stopped par­tic­i­pat­ing in the church, it took me until my late twen­ties to finally come to terms with the real­ity that Chris­tian­ity was not my path, or trial in life. I was finally able to embrace my truth, which had been with me all along but I had just been too afraid to live it. I love my fam­ily dearly, and when we are together no one pushes the sub­ject much any­more. I believe that my fam­ily wor­ries some­what about my sal­va­tion. How­ever, I believe that we are all head­ing to the same place, but there are many dif­fer­ent ways of get­ting there. I don’t believe that this life is a test. I do believe that it is about cre­at­ing, and adding unto all that is. I don’t believe in Jesus as my sav­ior, but as a mag­nif­i­cent teacher. Instead of envi­sion­ing God as a man or as a Heav­enly father and mother, I believe that God is the whole of every­thing that exists, and I like to use the term Uni­verse a lot in my God vocabulary.

Para­nor­mal

I have always had the abil­ity to see and feel things that oth­ers around me did not. This didn’t hap­pen every day, or even every month, but enough that it affected my every day life. I remem­ber when I was five years old telling my mother about some­thing that I had seen. She lov­ingly told me that i must have been dream­ing it and con­fus­ing it with real­ity, and that I must have a wild imag­i­na­tion, but I knew dif­fer­ently. That was the begin­ning of my think­ing that there must be some­thing wrong with me…

I devel­oped many fears around cer­tain para­nor­mal sub­jects, such as dead peo­ple and aliens and some types of ani­mals. When I saw the movie E.T. it lit­er­ally brought me to my knees in fear. My E.T. fear became quite the joke in my fam­ily. How­ever, to me it was not funny.  That sub­ject was very real. It all sounds very humor­ous as I write this now, but this has always been a big influ­ence in my life. My vision of things stopped around six years old, but the sense of them was still very strong.

As a teenager I began hav­ing dreams that came true.  At first I found it some­what amus­ing, until one day I had a dream that was so shock­ingly real that it changed my life. When I was fif­teen years old I dreamed about the death of a girl that I did not know. The dream was so vivid and real that when I awoke I was in shock from the adren­a­lin in my body. I never for­got the details of that dream. When I was 19 years old that dream became a real­ity, right down to very last detail. I couldn’t believe it. How could I have dreamed about some­thing that would hap­pen four years later? I was at a loss for an answer to this one, but chalked it up to a gift from God to help me deal with the trauma of the event.

Finally in my late twen­ties all of these sub­jects that I had tried to stuff down into the deep­est parts of my being came explod­ing out. I couldn’t deny them any­more. I was sud­denly able to see things again just like I had as a child. My dreams of future began hap­pen­ing every week, and would only be about a week before the actual event. I even expe­ri­enced see­ing pic­tures of words moments before peo­ple would speak them. For the first time in my life I began look­ing up top­ics on the Inter­net that I had expe­ri­enced as a child. To my shock and relief I found that these expe­ri­ences were not unique to me. There were peo­ple all over the world who had expe­ri­enced the same things. I have taken baby steps to try and embrace these parts of myself, and still have ways to go. I would love to be able to get to the point some­day that I will be able to use these abil­i­ties inten­tion­ally, instead of ran­domly. I would like to come together with oth­ers to dis­cuss all of these sub­jects in a pos­i­tive light.

One of my favorite quotes:

“The uni­verse is con­spir­ing in my favor!”  –Abraham-Hicks

Bri­tany Black