evening called what is spirituality and we have a lovely panel here of women brenda  so we're going to go i'm going to go ahead and give the microphone to brenda asked arena when she's going to talk about what is spirituality and we'll be asking questions as well thank you but everyone now is more open to spirituality talking about it from a level approach so i'm happy to be here to speak to that topic spirituality is an interesting topic visionar in the recent past have often been discussed especially those who've been nominated for sainthood or who became saints recently visionary is more an economic term who has the vision of a way to come up with a better way to be the global leader or to make the highest profit for their companies so i think our terms are changing or we need to be aware of how terms are being used recently on the internet it was spoken that it was stated that religion needs to redefine its roles with humanity because everything is changing because the scientific paradigm is changing this is another aspect of how we as humanity may want to look at what values we are holding and what values we want to go forth with  the rest of this millennia as far as developing values for our children for our communities cetera historically in the last few hundred years many of the people who were labeled spiritual labelled spiritual were often the ones who were in convents or monasteries and those people were either recognized as far as their contribution in some way and made a part of the religious system or they were exterminated and sometimes labeled as things later on or forgotten about one example would be the man who became st francis of assissi was being come becoming remailing for his skills and abilities that healing and talking to animals there was another person who was doing the exact same thing but he was not fitting into the contemporary paradigm for those times and he and his followers didn't stay around for very long so we now have a growth in spirituality and where do we fit our views of spirituality what does this mean to us and what does this mean in the future and in very ancient times prehistory like i'm talking five to ten thousand years ago there were very specific schools called mystery schools and as those were either went by the wayside or were pushed out by a new paradigm of a ladder of power  those values went by the wayside and those values were based on that spirituality meant recognise thing the justice and equality of each individual and each individual's contribution during that time and before that time there was also the paradigm of spirituality was based on your your relationship your personal relationship with god or whatever you believed in and for many that included nature so nature during these times this fast quick lee going away what is our personal relationship many people are too busy running hard to keep up with feeding their family it's not always the cultural paradigm that's discussed it kind of depends on what culture you live in in india reincarnation is taken for granted in this country it's still being discussed if it's real so i think for us to decide what spirituality means for us and to evaluate when we interact with others if what they defined as spirituality is what we want for ourselves in our future communities is very important i suspect that the direction we're going is that most most more of us will be empowered for our own connections and more of us will be empowered to speak and live our own truths and that as changes occur because of that we will garner a new view of the value of everyone in our spirituality those those paradigms that speak to the pillars of justice and truth and a lot of cultures sometimes blend the word honesty with truth is something that i would encourage each person to explore because we each have our own truth and then what do we designate as the truth for everyone or the truth as far as existence or the truth as far as our connection with what's higher and which which is important in is that higher or is that really just the all how do we move out of duality to get to those principles and how are we going to decide to live our lives to support a better structure for what is sacred and sacredness is certainly an aspect of this and if i were in charge of the world or if i was a voice that was heard throughout the world i would suggest that we make humanity sacred that way we would automatically want to clean up the air in the water in the soil we would automatically care about our children and the future their future and we would hold each other more dear so my name is deborah latreille i'm a facilitator a certified facilitator with access consciousness and  for over thirty years i've been a mental health professional doing alternative forms of psychotherapy body centered psychotherapy d r other energy psychologies as well so spirituality  so thank you brenda for mentioning that definition component to it that's kind of the first place i go what is spirituality i was looking at writing some stuff on receiving i looked at my six and a half year old friend i said what do you know about receiving and he asked me this brilliant question he goes that's receiving part of what we do in access is really kind of looking at what what are words what are they really mean  because they bring things into existence so kind of knowing what we're working with but also the words of the definition of words got changed after one nine hundred forty at from one thousand forty six on they begin changing them and so what energetically reads now is not always accurate to what they really are it's quite interesting so the question of current definitions is quality or fact of being about the soul or spirit as  posed opposed to one's physical nature or material things in kampar or in material in nature devotional religious otherworldly and here's an interesting definition which is like an old version ready for this property or revenue of the church so i looked for years of studied lots of different kinds of spiritualities and you know i always felt there was a little bit of a truth here a little piece of the truth there a little piece of the truth there but no one form really was bringing it home for me right and actually felt like i got more disconnected the more i was studying different traditions and and i was in a matric mystery school for a while as well so looking into the whole thing so you native american tradition i had somebody native man who was in one of my classes recently who was one to me goes well i know they always say our elders know all these things but but if all the old ways worked you know and we keep trying to bring them back but they're not seeming to work in the same way the other piece spirituality is more like looking outside of self like something outside of me knows it and that hasn't really worked for me either and then it was kind of like we'll go inside and  know i don't there's just been a lot of conflicting kind of materials or point of view or there were other things that was helpful for me with the access program was basically we look at that we're all infinite being and if we're all already infinite beings the only thing that stops us from accessing anything is our point of view that we're not that we don't have a capacity that we are less than that we don't know that we don't know ourselves that we don't can't do this so a lot of what we do in access is really about how do we power you to know you know what you know right and that's the thing i've loved about the tool is it's about me empowering me to know i know what i know and it's been very interesting journey and very tricky about how the different ways in this reality including religions and spiritual traditions are actually did have been designed to take us out of knowing that we know what we know i i was just in a facilitator five days facilitator training in costa rica and we really got down to support very interesting places about like where we judge ourselves interferes with us now and what we know you know and how we judge ourselves when we're really not judged in ourselves because we're really picking up somebody else's judgment of themselves right or that we're judging ourselves because somebody judged us and it's like all these very interesting intricate plays that go back and forth that interfere with us knowing that we know right and questioning ourselves we were also looking at how much this reality and the spiritual and religious traditions are also about defining you know the right in the wrong in the good and the bad right and what's what's the spiritual way to be or the grateful way to be or the the humble way to be or so but by them but their definitions and definition by definition is a limitation what i discovered is when i defined myself i didn't crunched myself in and i remember earlier this year having this real longing to have this connection to me being me expressing me and i remember laying down and going well who i be and all of sudden i went huge and i want all and then my mind started trying to put words to it and define it and everything was going i went oh so every time i go into definition of me or reference of me or referencing what i was in the past or referencing what i do in the future it contracts and it got kind of got small so it's been a very interesting journey for me and there's much more for me to learn but i've kind of like stepped out of the whole spirituality kind of seeking thing and going how do i know more about knowing what i know and how do i really come back step into the infinite being i be and live from that well thank you for having us here in beautiful vashon this is a beautiful center and it's very inspiring well i'm and i've been a professional psychic for over twenty seven years now as that i have gone through experimenting exploring many levels of spirituality i didn't choose to be a psychic it wasn't something that i knew that i was born with though in time i came to realize that everyone is psychic or intuitive or as deborah here says very nicely has that ability to know what they know and i think that's a very strong truth because when we ask ourselves we know it rings true or it sits sideways and and we know it is right so in my years i've been to over twenty nine countries and studied with schama nse and spiritual teachers healers and the one truth that i see in all societies and all cultures that i have journeyed through is the awareness that there is a divine being regardless of how individuals define it it's a universal theme on the planet earth and what i begin to discover through my journeys is that many people have religion and religion is someone else's path that brought them to their connection with that divine being and that inner knowing and so i have found that religion may or may not lead to spirituality but spirituality stands alone it is that connectedness and i think all of us feel that need feel as if there is something that we are connected to something that pulls the universe together gives a cohesiveness and gives it a pattern and we all marvel at the flowers the universe micro organisms and yet there seems to be a consistent design in all of that so to me spirituality is about being part of that wholeness part of that grand design and honoring and interacting with that connectedness now we come into words like saw and spirit and i think i like quite deborah's talking about let's go back to the source let's look at the original form because  much of as we go down the line people come up with their own conclusions and pretty soon it seems as if we're all talking different languages and we're not really communicating the spirit i feel in my experience has been that divine connection that sense of when whether you say the holy ghost comes into you or when you in yourself are in a place of presence where you know you are bigger than you know yourself to be that you are really connected to all that is and there you are eternal in that connection in my years i have spent a lot of time i love to read i love to learn and i have spent a lot of time studying psychology i have a degree a masters degree in cross cultural psychology and through that i have found that all philosophies basically come back to the core essence of finding a way to live your life a way to harmonize with your surroundings and a way to feel that you are part of something than yourself and in many ways is that not spirituality there's a joke about we're human beings having a spiritual experience and in reality it's just the opposite we are spirits in drag or having a human experience there's been a lot of scientific study around death and dying and this is a fascination for myself i often spend time doing volunteer hospice work working with people dying really letting them know that it's ok to die and to talk about their feelings to explore what comes next to be present with that and what i have found is in the readings of the scientific data and documentation that when people die there's actually a weight loss of the body and those who die and come back all have similar experiences whether they're out of the documentations that happened in india whether the documentations in china or the documentations by scientists in the united states and when they all see a bright light know an inner peace and know that they are not their body they are not of this planet they are not of this earth but they are something greater spirituality is in many ways getting out of our way and celebrating our divinity and connecting with that divinity just being present moment to moment truly authentic religion is doing behaviors and rituals that should lead us to a sense of personal presence  personal connection spirituality is just being alive celebrating in being connected with the flow in the presence of that i find that people come to me as a psychic because they're looking for their way through life most people that come to a professional psychic are coming not because they want answers but because they have too many answers it doesn't gel together there's too many truths too many diversity's and they they need some way to open the space and find their way through it all so it makes sense now a spiritual life for me is a life where you take vacations with god you have god tox you make that every day you just say connected with the divinity in yourself and everyone else i'm a full trance channel and what that means that many times i will actually step aside and let a spirit of my vibration or higher talk either in a public setting or to an individual this is known as channeling and i've been working in the channeling field for over thirty years and when we talk to the spiritual realms about spirituality they have some very profound things to say they talk to us about here and there they say that if we're busy trying to get there were lost and why are we wasting our incredibly precious incarnation trying to get holy because we already are it's like being a dog and trying to be more a dark or being a woman and trying to be more womanly you are that which you are and as a spiritual being we are in this inclination to have experiences that bring us into the finite for when we're in a spiritual reality or part of the totality and the infinite and so when we're in the finite we can focus down and come to mastery and awareness and awake and conscious mind for in the spiritual realm where in the higher conscious that connected that expansive mind and so here we are able to do cause and effect action interaction and we begin to mediate our reality and transcend our selves where able to have an experience learning crow and expand and then as we bring our consciousness up to higher consciousness again in that position we're able then to keep the conscious awareness and see the parts of the in and not just be aware of the totality but the elements of it and so spirituality is something that is what we are our human experience is what we do so for doing our lives if we're performing our lives if we're surviving our lives we're just disconnected from ourselves we're not unspiritual we're not and connected we just  ourselves not aware of that connection there's an old saying all can answer is given look within the truth and the connection with the divine is within you basically you're asking how how can you teach someone to be aware of their own spirituality and my answer is be present with them create an arena where they can be present with themselves and through their experiences they begin to perceive themselves we cannot teach another person what they already know we can be present and witness and play with them and laugh with them and show and tell but try to teach a dog to be a dog or an eagle to be an eagle would be coyote medicine and where it's fun and it makes us learn more about ourselves it really doesn't serve so being present as a witness the greatest teaching that an human being can learn is to practice personal presence just to be be aware and see all things as they reveal themselves you know there's a series of things i like to do with folks the bulk of my practice over the years has been helping putting tools in people's hands to help them know themselves more the first thing i like to do is to get some sort of acknowledgement that they are no recognize or an  infinite being that they have that capacity that they that might be covered up the next thing i like to do with folks is to help them perceive truth for them so the truth there's universal truth of the truth will always make you feel lighter or more expanded alive will always make you feel heavier or more contracted and so it's similar to what teresa saying in terms of being able to to pay attention to what's happening to you is one of the first places because if you're not present with yourself and you're not being self aware then you can't notice things you can't notice when you're connected when you're not connected you can't notice what's true what's not true so i  to give people a series of tools that they can play with and work with like light and heavy you know like like i'd like roast beef for dinner at like turkey for dinner i'd like salad for dinner later heavy lighter heavy lighter i mean just simple things like that