Each month, as an extension of our monthly email, "News from the Ideafrontier" one individual will be invited to share their own journey and how they experienced the call to awakening; a close up and personal perspective on the ascension experience. Each person will respond to the same standard list of questions and we'll have the honor of one up-close and personal perspective.
For our first feature in February 2010, I'm pleased to introduce you to one radiant, and beautiful human being: Jermaine Lewis. Enjoy!
Jermaine
Lewis of Charm City/Baltimore, Maryland. An intuitive, creative, compassionate spirit who
is NOW a human Being, awakened/ing to the shifts in consciousness happening on
this planet Earth and happy about the illusions that are crumbling. The arts and various types of spirituality
have been tools that I have used and given to others to find the way back home.
What got this whole process of
spiritual awakening going for you?
When
did you realize you were having a spiritual awakening?
I have always
been deeply drawn to spiritual matters, even from childhood, being raised in
the Baptist Christian faith, having ministers as grandparents, and a father,
who is a minister of music. During my first year of college when I was 18, I
read a book called You Are God by
U.S. Anderson and that totally changed my way of life and my thinking. And it is
funny, because I found it in my parents’ house actually. Though I was admitted to college on a
scholarship for engineering, I heard an internal voice during my freshman year
of college that was telling me to perform, to dance, act, write, and perform
poetry, even though I had no real formal training, besides being involved in
music as a child. My first performance
piece was at the age of 18 and I named it Standing
On a New Plateau, all about being in a new place spiritually, emotionally, physically,
mentally, and sexually, as I had just come out as gay a year before leaving
home for college. The next year, I was
scouted to join a new dance company on campus, Dark Arts Performing Dance
Company. For our first concert, I
choreographed and performed a solo piece to Bob Marley’s song, “Wake Up &
Live.” That was in 1996 at the age of
18, when the very first stirrings of spiritual awakening were happening, yet
unknown and unnamed.
My last year
in college, at the age of 22, I wrote and performed an autobiographical one-man
show called The Nervous Breakthrough of a
Berdache Boy. In two acts of
monologues, dramatic poetry, and movement, I theatrically presented my
experiences of being once closeted to being openly gay, sexually molested as a
child, to being un/comfortable with both male and female energies and bending
gender expression, and professing myself to be like the Native American
Berdache men, who were twin spirited shamans and spiritual leaders, who lived
inside and in between male and female. I
didn’t really know much about Berdache men or shamanism, but it was something
that my spirit gravitated towards in the creation of this piece, without much
judgment, but much more trust. To add, while
in college, I also became interested in
work by one of the founders of transpersonal psychology, Stanislov Grof,
particularly his work Psychology of the
Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research (2000).
After my
undergrad days at the University of Delaware, I moved to Baltimore, MD to start
a MFA in Performance at Towson University, but dropped out after my first
semester and worked at a jewelry store called Fire & Ice, Inc., so appropriate
since what was to be revealed to me, both backwards and forwards, could be
summed up as a journey through fire and ice in many ways. Several months afterwards, I joined
AmeriCorps/VISTA and worked for a nonprofit that placed me in an elementary
school as a School & Community Partnership Coordinator. After my one year term of service with
AmeriCorps/VISTA, I joined the teaching staff and became the art teacher. During
that time of helping young children, most of who were growing up in poverty, I
started to get a glimpse of synchronicity happening in my life. Many of the art lessons were a reflection of
what I was feeling in the past, present, and/or future. I also was introduced to Reiki by a friend, who
was also a Yoruba priestess and had also introduced me to my personal west
African orishas—there are over 400 supernatural divinities in this earth based
religion, which is directly connected to my lineage as an African American. My feminine orisha was seen to be Oshun, the goddess
of love, joy, beauty, sensuality, and money.
She is associated with the sweet things in life and is adored with
honey, sunflowers, and the color yellow.
Oshun is called the sweet mother and linked to the Egyptian goddess of
love, Hathor. My masculine orisha was
said to be Obatala, who represents honesty, compassion, wisdom, purity, peace,
calmness, humility, the New Year, forgiveness, and resurrection, which is why
he is also linked to Christ and the Egyptian Osiris. His name means King of the white cloth and
white is the color that represents him, as it is all the colors of the rainbow
and is connected to pure light.
One day, I
went to a holistic health fair with my Yoruba priestess friend and was given
what was supposed to be a short, twenty minute Reiki trial by a Reiki
practitioner. After an hour of laying on
this practitioner’s massage table and not being able to get up because of the Reiki,
my spirit was obviously overwhelmed, my hands felt electrified, and my whole
world was beginning to move into another realm.
Not too many months afterwards, I took a Reiki I workshop, but didn’t
really practice for a couple years. I
was mostly interested in astrology and numerology and how it related to my life
path and experiences. Several years
later, I met a Reiki-Sekhem teacher who I took Reiki-Sekhem II with. Sekhem is an ancient Egyptian healing
modality, closely related to Reiki. After
Reiki-Sekhem II, I wasn’t considerably serious about Reiki-Sekhem, not until
the end of 2007, when I took Reiki-Sekhem III or the Master level. And it wasn’t until the summer of 2008 that
my mind and my heart connected all the dots, so to speak. I then realized that I was having a spiritual
awakening and that my whole life experience had been a part of this spiritual
awakening actually. I remember I had a
postcard with the word awakening in my cubicle at work and that was before what
I consciously knew about spiritual awakening.
2008, I believe, is when I discovered spiritlibrary.com, information
about indigo children, channeled messages through the Ascended Masters, and I
began to feel much more synchronicity occurring in the present, past and future.
How long do you think the spiritual
process was underway for you before you understood specifically what was taking
place?
Forever-seems
likeJ! I look back on my first years in college,
which began in 1995, at the age of 17.
Early on, I used astrology as means of explaining everything that was
happening. In 1996, Pluto, the planet of
transformation and change, had moved into my birth sign of Sagittarius and came
out in 2008. Now, I am 32 years old and
perceive astrology somewhat differently now, though I find it a helpful guide. For instance, my karmic astrological path is
stated to be the Way of Compassion, however, I believe that we all should all
be headed towards more compassion and all other paths ultimately relate to me
or not, particularly since we can now step outside of the idea of karma, if we
choose. Out of all my major astrology
books, I got rid of the karmic astrology book first. Not that it wasn’t ever helpful to me, I just
felt the need to break out of this way of thinking.
In 2006, I
fondly remember writing a poem called RE,
named after the 2006-2007 season theme of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center
at the University
of Mayland where I work
as Assistant Manager for Cultural Participation. In June 2006, I had just joined the staff and
their season theme was RE. They were having a staff performance night and
I decided to write and perform some poetry, even though I had NO idea what I
was going to do until the night before. In
a performance poem titled, RE, I
illustrated how I was preparing to REmember, REevaluate, REimagine, and REdefine
my life and my being, but I had not yet known, consciously, about the awakening
process or how that process of creation would come into form, but obviously, my
I AM presence knew/felt something.
…I started to
Reexamine
My
life
My
purpose
My
work…
Cuz
the negativity surrounding me was
Repugnant...
…I had to make a choice
Sink
or swim
Regress
or reclaim
Remain
or remove myself
Die
with remorse
Or
live and rejoice
So
now I’m just trying to
Recycle
the past
Recoup
from the stress
Rediscover
peace of mind
Regroup
my soul
Remodel
my outlook…
During
the summer of 2007, I was in the second semester of earning my Master’s degree
in Nonprofit Management and had done a lot of research on workplace
spirituality and transformational leadership, which helped me understand how
where one works and what one does can be like a mirror of the personal and
world’s transformational process. The
next year’s season theme for 2007-2008 was UN.
I didn’t understand the significance
of that at first, until I went for a Reiki session and my Reiki-Sekhem teacher/guide,
who told me afterwards that I was being UNplugged from the grid/the matrix/the
third dimension. When she told me that, I didn’t completely UNderstand what she
was saying, until a couple years later.
The next year’s season theme for 2008-2009 was MOVE, which I thought was a reference to me moving physically,
or perhaps to a new line of work, but it wasn’t until later in 2009 that I
understood that I was indeed moving. I was moving spiritually or, to circle back
to my freshman year in college in 1996 after I read the book You Are God, I was preparing to be Standing On a New Plateau all over again. So, 2009 was a pivotal year for me. For that year, my theme was 2008..Great, 2009...Divine. I felt like I was coming full circle in
so many ways and before the end of the year, I had already declared 2010…Where Have You Been?! Before New Year’s 2010, I could feel like I
was beginning to really come HOME in many, many ways and that HOME was coming
to me.
What events or experiences along the
way clarified for you
what was happening in your life?
In November of
2007, prior to taking Reiki-Sekhem III or the Master’s Level, I was in a near
fatal car accident on interstate highway I-95.
On Sunday, November 18, I was driving on my way to spend the day and
night with my new and present boyfriend before a week of arts engagement
activities with the classically trained Haitian American violinist, composer,
and band-leader, Daniel Bernard Roumain or DBR.
DBR is an amazing human being, artist, businessman, and teacher, who
blends classical music with rock, hip-hop, and funk. I was gearing up for three days of workshops,
performances and dialogues between Daniel and University of Mayland
students and community members. I was
responsible for leading the coordination of his engagement events on campus
that year. In the spring semester of
2008, DBR was scheduled to come back to campus for more community arts
engagement and a performance of his multimedia performance piece/meditation
titled One Loss Plus, which dealt
with the question: What is gained when
something or someone is lost?
While
I was losing control of my car from a tire blowout, my car spun out of control
while going 75 mph in the left lane of the highway. My breaks didn’t help to stop or slow down
the car. I spun to the left, then to the
right and back again. Soon, I saw an 18
wheeler coming towards me at a high speed though the driver was attempting to stop. Somehow, I ended up in the far right lane and
the 18 wheeler just passed me by as my car crashed into the guard rail of the
highway, which at that point was either on a bridge or very close to a bridge
for Exit 38/Route 32 headed to Columbia, MD, a newly planned community designed
in the 1960’s to enhance interaction among people. Columbia’s symbol is the
People Tree and it was created to not only get rid of the hassles of suburban
subdivision design, but also to eradicate racial, religious, and income
segregation….so I crashed near an exit towards oneness! Surprisingly, I wasn’t seriously injured. My car was totaled, but I only had a
fractured rib, which the doctor in the ER gave me nothing for, because
fractured ribs can only heal by being left alone. I couldn’t believe I escaped
that accident alive. I seriously thought
I was going to die. I stayed with my
boyfriend and got home, cried and pondered the question inside One Loss Plus: What is gained when something or someone is lost?
About
a month later, at the very end of 2007, I decided to take Reiki-Sekhem
III/Reiki Master certification, because I felt like it was time to complete the
series of trainings. Perhaps, the year
we were in influenced my decision, 2007/9?
Soon
thereafter, I began to see the world much, much more as a mirror. So many synchronicities were showing themselves
and at first, it was so exciting and new, but after a short while,
synchronistic experiences were so commonplace for me that I came to embrace the
phenomenon as a natural way of life. I also
read a lot about the significance of the number 1111. My boyfriend that I was on my way to lives in
a high rise condo/apartment building and he lives on the 11th floor
in apartment 1111.
I didn’t find out the significance of 1111 with spiritual awakening until
months after the car accident. We live
together now and I moved into the condo/apartment 1111 at the end of 2009/11 in
this building, address 1101.
In the beginning what other
explanations, if any,
did you give for your experiences?
For
several years between 2003 and 2007, I found myself focusing on mainly honoring
my feminine goddess, Oshun. I had an altar for her and I gave her offerings of five
oranges drenched in honey and flakes of golden glitter, yellow flowers, a fan, and
sweet wine. Those offerings to the
divine feminine energy of Oshun brought many sweet gifts to my life and it was
amazing to re/connect with that energy.
However, by 2008, I found myself gravitating more and more towards my
male orisha, Obatala, who, again, is the Yoruba deity representing Christ
consciousness. Slowly and innocently, I
found myself building up my altar to Obatala, by giving offerings of white
cotton, clear and rose quartz, a painting of a Mandala created by Buddhist
monks, a Native American dream catcher, a small statue of an Egyptian pyramid, and
an amethyst obelisk.
In early
March 2009, my grandfather died and at the wake I was so amazed at the flower
arrangements, which was a combination of white and brown. To me it symbolized pure light, Christ
consciousness coming down to earth. It
was like a physical manifestation of Christ consciousness. Afterwards, I added the funeral program to
the altar and by that time, I had taken down the Oshun altar, as I found myself
wanting to get rid of the altar to Oshun, just because I felt it was time too.
However, now I look at a geisha doll that was on Oshun’s personal. Now, I notice that she is no longer holding
an umbrella in her hand, because the umbrella broke off of the umbrella pole
during my move to Condo 1111. Now, it
just looks like a stick is in her hand.
She is also now surrounded by remnants from Obatala’s altar, clear
crystal quartz, an Egyptian pyramid, a blue calcite dolphin, and the amethyst
obelisk. This wasn’t planned, but just
how it turned out as I was unpacking and decorating. Perhaps, Oshun/the goddess of love/me need
not hide her/my love anymore from the world, because she is/I AM protected and
surrounded by Christ consciousness. This
divine feminine and divine masculine energy are now united. Apparently, love is what guides his/her/MY way. There is no need for hiding, or covering
oneself/myself from the rain. It is not
raining so much anymore.
When you began to hear the call to
draw inward and follow this unfolding in your life, what changes were most
challenging to make?
To realize
what is real and what is just an illusion and to be able to accept everything
as divine and a part of the divine process, even if it doesn’t feel good or if
it ‘looks’ like something negative. I
remember doing a marketing activity for an upcoming show called Astrorama. Student employees and I were standing outside
in the heat of early September next to a flying saucer and actors dressed up as
the Men in Black. We were passing out fliers that had some random information
about an upcoming outdoor spectacle and performance about life in other
galaxies. The flier read “Demand the
Truth” and that the truth was to be revealed at the performance at such and
such place on such and such days. At the
time, I thought having this structure outside with us while passing out fliers
was not a good marketing effort. In
short, I thought it was pretty silly.
“Demand the Truth” was the largest sentence on the flier and I wondered
who in the world we were reaching and how foolish they must have thought we were
for doing it. Most people kept walking
or only stopped for a couple of seconds out of slight curiosity. I thought it was such a waste of time, until
I realized how just doing that act of giving people a message saying “Demand
the Truth” was perhaps the universe’s way of calling out to the masses, or even
using me to tell people, or telling me
to Demand the Truth.
The day I
graduated with my Master’s degree in April 2009, I realized from the hanging
banners on the graduation stage that read 2009 (11) on the left and 2009 (11)
on the right, that I had graduated with more than just a Master’s degree in
Nonprofit Management. In many ways, I was
graduating on to the next level of ascension, whatever that was/is. Now, that I’m done, people ask me what am I
going to do with my degree and my response is usually the same, “We’ll see.” I didn’t necessarily need to get a Master’s
degree to become a Master, because now I realize that I am one, minus the
degree, even though gaining the knowledge was enjoyable, challenging at times,
but overall, a great, worthwhile experience. And it is so interesting that the 2009-2010 season
theme for the performing arts center where I work is titled BECOME. Looking beneath the surface, I sense a very
powerful message beyond marketing performances and the Center, as we call it
for short, because now, in this moment, we are supported enormously and are
able to be so creative, to just be and/or to become the earth angels of the new earth.
About two
years ago, my Reiki-Sekhem teacher/guide/friend lent me the children’s parable The Little Soul in the Sun by Neale
Donald Walsch. It was a great story and
helped me deal with one of my life’s biggest challenges that I had not
completely resolved. I always looked at
my experience with being sexually abused as a young child by an older teenage
male babysitter as a totally bad experience.
I thought that he was an awful person that I should never come into
contact again. The idea of forgiveness
never crossed my mind and I never saw it as a part of this divine experience we
call human life. It wasn’t until I was
ready to read the book that I started to feel that everything in life is
divine. The ‘good’, ‘bad’, and ‘in
between’ is all one—
the childhood
sexual abuse, the emotional and sometimes physical fights with other kids for
being a feminine boy, the arguments with my parents for leaving my religious
upbringing, for being gay and forfeiting a full engineering scholarship to find
myself through the arts, having to press charges on a college fraternity for
making verbal threats, and last but not least, my experience as an art teacher
in the heart of Baltimore City in a school that faced a Parole and Probation
center on one side and the Baltimore City Public School System headquarters on
the other. Before my last week of
teaching at the school, I was asked to create a large visual for the pre-school
graduation around the theme Up, Up &
Away. I didn’t realize that it also
meant my own ascension.
I learned so
much from these experiences and they all gave me so much. I must have had so many agreements with
different people before coming into this life and forgot nearly all of
them. This past year, we had another
guest artist on campus, David Gonzalez, an amazing human being, poet,
storyteller, actor, and musician. We
brought David down to campus for an extended residency with the community in
preparation for a new piece of his titled Wounded
Splendor. It’s a beautiful
multimedia work about the planet, environmental pollution, and its’ hoped for
recovery. Just the title alone made
think about how this was connected to my own life experiences. And during his stay on campus, he performed
the fable The Lion and the Mouse for
a group of fifty pre-school children. The
fable is about a little mouse that is, at first, almost eaten by an angry lion,
but eventually thanked by the same lion for freeing him from a hunter’s rope.
This story of anger and later compassion made
me almost break down in tears while standing in a room full of laughing
children. It was such a powerful,
synchronistic experience, because the night before hearing this fable performed
by David, I performed Reiki on myself and meditated on my need to forgive and
reconnect with the spirit who in human form molested me as a child. So, a year or so later and just last week, I
was able to make a virtual connection with this human spirit via Facebook. I found him and friended him and he, after
several weeks, accepted my friend request.
I had to do it for me, not necessarily at this point for him, but for my
own peace. I told my best friend this
and she said to me, “You really are like Jesus.” I thought that was so funny, but as I read as
an 18 year old, You Are God.
Did you have any internal skepticism
or relationships in which their view of your experience created doubts and
difficulty in believing in your own experience?
Very early on
in this process as a teenager and before I understood what was happening, I had
major conflicts with my parents in terms of my desire to expand upon my
Southern Baptist upbringing, along with a burning desire to explore the
performing arts, though I had been admitted to the University of Delaware on a
full scholarship for engineering, and also, along with having had come out to
them as gay during my senior year in high school. To them, I was turning into a totally
different person than the son they had raised.
This caused a major rift in our relationship, because they didn’t like
it, didn’t accept it, and even sent me to Christian counseling. When I would come home for winter or summer
vacations, they gave me lecture after lecture on how I was ruining my future
with all of these changes. However, I
think they realized after five years that I wasn’t going back to being a
Southern Baptist Christian, or an engineer, or a heterosexual, though nothing
is wrong with any of these, it just wasn’t me, but at the same time, perhaps
those human identities are me, since we are all connected really.
In spite of
everything, it was not until the end of 2008 that I realized and knew that my
guides were with me during this whole journey, even though my sense of home had
been broken and drastically changed. My
parents moved out of their single family house during the last week of 2008
into a townhouse. It is only the two of
them now, as my sister and I are both adults and on our own, so it made sense
to me. On the first day of the move to
the new house, I went into one of the spare bedrooms with my five year old
niece and saw that it had a wall painting of a Native American village. It is a
beautiful wall painting, very colorful and full of action. My niece blurted out “Jermaine, this is your
room!” Though it really wasn’t my room
and she knows nothing of my past work/experiences, it is so amazing how little
kids are so honest, creative, and perceptive.
The berdache boy I wrote and performed about in 2000 was in many ways
finding his way home, even though, at one time, the relationship with my parents
was chaotic and I was a little chaotic at times. Ultimately, I learned that home is deep
inside of me, in my heart, home is love.
And thankfully, now, my parents are completely accepting of me and my
life, my decisions, my boyfriend, everything…Finally…or right on timeJ
As a kid, I
had a dream of becoming an architect or urban planner—(what little kid wants to
grow up to be an urban planner?)
Nevertheless, we are at an amazing point where we can build new ‘places’
in the new Earth, so perhaps, I can
‘plan cities and ‘design houses’ that are based and built on and with love.
Looking back, what advice and guidance
would you share with someone just beginning or even in the trenches of
answering this call?
Transformation may not always feel
good, but then again, sometimes, it might.
Things change, people change, environments
change all the time—Just go with it.
Learn to trust and think with your
heart.
Don’t feel bad about loving yourself. Love of self is one of the best things you
can do to help your fellow man, since we are all connected, no matter the illusionary
divisions of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, job, status, age,
religion or non-religion. We are ONE.
You are not your (insert any
material illusion, i.e., race, job, hair, car, college degree or not, sex,
house, bank account, ability to or non-ability to (_____). You are love and so is/are he/she/it/them/me/we.
