Set Ablaze by the Breath of an Angel

A gust of hot air blew into the crown of my head like a bellows blowing oxygen into a fire. Then, warm waves of bliss swept head to toe: kindling set ablaze. Paralyzed and stunned awake, I knew I wasn’t in my physical body. That lay sleeping beneath me on the bed. I was in some connected but distinct body, right above that other one, senses on high alert, heart pounding.

Another blast of warm air came, loud like a stream rushing through a culvert. Corresponding rivulets of ecstasy flooded my body in a waterfall of sensation. Who was doing this? But there was no time to think.

A long exhale shot into my head for a third time, followed by streams of rapture, my vessel simmering in the fires of ecstasy. And then one last time it happened, leaving me breathless.

Like a tide, gratitude swelled up in me towards this unknown angel, and I mentally inclined upwards. Who is this? As if in response, a figure appeared to my left, a shadowy phantasm wearing a countenance of pure compassion. Love poured from my heart, like lava from a volcano. Reaching out to touch the hand of this angel, I never made it. As my fingers neared their mark, a bolt of fire erupted, an explosion of light separating our hands. Then the figure disappeared.

With a sharp inhale I blinked my eyes open, and peered at the ceiling in the gray light of dawn, mesmerized. Something amazing had just happened. But what did it mean? Tingling aftershocks coursed through me, leaving my whole system buzzing. A smile spread across my face. Thank you my angel. Thank you, whoever you are.

In the ensuing days, still enjoying the tender sensations that continued to simmer through me, I puzzled over the meaning of this experience. Such an immersion into spiritual ecstasy was a gift from Spirit that I could never conjure on my own. Why did it happen? And why now in particular?

It would be more than a year later, after my sister Cathy’s untimely death, when I would learn the answers to these questions. The kindling gusts of air, and the resulting waves of bliss, had been an initiation rite to catalyze a latent ability. Blowing open a channel in my crown chakra, the angel had cleared a pathway, a protected conduit, through which I would later soar out of my body and, in tandem with my sister’s spirit, traverse the landscape of the afterlife.