By Dana Shino
I launched The Purple Phoenix in the fall of 2006 and by the following spring, I’d received an initial crash course in the beginnings of how to intuitively work with people. (It hasn’t really ended!) At that time, the time this was written, I was doing psychic readings. Even then, I found myself pulling away from the fortune-telling style so many psychics follow, and began clearing new ground for tools to teach others. Among the first was this golden nugget of a tool. Read on about how powerful, how beautiful the question truly is.
While buried in the cocoon of a silent winter night, tucked in a chair in the yellow glow of my reading lamp, I unobtrusively discovered an informational gold nugget in a tome by self-help guru Anthony Robbins. I was in my late twenties when this nugget “twanged” inside me as a “good one” to remember. The nugget went something like this, “If you want to improve your life, learn to ask constructive questions.” Ever since, this “good one” has occasionally resurfaced especially this year.
To give you a little background, my internal quest has always haunted me, tugged me forward towards an elusive, meaning-filled answer beyond the physical answers surrounding me. Even when I’ve wanted to rest from my quest, I haven’t been able to. My hardwiring always short-circuits me back into the quest. The quest has driven me nuts. It’s driven others nuts. Some days I’ve carried the quest in silent secrecy and other days I’ve worn it brazenly, overtly. Deep down, I’ve always felt I was sold a short bill of goods about the answers and understandings in life. Something’s always been missing. What? I did not know, but I always felt the quest needling me to learn more.
So, when my ex-husband introduced me to the vast wealth of self help information at the local public library in my mid-twenties, I was as happy as a pig in you-know-what. It was one of the best gifts he ever gave me. I could not swallow the information fast enough as I believed I had found “the answers” to the quest, to living. Worlds, doors, windows blew wide open for me. I devoured book after tape by Wayne Dyer, Anthony Robbins, Les Brown, Zig Ziglar, Jack Canfield, Robert Kiyosaki, Napolean Hill, Norman Vincent Peale, Deepak Chopra, Earl Nightingale, Brian Tracy and others. After the initial gleam of the find tarnished, and I slowed my devouring to a more methodical intake, I realized a lot of it sounded like re-hashed rhetoric and I gradually noted the cynical attitude many people carried towards the Self Help industry. Yet, there were still certain truths from the authors’ words and voices that resonated with me.
Inevitably, by my early thirties, I became secretly sorely disappointed that for all the self help material I’d devoured, I was not able to dramatically positively change my life like I’d been promised. As I watched “What the Bleep Do We Know?!” a handful of years later, I strongly identified with Miceal Ledwith’s comments. He said, “. . . it’s a wonderful idea, positive thinking, but what it usually means is that I have a little smear of positive thinking covering a whole mass of negative thinking. So, thinking positive is not really thinking positive, its just disguising the negative thinking we have.”
With Ledwith’s comment also came another concept that ” . . . to make changes in one’s life, you had to . . . make changes.” It dawned on me, if I wanted to improve my life, my changes had to be much more probing than waiting for the information to somehow transform me. I sheepishly realized, duh, I had to do something. So, the quest continued at a deeper level and I was uncomfortably aware of the greater responsibility I was taking with my life.
Despite my overall disappointments with the self help material, the effort and time I’d given to absorbing it still counted. Somehow, I’d built a foundational wealth of information and understanding about these self help concepts, which are frequently universal sister truths and sometimes same truths found in the spiritual field. Even more profound, I’d intrinsically learned the art of internally listening to my personal “tuning fork of truth” resonate when I hit upon personally valuable information.
So, on the particular deep winter evening, when I occasionally heard snow and ice crunching beneath the tires of outside traffic, I read Mr. Robbins’ words . . . “If you want to improve your life, learn to ask constructive questions.” Over the years, in the odd way my eclectic logic works, the bit of Robbins’ question advice morphed with another quote I’d heard in my early twenties at a movie. Danny DeVito, in “Renaissance Man,” played the character of a down and out marketing man who hired on as a temp to teach a group of military boot camp screw ups the finer points of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” Among the wisdom he dispensed included this: “The decisions you make, dictate the life you lead.” In my mind, the morphed question and movie quote looks like this: “The quality of questions you ask dictate the life you lead.”
That might now sound like much, but it’s a little question tool with a BIG lever. I didn’t really understand how big of a lever until this spring (2007) when asking quality questions resurfaced on my radar screen with a vengeance. As I learned to craft questions with more zing, more punching intensity, more directness, more simplicity, more clarity, it transformed the Model T version of my “put-put-putting” down the quest road into something a little more turbo-packed and steroid-laced than I was prepared for. There’s been more than a few times my Spirit Guides have had some “I Love Lucy” Ricky and Lucy style “‘splainin’’ to do and “Jetson’s” style George yelling for Jane to “Get me off this crazy thing!” But my Spirit Guides always tell me, “You asked!” And they’re right, I did.
And that’s it. That’s the very point. When you ask a question, the universe is designed to always answer. It is as basic a Spiritual Law as the universal Free Will clause and the God Is Love clause. Questions are energy. Questions open energy. Questions move energy. If energy follows your intent, then questions are the certainty of opening the energetic gateway and allowing the answer to shine through (sooner or later). Questions are smack in the middle of the quantum consciousness mechanics soup. Questions are the “ask and ye shall receive” of divine biblical proportions. They are the beautiful preface in the prayer.
Granted, a year ago, I was not hip about asking questions in The Sacred Temple of Questions like I am today. Questions hung on the periphery of my after-thoughts until I acted on a professional nervous whim. In lieu of needing to create energy flow for psychic readings, I asked my clients to ask Soul Questions for their readings. It was a logical enough request, I thought; and it did eventually lead me to the back stage energetic view of questions (among the curtains, ropes, props, and theatrical back stage chaos) as the front stage floor lights shone on Question Function.
Initially, I considered requesting a client’s Soul Questions a crutch I would eventually relinquish. Little did I know, questions would grow from a crutch to a powerful tool for all of us. After using questions as an energetic jump start agent, I began setting them aside completely (not looking at them at all prior to a reading or channel), and then later magically watched how the channels, the readings innately answered the questions without any prompting. It truly was a consciousness experiment of grand proportions to not “know” the mark, and yet allow the information to intuitively flow and find that in the end, the question was miraculously answered. It was proof to me that just holding intent, holding the idea of the question, formed the energy flow of the answer.
Then, one day, in the middle of a channel, I noticed a subtlety. I noticed less the actual question, it’s words and meaning, and more so the actual energy residing in the question. It dawned on me, questions hold energy.
Questions . . . hold their very own energy. And in doing so, the question IS the answer. The nature of the energy held in the question gives the answer. I’ve seen this energy literally shimmering in the question. It’s all right there, like a seed waiting to burst forth with the potential to flower a thousand petals. Questions hold endless stunning possibilities when you present the universe with your single utmost personal request, having multi-dimensionality work its multi-faceted magic on it. Energetically, the universe’s vast resources truly lie at the fingertips of your present consciousness. What exhilaration!
. . . but, I’ve noticed for many of my clients, asking questions is a bit overwhelming, intimidating and scary. I frequently hear, “What do I ask?” And that’s very fair.
To ask the universe for something, you must know what you want, what your heart’s desires are. Not a big deal, right? Well, if you know what you want, it’s inevitable that you must eventually leave the Grand Waiting Room of Life (as so wonderfully personified in Dr. Seuss’s “The Places You’ll Go”) and step fully into the responsibility of who you are and risk in front of God and everyone.
So, for many people, questions are a really big dinger. Whether you know it or not, questions are the crux, the crossroads, the crosshatch in the cross hairs of life: on one hand you hold a truly beautiful, bountiful, exhilarating, exponentially potential filled resource at your conscious fingertips. On the other hand, you hold the gateway to personal responsibility and personal risk on the journey of life. You risk learning. You risk growing.
So, it is no surprise that as humans, we craft our questions, with dual conscious and unconscious intent, creating structurally, energetically architected questions determining what we receive as an answer and how we receive it. (If we ask at all). Plain and simple, if we don’t want to know something, whether we are conscious of it or not, we will find a way to ask a question in a manner protecting us from ourselves. Thus, asking a personal question in a way that thrusts yourself out of your comfort zone just might be one of the single most courageous acts you perform in your life.
A question is a sacred prayer simultaneously flying on angel wings and through atom’s quarks on their way to God, just a hair’s breadth away. If we hold the sacredness of the asking of a prayer long enough, and stand in the quiet, still, silent light of it, we can hear its eternal answer from God’s universal breath.
