When Higgins came to me, I was attending First Congregational United Church of Christ in Everett. We were a very open an inquiring group, for the most part. Our pastor invited a couple, David Thomson and Mattie Davis-Wolfe, to lead a group called Sacred Circles. At that time, I was part of the Education committee. In fact, I was the education committee since no one else was on the committee at that time. I didn’t have any idea what Sacred Circles was about so I decided to attend a meeting to discover what Sacred Circles was all about. I ended up meeting with that group for five years and credit them with helping me meet Higgins. If it was not for their teaching, I may never have relaxed enough to allow anything so far outside my ideas of normal to occur.

Sacred Circles met every Wednesday evening. One of the things we learned to do is ‘journey’. Shamansim.com defines journeying as a visionary experience, in which one is able to achieve an altered state of consciousness or trance.

This is what I wrote on November 13, 2004:

Thursday night I tried to “journey” on my own. I was in bed and tucked my medicine blanket in on one side and Bailey (my cat) on the other. Then, because I don’t have sage to smudge and I’m afraid to call in the directions, I prayed for God to keep me safe on my journey. I was trying to find out why I fill my time up so fully the way I do.

Anyway, I was able to watch a place in my mind’s eye start to work as a kaleidoscope. It got more and more fantastic and then exploded into the night sky. I felt myself at the opening, looking into the black sky dotted with stars and realized I had gone up into the sky, rather than into the earth. I hesitated, a little afraid, and could not get out into the sky.

I came back carefully, I tried again and virtually the same thing happened. I was lying on my back during this. So I rolled over and tried again. This time the kaleidoscope started but changed into a ladies ruby necklace. It was formed like lace and became more and more intricate as I watched. Eventually, the rubies turned black. Then the necklace morphed into black iron railing surrounding a stone staircase. The staircase circled down to the left. I admired the stonework and realized this time I was going down. But the stairs got darker and darker and I was afraid. As I hesitated the stairs became a chute and I couldn’t figure out how to get on it. Then it shrank up, lickety-split, until the chute was so narrow I couldn’t get into it anyway.