Phaedra Star - On Her Awakening

September 23, 2024, interviewed by Alan Verdegraal

A: One thing that I’ve always wondered about is your Awakening and how it affected you? It was in 2009; I believe you said once.

P: Yep. Okay. To understand an Awakening, we really have to understand what brings us there.

And it’s never any different, I mean, there’s only two ways you can get there. One way is incredibly rare. We know that way because our teachers talk about being in the midst of their gurus and having a shaktipat experience. Immediately, they’re there, rare, but we understand energy and how that happens. This takes a certain amount of opening to be able to receive that. Whether that is an opening through lifetimes of evolution, or, having done enough work here, who knows. However, it doesn’t typically happen that way for everyone, so that’s why it’s such a rare thing. Mostly, we have to fall on our asses pretty hard to the point where we’re just willing to give up everything. Nothing makes any sense anymore. That’s pretty consistent across the board. Every teacher I have ever had in my life had some kind of cataclysmic experience that left them absolutely distraught beyond repair. They were ready to die. They were just done.

I think that’s the moment of reverse. Most of us get to place so horrible and painful, we don’t realize that’s the opportunity. You’re already burnt. You feel it. Life has just fucked you up. So, instead of wallowing in that, which is what most people do, you’ve got to rise. You get to recreate in that moment. The whole point of devastation is to recreate from nothing. You get an opportunity to do that.

My son died in 2009 with a really freak anomaly that no one could figure out. In as much as I could tell, it was toxemia, because I had protein in my urine, and I was very swollen. Nonetheless, I don’t have a son who’s alive because of that. Because I’m so empathic, I’m the kind of mother that knows the sex of my children long before they can tell me in an ultrasound. I know the instant that I’m pregnant.

You can imagine how every day, having a baby growing in my womb, how attached I was to that. So, this was not just losing a child; it was losing a big part of myself.

A: This is your child, Sequoia?

P: Yes, this is Sequoia. To make matters more intense, of course, because apparently, that was just the situation that was needed at hand, I don’t know. I wish it could have been any other way, but it wasn’t.

Having a man who was so angry and resentful and not having an opportunity to flee from him, I did the only thing that I could do, and that was to fall into my spirituality, which had never failed me.

My spirituality had gotten me off cocaine. It wasn’t that I was pouting about God and all this bullshit. No, I had faith in myself and the power of energy and the power of the cosmos, and that was evident to me, in my experience of dance. Dancing is to me, not just movement, but is a catalyst to the great Divine. I experience absolute bliss, when I’m dancing. You’ve seen that. You’ve actually experienced that.

The pain I felt ... people say depression, and I’ve been depressed; I’ve been horribly depressed ... but when grief takes you, it’s a whole new game. It’s a whole new level of questions about life, about your scope, about where the fuck you’re headed, about everything.

If the universe is going to take my child away from a mother who was most definitely going to love him, adore him from the moment he was conceived, it made no sense to me, especially when the woman downstairs was on baby number five and she was abusing the four she had.

I had questions about everything, and I knew the Universal Laws, so it’s like, how the fuck did I manifest this bullshit, because I blamed myself. Chalk that up to the blame I had about my first son, having to give him up for adoption. All of this was starting to really load up on my plate.

I needed to go deeper. I’d already done my meditation. I was already on a yoga path for at least a decade before I lost my son. So, even the meditations and the things that I had done were preparing me diligently for the task at hand, and I am extraordinarily grateful that I’ve been doing that, otherwise I don’t think I would have been able to bear this quite so well, when my son passed away. The fact that I had been working on myself.

That put me on the pathway of Eckhart Tolle. The way that happened was really interesting. Talk about having amazing people who just come into your life. A year before, while I was pregnant, this lady comes to take the class I'm teaching and she goes, “Have you ever heard of Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now?”

I said no and I dismissed it. I didn’t think about it until I lost my son. Then it came flying at me. Actually, I couldn’t even get to sleep. If you can imagine this, Alan, I looked up Barnes & Noble and I wanted to know what time they opened. I was that adamant about getting in, to get there, because I figured there was something really important in that information that I needed. As soon as Barnes & Noble open, I got The Power of Now audio book.

Now, my husband at the time was in MMA [Mixed Martial Arts] and his idea of how to cope with this was to just go beat the shit out of something. I ended up in Center One for severe depression. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t function. I was there for a solid two weeks while they helped me through my grief and transitions. They gave me a lot of therapy. For a while, I was put on drugs to help me get to sleep. I had to let go of a lot of things to get through where I was. I didn’t wanna take medication, but I needed to do it, because I was going to die myself ... from grief. It was gonna happen. When I came out, my husband was fighting angry. Of course, this just made him more angry. It gave him more reasons to hit walls and put holes in places.

This was bringing back my past childhood with my stepfather. It was compounding, Alan. It felt like I had just lost my child and my relationship was completely gone. There was no love anywhere in there ever again. I was stuck, and I felt like a prisoner, and I had no idea how to get out of that situation, feeling the grief and the pain that I did. We were impoverished horribly. He kept us as poor as he could get us, so that I could never leave.

In the middle of all that, Alan, I could have died. At that point, I said, I don’t care anymore. He clearly doesn’t give a shit if we lived on the street, or not.

I’m going to just relinquish this desire to hold onto anything. It’s weird how people come into your life again. I had seen a movie with Master Charles Cannon in it. I don’t even remember which one it was, but it was on Netflix. It was a documentary, and all of a sudden that picture comes into my mind. I’m like, Master Charles Cannon ... I think I should go do something with that guy. That had never happened before. It just popped into my mind and I pursued it; that’s the difference. I paid attention and immediately, I sought him out, and I saw that he had a program I couldn’t afford. That program was going to help me get the resistances, the pain, and the clarity, that was going to help me clear all of that. He does HemiSync Therapy that uses sound on the brain. I needed simple. I didn’t need complicated. The man is brilliant in his capacity to deliver the most loving, tender, compassionate messages about awareness and awakening. It was an absolute honor that he allowed me to take courses as a donation, a charity. I was blown away! As a response of that, it gave me what I needed to start the Path.

Now having said that, Alan, I don’t recommend anyone do this when they’re living in a war zone, but I had no choice. The only thing that I could do, like Merlin, is to gather the magic and use it at my disposal and make these potions for me, to make me strong, because I’m in the middle of war.

I started on this descent, and Master Charles was really clear. He said, “You’re gonna feel great, and then the challenges will become more intense, because your resistances are really screaming.”

Now, no one had ever told me that there was a process to Awakening, so I knew nothing about how this was going to go. My only assessment from the words that I’ve heard before, was people saying, “You have an instant alignment and everything’s great; you have a few challenges, then life is wonderful.”

Bullshit!

I didn’t know there was a process to this, and legitimately, once I started really getting into it, meditating, I had nothing else to do but go inside, and work out my demons and my shadows, and I had a teacher there to help me get through it this time. When Master Charles wasn’t able, he had a team of other people who were helping me through this. I was aided by one loving teacher in the beginning, and then two loving teachers, and then three loving teachers. Then four of them, Alan.

Such love in their heart to give me their wisdom and their grace! Okay? That is an absolute blessing!

Here I was with this information of beauty, and I was using it. Master Charles said to me, “Here’s the magic of it. The music that you’re hearing has these sound waves that are actually optimizing the balance of the brain. We are lopsided; we’re left-side dominant, and we need to be more on the right side with the creation, and intuition, and the passions, and empathy. We’re lopsided. We’re not functional.” So I started to have these wonderful sensations, and then I was going pretty high. I was really getting up there. I called them and he goes, “You’re going to have to take a minute. Like a bird, if you fly too high, or if you think that too many Tylenols will make it better. It won't? It’s medicine, so you take as much as you need and you stop.” That was hard for me, but truth. It was that powerful, and I still believe in it today.

It folded time for me. When you start your journey, there’s a lot of stuff that comes up; you get in the ditch, digging up the mud, and you’re like, what is all this? Oh my God! And, we’re supposed to look at it, and not get attached to it. But, there’s so much information in it, and so we have to learn what to do with that. With all the tools I was given, I was not to bypass, or pretend it didn’t happen; it was to go deeper into myself! I mean, get dirty! Wow! There is all this yuck in here. All that pain, all that stuff that had happened, from heartbreak, from abuse, from law, was still stored in there. I didn’t know how to breathe! My teachers were helping me learn how to do that without feeling so intensely emotional in it.

For the first year, I was in heavy training with Master Charles Cannon. As I was building my life, it was making it harder in my marriage. My ex-husband, the more filled with Light I got, the more brilliant I became, the more angry he got. This got scary for me. Really, because I knew that I was just gonna shine brighter, but I had to kind of cover that Light, because if I was too happy and joyous, it was a bad deal. That occurred with my stepfather, too. These were repeating things.

The dark night of the soul happened, I would say, some two years after I had been really thick into it. The first week that I started, Alan, I really said, “Yes, I’m going to wake up!” ... hell broke loose. For the first week I had the worst nightmares I’ve ever had in my life! I had waking nightmares! I would be walking and I would hear these screams or have these flashes of horrible images pop into my mind. It was like my ego was horrified of what was happening. We don’t know what you’re doing! You’re juggling up everything! You just got to stop this madness! We’re going to send all kinds of bad images to you unless you just go back.

I was like, oh, look at this. I recognize that this was part of the process, and so I started taking notes. In my own journey of Awakening, I said, if nobody’s talking about that and you’re going through it, that’s a bad thing. Right? You’re going to be horribly confused and scared and thinking something wrong ... there’s nothing wrong! What I came to realize is that Awakening is a lot like climbing a really steep mountain, and you can’t see the sun because the clouds are covering the sun, but you can see the moon. You know it’s there, and it’s making you warm, but you can’t see the sun. You got to keep climbing the mountain.

Every time I climb a mountain with spirituality, as Awakening was for me, I get tools and I get stronger. I’d be like, yeah, let me go to that mountain, and that is when we feel the bliss, and we feel life is happening, and synchronicities are showing up.

Yet, then, the ego would go, nope, and it would put the cuffs on things, because the hard-wiring was not yet strong enough to hold it. I would get a challenge, and I would have this emotional rupture! I would go, Oh my God … totally normal! That’s totally normal.

Yet, I would have the tools, and I would go, well shit, that was a sting. I felt that on my ass, and my teachers were applauding, “Good job! You did it! Excellent! That’s what happens! You got off your ass~ That’s the way to go!” So, I was given that yes that I’m not doing anything wrong; this is how it happens. It just got easier, but those challenges never got easier. What got easier is my capacity to have awareness and the tools to see it. My perspective changed, and when your perspective changes everything changes.

I was noticing big changes in myself. My ex-husband was reading my journaling, and it was making him incensed. What was happening is that I was getting what I considered downloads. Not only did teachers come to me, it was like, oh, Byron Katie or Neale Donald Walsch. I would just pick them and I was off and sailing, into their beauty and their majesty and their wisdom. I was getting activated. This is how it was happening, Alan. I had the emotion that I really didn’t want to suffer anymore. I had nothing to lose at that point. I was at the bottom. The ex took everything; the man took everything, and then I lost my child. I was having a hard time looking for a reason to want to exist at that point. That was a literal struggle.

Even knowing my gift, my love, my talent, my compassion, it was still a struggle even wanting to walk on the planet. I struggle with depression my whole life.

So, getting here was so imperative, because I felt that the only reason I had ever gone through, what I got through, was that I had to be a bridge for men and women to find themselves.

We don’t remember who we are. We don’t even remember how to love each other. I was not given love as a child; that’s a legitimate truth. Love was withheld from me very often, and I am not that person at all! That led to another journey of who am I. Because I realized I wasn’t like everyone else, and they weren’t, like me. That’s another conversation about Star Seeds. The reality is that a lot of us come and endure massive amounts of trauma, and horrific situations like this, because we’re natural leaders. We have to have experience. Nobody is a leader without experience! Period! I don’t care how much book knowledge you have! Good for you, but that doesn’t do anything as far as knowing what it’s like to walk the Path.

I know what it’s like to lose children, to be beaten, to be raped, to be stabbed, to go hungry. I know what it’s like to be homeless. I know what it is like to be addicted. I know what it’s like to recover. I know what it’s like to be hopeful. I know what it’s like to find your power in places you never knew it existed. I know what it’s like to hear the voice of the great Divine inside my soul. And, I know what it’s like to be able to be a Miracle!