Reiki and an owl

Great Horned Owl

Just minutes ago I left an office where I had my first ever Reiki session. I’ve known the practitioner for years, but it was only recently that I had heard she was using Reiki as part of her therapeutic work. The reason for our meeting this morning was that I’ve been desperately seeking out any kind of help as a way to come to terms with the challenges of what I’ve been going through.

Anyone who has followed my story, even if only a little, will know I’ve had a lifetime of depression. I am at a place right now where I’m wondering if this bleak mood is somehow tied in with my UFOs experiences and synchronicities. I’m looking for any help I can find, and sitting with a Reiki therapist seemed as good a way as any to dig deeper.

The session started with her asking questions; I explained the reasons I came to her. I spoke about my ongoing depression and how its impacted on my life. Then I cautiously asked if she wanted to hear about what I think might really be happening.

She said, “Yep, I wanna hear it.”

I tried to fill her in on the UFO stuff, not an easy thing to do in just a few minutes. She nodded and reassured me that she believed me and then she asked me to move my chair to the middle of the room. She told me to get comfortable and to close my eyes. For the next half hour or so I sat quietly while she briefly set her hands on my head and shoulders. The rest of the time she just stood near me, mostly behind me as I sat.

After that she sat in front of me and told me I could open my eyes. She said, “Well, what I’m getting is that you are having a Kundalini awakening.”

She went on to explain what she had received. She told me I was very open, that I was experiencing things coming into me and that these things were real.

She was framing things in her own spiritual understanding, one based in eastern traditions. She had studied Kashmir Shavism, and within that tradition all things are a manifestation of a Universal Consciousness. The emotional pain I’ve been feeling could be seen as a separation of this wholeness of conciseness. Her sense was that the source of my depression wasn’t base on any kind of buried UFO trauma, but more on an awareness that I was feeling a separateness from the one unified source (call that love, Universal Consciousness, God or whatever) and I was now coming to terms with that deeper knowing.

Listening to her, it was obvious that she was seeing my experience as if it were parallel to her own. She wasn’t having UFO sightings, but she told me of an almost mystical kinship with elephants and that the grass would talk to her.

I was impressed that her way of framing the totality of all of it, what the universe meant to her, jived so closely with the way I see it. She used different vocabulary words and metaphors, but none the less, it matched what I’ve been experiencing.

During this part of our session she was sitting with a big window behind her, so her head was back lit by bright, but overcast skies. She had her curly hair tied back and the way some of the wisps of hair set against her ears created a weirdly vivid illusion that she had pointed elf ears. It was perfectly symmetrical on both her right and left ears. This wasn’t subtle, she looked exactly like an elf straight out of the movie The Lord of the Rings.

I interrupted her to explain that I was seeing her as a magical elf. In that moment, I had a profound ringing in my left ear. This happens sometimes, and I don’t quite know what to make of it.

Until this point I hadn’t mentioned any of the owl stuff. I wanted to tell her about the book project I’ve been focused on (the working title is Owls and the UFO Abductee) but before I did, I asked her: “Have you seen any owls recently?”

She said, “Well, me and my boyfriend saw a great big owl last night, it was really incredible.”

I asked what happened and she explained that they had been walking near their home when they saw an owl sitting on a branch near them. As they walked closer it swooped down low and then landed further down the path, staying ahead of them as they walked. She described a Great Horned owl, she said it was big and it would glide low and incredibly close to the ground as it stayed in front of her and her friend.

I asked if she had seen many owls since she moved her over a decade ago. This valley has a lot of owls so it didn’t surprise me that she said she had seen a few now and again. I asked if any of these sightings had been powerful in any way, she said, “Not really, except for what had happened last night, that was pretty intense.”

I calmly told her, “That was me. That owl was all about this, us here right now.”



She agreed. I went on to say that I was just about to tell her that she shouldn’t be surprised if she saw an owl in the next few days, but The Universe beat me to it, it had already happened.

If this had been 2009 and she said she had seen an owl the night before our session, it would’ve really flipped me out. The synchronicity of it would have sent me into a spiraling frenzy of second guessing. My fragile brain would have been a conflicted jumble of divergent thoughts, first dismissing it as nothing, and the next second, ascribing the owl as a divine messenger from on high. But this morning, I saw it as being almost (but not quite) mundane.

She also pointed out that I used the term crazy a few times during our discussion. I had said things like “this crazy UFO stuff” as I tried to explain what had been going on in my life. She told me that it wasn’t crazy and I should stop framing it that way. I agreed and said that I use it less and less as I proceed forward in my acceptance of what seems to be intersecting with my life.

Text added, same day, 11:23 at night:

I just got an email from my Reiki therapist (excerpt below). She saw an owl again tonight. Two big owls seen two nights in a row. Why does this all seem so normal to me now?

[my boyfriend] and I took the kitties for a walk tonight and just as I was thinking, "I'm going to manifest an elephant sighting," that big grey owl appeared on a fence post. I don't know if it landed there as I thought that thought - or if it came into my conscious view after I thought that thought - or if it just appeared, materialized. I had to laugh out loud - the playful universe constantly displaying its sense of humor and connection.

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Owls, driveways and laundry

A string of owl sychronicities emerged last week, and I’m trying to make sense of the overlapping weirdness. Like any synch, these things get so intertwined and personal that it ends up being almost impossible to convey their power, let alone their meaning. I’ve gotten to the point where I trust that the more entangled this stuff gets, the more I trust it. That said, I trust this flurry of synchro-weirdness.

What follows is my (excessively hyper-linked) attempt to unravel this knotted cluster of owl stuff.

I'm visual, so charts help me focus

On Monday (Sept. 30th) I had a Reiki session with a woman I know here in my little town. You can read a long post about what happened HERE. At the end of our meeting I asked if she had ever had any odd owl experiences.

I asked her: “Have you seen any owls recently?”

She said, “Well, me and my boyfriend saw a great big owl last night, it was really incredible.”

She explained about seeing a great horned owl that flew along side her, from fence post to branch, as she walked along a path. It would swoop down low and then landed further down the path, staying ahead of them as they walked. It was huge and it would glide low and incredibly close to the ground as it stayed in front of her and her friend.

I calmly told her, “That was me. That owl was all about this, us here right now.”


She agreed.

That same night I got an email where she told me she had see another owl after our session. She wrote that is was a huge gray owl (I am assuming it was a great gray) in the same spot, and it “appeared” right in the moment when she thought to herself that she wanted to manifest an elephant.

I wanted to talk with her but didn’t call until the next day Tuesday (Oct. 1st), right before calling her I switched on the live broadcast of Micah Hanks’ The Grailien Report. The show was only on for a little bit, just enough for me to hear that Micah had two guests, Cam and Kyle from the Expanded Perspectives Podcast.

I turned off the audio, walked next door to do a load of laundry (I use my neighbors washing machine) and when I got back to the house I made the call to the Reiki therapist. I left a message on her machine and then switched the audio back on.

The first thing I heard was Micah’s voice excitedly declaring, “The gentleman you guys are talking about is… Mike Clelland of the Hidden Experience blog. So, someone needs to get him in the chatroom, we’re talkin’ about owls!”

I was sitting right at my desk, I clicked on skype, send a little note, “Micah - I JUST started listening - and guess what I heard…” Within seconds I was on the air with him and his guests.

You can hear the excitement in amazement in their voices as they reveled in the fact that I heard my name and got on the air so quickly. I felt a little bit like I’d hijacked the conversation for the remaining half hour of the show. One thing I talked about was a weird synchronicty surrounding a woman from Asheville North Carolina, right where Micah lives, and her mystical experiences with owls and a very strange UFO sighting.

Now, what I hadn’t heard was just how my name came up. This morning I listened to the archived edition of the show from that night, and a a highly charged number comes up.

There it is again, 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 !

At the 1:23:45 time count, Cam begins a very interesting owl story by saying, “Now a little stranger than that, here’s another story that my mother actually shared with me…” What follows is an extremely eerie sighting of a giant 4 and 1/2 foot tall owl seen in a driveway.

As the guy tells this story, he says he pressed his mother for details because there is a guy who has a blog where he talks about owls and UFO abduction. He was obviously talking about me, but I hadn’t hear this part live.

Fast forward to yesterday, Thursday (Oct. 10th). I was at my desk all day obsessively working on this owl book project. As it got to be evening I received an email from Alan Abbadessa-Green, he was replying to a note I had sent him on Monday (Oct. 7th) where I said, “Are you up for a call?”

I don’t know if I’ve ever just asked him to chat like this, but I really enjoy talking with him. So it was a little bit unusual that I would just ask to talk like this. He said lets talk and later that night he rang me up on skype.

He excitedly asked, “What did you think of that picture I sent you!”

I hadn’t received anything, and he resized he had tried to tag me on someone else's photo on facebook, so I never go it.

a small owl in Alan's driveway

He sent it as we talked. He explained that last week, on Wednesday (Oct. 2nd) he was coming home from doing the laundry, and as he was nearing his driveway he had a strong thought in his mind, “Mike Clelland - owls - owls owls - Mike Clelland.” When he pulled into his home, there on the driveway was a small little owl. He was with a friend and he took a picture of it. He said he was close enough that he could see it’s big eyes dilate from the flash.

Caption from the site: 
Ran into this cute little guy on my walk to work.
He didn't move, just starred at me.
I even gave him a boop on the head.

Now that morning Thursday (Oct. 10th) the first email in my in-box was a link to this image. It was from someone who I didn’t know, but had heard me on Greg Bishop’s Radio Mysterioso. It was just a cute owl image found online, but it weirdly matched Alan’s experience. It was an owl in a driveway!

Alan and Micah both live in the same town, along with the woman who had the owl and UFO experience, that being Asheville North Carolina. Both Alan and Micah are podcasters, bloggers, authors and publish books. I've interviewed both Alan and Micah, in both of these there was huge focus on synchronicities.

Now, there is no better person on earth than Alan to try to unravel this kind of synchro-weirdness. The laundry connection seemed odd, and Alan pointed out that I had my own powerful laundry sync (linked HERE). But weirder to me was the striking similarity of the two owl in the driveway pictures.

We both tried to untangle this weird knot of owl stuff, but all we ended up doing was seeing more and more little threads that seemed to lead everywhere. No answers, just a recognition that this stuff really happens.

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the reoccurring message

a quote that has the ring of truth

As I proceed forward, the idea of shamanism, or more specifically the role of the shaman, has been welling up in my work and I am trying to pull on those threads. 

Last week I spoke on the phone with Joe Lewels, Ph.D., the author of two books I really like, The God Hypothesis and Rulers of the Earth. I contacted him specifically to ask about shamanism. He had spent time with Dr. John Mack, they traveled together throughout Mexico talking to shamans about their connections with other realms, and how could this be the same realm as the UFO occupant.

One of the things Joe spoke about (and was in his books) was his feeling that he survived his time as a pilot in Viet Nam by direct intervention from some other realm. I also asked Joe if he had any UFO contact experiences, he said he had asked himself that same question, and feels strongly that he hasn’t.

Then I had two amazing conversations over the weekend, one on Saturday evening and the next on Sunday morning. The first was with a woman who I had talked with three years ago, and I wanted to check in again just to hear how she was doing. She experienced a profound missing time event in her car, that plays out like a textbook abduction event. Afterwords, through a series of synchronistic and psychic experiences, she was compelled to begin a Norse tradition of shamanistic practices. She ended up moving to a home directly across the street from a Civil War cemetery, and this unleashed all kinds of paranormal weirdness, including seeing Union soldiers in her yard in the middle of the night.

The next morning my phone rang and the voice on the other end was nervous and apologetic. It was from a young man who said he felt compelled to call me. What followed was a two and a half hour conversation where it seemed both of us was confirming and validating the others experiences. It was as if we each had missing puzzle pieces and we were handing those pieces to each other in a way that helped shine a light on both of our overall experiences. It was really powerful sense of connection. Like the call from the night before, this guy had textbook contact events, he was compelled to follow a Norse tradition of shamanistic practices, and he was in the military.

The themes of these phone calls all overlapped and intertwined. As I write this there is a feeling of one long blurred communication, albeit it with three different people.

What we all agreed on was that, collectively we as humans, are dangerously adrift. Something is terribly wrong and we don’t seem to have any tools to alter what feels like train track heading toward some sort of doom.

I told all three folks that I have a working model for how I have been framing these contact experiences. It feels like the UFO abduction lore is playing out like a shamanic initiation, and the experiencers I interact with all seem to be playing the role of shaman, or at least some facet of that kind of work. I talk to a lot of people claiming the UFO contact experience, and pretty much all of them are channelers, Reiki masters, psychic mediums, healers, therapists or they are writing a book in the hopes of helping other experiencers. (This comes up again below)

In my notes from these calls I found this scribbled at the edge of the page: idea for a new book, shamans are being created, or forced (forged) by these entities. This idea was explored in John Mack’s 1999 book Passport to the Cosmos, he argued that direct UFO could be compared to a shamanic initiation. 


Here are some quotes from Joe from our conversation. He was articulating what I have been feeling.

I see see whats called the alien abduction phenomenon, and I don’t like that term… lets say experiences with non-human intelligence… and the people who are having these experiences are, many times rather unwillingly, being dragged into a shamanic apprenticeship. The people having these experiences are being taught how to heal, their consciousness is being elevated, they are being given opportunities to help people. Many of them will leave their jobs and then become reiki masters and massage therapists and hypnotherapists, and all of these can be seen as forms of shamanic activity…

We need shamans, and if society doesn’t provide them, the universe will.

During our conversation I shared some of my own stories, and he listened closely, taking on the role of therapist. Then he spoke directly to me:

Follow your heart is the opposite of following your brain. You are following your brain and not your heart, that's what I see. You’re trying to reason this out logically and objectivity and objectivity is just an illusion, there is no such thing so you are waisting your time being logical. It sounds to me like your guides are pushing like hell to get you to move forward and you are just kind of digging your heels in. Anytime you are doing something that helps people, you are on the right track. Just jump in with both feet, you’re on the right track.

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“Mom, is that you?”

Barred owl, photo taken February 16, 2017. Click on image for HI-rez view.

Last Friday morning at 8:35, Andrea had a photo of an owl show up in her Facebook chat box (see above). The text under the image asked, “Andrea, this owl is on my deck. Do you think it might be injured?”

The message was from Andrea’s friend Suzanne. I was sitting nearby and she showed me the picture. My sense was that it looked fine. Andrea replied and asked when it showed up.

What then took place was a real time back and forth dialogue about the owl right out her window. Suzanne told us over Facebook that her mother had recently died, and that: “Today is my Mom’s birthday.” She had been crying earlier that morning, still grieving over the loss. Her mom had always been a good listener and she desperately wanted to talk to her.

She sat down and took some time to meditate after crying. Her intention was to process her feelings of confusion and loss. It was right when opening her eyes after meditating that she first saw the owl. She remarked that the way the window was lined up she would not have noticed it if she was seated even just a few inches off to either side. Her immediate thought was, “Mom, is that you?”

She tapped on the window and the owl slowly turned its head, its eyes wide open and staring at her. It was at this point that she took the photo (above) and sent it to Andrea.

Suzanne wrote, “So gorgeous… Never seen one so close.”

I was getting the play-by-play as Andrea read each of the incoming messages. When I heard that Suzanne’s mother had recently died I immediately blurted out, “Talk to the owl as if it is your Mom.” My comment was because of all the accounts I'd collected of people talking to owls after a loved one (most often a parent) had passed. 

Suzanne couldn't get out onto the deck because of deep snow, so she opened the window to talk, “It looked at me for several minutes with those eyes and then flew into a tree. Has to be her.”

The owl had sat on the deck chair for about an hour, and then spent about five minutes in a pine tree close to the house. She said this short time felt endless. 

In a follow up phone conversation I asked Suzanne her thoughts on the owl. She said that before noticing the owl she felt alone and despondent. Since the sighting, “I just felt an amazing connection, I don’t feel alone.” 

For the whole rest of that day she felt like crying, “It was so moving, but I wasn’t grieving. The tears are not of despair.”

She had lived in that house for over eight years, and never once seen an owl. 

Her mom would have been 95 years old on the day of this owl sighting, February 17, 2017. If you leave out the zero, the calendar date repeats itself in the year, 2/17 is 2017. 

Suzanne is a psychotherapist, and like so many of the other people who have described similar owl experiences, she is trained in Reiki.

A few days after the owl sighting on her back deck, Suzanne said this, “I am convinced that the visit was also a message to me to take care of business. The business of letting go ... and to commit to my work and my purpose here. Even if it means facing down the loneliness for the time being. But I am not alone. The owl did not seem to leave the yard. I believe it is still around my home.”

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I am indebted to all the people who have shared their stories with me. I realize that I've become a sort of archivist for people's personal exerinces. There is a responsibility to do more than just catalog these accounts and tuck them away in file cabinets. There is a need to share. My hope is that the people who find these little reports will end up being just a little more open to the deeper aspects of our reality.                        

—Mike Clelland.  

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audio conversation with Mary Rodwell

Mary Rodwell is a former nurse and midwife, and she now works in private practice as a professional counsellor. She is also a hypnotherapist (including past life regressions), Reiki Master as well as researcher and author. 

Mary is also the founder of the Australian Close Encounter Resource Network, (ACERN). The primary role role of ACERN is to offer professional counselling, support, hypnotherapy and information to individuals and their families with anomalous paranormal experiences, particularly specializing in abduction-contact experiences. This is not a research organization, it is a resource for therapeutic counseling and support.

  one-click audio download HERE  

The focus of this conversation was on the tensions within the UFO research community. Specificly when folks are confronted with reports and experiences well beyond the simplistic materialist framework that defines our existence. This subject forces any thoughtful observer to look deeply into the multi-dimensional aspects of not only UFOs, but reality itself.



There are a set of interviews with Mary done by Alex Tsakiris on Skeptiko that are essential listening. Linked here are PART ONE and PART TWO

Mary is the author of Awakening: How Extraterrestrial Contact Can Transform Your Life.

My Mum Talks with Aliens

This documentary was produced by Australian television and focuses on Mary's son Chris, and his attempts to understand his mother's work with UFO abduction. Recommended viewing.

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audio conversation with Jonathan Talat Philips

author and contemporary gnostic

Healer, media activist, and author Jonathan Talat Phillips joins me to discuss his own experiences and his book, The Electric Jesus: The Healing Journey of a Contemporary Gnostic. In this interview we talk about to his path from darkness to light.

one-click audio download HERE

one hour and 20 minutes long

In this interview Talat and I talk about the one subject that might get ignored in more main stream resources, we talk about ALIEN influences in his life journey. We jump back and for the between the role of Christ consciousness and the use of psychedelics in the path of the modern shamanic initiate.

Talat is the co-founder of the Evolver Social Movement, and a senior editor at Reality Sandwich, the premier web zine for transformational (counter) culture. In addition, he’s also a Reiki Master, a member of the International Sufi Order, and a promoter of energetic and entheogenic healing.

On its own … spiritual liberation will never be enough. If the new humans are to survive, Jonathan warns, they will also have to be spiritual warriors … capable of standing up to the Western materialism machine, so we can create sustainable societies that care for their citizens, harmonize with the cycles of nature, and receive and honor the vast healing light that quietly connects us all.

What’s great about Jonathan is that he doesn’t just talk the talk. He absolutely walks the walk – whether as an energy healer, as a resolute explorer of non-ordinary realms... and he has a compelling story to tell.


- Graham Hancock, excerpt from the Introduction of The Electric Jesus

Here are two other excellent audio interviews with Greg from Occult of Personality. The first was from last year (HERE) and the follow up was from just a few months ago (HERE). And here's another good one from The Occult Sentinel.

For more info on Jonathan Talot Phillips, you can read a more complete bio HERE.

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