Your Hidden Portal to Peace

Want more peace and joy in your life? Daily stress getting to you? With terrorism, layoffs and pollution, can you feel safe and happy? Yes, you can-by tapping into a little known, and less-used, doorway to internal security. This entry is not really hidden as much as misplaced. As a culture, we've lost the use of this innate inner compass.

We each have our own personal portal to peace. The treasure hunt begins with an inner feeling triggered by outside circumstances. It's a timeless game of internal guidance by external clue. For millennia, ancient civilizations and native peoples have been playing this sport for fun and good fortune.

Don't Shrug off that Weird Feeling!

Have you ever felt a rush of recognition wash over you? Do new people or places seem vaguely familiar? Do you ever get a sense that you've been in this exact situation before?

This strange feeling of connection with places and people is a clue, a flag, a signal. This sense of familiarity marks a gateway to a personal gold mine of clarity and strength.

"It's Deja-vu All Over Again!"

Yogi Bera's famous outburst reminds us of the repeating nature of this phenomenon. The French phrase "deja-vu" literally means "already seen" or "seen before." How? When? Where? These questions invoke the intrigue that gets us to play the gambit of a lifetime-the voyage Home.

If approached as such, this feeling of familiarity can be a fortuitous opening or opportunity. This sensibility can be a portal to your intuition and inner wisdom-which, in turn, can help you make the right moves in life to bring you Home to yourself safe and sound!

How Does the game Work?

Act on the sensation of familiarity as you flow through your day. Instead of brushing aside the hazy sense of foreknowledge, follow the lead of these glints of recognition. As in a treasure hunt, one clue leads to the next until you find the prize at the end-your internal center of clarity. Take my recent journey to China, for example.

A Hong Kong Homecoming

One day, "out of the blue" a metaphysical bookstore owner in Hong Kong emails me to come to China to present my workshops at her store after she likes what she reads on my website. Oddly, her name and store don't seem as foreign as her country. My intuition screams "Yes! Go. You know her." My rational mind moans "No!" to the notion of an expensive 19-hour plane ride halfway around the world based on a "hunch." I can't pin down the connection I feel to her or Hong Kong. Yet, because similar subterranean magnetism has led me to many fruitful adventures, I buy my ticket to the Far Out-I mean, the Far East.

Mystery in the Mist

Hong Kong is a funky mix of ultramodern glass and steel-and traditional mud bricks and stone. Appearing and disappearing in the swirling mist shrouding the fabled South China Sea, strangely familiar Chinese junks cruise alongside sleek ocean liners. Impressions coming and going like the boats in the fog, I see details of the inside layout of a sampan-although I've never laid eyes on one before!

Winding my way through narrow alleys cluttered with shacks selling everything from jade to silk, elephant tusks to exotic birds in gilded cages, I sense that I've walked these cobblestone streets long ago. I feel some lost connection with the bizarre goods being hocked so boisterously. At dawn, hundreds of people fill pocketsize parks with the graceful beauty of Tai Chi and Chinese Sword Dance. Goosebumps on my arm inform me that I, too, practiced these arts in some other era.

Open-air fish tanks in front of every restaurant promise fresh, tasty morsels of squid and eel. The pungent smells of savory spiced pigeon ricochet through my sensory memory bank. Surprisingly, it doesn't strike me as unusual to eat the head, feet, ears and nose of fish, pig, dog and insect, as the locals enjoy in this land that is not really as alien as I thought.

I wend my way between sacred stone temples dwarfed by cloud-kissing skyscrapers. Strolling through th