A Conversation with Author, Jan Phillips
by Jan Deremo Lundy, HGJ Senior Editor

Originally published in the Healing Garden Journal, March/April of 2005

Jan Phillips has served as the Muse for many aspiring writers, artists and photographers. Her books, including Marry Your Muse: Making a Lasting Commitment to Your Creativity, and God is at Eye Level: Photography as Healing Art, have inspired many amateurs and professionals to probe and express their creative passion. Simply put, she helps people fall in love with the artist that is within them. She is an active member of and workshop presenter for the International Women's Writing Guild. She offers workshops internationally on creativity and will be in Michigan from June 10-12 leading an experiential workshop based on her new book, Divining the Body: Healing Yourself from the Inside Out, at The Inn at the Rustic Gate in Big Rapids. For more information call (800) 319-5867.

HGJ: Where is your heart today, Jan, as we begin this conversation?

JP: Let me see. Right now my heart feels that it's being beckoned and called by the future. In the old days, it used to feel like I would be propelling myself forward with my passions and my dreams. But now, for some reason, I think because the state that the world's in, and because of the havoc that's localized in so many places (the recent Tsunami), that it's thrown me into more of a state of surrender--in terms of feeling that I have to come up with a solution. Because I think the solution is going to arrive through a community of minds and hearts, not through an individual anymore. I think that's part of the massive shift that we're undergoing as a human family, that we're done with the sense of rugged individualism, and we're only now opening to a sense of divine community. So my heart is resting in that in-between place. I feel transitional and optimistic. Everyday I know that my daily actions, because of the consciousness I bring to them, are contributing positively to the people around the world that are in danger and trouble.

Jan: Yesterday, I spent some time with your wonderful book, God is at Eye Level, and what struck me was a passage that said, "These are dangerous times on earth--times of despair and disillusionment, of mean-spirited greed and intolerance for "the other," times of reckless violence against nature, against each other, against our own overworked, over-stressed selves." This was written in 2000--are we still there?

J.P.: Oh, I think that we're further along in both regards. In the regard of danger, I think it's deeper. In the regard of hopefulness, I think it's broader. For example, I run these ten-week groups and I started them maybe four or five years ago. Women would come into the groups and we'd all have to tell our story. It's like a graduate version of consciousness raising. I just started a new one two nights ago and the distinction between the participants from four years ago, and the participants now, is extraordinary. Everyone in the group--ten women who come from diverse backgrounds--everybody is already aware that with our thoughts, our feelings and our words, we create the future we enter into. So it's not remedial any more. I think this mash of cultural creatives is congealing now. We're coming together.

HGJ: And you really do sense a shift toward broader hopefulness?

J.P.: Yes I certainly do, and you know, I'm all over the country in my travels. Granted, most of those who come to my workshops are already the enlightened masses. But I'm seeing that we're a powerful bunch. Enlightenment doesn't come without a regard for the rest of us, because the primary tenant of enlightenment is an understanding that you and I are totally connected.

Jan: What do you think is the major call being issued to us today as individuals, as a people?

J.P.: I think there's two calls. And I think they're equally important, fueled, fed and informed by each other. First is the call inward, which is the most difficult call because it's a demand for separation from the world It's a call for silence and openness to the Spirit--to the Universal Spirit, to the oneness that we're all a part of. So the first step then is to be able to say, 'Okay, I'm willing to give even one-half hour a day in order to sit quietly to have a relationship with the invisible and to tune my ear to the great below in order to be a receptor and a transmitter for information about the next evolutionary breakthrough.' For us to perceive ourselves as vehicles--it's like transformation is not happening to us, it's happening through us. So for me to be the clearest vessel I can be means that I had to spend the last 45 minutes before your call preparing myself by being silent. So that's part A.

And part B is to simultaneously be reaching out into a community of our choice. Because I always say, you have to link up, and here's your choice. You do it locally, nationally or internationally, depending on what turns you on and what makes you happiest. But we must start giving back and making connections and building bridges. So it might be that a person like Jan Phillips would pick national because that's more my audience and my preferred way of being. I love taking the pulse of the nation and I love speaking to national organizations. So that's how I figure out I'm going to make my connections and my contribution. But the person who's sitting next to me is saying, 'Oh no, I'm just going to do it locally. I'm going to start a foundation here, I'm going to organize a circle of women to go down to a women's shelter once a week.' Everybody gets to decide.

So we just pick and as long as we've got those two things operating in an equal way, like a seesaw--the inward journey and the outward giving--then we ourselves become much clearer vessels of the transforming nature of the transforming event that's occurring on this planet at this time.

You know, I was in a Japanese-Catholic-Buddhist monastery when I made my peace pilgrimage around the world, and there was a Catholic priest who had been banished to the mountain because he was a rabble rouser according to the Church. We started at dawn with a bell, sitting zazen on pillows in the round little chapel, and after an hour of meditation another bell rang, and we all sang Gregorian Chant. After half an hour of that, we then had a Catholic Mass with the Eucharist and all. And he said to me at one point that Jesus was the event of Buddhist thought. I think that we are the continuation, we're the embodiment of the Christ message. If you really care about what Jesus was up to, he made it really clear that he believed there was not a single thing he was doing that we can't do. Totally clear. But any religion is not going to promote that because religion is an institution and it soon becomes about itself.

HGJ: Jan, we understand your newest book Divining the Body is the subject of a weekend workshop you are doing in Michigan?

J.P.: I think of this book as Deepak Chopra meets Catherine of Siena. It's the latest, greatest news from the scientific and medical community converging with the deepest wonders from the mystical community--the poets, the saints, the mystics. It's celebrating that convergence, and it's all about the human body. The book is actually a pilgrimage through our own bodies starting with the feet, so every chapter is a different body part--the legs, the back, the womb, the breasts, the hands. Each chapter makes a case that this body part is a threshold across which sacred energy is received and given. It gives us a chance to undo the damage of living in a culture that only can profit from our feeling insecure about our bodies. This book shines light on the beauty of who we are as human bodies, which are great containers for a soul that is just so magnificent...