Soul Sisters: Raising the Consciousness – Part 2

Haven’t read Part 1? Go HERE

They’re sisters of soul, these two. Colleen Buckman — mystic, massage therapist, healing touch practitioner and intuitive healer, writer, songwriter, singer — and Susan Shehata — feng shui practitioner, Reiki practitioner, rebirther/breathworker and healer of space, people and animals — come together every Sunday afternoon to present consciousness-raising radio, sharing their connected vision of peace, love and understanding.

Colleen and Susan (from left to right in photo) host “Raising the Consciousness” [on from 1-2 p.m. Sundays on AM 950], a program that provides simple solutions for conscious living. Both are deeply committed to the cause of inspiring global change through individual action, and what they do in their daily lives, when they’re not in front of the microphone, demonstrates more than what they could ever hope to convey in a single interview. Yet, they sat down with The Edge prior to a Sunday broadcast, at the KTNF studio in Eden Prairie, and while answering questions about their on-air collaboration they revealed much more about their passion for life and their friendship with each other.

In this conclusion of the interview, Colleen and Susan  discuss the components of their radio program and the intention behind it, as well as their personal dreams and visions.

Let’s talk about the three segments of “Raising the Consciousness.” Tell me about “Voices for the Mother.”
Colleen: The name came through when I was taking a shower or meditating or something, during that silent time. The idea is that conscious artists are here ultimately to be a voice for Spirit.

Because of this time period on the planet and all of the changes that are happening, really the one that we need to have a voice for — at my deepest heart, I feel this — is the Mother, the Divine Mother. That’s the first place it comes from, and then, in turn, Mother Earth, and then all of the females and the mothers on the planet. This doesn’t exclude male artists by any stretch of the imagination. It’s the principle that if you are really connected to Spirit, then you understand that we are all whole and connected to the Mother, and without her and all of her resources, we would not exist.

I’m interested in talking to the artists who come from that place when they are writing a book or making an album, or whatever they are passionate about doing. Those are the artists we gather and that we look for. A lot of them come from my connections through being an artist and what I do at Fair Trade Om, which is a philanthropic production company.

It’s about bringing together conscious artists who make a difference in the world. Susan also happens to be an amazing artist with an amazing voice, so we both knew that if we were going to do the radio show it had to have an element of our creative artistry in it, or we would start to lose interest relatively quickly.

Susan: I agree. It is about giving an opportunity for artists to share what inspires them. Even people who are not professional artists sometimes need to hear from other people, to find inspiration.

Tell me about the segment, “Space Guru.”
Susan: I am the “Space Guru.” And although Colleen is definitely Space Guru’s sidekick, I enjoy having the input from her in the segment, as well. This segment is based on the idea that our space is a mirror of our lives. We can look to our space as an informer of our goals and anything that is holding us up in any way. The ability to translate that for people is one of my missions on the planet. I’m able to say, “Okay, your house is doing this, let’s talk about what that’s about.” To some degree, we have a home — even with the homeless there is an element of space that they create, whatever form that may take. So our creation of space is a universal experience, and by being able to use something that is universal as a tool for people’s healing is a real gift. I always tell people that your space is really a gift to your healing.

Colleen: Yes. It’s very important to include all the aspects of living simply, all the aspects of people’s day-to-day lives and how people function in their lives. Clearly your home or your office or your car, the places where you spend a great deal of time, are reflections of what is happening. I know that my house is way more likely to be a disturbed mess when something is happening internally that is not being handled. Often I can shift how I feel internally by changing the elements of my surroundings. Susan has such a gift with this and helps me with my home all the time. It helps other people just be in awareness, at the very least, of their environments.

And the third major segment is “Integration — education and tips for integrating healing and awareness into our daily lives.”
Susan: That’s a broad segment where we may do anything from interviewing a chiropractor to talking with a Kriya yoga meditation master to just talking about our own work as healers. It’s the integration of the mind, body, spirit connection. It’s really not more involved than that.

We’ve picked these three segments of the show based on the things that we’re passionate about. “Voices” is very specific to the creative piece. “Space Guru” is very specific to the living space. And “Integration” of mind, body, spirit allows us to bring in such a wealth of different wonderful guests and knowledge from different aspects of different forms of spirituality and healing.

Colleen: We don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves in what we talk about with regard to healing and spirituality. We want to be able to get as scientific as we can at times, and other times we like to be as esoteric as we can be. We’ve been blessed by some amazing guests, like Dr. Ibrahim Jaffe and Dr. Norm Sheely, and Paula Kuether. They just keep coming our way. For us, it’s just a pleasure to be sitting with wise teachers and healers for an hour or a half an hour once a week.

Were there any moments during the first 63 episodes that really touched your heart?
Susan: Dr. Ibrahim Jaffe was one guest that I was very taken with. Somebody had come into Sacred Rearrangements with a flier saying he was in town. I usually don’t get so inspired to interview someone that I haven’t researched, but right in that moment Spirit moved through and said, “Yes, you will interview this man!” The next thing I know we had the honor of having Dr. Jaffe on the show. He is a Sufi master and spiritual healer, and I was so moved by the interview, not only because he is a very special man, but also because it touched something on my own spiritual path. The next thing I knew I was signing up for his workshop here in town that following weekend. It is rare that I get the opportunity to sign up for any workshops with my schedule, so for me to drop everything and go take a two-day intensive meant that something was triggered.

Colleen: I think there have been a lot of touching moments. Using Dr. Jaffe as an example, when you get to sit with people who have mastery over a certain subject, whether it be Emily Goldberg (Venus of Mars) with filmmaking, or Dr. Jaffe, or how Dr. Sheely knows so much about healing and the body and the mind. You just get to laugh and pick their brains. That’s what brings the lump in my throat and makes me feel just very grateful to have these opportunities.

What were the funniest moments in the 63 episodes.
Colleen: Well, a lot of them occur in the moments during commercial breaks. We’ve had a couple moments. One particular time we were relatively prepared, and a guest was supposed to be calling at 1 p.m. for an hour interview. And that guest was not on the line. No, that guest was not on the line. So in about two minutes we were like, “Okay, what could we talk about for an hour? Do we know anything? I don’t know if we know anything.”

Susan: All of a sudden, all of your knowledge that you have gained totally evaporates, because you are on the spot. Fortunately, we are good improvisers.

Colleen: Yeah, it ended up being fine.

Susan: The guest called.

Colleen: The guest did call, and we had a full interview. But it just cracked me up, because both of us were like, just that feeling with your pants down. What would we do if we just had to shoot from the hip for a whole hour? If nothing else we could have had a whole hour of conversation about how weird it is to have to do a radio show when you have no information. Talk about being in the present moment.

What are your personal dreams of what you’d like to create or express before your experience in this lifetime is complete?
Colleen: My real passion is to have some sort of holistic healing art center in the middle of the mountains that would have an amphitheater, yoga studio, some sort of community living, people having their individual space, but still coming together weekly, or even daily for meals — a tiny, little village where you would have workshops and classes and then, at night, entertainment. You could have someone like Meryl Streep teaching acting classes, but she wants to come to the holistic healing center because she is going to get the benefits of being able to be in that environment, or Bob Dylan teaching songwriting, but he gets to be treated like a king while he’s there — not because he’s Bob Dylan, but because everybody who goes there has that experience. That is my grandest fantasy at this point. Anything between how my life exists now and that would be blissful.

Susan: Our ultimate goals are really just an extension of what we’re doing now. When we talk about what we want for ourselves or any changes we want, we aren’t in a place anymore where we feel like, “Well, what am I doing with my life?” so much as we’re in a place of, “How can I step this up to the next level?”

Everything we’re doing right now, with things that we’re doing with Fair Trade OM and Sacred Rearrangements, are kind of little mini versions of that. Ultimately our goal is to create something like what Colleen described, and we’re creating it in smaller versions now.

Colleen: The service to humanity piece still weaves through all of that, and philanthropy is a large piece of that. One of my personal goals is to hang out with as many evolved people as I can, as often as I can, in whatever they have mastery of, so that I can just be absorbing that presence. The more I hang out with really wise teachers, the more likely I am to be living that in my life. The more I hang out with really masterful musicians, the more likely that I am going to be translating that into my own music. That’s where the little humble part of me feels like, “Oh, I’m so excited to be sitting with all of these great, great people!” And then, whatever in my heart I can do to take that energy and give it back to the world, whether that be traveling around the world and being of service doing healing work or massage or being able to throw $50,000 to orphanages in India, or whatever that manifests into, I will be happy with it.

Susan: I don’t know if it’s necessarily a life goal, but just the recognition of being in the presence of people that have mastery in different subjects and understand how that aligns with spiritual evolution. It’s too easy to get into the mindset that spiritual evolution is based on how much we understand metaphysics and spirituality and things like that, but there are many masters out there who have not focused their energy on their spiritual evolution based on spirituality and healing, but through like music, or through the production of films. They have a natural evolution that has been created through that focus.

One of the things that a spiritual community really needs to be aware of is not boxing themselves in as being the most evolved people on the planet, just because they are the ones who are paying attention to their spirituality. Some people have a natural inherent spirituality that comes out of many other subject matters.

Colleen: We just spent a whole evening watching all of the Lord of the Rings movies. I don’t know Peter Jackson, the director of Lord of the Rings, but it seems to me that he’s not necessarily the dude who is going to shave his head bald and go to India and become an ascetic But clearly, this is a deeply spiritual person who has gained a certain level of mastery as a mythological storyteller for our time. So, to me, does it matter that Peter Jackson is using low vibrational words, or not meditating enough, or eating white bread? Not as much as it does that he is on his life path, changing the consciousness of the people of this time period.

Listen to an interview with The Edge co-owners Tim Miejan and Cathy Jacobson on “Raising the Consciousness”

Listen to archives of past episodes of “Raising the Consciousness” radio at www.raisingtheconsciousness.com.