By Brandon Alter:
Maybe it’s because I’m just coming back from New Orleans, maybe it’s because I'm heading out to the desert soon, but I’ve been thinking about portals a lot. Portals are doorways into other worlds. Portals can connect us to different times, different dimensions, different frequencies. They are neither good nor bad, they are merely gateways into the unknown. Simply put, they are bridges between here and there and they are everywhere.
When you’re out in nature, exploring a silent cave or a sacred clearing, and you notice the air change, that’s a portal. Where you walk into a room in a house and you feel your hair stand up on end, that’s a portal. When you put on a song from your youth and you get transported back in time, that’s also a portal.
People can be portals too. You are a portal. You are the threshold through which your whole life is being channeled; some days you are a portal reaching forward to your future self and some days you are reaching back to your wounded child. Portals get created and closed all the time.
Think about the last time you got together with your best friend in the whole wide world. Can you see how that opened a portal? Did time speed up, did you forget about the rest of the world around you? I have some best friends with whom I never fail to create a portal—even over the phone!
But portals don’t just exist outside of ourselves, they exist within us as well. Your heart is one of the most powerful portals I know. By entering into and through your heart, you get to feel the world differently. By entering into and through the portal of your third eye, you get to see the world differently.
I’m gonna tell you a little story about the last time I stumbled onto an unexpected portal just a few weeks ago:
So this weekend I was trying to order takeout from the only pizza place in Joshua Tree, on a Saturday night, on a holiday weekend. Needless to say I got a busy signal every time I called. After twelve failed attempts, I checked in with my intuition for what to do and I heard 5:55. It was currently 5:30 and I thought my intuition was telling me if I called back at 5:55 I would get through. But let me be real with ya’ll—I was hungry and I didn’t want to have to wait that long. So, I kept calling and calling and finally I got through. Then I proceeded to be put on hold for 16 minutes! Can you guess what time it was when the girl finally picked up the line and took my order? That’s right, it was 5:55. I mean you can’t make this shit up! So to me, this made me think about time as a portal too.
There are certain magic times in the day when windows to the invisible world slide wide open. 5:55 is a portal, 11:11 is a portal, sunset is a portal, so is high noon. Even Sunday Morning is a type of portal if you think about it. So now, when I have to send an important email, or make a scary phone call, I wait until 11:11 or 12:12 or 1:11 or 3:33 or . . . you get the idea, right? Does it always work out in the way I want? No, but does it always empower me with magic? Abso-fucking-lutely. Hopefully this is all very interesting and engaging but I’m sure you’re wondering, why should I care? Well, because the truth is, we are always channeling something. At every moment of our lives we are reaching into portals and it’s important we start to become aware of that.
We need to take responsibility for the energies we are engaging with and drawing from. By starting to become aware of the portals around us and within us, we can pick up our power in a major way and have more agency in calling in EXACTLY the type of energy we need to help us flourish in our lives.
By becoming aware of portals, we can also learn to close those which zap us of our vitality and confidence and avoid those which drain our energy and time. The most sacred portal each of us possesses is the portal to spirit, a soft spot within all of us that immediately connects us to the great mystery. This is the portal, humble and quiet, that I cherish most of all.
My wish for you is that you find it right in this moment—this portal is an infinite invitation to feel your interconnectedness in this magnificent and tangled web of life. Step into it now.