Please Note:Reprinted at the gracious consent of Mara, from the
July/August 1999 issue of New Age Retailer.

I admit it. Ever since I read author and healer Denise Linn's The Secret Language of Signs, I've secretly idolized her. I loved her belief that seemingly random elements such as a stray feather, an unexpected phone call, or even an afternoon storm can give us clues about how to better our lives. Drawn to her appreciation of everyday magic, I went on to read many of Linns other books, including Quest, a recounting of her experiences leading solo vision quests in nature, Past Lives: Present Dreams, and Sacred Legacies, her most recent release.
When the opportunity to interview Linn presented itself, I jumped. "Finally," I thought, "I'll be able to gather wisdom from this wonderful teacher in person." As I puttered toward Seattle in my little Subaru, my anticipation grew. We met for lunch in a crowded restaurant along Green Lake, across the street from the very wading pool I splashed in as a child. I wanted her to tell me something new and radically enlightening, something that would forever change the way I looked at the world. But each time she grinned or squinted her blue-green eyes or leaned in to emphasize a point, I simply felt affirmation of those things I'd discovered true for myself in recent years. And as we talked in the bright spring light, I thought perhaps the interview itself was my own little sign--an indication that I'm on the right path after all.

NAR: You wrote in the Secret Language of Signs that in every moment, the universe is whispering to us. How do we know what the universe is saying?

Denise Linn: A lot of research has been done with dreams, about how dreams have secret messages for us. Most people don't realize there are signs that are equally valid in our waking life--in some instances, even more immediate and direct signs. If you don't listen to the whispers, the signs will become louder, until they seem like screams.
Before you go to bed, go through your day and see if there was something that kept happening over and over again. Maybe you're trying to get someplace, and you keep going down roads that say "dead end." And then you turn on the radio, and someone's being interviewed, and they talk about how in their life they were just at a "dead end." And you go to the grocery store, and there's a new product out, and you notice it, and it's called "Dead End" something. So you start to think, "Well, gee, all during this day, I've seen the words 'dead end.' Is there any place in my life where I'm feeling I'm at a dead end?" It could be that you feel like you're at a dead end in your job, but you wouldn't have consciously recognized it.

NAR: What are you working on now?

LINN: I just finished a book called Altars, and that's coming out next fall in the States. And I've written a book called Feng Shui for the Soul, but it won't come out until spring next year. It's a really big, comprehensive guide about feng shui and lots of areas associated with feng shui.

NAR: Are you still leading vision quests?

LINN: I did my last one in September. It was a bit sad, but sometimes you just know it's time. You can tell when one door in your life closes and another is opening. I've become really passionate about feng shui and how the exteriors in our life, in our environment, relate with our interiors. I've traveled a lot and spent time in different cultures, and I've trained in a lot of different disciplines. When I became interested in feng shui, I realized that I actually never had to go any further than my front door. Everything that I needed--all the places in myself I wanted to visit, all the things I wanted to activate--I could use in the home as a medium.
You don't have to spend a lot of money to have good feng shui. I love being able to take something that someone else has thrown away and, through creative action, make it into something that's beautiful or useful or wonderful. I have a saying: "If it feels good, it's good feng shui." There's a lot of feng shui that's complicated, and it doesn't have to be. When you are in an environment that feels impoverished, usually you will fell impoverished. We identify so strongly with our environment that there's a place where it becomes part of our definition of self. The person who runs into a burning building to get their possessions--in that moment, their identity is more their possessions than it is their body. By shifting the exterior manifestation of ourselves, it has a very profound effect on our interior definition of self.

NAR: You were run off the road and shot by a stranger when you were 17 years old. Why did this person do such a thing, and how did it change your life?

LINN: If you look at it on one level, this was someone who had killed other people. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was a single female alone on a deserted road. It was someone I didn't know. I hadn't done anything to him. I was a victim of a madman.
If you look at it on another level, the level where everything happens for a reason, where there's value in all experiences, then I can see there were greater forces at play. Through the injuries I suffered, I gained an understanding about healing. I gained an understanding about suffering and the suffering of others that I wouldn't have gained otherwise. Through the near-death experience, I gained an understanding or perception that there's something beneath the physical world, and what's beneath that is spirit. I didn't know that before. Both my parents were scientists. I thought, like they thought, that if you can't prove it scientifically, to doesn't exist. So that experience allowed me to sense that we live in an ocean of energy, and in every moment we're influencing it. I wouldn't trade what I lose, and the organs I lost, for what I gained in that experience.

NAR: Are you still suffering repercussions from the accident?

LINN: I feel fine. I lost a kidney, my spleen, an adrenal gland. I lost part of my small intestine, part of my stomach, part of one lung. I have a 6-inch tube replacing my aorta. The bullet bounced off my spine, so I have a herniated disk. I was told I would never have children. Physically, there are organs gone, but I don't experience my life differently than anybody else does. I must have been blessed with a healthy body to begin with, but I also think that in those few moments when I was thought to be dead, that a shift of identity occurred. Before that, I thought I was by body. As a result of that experience, I had the awareness that there was something inside of me that was uniquely me, that was not of my body, and I feel that shift allowed my body to heal very quickly.
There's a life force inside of all of us that's remarkable and that's healing and that's magnificent. It's almost as if it's an ember that's covered with ash. The ashes are just the fact that you don't consciously know it's there. In those few moments, when I was at death's door, it was like the warm winds of heaven just blew gently over that ash, so it became a flame for a few moments, a flame that allowed me to remember, but also activate, that life force.
The work I do with people is to create environments within which that life force can be activated. To that extent, lots of people have spontaneous healing experiences. I don't think it's anything special about me. I believe that when we create an environment for someone to feel that sense of spiritual safety, a remembering begins to awaken inside of them. Sometimes it's not even a conscious memory, but it's a subconscious awakening, and with that occurs healing, both psychological and emotional. Something occurs beneath conscious awareness, because so often people have an effect on electrical systems afterwards. Light bulbs will burn out. A woman said she walked into her house and 11 light bulbs went out. Or they'll walk by a car and the car alarm will go off. Or the TV will spontaneously come on. To me, these are signs that something is actually affecting their bioelectrical systems.

NAR: When people come to work with you, do they believe in this phenomenon, or are they skeptical?

LINN: Some people come in believing, because something's happened to their friends, and I think that's actually to their advantage, because what someone expects tends to be realized. However, there are a number of people who have come in really skeptical, dragged by their husbands or wives, and those people usually become the most fervent believers, because it wasn't something they expected. It doesn't happen for everybody, but it happens enough. When we gather together, there is something we cocreate that is powerful and beautiful. I don't think those spontaneous healings are miracles. I think they're a result of natural laws.

NAR: Sacred Legacies, your current release, speaks to the connection, or lack thereof, between our generations.

LINN: That book is actually about creating a better future for all of us as well as our descendants. The seeds to this book really were planted in my soul about 14 years ago. My daughter was in school here in Seattle. They took a survey at her school, and they asked about the children's view of the future. Most didn't see themselves growing up, and they gave reasons such as gang warfare, nuclear holocaust, environmental problems. I was really concerned. The teachers said it was an inner-city school, and these kids lived in high-risk environments, so they projected their own family fear onto the world around them, which makes sense from a psychological point of view, I suppose. But I felt a big concern that we have any children that feel fear. Then I began to realize that that fear the children were expressing was really a reflection of the fear in society.
I felt it was really important to begin to cocreate a new collective unconsciousness where we can begin to say, "Hey, we've got problems, but we've got the resources to solve them." So that's why I wrote the book.
I was asked to feng shui a survivalist compound, which is an interesting proposition. He (the owner) wanted to know where the guns should go and where the medical supplies for all the people who got hurt when they were defending their food with the guns (should go). And I said, "What's going to happen if there isn't mass rioting, if there isn't mass food shortages? How are you going to feel?" And he said, "I'd really be devastated, because I've put all my money into this." And I said, "You know, just as a suggestion, hold in your heart the possibility that this won't happen," because it seemed to me that he was very heavily invested in it happening, and it was really going to mess his life up if it didn't.
People say it's so bad now, and they glorify the past, but if you think about it, our ancestors died at age 30. They died in childbirth. They had the plague, they had starvation. They had to spend weeks just getting food for the table. A simple cut could create an infection that caused death. So they had equally severe problems, but they had something we don't have. They had a sense of lineage. The elders were the spirit keepers, the keepers of the oral tradition. They knew the history of the tribe, and they would say, "Oh, we had problems six generations ago, but this is how we solved them." That gave each individual a sense of being a link in a chain that unfolded behind them and flowed before them, and an important link, because they knew that those who had gone before them had sacrificed for them. They also knew they were responsible for future generations. The Cherokees would never make a decision without considering the impact on the seven generations ahead of them.

NAR: That "link in the chain" concept is so striking, especially because it has been lost in American culture. It's nearly impossible to relate to our grandparents these days.

LINN: People say, "I don't want to revere my elders, because they don't know any more than I do, and, in fact, they know less." But I think that's also because of our cultural conditioning. We are conditioned from early childhood to think that when you're old, you're worthless. In many earth-based cultures, you are conditioned from the time you are a young child that the older you get, the wiser you become. Again, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. So the elders become the wise ones. We don't have that definition, and if you just all of a sudden start going to one of your great aunts who's in a nursing home, she's not going to be able to be that elder because it's not endemic in society.
We need to realize that we are all evolving elders. And then also to gently, when you're with your elders, begin to encourage them. If you treat someone as wise, they're wise. If you treat someone as worthless, it's really easy for them to feel worthless.
In the different cultures I've spent time in, that's one (trait) I have so admired--the reverence that is given to the elders. I met aborigines in Australia. The children would sit around, and the old people would speak. They always said something that really touched you because they were relying on their life experience. In those earth-based cultures, the elders also offered a balance. The young men would want to go to war, and the elders would be the ones to create the balance for that.
Someone was telling me that at Oxford, England, in the big dining hall, they have these big beams, and they needed to be replaced, so they went out and were cutting some trees. People were all up in arms, saying, "How dare you? How can you cut these trees?" And they said, "You don't understand. We planted these trees 100 years ago knowing that we would need to replace these beams, and now we're planting trees so 100 years from now, the beams can be replaced again." I loved that! I just thought that was so cool! It's so un-Western. But that's the way it should be.

NAR: Planning that far ahead seems almost unimaginable in our society.

LINN: Americans move once every five years. If you go into France, people would have lived on the same land for five or six or 20 generations. So the idea of doing something that's going to be helpful to your great-great-great-grandchildren is less foreign to someone in France in the countryside than it is to someone who's American. When you move once every five years, you don't have any connection to the land. You also don't have a connection to your family, and so there isn't that sense of connection to the future.

NAR: Why do you write books? Who do you want to hear your message?

LINN: Every book I write, I write for different reasons. I wrote Sacred Legacies because I care so passionately that we can cocreate a world that is sustainable for the future. I want everybody to read this book. It's not the kind of message that's popular. Disaster has an allure to it. When you watch the news, usually the top headlines are disaster. Good news doesn't make the front page. So saying, "Hey, we can do this!" is not real popular. People get this excitement, this fervor in their eyes when they talk about cataclysms. If you need drama in your life, create it in ways that are positive rather than negative.
There was this small number of people in Brighton, a little seaside town in England. These people looked at the world around them, and they saw some problems, and they thought, "Well, what can we do?" They believed in the power of intention and prayer, so they decided they would try an experiment. For one minute a day, at noon, exactly they would send thoughts of peace and focus them on the fountain in the center of Brighton. They did this for a year, and at the end of the year, they wanted to see what the results were. So they got the emergency entrance records into the hospital and compared those with the year before, and they found that it was dramatically down. They go police reports, and they found that traffic accidents were dramatically down. Crime was dramatically down. Over and over again, they found that statistics for that year were dramatically down from all the preceding years. And they began to realize that in no small way did their one minute a day of holding thoughts of peace make a difference. So out of that, all over England, have sprouted fountain groups. To me, it really gives credence to the idea that even a single person can make a difference. And I think it's important to know that, because it's all too easy to think, "Well, what difference do I make?" We can make a difference with our prayers and our intentions and our thoughts.

NAR: What is intuition? How can people use it?

LINN: I think, basically, intuition is being receptive and being open. Your intuition can come from a number of places. It can come from your deep subconscious. Another way is really opening yourself up to your guides, opening to the Creator, to divine guidance. There's lots of ways to activate you intuition. Some people like to use the pendulum. Some people will use the tarot cards. There comes a point where you don't actually need any tools, that you can just go direct, but for some people, it seems to make it easier to tap into their subconscious or their higher self.
I find the greatest barrier to people developing their intuition is they're afraid of being wrong. And they're so afraid of being wrong that they're not willing to fail. There's a famous expression that goes, "Knowledge comes from experience, and experience usually comes from failure." Anything worth learning is worth failing at first.
I do exercises in my interior alignment seminars. I'll take a piece of fruit and hide it someplace in the house. And I'll have them tell me where they see it. It's kind of scary, because they might be wrong, and then people might judge them for being wrong. I teach people dowsing. I take them to a place where there's underground water. The people that are able to find it are usually the people who are not attached to being right. They're willing just to trust their gut response.

NAR: How many people are usually in these seminars?

LINN: In my group seminars that I've done for so many years, I usually work with 200 to 400 people at a time, and when I'm on tour, which has been a lot, I'm usually working with 2,000 people a month. I'm really wanting not to work with such big groups of people. Plus, it's usually just for a weekend inside a hotel. In my interior alignment courses, working with just 12 people for two weeks in nature has been a real joy because we've gotten to depths that we couldn't achieve in such a short time with so many people. There's something exciting about working with a large group because you can generate an energy that is so powerful. It's long hours, but it's good.

NAR: Do you talk about music in your interior alignment and feng shui work?

LINN: I talk about sound in general. One of the things I'm advocating is the importance of having nature sounds in the home. They're finding correlations between all the living systems. There was this American man in Korea named Dan Carlson, and he saw a woman break her son's legs so that he could beg for food for the family. Carlson made a decision that he was going to do whatever he could with his life to try to provide ways for food so that people wouldn't be starving in the world.
He went to the University of Iowa and got a degree in agriculture because he wanted to find a way to get more yield. Poor countries can't afford fertilizer because you have to put so much in the ground, but (he thought), "What if they could put a little bit on the leaves, and it could absorb through the leaves?" On the bottom of the leaves are these things called stomata, little mouth-like openings, and that would be a natural place to absorb fertilizer. But he couldn't get the stomata to open enough. He heard about some research with sound, and he began making sounds in the laboratory. He came up with this synthesized trippy sound, and when he played it, the stomata would open. Another researcher came in and heard the sound, and he said, "That sounds like birds!" They began to play bird (calls), and they found that the morning bird songs actually open the stomata! In an orange grove, they increased the vitamin C 121 percent. They were able to double crop yield in Pakistan. So, in fact, those bird songs in the morning are important to the vitality of the plants.
They do research to say how our bodies and our health are improved by natural sounds, but I know that they are, just like those synthesized bird sounds had the effect on the stomata. So I suggest playing natural sounds in the home because we're isolated from natural sounds. When they play the sound of a fountain in a hot place, people think it's 13 degrees cooler than it actually is.
There were these monks in France who only used to need four hours of sleep a night. They chanted during the day. Then the "modern way" came in, and they said, " Why are these guys chanting? That doesn't do anything." So they had them doing work, and they were getting more and more tired, and they realized the chanting was actually revitalizing their body. When they began to resume the chanting, they got their strength back.
Part of our psyche needs nature. We've become so isolated. So I suggest lots of ways to bring in the forces of nature. Even though it's unnatural to listen to a CD of birds, somehow, the body perceives it as birds. And as the body perceives it, we respond emotionally. In nature, we are influenced by the movement of the sun. Birds will sing different songs when the sun is in different positions.

NAR: You discourage the use of profanity in your books…

LINN: (giggles madly) This is so funny! So funny that you mention that, because I was just thinking of this last night--because I cussed! I mean, I sometimes use profanity. But I'm so aware that every word has an energy. It's not necessarily a universal energy. Some people might say the word "mother," and their energy goes up because they have a wonderful association with the word. Someone who had a horrible mother, the word might have a negative energy for them or lower their energy. By stringing together words that are beautiful and elegant and magnificent, it makes us feel more beautiful, elegant and magnificent. On the other hand, someone who has lived in a pristine environment their whole life, and they've never been allowed to use any cuss words ever, it can be absolutely liberating just to go at it and cuss up a storm.

NAR: How do you find a connection with your spirit or with magic when you feel overwhelmed by a busy schedule?

LINN: It's not easy. The way I find magic is in nature--just to take a look at those little buds outside and to know that within each of those is potential power. Sometimes that's what I do when it gets too busy, because sometimes you just don't have an hour to take a walk in nature. You don't have half an hour to meditate. Sometimes you wake up and you have to hit the Tarmac running. But if you just take a breath, look at the sky, close your eyes, even for 10 seconds--I think that's the modern way we have to do it.

NAR: Where do you think we're headed? What's our future?

LINN: People say it's a time of great darkness now, but I think the greater the darkness, the greater the light. There's never been a more exciting time in the linear history of our planet to be alive. I think there's never been a more potent opportunity for us to embark on spiritual journeys. We're not spending half the day pounding our clothes on a rock. We have the time to take that inner journey. I think we have a lot of potential difficulties we have to address. But I also think it's such a vibrant time for that inward journey, for going on spiritual quests to discover our roots.
I've heard from people in the publishing world that two areas are growing the fastest: one in New Age books, the other is women. I just think that's a really good sign. One publisher told me it was the New Age books that were sustaining the market. This is an area that's expanding because people are so interested--"My needs are taken care of, but I don't feel happy. Why not?"

NAR: What are your thoughts on fate?

LINN: I absolutely believe our life is predestined, and I absolutely believe in free will. I know these seem to be mutually exclusive. But I believe that when you are born, you have a destiny. And I also believe that in every moment you have free will. You have the ability to choose. I believe the more opposing points of view you can hold, the more expanded human being you are, so I don't have a problem with the fact that I believe in both.

NAR: Is karma tied into that at all?

LINN: Yeah. I have a little bit different view of karma. One way that some people look at karma is, "You've been bad in one life, so now you have to pay for it in the next." I think there is something inside of us, an internal system of checks and balances. Like if you tell a lie, you turn around and walk into a wall. It's what I call "I.K."--instant karma. I don't think the Creator pushed you into that wall to punish you. I think there's something inside of us that feels, "Oh, I'm not in integrity, so I've got to balance that out." So I think that part of ourselves is always creating opportunities to see it from a different point of view, but I don't see it as a punishment.

NAR: Why do you think we're here?

LINN: The Cherokees, when they talk about the Creator, say the Great Mystery, and I like that. I think it's really hard to be here. When I had that near-death experience, I experienced that every single person that ever lived and every single person that is ever going to live was one. We were not separate from each other. There was a sense of individuality, and yet also the deep connection. It's almost like one of those mirror balls they have at a dance. There are all those reflections, and they all look different and separate, but actually they emanate from the same source. I can't conceive of us being one and yet being individual. I cannot conceive of it, but yet I can remember it.
It seems to me that it takes a conscious choice to come her, with full knowing that when you're here, you're separate. I think that even the most self-actualized person here on this planet yearns for that place where we aren't separate.
It's more important to ask that question of ourselves, and I think it's important to come up with an answer, because without that answer, life is meaningless. I can see that a lot of the experiences in my life have allowed me to become more compassionate and more accepting and ultimately the compassion and accepting is of myself. There comes a point where you begin to see yourself in everybody and everything. I haven't had that experience often, but there have been times when I really experience that the only person I'm teaching is myself. The only person I'm talking to is myself. The only person who's here is my self.