When my daughter was about 9 months old, we took her and her brothers to the New Jersey beach. I had heard that dolphins often cruised along the shoreline within easy sight, but had never seen them in all the years I had been going to the Jersey coast. This time was different. I just knew we were going to see dolphins that day.

Sure enough, sometime in the afternoon I looked up to see people pointing out to sea, and there they were. Dark dorsal fins and bodies slowly moving through the water right in front of us. My daughter immediately started crawling as fast as she could towards the water and had reached waters edge before I knew what was happening. As I ran down to get her she was already in the surf, on her hands and knees, not caring that the water was rushing up to her, splashing her face. I brought her back to our blanket, only to see her make a beeline for the water again, caught in some powerful urge to join the dolphins no matter what.

Two years later I was at another metaphysical bookstore when I found myself, inexplicably, buying a card by Jean-Luc Bozzoli of a fetus hanging in the heavens with dolphins and sacred forms around it and the earth. Three months later I became pregnant with my second daughter whose due date was the exact day, a year later, that I had bought that card in the bookstore

Nine months after she was born, I received information from an animal communicator friend saying that she would be co-facilitating a dolphin swim with a well known facilitator from Santa Fe. I was on the phone before I knew what was happening, watching myself get information and making a tentative commitment to go in 3 months time. My husband thought I was not only crazy, but irresponsible. How could I leave our year-old baby who was just being weaned, and how would we get the money? I didn't know. All I knew was that I had to do it.

Three months later I was on a boat in the Bahamas, a weak swimmer who had never snorkeled much less lived on a boat, about to do just that for 5 days, 40 miles from land.

That trip changed my life. Most of the time I had no idea why I was there, because all my experiences with the dolphins seemed so subtle, so familiar. My first encounter with a wild dolphin, side by side, was simply "Oh, there you are. I've known you forever." While others were joyfully screaming in their snorkels, singing, calling, and playing with them, I was in sensory overload trying to adjust to all the new sensations of being in the open water with snorkel gear on, and hoping I really would float. Yet at the same time I was feeling like I was back with family, that this wasn't such unfamiliar territory after all.

My time seemed to be spent playing out, in full view, the dynamics of my inner life. For example, my pattern of always feeling outside of everything manifested in my continually being separated from the rest of the group when we were in the water. Because of the weather that particular week there were times when the currents were too strong for me, the waves too high to see, and the water too murky to track my direction. My drowning fears seemed always present. It all culminated in a deciding moment when I was truly being pulled from the boat by the current, alone, knowing I couldn't make it back, panicking, and feeling like there wasn't enough air in the universe able to give me enough breath thru my snorkel. I gave the distress signal to the boat, a 90 foot metal hulled dive boat, which pulled up to get me out of the water, something that, once I knew I was safe, embarrassed me greatly.

After that, everything shifted. I was offered the help of a crew member who literally held my hand in the water while we swam until I got used to overcoming my fear of it. Another participant swam around and under me to divert my attention to something amusing. And the dolphins moved from the main group of swimmers to me, back and forth, checking on all of us, making sure we were all touched by their presence. I, in particular, felt their conscious attention on me, making sure I missed nothing of them in my struggles with my lower-self's acting out. I was to learn that this dynamic of the activation of the ego or lower-self and its shadow parts, along with the opportunity for expansion into higher consciousness is a trademark dolphin encounter experience.

By the time the trip was over, I was so expanded I felt like I was miles big. My heart center was feeling in love with everything, for it had, unknowingly, been blown wide open energetically by the dolphins. In addition, I'd seen nothing but the movement of water, the light of sky, sun, stars and moon, the dolphins, and the people on the boat for 5 days. Being deprived of all sensory stimulus except for what naturally occurs is an awesome experience, and it helped me allow the process to unfold.

I didn't realize just how deeply I had been altered and transformed until I found myself, in the airport on the way home, stunned. I was heartbroken to have left the ocean and the dolphins, and horrified at what I was returning to - a marriage in deep trouble and a life that wasn't working. I was so overloaded by all the sensory barrage, and the despair of leaving that, I just sat in a chair in the airport paralyzed. A man actually walked up to me to ask if I was alright, I looked so undone.

After I got home, I experienced another dolphin encounter trademark or potentiality - whatever isn't working in your life will be cleared out. My marriage began to unravel in earnest, and it became clear that I could no longer put off or ignore the truth of my current life circumstances. More importantly, however, I began what I consider to be my initiation into dolphin consciousness and the effect it can have on human lives.

The initiation began one night soon after I had returned. My year-old daughter, who still slept in her crib at the foot of my bed, woke up during that 2-4 am magical time when we are between the worlds and most easily contacted by other dimensional forces. After I attended to her and got her back to sleep I laid back down sensing that something was different in the room. As I tuned in to whatever might be present I realized that I felt the presence of a large dolphin circling around my bed as if it was ethereally swimming through my bedroom. I decided to make myself available to this presence and see if it wanted to communicate with me. I opened my consciousness to it and was taken on a journey that would change belief systems and shift paradigms in me forever.

This dolphin made it clear that it wanted to take me on a journey, but before we could do that I needed to understand the dolphin breath. Their exhale is primary and the inhale secondary as it was shown to me, the opposite of our breathing tendency. I was asked to practice this breathing with an explosive exhale and then inhaling to a count of 7, bringing the breath up through my chakras from bottom to top. Next was an introduction to dolphin movement, how to refine human physical form and flow to dolphin-like form and flow so we could move efficiently together in this etheric journey.

After I became more adept at both processes I was taken through an underwater dimension to a place where I could see vortexes of energy coming up through the ocean bottom. In these vortexes I could see dolphins lying on the bottom, clearly very sick. I was told that these dolphins had taken on the sadness of the dolphins who were unhappy being confined to captive facilities, In essence they were using their physical bodies to take on and transmute the sadness of their companions, transforming the darker energies into light through the process of the death of the physical and the resulting transmutation into light body. I was led to one particular dolphin, a female, who was clearly dying.

Before we went any further, however, I was given a very important teaching - in essence it was the initiation into my new life. I was told that my soul and the souls of these dolphins were intricately, exquisitely intertwined, that we were all one. Even though we came to this planet in different physical forms, our essence, our souls came from the same place and I was part of their "family". This one message was the absolute crux, the foundation of everything that was to come to me through the dolphins. I was asked to accept, to acknowledge this in the very core of my being, to find the place inside that knew this as truth, before I was shown anything more. It was like doors inside my heart and mind being blasted open, veils lifted, questions answered, as I felt the resonancy of the truth of my soul's place in the universe rippling through me. I said "Yes." And then there was more.

I was asked to bring this female dolphin to the surface so she could breathe. I took her in my arms and brought her to the top where she took a few breaths. She then exploded into light in my arms - all except for a layer of dark, dense energy along her underside. I was told that this energy represented all the karmic experiences of negativity she had embodied, and that by my acknowledging my soul connection with her and our shared experiences of these negative forces she could transform them completely at this time. It seemed crucial to the process that our combined energies be united to complete this in the highest way possible. It was another part of the experience forcing me to see my multidimensionality, the bigger picture of who I was and the many dimensions I worked in and with, the biggest being the cetacean star family. When I acknowledged my place in the soul picture of this dolphin the rest of her burst into light, complete in her transmutation. At that, huge pods of healthy dolphins came swimming in and took ribbons of her light in their mouths. They swam off to all parts of the oceans bringing these ribbons of light to dolphins around the world as a message and a sharing of love, the gift of service to the ones in need, the understanding of life as energy and the ability to effect change and transform darkness to light.

The initiation, for the time being, was complete. I was returned to my room, my third dimensional surroundings, and the job of finding some resolution between my higher consciousness who knew that what had just transpired was real and true, and my ego/personality which told me I was crazy and losing my grip on reality.

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Katryn Lavanture facilitates wild dolphin swims, and lectures on the dolphin-human connection as the Director of Spirit of the Dolphin Journeys. She can be contacted at 215-848-1666 or dolfun@dolphin-spirit.com, or visit her website: www.dolphin-spirit.com.

Dolphin Video: Katryn has created a video of the spotted dolphins she swims with in the Bahamas. It includes underwater footage plus beautiful music created exclusively for this video by Michael Hammer. This video evokes feelings of deep peace, relaxation, and well being (similar to the benefits you attain when actually swimming with dolphins). This incredible video was created for use individually or in groups to set a mood, de-stress, and calm emotions. Highly recommended, read more about this video on her website by clicking here.

Katryn Lavanture tells us more about herself and her wonderful work:

Like many of us doing this work, I came to it through an unexpected life changing experience with dolphins. In truth I never saw it coming, and didn't know it was happening even while I was in the thick of it. I didn't get the magnitude of what was happening until I returned from my first dolphin swim and started having bizarre and amazing experiences. See the above article.

These experiences were essentially my training in becoming adept at sensing and working with the dolphin presence beyond the three dimensional form they embody. If I hadn't had 10 years an an energetic healer to help me become familiar with working in states of expanded consciousness I would have thought I was losing my mind. Even at that, sometimes I thought I was going a little crazy.

As I followed this new path laid before me by the dolphins, there was one underlying message I kept hearing, and that was "Bring people to us". Initially I was unsure what that meant. I wasn't interested in doing dolphin swims all summer, so I wasn't clear what was being asked of me. In time, however, I came to see that I was being asked to serve as a bridge between the dolphin and human worlds, sort of an ambassador to the Cetacean Nation.