WED., AUGUST 01, 2007
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Firing the Grid with Bradfield & Anael
by Robert Phoenix
This story starts at 4:00 AM PDT on July 17th, 2007. I rouse myself from slumber to join with millions of others in the pre-dawn silence to participate in the spiritual vision of a plainspoken, self-described "tough-as-nails" woman from Halifax, Nova Scotia, named Shelley Yates — as unlikely a candidate to usher in a planetary call for awakening and paradigm-shift as there has ever been. At her behest, in the hushed stillness of the young day, we are “firing the grid.” But what does that mean? To understand, one has to go backwards in time to November 14, 2002, when Yates and her young son were driving along a flooded road and flew off into a lake.
Yates and her son were trapped in their car, submerged in ten feet of water, for over twenty minutes. While she was, in essence, dying, a voice came to her and asked her to “relax.” Yates, who had been angry, depressed and even suicidal for many years, looked forward to the possibility of death, so she obeyed.
They were miraculously rescued and revived, though her young son lay in a coma. Doctors said that he would not live and urged her to pull all life support. It was then that the voices returned to her and urged her to “fill it up” and within three days her son would regain consciousness and live a normal life. She took their word for it and brought in everyone she knew to tell her near-lifeless little boy things they loved about life and this world. She had one stipulation: No tears. This was to be a joyous exchange. As people filed in and out of the hospital room, his condition grew graver by the hour. And just when she was experiencing the most intense pressure from the medical staff to pull the plug, on day three, her son emerged from the depths of his coma. The doctors said that he would be a vegetable. Shortly thereafter, Shelley Yates and her son walked out of that hospital together. This was just the beginning.
Those voices, or “beings,” as Yates would later call them, urged her on another mission, a mission that would culminate in the pre-dawn hours of July 17th, 2007. It was a call to gather as many people around the world to meditate for one hour to try to do for the planet what all of those people did for her son in that hospital room — to fill its energy-body with life, sharing their essence through the joy of being human. Yates would later be told by the voice that this would be “firing the grid.”
On June 16th, 2007, I received three separate emails about Shelley and the project. I sat glued to my computer monitor as I watched her story unfold over a series of short videos on YouTube. This woman, kind of like a benign Rosie O'Donnell, seemed anything but a messenger of such a weighty cosmic vision and yet, therein laid the beauty of it all. What better way to reach the masses than by employing one of their own for the mission?
A key participant in Yates' four-year-project was a web designer named Bradfield, the husband of a woman who had signed on with Yates to be her assistant, when Yates herself was plagued by doubt and resentment about being “chosen.” Bradfield not only set up her website, a key ingredient for an undertaking vast enough to reach all corners of the planet, but he was also a composer and supplied Yates with music for the website.
I guess after driving off a road and nearly drowning to death with your child, Bradfield probably sounds just perfect.
Yates had been told that the music created by Bradfield contains all the tones necessary to help fire the grid. On a lark, I searched eMusic on the eve of “the fire” and sure enough, there was Bradfield’s music. It is new age in the purest sense. Many of his records feature the vocals of Anael. Her voice sounds eerily similar to Enya’s and in fact, many of their tracks echo the Celtic fusion sounds of the noted Irish new age thrush. Bradfield’s latest record, Buddha Spirit 2 reaches towards the east for inspiration and manages to transport the Enya-like sound into the realm of Tibetan Buddhism, while channeling a bit of Deuter into the mix.
Many of Bradfield's albums on eMusic contain similar themes, some of them even inspired by Yates' work, especially on Spiritual Beings on Human Journey a theme that is mentioned on more than one occasion by Yates in her YouTube videos. Anael again provides ethereal vocals, occasionally in French or Hebrew, to give voice to Bradfield’s melodic and soaring compositions. This is music for people who enjoy traditional new age sounds typified by the likes of Yanni, Medwynn Goodall and Nicholas Gunn, archetypal examples of music that are synonymous with the new age genre, the edges and definition of which remain clearly and definably intact.
Now, here is where it gets tricky for me. I’m up at 4:11 in the morning, for cryin' out loud, all because of Shelley Yates’ video on YouTube. But why does the soundtrack for something like this always have to embrace new age music? Why couldn’t it be the new Mark Ronson record? Now, don’t get me wrong — Bradfield’s scores are lush and lovely expressions, neo-Romantic new age suites, but sometimes, especially as a columnist and someone who has journeyed far and wide in the spiritual playground, I just wish the sound and the scene was a little hipper. But I guess after driving off a road and nearly drowning to death with your child, Bradfield probably sounds just perfect.
Anyway, like I said, it’s 4:11 AM and I join in on the fire. Then something unusual happens. As I submerge into the meditation, I begin to hear bells and tones, sounds emanating from outside my body — and if my wife were a prankster who valued a good laugh over a solid eight hours, I would’ve thought she was in the other room with the Bose Sound Dock turned down low. But she isn’t.
The tones get louder, closer and more complex — then I hear something akin to a zap and then feel a wave of energy descend from the top of my head down through my body.
The tones continue for a while and eventually stop. I had no idea how long I had been meditating so I get up to check the time on our microwave. It was 5:07 — nearly an hour had passed. As I made my way back to bed, a flashing light on the microwave caught my eye. I looked closer and, instead of displaying the time, the readout now simply said “End.” In a twenty-four-hour day rife with synchronicities, this one was the most ironic and funny. I drifted off to sleep while the earth’s grid glowed into the light of the dawn.
Yates and her son were trapped in their car, submerged in ten feet of water, for over twenty minutes. While she was, in essence, dying, a voice came to her and asked her to “relax.” Yates, who had been angry, depressed and even suicidal for many years, looked forward to the possibility of death, so she obeyed.
They were miraculously rescued and revived, though her young son lay in a coma. Doctors said that he would not live and urged her to pull all life support. It was then that the voices returned to her and urged her to “fill it up” and within three days her son would regain consciousness and live a normal life. She took their word for it and brought in everyone she knew to tell her near-lifeless little boy things they loved about life and this world. She had one stipulation: No tears. This was to be a joyous exchange. As people filed in and out of the hospital room, his condition grew graver by the hour. And just when she was experiencing the most intense pressure from the medical staff to pull the plug, on day three, her son emerged from the depths of his coma. The doctors said that he would be a vegetable. Shortly thereafter, Shelley Yates and her son walked out of that hospital together. This was just the beginning.
Those voices, or “beings,” as Yates would later call them, urged her on another mission, a mission that would culminate in the pre-dawn hours of July 17th, 2007. It was a call to gather as many people around the world to meditate for one hour to try to do for the planet what all of those people did for her son in that hospital room — to fill its energy-body with life, sharing their essence through the joy of being human. Yates would later be told by the voice that this would be “firing the grid.”
On June 16th, 2007, I received three separate emails about Shelley and the project. I sat glued to my computer monitor as I watched her story unfold over a series of short videos on YouTube. This woman, kind of like a benign Rosie O'Donnell, seemed anything but a messenger of such a weighty cosmic vision and yet, therein laid the beauty of it all. What better way to reach the masses than by employing one of their own for the mission?
A key participant in Yates' four-year-project was a web designer named Bradfield, the husband of a woman who had signed on with Yates to be her assistant, when Yates herself was plagued by doubt and resentment about being “chosen.” Bradfield not only set up her website, a key ingredient for an undertaking vast enough to reach all corners of the planet, but he was also a composer and supplied Yates with music for the website.
Yates had been told that the music created by Bradfield contains all the tones necessary to help fire the grid. On a lark, I searched eMusic on the eve of “the fire” and sure enough, there was Bradfield’s music. It is new age in the purest sense. Many of his records feature the vocals of Anael. Her voice sounds eerily similar to Enya’s and in fact, many of their tracks echo the Celtic fusion sounds of the noted Irish new age thrush. Bradfield’s latest record, Buddha Spirit 2 reaches towards the east for inspiration and manages to transport the Enya-like sound into the realm of Tibetan Buddhism, while channeling a bit of Deuter into the mix.
Many of Bradfield's albums on eMusic contain similar themes, some of them even inspired by Yates' work, especially on Spiritual Beings on Human Journey a theme that is mentioned on more than one occasion by Yates in her YouTube videos. Anael again provides ethereal vocals, occasionally in French or Hebrew, to give voice to Bradfield’s melodic and soaring compositions. This is music for people who enjoy traditional new age sounds typified by the likes of Yanni, Medwynn Goodall and Nicholas Gunn, archetypal examples of music that are synonymous with the new age genre, the edges and definition of which remain clearly and definably intact.
Now, here is where it gets tricky for me. I’m up at 4:11 in the morning, for cryin' out loud, all because of Shelley Yates’ video on YouTube. But why does the soundtrack for something like this always have to embrace new age music? Why couldn’t it be the new Mark Ronson record? Now, don’t get me wrong — Bradfield’s scores are lush and lovely expressions, neo-Romantic new age suites, but sometimes, especially as a columnist and someone who has journeyed far and wide in the spiritual playground, I just wish the sound and the scene was a little hipper. But I guess after driving off a road and nearly drowning to death with your child, Bradfield probably sounds just perfect.
Anyway, like I said, it’s 4:11 AM and I join in on the fire. Then something unusual happens. As I submerge into the meditation, I begin to hear bells and tones, sounds emanating from outside my body — and if my wife were a prankster who valued a good laugh over a solid eight hours, I would’ve thought she was in the other room with the Bose Sound Dock turned down low. But she isn’t.
The tones get louder, closer and more complex — then I hear something akin to a zap and then feel a wave of energy descend from the top of my head down through my body.
The tones continue for a while and eventually stop. I had no idea how long I had been meditating so I get up to check the time on our microwave. It was 5:07 — nearly an hour had passed. As I made my way back to bed, a flashing light on the microwave caught my eye. I looked closer and, instead of displaying the time, the readout now simply said “End.” In a twenty-four-hour day rife with synchronicities, this one was the most ironic and funny. I drifted off to sleep while the earth’s grid glowed into the light of the dawn.
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