Jan. 2, 2010
I picked up a phone message today from a familiar voice. A girl friend from my past. Not for the first time. Actually, we have communicated several times since we broke up back in 1985. What did she want? Just to say hi, I supposed, happy new year, something like that. It’s her way. What can I say? I’m a Virgo. She’s a Libra. She is far more natural with that kind of thing than I am.
But there was a specific reason, one which I would not have guessed in a million years. She wanted to thank me…for teaching her a healing technique way back then, a technique in which one channels light energy through the hand to another person, or an animal, or…let us say, a negative situation.
She encountered such a situation, she said, in which a whiskey-drinking friend of hers came to visit and, as whiskey tends to do, created some belligerent, loud-mouthed bad energy. Her three frightened cats departed. So, not knowing what to do in the presence of a drunken threat, she began to channel the light through her hands and the bad energy departed. The man left. Her cats came back and swarmed around her for protection. She was relieved.
She thanked me in her message. I was somewhat dumbfounded. I called her back and said, “You’re welcome. But I’m surprised. First of all, I had no idea you were doing this technique. Second, I don’t recall teaching it to you...”
She said she has been doing this technique for the last 20 years. Or, roughly, since before we broke up. And that I had indeed taught it to her.
Well…I must have, or she would not have known how to do it, right? So where was my brain back then?
Ahem…Never mind. That’s another story.
There is probably a whole post I could write about this alone, breaking up, and frames of mind, and how maybe it’s not so hard to do after all, and so on. But breaking up IS hard to do, no matter where or when, no matter who…
No. I will resist the temptation...
There is a brief story I wanted to tell her but did not get the chance. And so I will tell you. The technique she spoke of I first learned in 1973 in Colorado Springs. You might be thinking it was Reiki. It was not, although it was similar. This was before Reiki became as popular as it is now among energy workers. It was a style of healing called “Johrei” – a Japanese word meaning “Light”. You hold your hand out to someone and you literally channel light to them, dispelling their dark energy, called “clouds.” As you gained proficiency in the technique you could actually feel, even see, these clouds. The people receiving could often feel the heat of the light on them, wherever the light from the hand was directed. I often felt it myself.
I had a counselor friend at the time, in 1974. I had told her of the technique and demonstrated it on her to positive effect. She called me one day, saying a male friend of hers came to visit her and would I come over and do the technique on him? He was drunk and depressed and talked about killing himself in a somewhat left-handed way. I replied that I would be glad to do so and hurried over to her apartment. Her friend, I thought, did not fit the impression created in my mind when she had described him. I had pictured someone dark, ugly, perhaps corpulent. False conclusions.
First of all, he was very handsome, and second, in very good shape. Why should that make a difference? I didn’t know at the time, but my sense told me that his “problem” was not physical, but meta-physical. I was right.
He said he didn’t know how to find his way in life. Every path was a false path. The truth was, he didn’t know how to find his way through his inner life. His outer physical life was fine. He had a life; money; a car; mobility. He could pretty much do what he wanted.
He had an extraordinary mind and as we talked I learned to what depth he questioned everything in life, and had ever since he was a child. Questions of religion, existence, war and peace, reincarnation (which he did not believe in, and which I did at the time). And he did not believe in “energy” as one primordial force. There was love energy between a mother and her baby, and there was atomic bomb energy…but they were different; they were not the same. How could they be? How could there be unity in this world with opposing vagaries of energy like love and war? How could a person even begin to imagine them as one energy?
What is your intention, I asked. You may pick up a knife and carve a roast turkey to feed a table of people…or you can kill somebody with it. What do you want to do? Which is the right choice?
You’re a dreamer, he said. You don’t see the reality. You are lost in that dreamy world of yours. Life is harder than that.
I was surprised. How can you be so sure, I said, that your reality is more accurate? Look at the pain it has caused you. Is that your final criteria for judging the truth of your reality? You want to end your life. My life is not perfect, but I desire to keep living. I see more good and hope in the world than that. And yet you say it is I who do not see the reality. I’m afraid, my friend, that it is you who are lost in your dreamy world. And I do not wish to share those same dreams, for they are nightmares.
He was, as I said, drunk. He certainly believed in alcohol and his right to end his life if he so chose. Nevertheless, he agreed to try out the energy technique with me, on the suggestion of our mutual friend. I instructed him to sit up comfortably straight and to close his eyes. I then held out my hand and “channeled” the energy to him, starting about 12 inches from his third eye (forehead). I recall feeling a strong tingling sensation in my hand, and so kept my hand there. After about 4 or 5 minutes he weaved, opened his eyes, and ran to the bathroom and became violently sick.
He hurled for about 20 minutes.
After, he came out feeling understandably woozy, went to bed on her couch and slept deeply all through the night. The next morning he woke up predictably hung-over. Yet when I saw him he looked strangely refreshed. He still maintained his conviction that the spiritual “energy” I spoke of did not exist, but that something in our relationship the previous evening had changed his mind about killing himself. It was more than the alcohol or any energy. It was a kind of camaraderie.
I asked him, what about our mutual counselor friend? Hadn’t she had a hand in changing his mind? After all, she had instigated the whole encounter. He said of course, that she was a wonderful friend and knew she cared for him sincerely, but that they’d had conversations like this before.
Well, what was it then? He replied that he had enjoyed meeting me and hearing about energy, and concluded that it must have been the meeting of a “like” mind.
I wasn’t sure how to take that.
I never saw him again. I can only hope that something in him had awakened and stayed awake in spite of the alcohol and…his way of looking at the world.
I saw his suffering as my own, as the suffering of all. A problem of perception. Seeing the world accurately, but not correctly. Something changed in him. Why? Camaraderie. Because we had related, as he said. Because my counselor friend had intervened. Because I desired to help by channeling this “Light” to him whether he believed it or not. And it worked. In some strange way it all worked. It was all energy, after all. Working as one, as all water is water, no matter where it comes from.
It is the nature of energy, like water, to find the most expedient, open way to flow. To seek its own level. That is what it does. That is why it is real. That is why it “works.” And that is why it is always unpredictable.
A most easily misunderstood truth.
M
(Next: Learn This Technique!)
No comments:
Post a Comment