And So It Begins…

Last night was one of the worst in recent memory. I couldn’t sleep for my stomach was tied in a knot, which was caused by something that happened earlier in the evening. Sometimes being on a spiritual path knocks you upside the head, and this was a big knock. Things are not over yet, and I expect that it will be some time before the full meaning of this, comes clear.

I held my MeetUp last night, at a local coffee shop. Only one other person showed up, a recent friend of mine that also happens to be a retired English professor. I had mentioned earlier that may guides had told me that I was going to write a book. I had also said that I had no idea when or what it was to be about. When I became clear that no one else was going to show up, she proposed to help me write that book, in exchange for help I had given her in handling a spirit in her house.

We discussed the idea and she outlined how I would get started. For my part, I was resisting, but I’m not sure exactly what I was resisting. I don’t mind writing, (obviously!) But something about the situation was bringing up something, something I couldn’t put a name on, but I have felt before.

This something first popped up when I did my first QHHT session as a client. I never really got much detail, but an enormous about of guilt and grief came to the surface. It seems that I had been someone who was responsible for the deaths of thousands, if not millions of people, and wholesale destruction as well. Despite the powerful feelings and the physical symptoms from that session, I have never been 100% convinced that I didn’t just make the whole thing up, well, to be important, and all that. Once the session was over the emotions slid back beneath the surface again, only occasionally reappearing, in brief flashes.

Last night, I’m still not sure what I felt, but it seemed like I was feeling the huge swells caused by some powerful force below my awareness. Something so large that it only needed to roll over in it’s sleep to cause tidal waves on the surface of my mind. I can never leave well enough alone, so, like most boys do when they see something they don’t understand, I kept poking at it with a mental “stick.” Unfortunately that left me stuck inside it most of the night, with my stomach knotted, thoughts swirling in my head and unable to sleep.

Let me try and explain what was going on in my head. First there was a buzzing, and anxiety, and a set of memories that kept playing, over and over. The first memory was of a “dream” or past life, take your pick, were I was a priestess, traveling on a ship. Though I was technically a priestess, I was for all practical purposes, a mid- to high-level bureaucrat. One of those faceless people who do the grunt work of managing all the details of keeping a temple complex running smoothly. I was on the ship, with a single, armed, escort, because I smuggling holy artifacts to a trading outpost to protect them from the coming disaster. I really didn’t want to be there, but I was ordered to by my superiors, and there was nothing I could do about it. Apparently politics were such that we were not allowed to admit that we knew what was coming, so we had to make what preparations we could in secret. I kept getting more and more details about this, as the scenes played over and over in my mind.

The next memory was something that happened when I was about five, and playing with a neighbor girl. I was living in Massachusetts at the time, in an area that was pretty undeveloped at that time. The street we were on had houses on just one side and we were surrounded by undeveloped forest and fields. The girl and I were playing in some area away from the houses and she needed to pee, which she did, in front of me. I remember watching with mild interest. After that, we went…somewhere, and the next thing I remember is “I don’t want to feel any more.” Where about that time I disassociated so strongly from my body that it took decades of self work and a therapist to get back in, sometime in my 50’s.

Now for the last memory, the one that turned out to be the key. This is about a girl I had a crush on, starting in the first grade, and on through the last time I saw her in school, junior collage. Despite the fact that we were in the same grade all that time, I don’t remember noticing her very often. The first memory I have of her is in the first grade. We walked to her house after school and playing “horses” in a neighbors yard. Later, as I remember it, I was attacked and bitten by a dog on the way home. After that, I never spoke to her again. I would see her at school, but I was deathly afraid to ever go near her.

I ran into her at our twentieth high school reunion and her story of that time is quite different than mine. Apparently, she followed me around a lot, and hung out at my house enough that she knew my mother. I have no recollection of any of this.

Back to last night. I got up, at some point, very late, to walk a bit, in the hope the my stomach pain was caused by gas and standing up would allow me to burp and release it. No such luck, but, while I was pacing, thinking about my grammar school crush, a strong need to cry came over me, and the words “I am so sorry!” Once I had let that run it’s course, I felt a feeling of release, and then went back to bed. Soon I realized that everything in my head and body had subsided enough that I could finally get to sleep.

Today, my stomach still hurts, and it still feels a bit weird inside my head, but it feel…different, something has shifted. Something has begun and we’ll see what happens next.

My Colors of Fear

I thought I knew what fear was, I didn’t know jack. Earlier this week I had a session with another practitioner and discovered fear comes in many flavors and shapes, and I had managed to hide myself from most of them.

We traded sessions. It’s a practice among us practitioners to help the newbies gain experience. I use it to help keep myself grounded. With over a 100 clinical hours under my belt, I’m no longer a beginner, but I’m hardly the seasoned professional either. I need to ‘check in’ from time to time to ensure that I’m not drifting off course. I’ve done a couple of these trades over the past few weeks, but they didn’t work out as I had hoped. The sessions were I was the client went poorly, because I am still significantly blocked from getting access to my subconscious. I was hoping things would have gotten a lot better, but I was disappointed. This time, access was a lot easier, but it was still far from easy and wasn’t of any real value. The past lives were interesting, though odd, but no real information came through, as I can remember. (The other practitioner had trouble operating my recorder and so my session wasn’t recorded.)

My first life was as a dark-haired young man, in what looked like renaissance Italy. He was wearing expensive clothes and a puffy hat. I don’t remember anything else about him. The next life was as a young girl, about 10, with long gold hair and a red velvet dress. It seemed like England, sometime in the middle ages. In the first scene she’s sitting on some grass, smiling and listening to someone sitting on a stool. I don’t know if it was a teacher or a storyteller. The next scene was a party in a large hall, but now she seemed only about 2 or 3 years old, holding hands with some really big person. In the last scene, she was old, with long grey hair, sitting up in a bed in a clean, brightly lit room in, what felt like, a small cottage. She seemed content and not afraid to die. i remember that there was a purpose to the life, but I can’t remember what it was. Then things got strange.

I jumped to a scene from depression-era America, the great plains. I saw the same girl, this time barefoot, in a plain dress, standing outdoors. Everything was dusty and cloudy around her, like there was a dust storm. Behind her I could make out the shadows of a small farmhouse and a windmill. She was just standing there, hand straight down at her sides and staring straight ahead, right at me. She seemed frozen as the wind blew around her. She seemed very unhappy, in stark contrast to the first time I saw her. Her eyes were hopeless.

After a while where nothing changed, I finally got the idea that she was stuck and I was supposed to help her ascend. I tried, and achieve partial success, as part of her seemed to go. But part of her remained. I tried showing her the light and showing her love, but it was a struggle. I should go back there and have another try. I think that what I’m seeing there is part of me that is stuck, somewhere.

The subconscious portion of this session was a bust, as I remember, I was so busy fighting the process that not much came out. I remember almost nothing.

But things finally got interesting when we switched and I ran the session for the other practitioner. Things went well, and at the end of the session, I sometimes the client’s subconscious if there is any message or advice for me. Usually I get some some simple advice, “Keep doing what you’re doing…” etc., but this time I got a whole conversation. A whole conversation about fear. Yeah. I know I’m blocked, but this conversation really showed me that the blocks were fear, in stark terms. I don’t mean that I was told about it, I mean that as the conversion went on, I was remembering and feeling the different kinds of fear that were there.

I remembered when I was working with someone on my LinkIn profile, and how reluctant I was to accept what she was saying. At the time I was thinking “I don’t know how,” though now it’s clear that I was afraid. I’m not sure of what, exactly, but we I was feeling was fear. I never realized that before. I also noticed arrogance. This is hard to explain, but I saw myself in recent situations and realized that what I thought was helpfulness was actually arrogance, and the need to force my opinion on the other person. It isn’t like this is the first time I’ve done that, but it’s the first time I recognized it for what it is. It seems that everywhere I look in my life, I see fear. I am hemmed in by fears on every side. Here I though I was so enlightened and so in control of my life, when I’ve been actually navigating a torturous path among the rocks of my fears, while pretending I was sightseeing.

That’s what the past week has been like. I’ve been doing it so much I’m getting weary of the whole thing, but truth is truth, and hiding from it just makes me feel worse. I’m beginning to question the authenticity of my words and actions in almost every interaction. I’ve started short posts, retyped them several times, taking over an hour, then ended up deleting them entirely because I couldn’t convince myself that I had anything worth saying. I’ve been serially doubting myself. But then, this morning, I read something that moved me and wrote a reply, and it just felt right. What I said isn’t important, but it was honest and genuine and authentic, and that’s what matters. I find myself reading certain things that provoke me to think and remember when I’ve been less than honest, and deal with confronting what was behind those actions and feelings. (I also seem to be expressing myself differently, or at least it seems that way to me.)

That seems to be my job, for the time being, confront what I’ve kept hidden. To pull penetrate the facades, remove the masks and peer through the disguises on all the things that I have been pretending were something nice, or at least acceptable. I’m done with pretending, so what if everybody else does it, I don’t want to do it any more!

Asking For Help

I haven’t been writing much lately, I’m finding it hard. My life’s in a bit of turmoil, what with finding a job and all, I just seem to have a hard time focusing. I’ve also been told that, since I’m looking for work, I should back off on the touchy-feeling stuff and focus on technology. I find that a bit hard to do because I just don’t care that much about it. It’s what I have to do for a living, I don’t really want to think about it in my spare time. 

I used to think that knowing a lot about tech made me cool or special, in some way, so I forced myself to read a lot of magazines on science and technology so I could “keep up.” It seems that having a bunch of current “technological tidbits” at my fingertips made me feel like I had something to say. Heaven forbid that I actually share something about myself or listen to what the other person had to say. Now I realize that I tended to hang out with people that did the same time as I did, talking only about stuff “out there.” I did it because I was uncomfortable talking about anything else. I didn’t think that my life was interesting and other people’s lives made me jealous, angry or depressed. No wonder I always had dysfunctional relationships.

I am trading sessions with another practitioner this weekend. I was disappointed with my session, I didn’t get to the answers I was hoping for. I did see an interesting “past life:” but wasn’t able to reach the subconscious and get any clear answers to my questions. I’m constantly blocking myself and this truly seems to be a theme of my life.

The “past life” took place on some other planet and I was humanoid, but not human. I was very tall and thin and wore a dark blue, suit-like thing. It resembled a stylized business suit, but I had the impression that it was more than just a covering, that it helped me maintain my shape, in some way. There were a few scenes with parts of the suit removed, and the body seemed like a blob that couldn’t hold it’s shape.

All the scenes took place on a kind of platform, high in the air, that stuck out from the side of some dark, cliff-like thing I that never really got a good look at. These images seemed stylized, almost like colored pencil sketches around the edges. The platform had no straight lines or any consistent curves, it’s outline resembled a stylized flame, with the tip of the flame pointing a way from the cliff. The surface of the platform wasn’t very flat, it was shaped somewhat like a frozen wave. Near the end of the platform was a fairly ordinary upholstered chair, with something like a skeletal end table/lamp nearby. 

I saw most of this from the outside. It’s like there were two somebodies: One doing the stuff and me watching. We both looked the same, though it seemed that I was larger. It seemed that I was both watching and being the other being. I could feel what he was feeling and know what he was thinking, but partially from the inside and mostly from the outside. Hey, I was beside myself!

At first, I was standing near the base of the platform, looking out at the chair, and past that into a hazy-cloudy vastness. I/he went and sat in the chair. He could control what he was seeing out beyond the platform. I don’t know how, there were no controls of any sort, I knew that he could. He was looking at rolling agricultural fields with scattered houses. He had some kind of job to do that partially related to the weather. 

My memory is a bit fuzzy here, but there was a scene where he was sitting on the edge of the platform, dangling his legs over the edge, and watching thick, billowy, clouds. There was no sky visible, just clouds, ranging from light gray to dark. 

The final scene had fire. I couldn’t see much more than an angry glow and a few glimpses of bright flame, the smoke was too thick. He was on the edge of the platform, watching, feeling remotely sad and like a failure. He was feeling like he’d had one purpose and he’d blown it, but the feelings weren’t all that strong. But still, there was a feeling of emptiness, and pointlessness to it all.

I disappointed with the rest of the session. I couldn’t get a purpose or a lesson from that life, and the subconscious wouldn’t come through. Looking at it now, I’m a little surprised that the lesson has nothing to do with failure, but revolves around being alone, and doing “it” all by myself, Never asking for help, reluctantly accepting help or assistance, no matter how much I need it, and believing that I’m “not good enough” unless I can do it all by myself. Wow. Never really brought that into focus before. I’m going to have to ponder that and see what comes out of it.

In a few months I will be living alone, for the first time in my life, if roommates count. Clearly a new experience. In a way, I’m already living it now. Knowing it’s coming is already putting me in that space. Now I get the feeling that a bad relationship is better than being alone. I hope this will pass soon. I don’t need to feel isolated, it’s just that the reality’s sunk in and it’s going to take some time to get used to. Having a job will help to give me some sense of purpose and a sense of self worth. Transitions are always hard, no matter how positive they eventually turn out to be. I’ve heard about this stuff forever, but this is the first time I’ve been self-aware enough to see what’s happening as I’m going through it. 

The past two years have been good preparation. I’ve been finding new interests and making new friends, getting out and doing stuff. I used to be such a homebody. Now I won’t be stuck by myself 24/7, but I’m going to have to make some choices soon, as my current path is not sustainable. Once I find my new direction, I will probably have to rearrange, or give up, some things that I like. I suppose that’s a good thing, that there are enough good things in my life that I don’t have room for all of them at once, but it’s more change.

Perhaps I should truly take the lesson of that “past” life to heart: Ask for help, accept help, accept assistance in small ways and large ones. I have this thing about not being a bother, I don’t want to annoy anyone, that asking to hang out or something, is being a stalker, or weird, or just plain awkward. Now I get to spend the next period of my life figuring out how all that works. It could be worse: It could be raining.