Shamanism 101

Today I started a course in Shamanistic studies. It takes years to get the stuff down, so I consider this just an introduction. I’ve had some training in shamanic techniques before, but that just scratched the surface, and I’m sure I’ll be digging deeper into this as time goes on. It really feels like following this path is the next step in my evolution.

This class went amazingly well. What that means for me is that I actually got what we were supposed to be doing in the journeys. If you don’t know what a journey is, think of it as a guided meditation. (That’s not really it, but you can find out more on the internet, so use it.) It wasn’t so long ago that this kind of stuff didn’t work for me. I was way too much inside my head to be able to feel, and way to self-conscious and worried about “getting it right” to let go and just let what happens, happen. It was a wonderful surprise to discover that I could be water, be air, earth and fire. Very cool. And I saw, and felt, that being air is how you fly: You become air, and just do what air does, up among the clouds.

As a little background, I’m been working on a post about fear. I completely rewritten it four times, and It’s still not ready. Maybe because it’s just a process I need to go through, maybe what I’m actually doing is changing my relationship to fear, not getting rid of it. More on the later, as it came up in my journeys. Before I talk about my journeys, I want to talk about what happened at lunch.

I didn’t bring any lunch, since the course paper work said that there was a place to get food “across the street.” Well, “across the street” turned out to be a mile up the road. And I was walking. It’s all good though, cause I had a good walk, once I got over the bitch’n. It was cloudy, with some sun, with an interesting wind. I was enjoying the wind when it hit me that I really enjoyed the wind. And this wind was saying “Hi!” It really seemed like an old friend. I have always liked wind, no matter if it’s soft and warm, or harsh and cold, or teasing and playful. I love clear air and a fresh breeze. Talking about this later in class, the instructor pointed out that air is the element associated with being in your head, and, boy, have I been in my head most of my life!

Since I had so much time to walk, I figured it was time to wonder why my feet were so cold today. That part was easy: Fear. But fear of what? It took some time to tease out the the answer, seeing how I had to fight for each word, but I finally got it: I was afraid that I would find out the real reason why I was so selfish. Who me? Selfish? I’m still wrapping my head around that. Here I’d thought I’d made real progress in that area, but, apparently, there is still much to learn. I have a feeling that that word doesn’t mean what I think it means.

I think we had three journeys. I can’t remember them all separately, so I’m going to tell it the way I remember. (I know, I should write things down. But I really don’t want to. I don’t have a good reason for that, I just really, really, dislike taking pen in hand and trying to write down how I feel. It’s much better to talk, next comes typing, which isn’t so bad, but writing comes dead last, in my world. I must have a lot of bad feelings wrapped around writing. From my childhood perhaps?)

I remember starting with an exercise where we tried being each of the four elements, earth, water, fire and air. That was fun. I’m not sure if I was actually being each element, but I sure felt like I was full, or made of, each element. Earth felt all peaty, like soil, water, cool, crisp and weighty. Fire seemed my least successful as I just felt energetic, but air was the most fun. I felt cool and light and transparent and ready to take flight.

Next, we went to the lower world, the land of essences, as I understand it. I went to find my “place,” and discovered a meadow of waist-high grass, along a meandering stream, inside a thick, pine forest. As I approached the stream, I found a clear area of dirt and lots of “Me”s: Many different instances of myself, all different ages and from different times, all different incarnations and realizations of the possibility that was me. Most were faint and ghosts-like, and payed no attention to me, but there was one who was solid and, lets say, mature. He was on his knees, working on something. A drum perhaps. And he seems angry or annoyed with me about something.

My mind has a real tendency to wander off, and this time was no exception. I don’t even know where I go. It’s just that I frequently I realize that I’m suppose to be doing something, or the instructor just said something and I can’t remember what I’m doing, or what the instruction means, because I can’t remember the context. That is why my recollections are always a bunch of separate scenes, punctuated by periods of amnesia.

Anyway, going to meet my guide: I was sitting on a log, with an ordinary-looking guy: thin, youngish, in ordinary clothes. Said his name was Allen. “Allen? Really? What’s your real name?” was my response. He just smiled a wan smile and shrugged. I didn’t get any further with that. At some point it occurred to me to return to the old guy and try and find out what he was so upset about. I had just started that conversation when the instructor called us back.

The next journey was into the upper world. That was my favorite. We needed to find a way up, and, since you can use whatever method you like, I picked a tree. There is a pine tree near my house that is very tall and straight and, when you put your head against the trunk and look up, it seems like it goes on forever. So I rode that tree up, into the sky, through the clouds, into space and into the upper world. I’m told that it looks different for different people, but for me, it was hazy with pastel colors. Sort of like walking on clouds. I found myself a bench to sit on, overlooking the world below. I had a sense that I could look down there and see whatever I wanted: The world, my life, my past, my future, other worlds, anything. At some point, I called in “grumpy old guy” to finish our conversation.

The conversation still didn’t get too far, but I learned a bit more. First, he was disappointed with me because of “so much fear.” It was my turn to be upset: This, after all the work I have been doing on fear? Anyway, I eventually got that there are fears that I’m so not willing to admit to myself that I don’t even feel them. I had just asked the question “How do I deal with fears that I can’t even feel?” when I ran out of time an had to come back.

Coming back was super fun, I just stepped off the overlook and flew down through space and the clouds, slid down the tree and “poofed” my feet onto the ground. I wish I could do that all the time! I wonder if it’s possible, one of these days, that I might get so comfortable with flying that I might just step off some high place, forgetting that gravity tends to have its own way, in this world, at least. I suppose I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

I’m really looking forward to the next class. In the meantime I have a lot to chew and meditate on. As usual, send questions and comments to rodwhitehouse@ieee.org. Take care.

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.

Timey, Wimey, Meaning of Life Stuff?

I recently had an exchange session with another local QHHT practitioner. It was my turn this time. Truth be told, I am not a good subject. I can’t seem to help resisting, obstructing, and otherwise getting in the way. I’m not sure if I just don’t trust others or don’t trust the process, but I find it really difficult to go with it. The resistance shows up externally and internally. At my worst, my body jerks and flails around, at times working up a real sweat, and my face and mouth going through distortions and contortions at any attempt to speak. Even my best, I still feel a marked reluctance to notice, acknowledge and share what I’m perceiving. I have noticed, recently, that the physical stuff had really tapered off. It’s still a problem, but I’ll take what I can get. The good new is, in this session, I got a possible explanation for what has been going on, but I’m not sure if I like the answer or not.

My first life was as a WWI fighter pilot. In the first scene, he is flying his plane to his first post. He is very young, maybe 18, and is excited and idealistic. He flies through some clouds and lands on a grassy airfield. I am really struck at how bright the colors in this scene are: The blue of the sky, the clean, white, crisp clouds and fantastic green grass. He hands the plane over to a mechanic and stands on the field looking proud. I saw this life, mostly, from the outside.

In another scene, (I’m not sure if it was the next one) he seems much older. Maybe only a short time, but he looks much older and has lost all his innocence and is deeply sad. He seems to be standing in roughly the same place as the first scene, but is now staring at a crashed and burning plane. On of his friends, I suppose, but he’s not thinking, just staring. I can’t remember if there was more to this life or not but it seems to stick here.

While I’m looking at this life, I keep getting the image of a white room. It’s completely white and empty and the light seems to be coming from the walls. There is also a strong impression of echoing footsteps. This impressions are confusing and seems to have nothing to do with the life I’m looking at. I do my best to ignore it.

Next, I’m in another life as a sort of a white, dolphin-like, creature, traveling through space in a huge, transparent, ball. The ball is clearly a spaceship of some kind: I can see it from the outside and, while it’s mostly transparent, there are mechanical structural, parts as well. There are many of us inside the ball and there is a sense of joy and happiness. In the next scene we’ve landed and disembarked on a beautiful world that is mostly water, clean and unspoiled.

Things are getting pretty confused in my head by now, I’m getting the White Room and the WWI life at the same time. At first my impressions resolved into a “split screen” with the White Room on the left, and the WWI pilot in the right. In the White Room, there was a rather ordinary looking, guy, sitting in a plain chair, dressed in contemporary clothes, leaning forward and intently watching the WWI pilot. It didn’t feel like he was watching on a screen or through a window, it was like the room was missing the right-hand wall and he could look directly out into the past. Of course, the pilot could not see him, or know he was there.

Once I allowed that scene to be, I realized that I was seeing it from a third vantage point, and I was seeing some kind of white, lumpy, thing in the bottom center of my view. With a little more allowing, I got that the “I” that was watching was the dolphin creature, sitting in a kind of lounge chair. The white lumpy thing in front of my was my lower body. (Frankly, that is still a little weird.) In fact, all three were (are?) me, in different…um…incarnations? Timelines? Realities? Whatever! (You have no idea how confusing it is to try and wrap my head around this experience!)

The story so far: Creature “me” is watching both a “contemporary me” and a “past me,” while “contemporary me” is studying “past me.” Got all that? Time to call in good old Higher Self, as I have no idea what is going on.

You might want to take a deep breath before we go on. We’re about to take a deep dive into Dr Who territory: The creation of the universe, all universes and what existed before anything and everything you can imagine. Ready?

First, Let me say that the most dramatic of the physical actions during sessions were caused by attached entities that have since been removed, but the remaining issues are a necessary adaption for a job that I have taken on that encompasses at least three lifetimes. I haven’t really digested all of this yet, so I’m just going to just present what I know and let you draw your own conclusions. I don’t know where to start, because everything is tangled . I ask you to just follow along, as best you can, and I hope that all the pieces will come together in the end.

As I said, my higher self has always had trouble communicating through my body. It turns out that the problem is that the “control interface” of my physical being is scrambled. During this session, I could clearly see how hard it was for my Higher Self to coordinate my body. I watched it struggling to operate and coordinate the lips, tongue, breath and vocal chords. Speech was difficult, to say the least. “I” know how to operate my physical self, of course, but nobody else does. The kicker is that this was done on purpose: I needed a specialized “system” for difficult conditions.

Now for the timey, wimey, part. The three scenes I was watching are distinct points where space/time was distorted and the timelines were tangled and confused. These points are where artifacts of the base substrate of all realities cause dislocations and discontinuities in the fabric of reality. In a way analogous to the way flaws in the silicon crystal lattice of a semiconductor disrupt signal flow by snagging charges and holes and keep signals from getting through, timelines of different realities “snag” on these flaws and get tangled up, co-mingling time streams and confusing causation. Some time streams get locked into a defect, endlessly spinning, circulating, folding back on itself and intermingling with other trapped streams, unable to progress and evolve. It appears that these flaws have existed since the creation of the universe, but were initially submicroscopic and inconsequential. No longer, now they pose a problem to our plan for all reality. The job I appear to have taken on, along with many others throughout existence, is to help heal these defects.

Those three instances of me were (are?) stuck (or are positioned?) on the three points where one of these artifacts intrudes into my time stream, sort of like the way that woodgrain can show through a coat of paint. How am I supposed to heal this? I have no idea. I suspect that I’m going to need a lot of help, though.

Remember my scrambled “control interface?” Apparently, a complicated and unusual “communication protocol,” if you will, is required for an incarnations to exist in these tangled time-spaces, and still be able to stay in contact and to coordinate with each other through my, universal, higher self.

I don’t really know what to make of all this. If it’s supposed to make me feel really important and special, it doesn’t. What I mostly feel is fear, at the job, if it’s real, and what people will think and say when they read this. I don’t want to be one of those people that live in their own crazy reality. On the other hand, maybe I just have a terrific imagination and should write Dr Who stories.

If you have any comments or contributions, please post them, but notify me as well at aquestioningspirittherapy@gmail.com, because this site doesn’t notify me when people post comments. Take care.

Taking Care of Family

I regularly go to a hypnotherapy MeetUp where I learn new techniques, and every time I do, I ask for volunteers to practice on. I usually get a couple of takers. This is one of those sessions.

The new techniques are for quick inductions, like you see in hypnosis stage shows. But this client really didn’t need anything because she, as long as I have been working with her, she can go under with a single command, but I got my practice in anyway.

The client wanted to get completion with her older sister, call her A, who had died a few years ago. In the process she ended up visiting another sister and some other people as well. The client is female, in her 70’s, and had two sister, one which was very psychic and one that was staunchly atheist/materialistic and thought all that paranormal stuff was pure bunk.

The induction went fast, and she when directly to a beautiful place: “I found myself sitting on a stone floor in front of a stone throne that was two steps up from where I sat. Behind me was an almost life-sized Buddha figure. The room was ringed with small stained glass windows with Christian themes. The stone floor and throne setting seemed very old and had a roughish, primitive appearance. The floor, though, was very smooth and comfortable. The room seemed to me to represent various faiths that I had encountered and the idea that I had accepted parts of each one and the room illustrated that. I think I laughed out loud several times as I found the room quite delightful.”

She did laugh, and cry, many times throughout the session.

When she finished describing the room, I asked A to join her: “I had a very hard time not seeing her as a dead body, but gradually bits and pieces of her personality began to come through. She said to me, laughing ‘I can sparkle and (?) for you if that’s what you want, but you know we don’t really need that.’ Not her exact words, but that was the general idea, that if I needed to see her as lively and ‘lifelike’ she could do that.”

“I had felt that I had let her down as she was dying by not impressing on her that she should look for the light, a guide, etc., but she had turned to a standard form of religion not long before she died, and I realized that I hadn’t felt right about ‘imposing’ my beliefs about the afterlife on her at that point.”

“We ‘talked’ for a while, and she reminded me that we both knew there were no boundaries and that we could communicate without outside support. I gave her permission to ‘drop in’ whenever she felt like it.”

The client laughed and cried during this conversation. She then said her “so longs” to A (No Good-Byes here, they would be talking again!). Something she said made me suspect there might me more to do here, so I suggested that she see if there was someone else she wanted to talk to:

“Then I looked for my other sister. Call her B. She died a few months after A. I had felt really bad that I was unable to understand what she was saying the last time we spoke, as her voice was very rough and she was sort of mumbling. I felt worse that I had no idea whether the last words I spoke to her conveyed anything of my feelings about her. We never did address that in this session, but it didn’t seem to matter.”

“When I first saw her in this session she was sitting in a sort of office – a small room with books, papers, a computer. She said she knew she was dead, but thought she might just as well stay in her little room as she didn’t believe there was anything else out there.”

I was looking for a way to get B to consider leaving the room. B had said that she was writing letters, so I asked something like, would the people they were addressed to ever read them. That gave B pause, she had never considered that. Somehow in the conversation, the fact that one of her sons had died, came up. A suggested the client go with that: “I asked her if she knew that one of her sons had recently died. At this point, Rod asked me to encourage her to open the door of her room, and when she did, the son was standing there. They eventually walked off happily together.”

Then the client switched back to A: “She more or less brushed off all my apologies, conveying to me that it wasn’t important, that what I had or hadn’t said to her didn’t impede her in any way. Our Dad came to get her, and the two of them walked off together. I just realized that it didn’t occur to me to try to speak with my Dad. He said to A that, although he had never actually said it to her, he hoped she knew that he had always loved her very much.”

“While she and I were talking, I felt that I wanted to hug her or touch her in some way. I realized that we had never been ‘huggy’ with each other, but we did have a very strong bond. She was very lighted-hearted and laughed a lot, which was typical of her in life.”

“Rod brought me back to the original room.” (The “Chapel”) “I felt much more peaceful that I had at the beginning.”

I had a “Ah Ha” moment during this session. There was one point where it felt like I had lost focus, or my mind had wandered. This has happened, from time to time, and I usually just feel bad and double my efforts to stay focused. This time I got something totally different, because I realized that it had happened right after I had the client to give a suggestion to one of her sisters. What had actually happened is the that energy of the room had shifted, which I believe meant that the sister we had been talking to had had an insight and we were making progress!

When I read this, I can’t help but think that there are some important points that are missing, but I just can’t remember them. Lesson learned: I need to start recording all my sessions.

Unexpected Benefits

This Sunday I attended the monthly Paranormal Pub, put on by MUFON and McMenamins. Admission is free and I find it’s a great way to spend a Sunday evening. And it’s only a short walk to several great pubs, if you don’t want to go home afterwards. The speaker this month was Susan Pease Banitt clinical social worker and author, talking about past life regression and it’s role in healing trauma. McMenamins serves a variety of adult beverages and I suspect that my partaking may have had a role to play in later events.

I like to show up early, so I can get my drink and get settled into my favorite spot before the crowd shows up. I struck up a conversation with the woman next to me, and then, as luck would have it, some people I’d met a few times before, at other events, showed up and joined us. The person who sat next to me was someone I thought was pretty cool, but that may be because I’m pretty sure this aint our first BBQ. I generally don’t say anything in these cases, it seems best to let sleeping dogs lie unless it comes up for some other reason.

At the end of her talk, Susan offered a group past life regression for anyone who wanted to stay. Of course, we all stayed.

My regression didn’t seem all the remarkable. I saw three scenes, all three were dominated by the big round eyes of a young girl, about six or so. I couldn’t see much else about her except a dress that tagged her as native american. For myself, I saw dirty, knobby, bare feet and extremely ragged pants. I got the impression that I was European, maybe mid thirties, and very dirty, ragged and in really bad shape. My impression is that I was the girl’s father, but I never knew about her, or I abandoned her mother before she was born. I saw nothing about the mother, so perhaps she was dead. It seems that, somehow, I’d found my way back to the tribe in this terrible state. The first scene seemed to take place in the late afternoon on a rainy, overcast day. The light had that particular flavor to it. The girl and I were standing outside. I think there might have been other people around. Nothing else happened.

In the second scene, it was night, and I was sitting with the girl, in front of a big fire, outside, with many other people. In this scene I had the impression of teepees in the background. Again, it was just a snapshot with no action.

In the last scene, I was lying on the ground, in the dirt, it was day again, morning perhaps, and the girl was standing next to me. I was dying. I was inside the camp, for there were a few people and teepees around, but no one was paying any attention to us. I soon raised up floated away, watching the scene grow smaller and smaller below me. The girl was watching me the whole time. The little girl was the person sitting next to me.

Afterwards, I felt...off. And the feeling got worse and worse as time went on. It only took a few minutes before I was fighting to hold it together against fear, shame and indecision. I just wanted to get out of there. Part of me was yelling at me to talk to someone and get some sort of help, but fear of “being a bother” took control and I fled without saying anything to anyone. I drove home, doing all I could to hold it together under an onslaught of fear, guilt and shame. I apologize to everyone there for being so rude as vanish without a word.

After a miserable night, I dragged myself up to see that nasty shadow was still there. I know I had to do something about it, I had an unusually busy day with clients and other appointments, and the last thing I needed was to have this cloud hanging over me, interfering.

Finally, my rational mind kicked in and the obvious dawned on me: I’d picked up a hitchhiker during the regression. That’s a new one on me, I’ve never even heard of even the possibility of that before! Fortunately I had time before my first appointment, so I had a conversation with my new tenant. I can’t remember his name now, but he actually was from that time. He and a girl had tried to run off together, but the men of the tribe had caught them and killed him. Somehow he managed to latch onto me and I pulled him into the present. It only took a few minutes to send him on. It felt do good, after all that turmoil, to be so relaxed and peaceful again. I couldn’t enjoy it long, though, places to go, people to see, and all that.

I can’t be sure of this, but I suspect that having some alcohol in my system made it easier for him to latch on to me. Maybe this was all meant to be, so it would have made no difference but, who knows? Another insight I’ve had about this is that I think that my reaction was so strong because his feelings hooked into and amplified latent feelings of my own. That could be another reason why and how he was able to effect me so strongly, his deep resonance with my emotions, on a subconscious level, that allowed him to slip past my normal defenses.

I’m sure he is gone, but an echo of his feelings still remain. So here’s another aspect of this whole incident: Perhaps his purpose was to help me to bring up and deal with emotions that I’d allowed to slide out of sight, where I could ignore them. This, and other events, are making it pretty clear that I’ll be confronting some uncomfortable issues pretty soon.

Between Life and Death

“Is there a state between life and death where spirits hang out?”

I was asked this question recently. My first reaction was that it almost seems a bit silly, then I realized that it’s a reasonable question, given that our culture doesn’t officially recognize any sort of life after death, outside of religion. I suppose there’s a whole book to be written about the way people invoke God, Jesus and a Higher Power in one breath and distain for the supernatural in the next, but that’s not for today. I should just accept that most people are either completely ignorant when it comes to spiritual matter, or have aa very simplistic, childlike conception that hasn’t been thought about since they were six.

Short answer about life after death: There appears to be another place where souls go after death. Some call it heaven, others like to objectify it as another “plane of existence” or “energy level.” Whatever it is, the transition is often described as a journey through a tunnel to a white light. However, not all spirits make that transition, and they end up hanging around with us, unseen and unheard, for the most part.

Souls can stay for many reasons. Common ones are, fear of punishment/judgment from a religious upbringing, addiction or drugs, power or sex, unfinished business, and, perhaps the saddest cases, souls simply don’t know they’re dead. This can be because they died suddenly, or while unconscious, and, because they believed that death was nothingness, conclude that they must be still alive.

I know that seems odd, I mean, how could you not know you’re dead? Aren’t there lots of clues that *something* is different? The problem is that souls need a physical body to function properly in this reality. Without it, the tend to lose track of time and space, and even memory gets tricky. Without a body that keeps track of time through its needs and process, awareness tends to live in a perpetual “Now.” With, perhaps, only a dim awareness that they’ve repeated the same actions and asked the same questions, over and over again. Physical bodies seem to also play a role in forming the new memories that allow a conscious to draw conclusions, make deductions and “move on.” Souls appear to be more or less stuck in the attitudes and state of mind they had when they died. Souls usually can only be reasoned with on a basic, emotional, immediate fashion. Childlike, in a way, you can reason with what’s right in front of them, part of their current reality, but if you try and get too complicated or abstract and you will lose them.

I’m sure that, right now, people with extensive experience with the “other side” are probably giving me a hard time right about now. They have had contacts with spirits that were highly intelligent and helpful, or otherwise don’t fit the description I just gave, and I agree. The reason is, there’s a distinction between “souls” and “spirits.” Souls are the departed that have not yet returned to the light, and Spirits are entities that either have gone to the light and returned or have never incarnated in the first place. There is a process of reintegration that all souls must go through to be able to function effectively in a discarnate form. You can look to Sylvia Brown’s books, Answers About the Afterlife or many other places for descriptions about what that’s like. The point here is that I’m talking about Souls that have not yet gone back to the light, not Spirits, that have returned.

Could you say that souls, stuck in transition, so to speak, are between life and death? In a way, I suppose, but I wouldn’t say that. Their bodies are most definitely dead, no question there, but their souls have not completed the incarnation cycle, so perhaps. It occurs to me while writing this that immortals would also be “stuck” and unable to complete the cycle. I have no personal interest in living forever. I think eternal life is overrated. Without the periodic refreshing of viewpoint, knowledge and enthusiasm that comes from each incarnation, existence would devolve into a increasingly meaningless succession of days and events that would blur together into utter blandness.

As a final note, I want to add that I feel that the “supernatural” is much more complicated than anyone seems to think. It’s as rich in variety and life and experience as our “natural” world, perhaps even more so. We only see a small portion though our very limited lens, and one of the reasons it seems so confusing is we only see disconnected parts of it. Like the Blind Men and the Elephant story, where each man touches a small portion of the animal and concludes that the whole animal is like the tail, the foot, the trunk or the ear, we each get our own piece of the “other side” and we draw our own conclusions, which are distorted further by our own limitations and beliefs. All in all, it’s not surprising that people from different cultures and different backgrounds paint very different pictures about what they perceive.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?

I held a group regression at my place yesterday. Only one person showed up, even though I had a large number of RSVPs. She is a woman in her 70’s, single, living with her daughter and her daughter’s husband. I don’t know whether she’s divorced or widowed. She’s been to four of my group meetings before, and been hypnotized twice before. She considers herself a poor subject, but, as you will see, she’s quite the opposite.

I showed this text to the client and she added some comments that I put in quotes in the text.

After she arrived, we chit-chatted for about half an hour, waiting for others to show up. After catching up, we got on to the subject of my next meeting, which is “People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead,” by Gray Leon Hill. In the course of that conversation, we discussed the symptoms of spirit attachment and she suspected that she might have one, and she agreed to let me help her look into it, when we had time. Once enough time had passed that I was pretty sure no one else was showing up, I suggested that we skip the regression and explore the possibility of the “hitchhiker.”

My plan was to do a standard induction and then ask her subconscious (or higher self) if there were any other entities present. To that end, I had her imagine her beautiful place. But as she described that place, she mentioned that she was holding a book. That made me suspicious, and it only took a few more questions to determine that she was not in this lifetime. My guides said to go with it, so I did.

Client, “Either the book was written in a foreign language or I was unable to read, as I realized today that words in the book didn’t make any sense to me.”

She was a 12 year old girl, wearing an old, simple, dress that was too small. The left side of her face had some kind of defect or deformity that caused it to droop. She was sitting under a tree in a field of grass and could hear cows in the distance. There were trees around, but her area was mostly open.

When I asked her to go to the place where she lived, she chose, instead, to go to a cave. She always called it a “hole” for some reason, but, what she described was more like a large cave or system of caves. When she arrived, she was standing and looking up through an opening to the sky. She described the sky as so intense a blue as being almost purple. When she looked around, she saw a bunch of “little men” or elves working with fire and making metal things. (The client was laughing at this point, not believing what she was seeing) After a while, one of the “little men” took her out of the caves and back to her house. It was like she knew the way well enough, but one of the men always took her back when it was time.

She lived with a sister, that was a couple of years older, and a grown woman who seemed to be some kind of caretaker. The lived in a plain stone house off by itself. They seemed to be very poor, the house empty and very cold in the winter, and the food was pretty bad, yet they had this woman, who was not related to them, to cook and take care of them.

Long story short, her sister left four years later, she spend a lot of time with the elves, especially in the winter, when it was cold, and then she died at the age of 24. She apparently had some congenital problems, was constantly in pain or discomfort, and some injury had finally tipped the scales. The odd thing is, the buried her before she was dead. That’s not quite what you think, she felt herself being lowered into the grave and laid there looking at the sky, just a little indignant, but otherwise not particularly upset that they didn’t wait until she was dead. She died shortly thereafter, before they started to cover her up.

She then rose up, looked at the scene briefly, couldn’t answer any questions about the purpose of that life, then went to visit her sister. Apparently they were supposed to stay together their entire lives, and had tried this many times in the past, but each time, something always split them up. She seemed to be able to have this conversation with her sister, even though she wasn’t, physically, there.

After that, the client rose up into the sky, shedding the “weight” of her physical life, bit by bit, until she was just a few “molecules,” among countless other “molecules” of light. Each one a being. She was enraptured with the feeling of being part of the oneness again.

A remarkable thing happened at this point, her face changed: It looked dramatically younger, slimmer, and her skin looked like ivory. Her face reminded me of a classical greek statue. (At this point, I noticed a distinct scar, a straight line angling from her forehead to just outside of her right eye. Afterward, when we were talking, I couldn’t see it any more, and when I asked her about it she didn’t know what I was talking about.) She wanted to remain in this state, but something, or someone, was calling her to find another body and she didn’t want to.

Client, “I think this is fascinating. I saw my daughter’s face change that way once when she was describing a past life as a servant in an Egyptian temple whose job was to make sure that the lamps never went out.”

This seemed to be a good time to call in the subconscious, but there was a problem. Even though I got affirmatives when I requested to speak to the subconscious and ask questions, it wasn’t able to answer. The client saw a “big block” in front of the subconscious. So I started talking directly to the “big block.”

The blocks’ name turned out be Harry, and he’d been with the client since childhood. He joined her because she was self confident and he could undermine her confidence by constantly whispering discouraging and suicidal thought into her ear. (The client had mentioned earlier that she’d learned to distinguish these “not her” thoughts fairly early in her life and learned to block them out, mostly) Harry had died from indecision, his leg had been caught under a falling rock and he died from thirst before he could make up his mind about cutting off his leg.

Client, “I was told when I was in my 30s that I had an entity who had been attached to me for several lifetimes who sent me ‘death messages’ as a way of controlling me. The first time I consciously recognized this, I was driving over the bridge to Vancouver when I got a mental picture of myself driving off the bridge and being killed. From then on, I was able to recognize when those kind of messages were coming at me from the outside. When Rod asked Harry when Harry had attached himself to me, I ‘saw’ sets of numbers, and felt that Harry had attached himself in different lifetimes when I was 83, 49 and at birth.”

It took some convincing to get him to leave. He was very afraid of what “they” would do to him because of all the “bad” things he’d done. We eventually we able to locate a sister, I believe, that he cared about and trusted enough to let her take him into the light. At this point, the client was smiling and crying at the same time. I tried to find out what was happening here, but, between one thing and another, I didn’t get a clear answer.

Client, “I was overcome with joy at the point at which Harry left me, because I saw a large clay pot on its side with water pouring out. The falling water was unutterably beautiful and meaningful to me, and I can still visualize it and experience remnants of the feeling.”

Afterwards, she felt lighter, and smiled and shook her head whenever she mentioned the “little men.” She realized that her “sister” is here, in this lifetime, as a relative, but they are not close this time. Apparently they decided to “take this lifetime off” from whatever goal they are working on. I hope to see her again soon, and see what changes God has wrought.

Client, “Actually, I was very close to that sister in this lifetime, and she was still my sister, although there were many years in which I didn’t live near each other. She’s the first person I knew who had psychic experiences and told me about them. Her husband told me that the last time the 3 of us were together we were Chinese, and my sister had me beheaded so I couldn’t take him away from her.”

“My feeling is that the lifetime I was regressed to wasn’t particularly important. The significant things in this experience were, to me – rising into the sky after my physical death and the sensation of ‘shedding’ material things. I actually had a sense of things ‘falling off of me’ as I rose until I was just consciousness; traveling in unison with the other ‘beings’ that I described – at least to myself- as ‘other cells in a body’; the untrammeled joy I felt at the sight of the water pouring from the jar, which occurred just as Harry was coming in contact with whoever came to fetch him.“

“Getting rid of Harry was also gratifying. I didn’t feel any anger toward him, as it was obvious to me that he hung on to me as a way of ignoring his own problems.”

“I think I just realized what the falling water symbolized. I think it was for Harry. He latched onto me after having died of thirst, and hung on to me because he was using me to supply him with spiritual nourishment because he didn’t know how to find his own. I think the water represented the immense amount of spiritual ‘thirst quenching’ that he realized was available to him once he had the courage to seek it for himself.”