Earthing ~ Failures

Earthing ~ A Journey 7

My Personal Journey to connect with Earth (continued)

Time flies when you are having fun, or more correctly, when you are working towards a goal. Summer went by in a blur! We didn’t have a long summer break from college, and we’re now well into fall. One of the other students asked me if I would conduct a Reiki session for her Mom.

Mom was not much older than me. She was suffering terrible back pain and had consented to having a steel rod bracing surgically inserted to support her spine. It hadn’t gone well and now she was in hospital fighting infection and in agony. She was to have more major surgery to remove the rods again.

The student told me that she didn’t believe in Reiki, but would I try anyway? I wasn’t feeling optimistic about this, which should have been a warning for me to follow my intuition and keep away from this, but the student begged me.

We arrived at the hospital and were talking with her Mom when the private room door opened. A parade of interns and the surgeon walked in. My heart sank. Mom introduced her daughter, and then me, as lady who was going to give her some energy healing. The surgeon surveyed me skeptically. He spent a few minutes asking Mom questions and giving her info about her surgery scheduled for the next day, while we tried not to listen. As he turned to leave with his entourage, he smirked at me… “good luck, Maybe you’ll have better success than me!” It wasn’t meant kindly.

I took off my coat, and gloves, and washed my hands in the corner sink, but my hands were still chilly. I apologised for their initial coolness as I placed them on her. I moved systematically as I had been taught, focusing on general soothing energy generation. My hands began to generate their usual tingliness as I breathed energy through me. All touch, would have to be in face up position, as she had much difficulty in moving at all. As my hands moved over her abdomen (and of course, low spine beneath), strong magnetic fields started to jerk my hands to specific places. I had felt these before on other people. They were indicative of joint pain, wear and tear and inflammation. But these were the strongest magnetic sensations I’d ever felt. My hands danced as if possessed. They pulled to a specific spot. But from there I became scared…

I felt strongly that a sort of goo was attaching to my hands. I tried to pull it, but then Mom (who had been lying quietly up to now) began to moan and wince with pain. Her eyes were still closed, but her body heaved under my hands ever so slightly.

I was out of my depth on this Reiki session. Mom needed a ‘Master’ to work on her (as I had seen at the Saturday course). I felt unprepared to deal with someone going into the kind of thrashing that I had witnessed when trying to pull out this sick energy from a person. I had to let it slide back, and moved on. I finished the Reiki with soothing energy and gently asked Mom to open her eyes. She was asleep, but came around when her daughter said, “you can wake up now.”

Mom said she felt calm and it was nice, thanking me for helping. I didn’t say anything; I felt a complete failure. We left, and I decided not to tell the student what I had experienced. I had encountered something very bad… Bone cancer perhaps, but I really didn’t know and didn’t want to cause a false alarm. Later the student told me that her Mom still didn’t believe, but that she did note how my hands went from feeling ice cold to almost roasting with heat, especially over her abdomen.

I have only had one other intense instance like this. It came later when I had my massage therapy practice some years later. An elderly gentleman of African origin had walked in one day. He asked for a 30 minute session. I always did a thorough intake questionnaire and discovered some unsettling things on his medical history. I asked him to lie on my table (an adjustable hydrolic table that I could lower for him). I had not asked him to undress as per usual. I used palpation skills and a few easy tests to determine where his pain originated. My heart sank as I felt sticky energy in his right hip, pelvis and low-back. The poor man was in intense pain. Suddenly, the door had flown open and his large, angry looking wife stomped into the room yelling. She was unhappy he was on my table. I asked her to return to the waiting room, and that I could not divulge anything (client confidentiality). I turned to him.

“You need to go back to your doctor.Your problem looks quite serious and you may need to see a specialist.” I was as kind as I could be, and I apologised that I thought a massage would not help. He squeezed my hand and smiled. The man had suffered lymph cancer, but had been in remission for two years. What I intuitively felt, but could not say, was that I suspected that it had returned aggressively and was eating through his bones. I did not charge him, saying that all we had done was an assessment. He thanked me and left. I felt unhappy that I had to turn him away, but I would have been negligent if I tried to give him a massage. A Reiki session might have soothed, but that was not what he wanted or what my practice offered.

Five days later, the receptionist had a message waiting for me as I arrived for afternoon appointments. The man’s son had called to say that his father had died, but the family was very grateful to me. He had felt quite at peace after he left my office. I felt so unhappy. He was such a nice man.

Mom had all her steel rods removed, but still struggled with pain. The student and I were not speaking that often, so other than knowing something of her Mom’s gradual deterioration, I did not learn what the outcome was.

Sometimes, we feel things that we would rather not. Life throws all sorts of tragedies at us. Grounding is the only way to transmute the energies of such encounters. We cannot take on other people’s energies to ourselves, no matter how much we want to help. They just make us sick ourselves. I was not in a position to offer more, though I would dearly have liked to. I knew that I must not let my own ego get in the way. All I could do was learn from my failures.

(To be continued…)