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…)

Earthing ~ Uprisings

Earthing ~ A Journey 3

My Personal Journey to connect with Earth (continued)

My workplace became a place of backstabbing. My subordinate Night Manager wanted my job and tried to undermine me at every turn. I found him (a married man with three young kids) having an affair with another employee (also married). The security police had rung to inform me that our alarm system was being turned off at 2:00 am on a series of nights and my Night Manager’s code had been entered. (basically they were using my office for clandestine bonking sessions). However, my boss actually believed that he should not be warned or dismissed. Instead she ‘promoted’ me to a new job I didn’t want, nor was I qualified to do, and gave one of her friend’s my job. My Boss gave me no choice. I knew that this was the first sign that things were going to change, and rapidly.

I juggled my spiritual journey with an increasingly more difficult physical one. My new job gave me a new office, more computer work and demanded official marketing presentations but took away resposibility for any employees. (My Boss blamed me for not controlling my Night Manager’s rampant gonads!). However, other manager’s cooperation was required, and since I had jumped their ranks by 2 grades on the pay scale (something that shouldn’t have happened), it created animosity and I could not rely on their help (and in fact, they went out of their way to thwart my work). I was a long term employee, and my boss (only a year in the job) was not experienced enough to know what she was doing, but she had a way of belittling everyone, including me, while she flouted the rules.

Worse, I was suddenly aware that a deja-vu aspect of my death dream was developing quickly in my new circumstances. Not long after my move, my Boss said that I would be required to travel to New Orleans to some technology event or other, and she and her Supervisor would be coming too. My blood ran cold. It was the exact location in my dream that I had dismissed as silly and extremely unlikely. I had just been given a Dell laptop (an expensive bit of kit for the presentations) and my death dream had showed me going through a presentation on a laptop in the hotel coffee shop, when I would suddenly experience a gripping left side pain and my coffee cup would fall out of my hand, with the obvious death by heart attack consequences.

I kind of went into a meltdown of fear, but said nothing. Coincidence maybe, but many other incidences of the dream scenes were occurring for real,  and I began to panic.

I spent more and more time trying to meditate and ground myself. My world felt like it was spinning out of control and I could only watch and observe it doing so.

The real reason my boss wanted to go with me to New Orleans was to get an all expenses paid trip. It would be a junket on the public purse as our business operated under ancillary services of a University. It was all wrong, and I knew it. The venue would not benefit us or the University! The Provost, (her boss) was going along with this grand deception. I had to think of something to get out of it, but I was worried about income so I couldn’t just quit. I had several months before the New Orleans Technology Conference, so I did have some breathing space.

I thought I needed some time to think about my life without the stress of work. I requested an unpaid leave of absence for 10 weeks. I was entitled under the rules of my long term employment, but I still had to have a reason. I used ‘relationship problems’ as an excuse. My boss actually agreed (to my surprise).

My partner was going to visit his aging parents for six weeks, (and, as I would later learn, to play around with an old girlfriend on the side). My relationship was definitely on the rocks anyway.

I spent my ten weeks with my new friends, pursuing weekend Reiki courses, shamanic rituals, sacred dancing and special workshops that took me to an even higher awareness of connectivity and taught me more healing skills. I almost went to the ‘witch’ lady’s full moon celebration, but when she said they would dance naked around the fire and then sit in a sauna all night to purge their physical bodies, I wasn’t sure, and didn’t go. Perhaps I should have. In hindsight, dancing barefoot might have been very grounding, and the sweat lodges (a kind of shamanic thing), were built over bare earth.

During my solitary days, I sat on the grass in my garden, planted vegetables amongst the flowers and had my arms wrapped around trees on long walks, some barefooted. I was in heaven. All my stresses were out of my life for the moment. It was a blissful and healthy time for me. I ate salads and prepared lovely food from local organic shops and didn’t drink any alcohol. I was really grounded and happy. It was the best summer of my entire life.

But, I had to return to work, and while I needed a new job, I also needed time to implement a course of action to get one, so I continued playing the game.

The New Orleans trip was still three months away and I made a premature risky move to try to avoid going. It was one that didn’t pay off. In fact it backfired spectacularly…

I did a little research on the Technology Conference in New Orleans (coincidently occurring at the same time as the February Mardi Gras festival) and found that we were only given a small insignificant slot. It was hardly worth paying the flights, hotel and food expenses for  three (or as it would turn out, four people) to attend for four days.

And I told my boss in no uncertain terms that “We’ d be wasting our time there, and tax-payer money.”

My boss looked at me with thunderous eyes, walked around her desk and slammed her office door shut, (a sign to the staff on the other side of it, that she was about to tear strips off me). The blast of anger I received could be heard up and down the building. Then she said she would send another Manager in place of me and told me to ‘get out!’

I walked back to my office with staff eyes following me, burning holes in my back. Ten minutes later, my office door opened and my Boss walked in. Her anger, it seemed, had worsened. She was clever, no one heard this conversation and I couldn’t prove it (I did try, and even consulted a lawyer), but she growled in a low voice  that I was to go home immediately (it was a Friday morning). I was to think very hard about my options over the weekend and either come back on Monday with my resignation on her desk, or to grovel for my job (her words) but in that case, she would make my life a living hell for the rest of my work days.

I had not expected this at all. The stress for me was huge…

I had to  figure out what to do on Monday? … And I didn’t intend to go home to tell my lazy partner that I had virtually been fired. I spent the rest of the day in a nearby woodland trying to connect with the earth… And to plan a new life! I meditated and grounded myself all weekend. I was so grateful that I had this in my life, because without it, I think I would have had a complete mental breakdown.

(Incidentally, two of my previous staff were assigned to give the New Orleans  presentation in my place but when they all arrived that following February, the they had been relegated to 30 minutes in a general interest booth, outside of the conference proceedings – along with the trinket sellers – and they did their presentation to ten bored attendees, with five of them wandering away after just a few minutes. My Boss had not even made an appearance. The four of them spent the rest of their time partying day and night at the Mardi Gras courtesy of the Canadian taxpayer).

(To be continued… )