The Last Good Day, a Bird Invasion, My House Locks Me Out, and Bob Messes with My Phone

Exactly a year ago, April 3, 2023, my husband suddenly became violently ill with the pancreatitis that would kill him 10 days later. Right about this time in the middle of the evening, as I start to write this post. So very suddenly. He was fine and then he wasn’t, from one moment to the next.

I think of last April 3, the earlier part of it, as The Last Good Day. I’d had a pleasant, relaxed afternoon that included hanging out at a coffee shop and then the new library. Bob and I were at the beginning of a week of spring break, after working much more than usual in the past few months and hardly seeing each other, and were planning on a romantic getaway to take the waters in Truth or Consequences on the 5th. I had cooked a spring dinner of greens from the garden, with rice and parmesan, and he said it was good. It was the last thing he ever ate, and I haven’t made it since, can’t.

He took the trash out, as he did every week, and finished getting his tax records together for his business so that I could get the bulk of the tax work done and not have to worry about it the rest of the week. I gave him a little bit of a hard time for not putting everything in the right categories and making more work for me. Not the conversation I would have had with him, if I had had any idea what would happen just a few minutes later.

And then life as we knew it ended.

I figured that today would be difficult. It’s been tolerable, not as hard as it might have been, but of course I’m not OK. I can’t expect to be, shouldn’t be. It’s OK not to be OK. The next week and a half, I’ll be inevitably remembering, these days floating on the layers of trauma from the year before.

If that weren’t disorienting enough, in the past couple of days someone or something has seemed bent on playing April Fool’s jokes on me. A couple of exceptionally odd events occurred, and if you’ve read much of my blog, you know that’s saying a lot.

On April 1, I was taking out the trash, which is now my job along with everything else Bob used to do. I opened the garage door to roll the recycling bin out, and before I could close it again, a bird flew in! An unfamiliar species, substantial, about the size of a robin, pale yellow belly and grey and black head and wings, one who must have been passing through on migration and gotten confused.

I chased the critter around with a broom, trying to shoo it back out, but there were too many places to hole up in the rafters where I couldn’t reach, and it seemed to have no interest in freeing itself if that meant navigating in the dark. As it darted around in a tizzy it kept bashing itself into the panels of lights in the ceiling, which must have looked like sky. I was tired after my workday, and cold, and we weren’t accomplishing anything except to give the bird bruises. I put out a pan of water for it and went to bed. The bird would have a safe place to sleep overnight, and no harm done.

In the morning, yesterday, April 2, I woke up late out of a disturbing dream, strangely sore all over and a little bit loopy. It took me a little while to remember that I had a bird in my garage. I went to open the garage door, closing the door from the house to the garage behind me lest the bird should try to escape in the wrong direction. I heard a loud click behind me but thought little of it. The bird immediately found its way out into the sunlight.

Relieved, I turned to go back into the house and make some coffee. And found that the door was locked! Obviously it had been unlocked, or I couldn’t have gone through it in the first place. This made no sense. And I was in trouble, still in my nightgown in the morning chill, and of course without keys or phone.

My next-door neighbors have a key to my house, and I have theirs, so I wasn’t extremely worried. And my 90+-year-old neighbor fortunately knew where the key was and quickly retrieved it from a drawer nearby. Whew! I marched up to my front door— and was no better off than before, because my glass storm door was still locked from the inside and there was no way of accessing it. I was about to resign myself to calling a locksmith, but then, just in case, tried my front deadbolt key in the house-to-garage door lock. And it worked. I didn’t even know the two doors had been keyed alike.

So what caused that door to click itself locked? I’ve lived here almost 22 years and nothing like that has ever happened. I’ve been paranoid about locking myself out since Bob has been gone, and I always, always triple-check that I have my keys when I leave. This time it was like the house itself locked me out. Or like someone did. In the context of the weird bird encounter, this was seriously creepy.

I’ve had instances of disembodied beings having helpful effects on physical objects (like last summer when apparently Bob fixed the roller shade on the patio— did I tell you about that?), but none in which they manipulated objects to do harm. I had been broadcasting calls to Bob for days, unable to get any more than the faintest signal on the cosmic WiFi, and I’d hate to think that I caught some kind of untoward attention in the process. I do know better than to call out to just anyone… don’t I?

At a health care appointment yesterday, I told my provider about my strange morning. It seemed symbolically significant to her, and she asked me to think about what it might mean in terms of being shut out or something similar. It certainly had a feeling of significance, but if it has a lesson for me, other than that I should never shut that door behind me again, I haven’t yet gotten the message. Perhaps it will become clear. If the confused bird had a message for me, I don’t know what that was either. I could make up a story but that wouldn’t be the point.

Once the craziness was over, I decided to take a photo of the blossoms on my pear tree before they faded, with the intention of using it for wallpaper on my phone. This one:

When I opened the wallpaper settings, I was surprised to find that my phone suggested this picture:

As I was telling you, I’d been trying and trying to “phone” Bob, without success. This photo wasn’t recent or prominent in my photo stream; it was from way back in 2021. It had never come up before on the list of potential wallpaper images. And it’s an edited version– the original background was removed and the image is cropped closely around the face (which the photo program might have done on its own for some reason).

And just a little while before I had been whining at my appointment about how frustrated I’d been at being unable to reach Bob for days despite trying every way I knew how.

It reminded me of when this happened, all those years ago:

https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/fryc-in-print/

I think the last really clear visit I’d had from him was back on March 17, first thing in the morning while I was still lounging in bed. When I got up I picked up my phone to text someone, and in the space where I was about to start typing, there was already a word: Bob.

Special

In early January, a patient called to say she wasn’t going to be able to get here due to the day’s worsening snow, something that doesn’t happen all that commonly in Albuquerque. And then she added that her husband had died on December 20.

Of course I was shocked, and worried for her. Her husband was 84 years old but in good health and diligent about taking care of himself. He had died suddenly of an apparent heart attack. She had left the room briefly while he was on the phone, and when she came back, he was already gone.

The snow dissipated, and C made it to her appointment after all. It was a good thing, since there was so much for her body and mind to process, a very appropriate time for a supportive treatment.

She and her husband, J, had run a business together for many years, each of them handling different facets of it. She hadn’t gotten involved with the parts that J took care of, and didn’t understand his idiosyncratic ways of keeping records. However, she told me, she was in such close communication with him that he could give her specific advice to guide her through all that. With his help she was figuring everything out and keeping the business going by herself. Not that it was easy by any means, but it was doable. My heart went out to her, knowing all too well what a challenge it is to do all one’s own work plus everything one’s deceased spouse had been doing.

C asked if I had any sense of J being around, since a number of people she associates with had been able to perceive him. I had all my antennae up, but I wasn’t noticing anyone else in the room with us.

I marveled at the rich flow of information C was able to get from J, but she dismissed the idea that it was so amazing or unusual. She was about to say, “I’m nobody special, so if I can communicate like this, anyone can.”

She got as far as “I’m nobody special,” at which point I could feel J positively jumping up and down and waving his arms at my right side. He was taking vehement exception to C’s opinion that she wasn’t special! I told her what was going on— she was aware of his presence too— and she replied that he had always given her a hard time if she put herself down that way. We had a good laugh, and I made it clear that I thought C was very special too!

Seriously, what C can do appears to be beyond what most of us are capable of. After decades of practice, I can almost never get this kind of clarity. Apparently she’s been able to do it since childhood. She also has a spiritual discipline that she has pursued for many years, and I expect that it must help enhance her awareness.

I had only had one encounter with J during his life. It was in November 2023 when my laptop died in such a way that the data couldn’t be gotten out of it, and I was in a bind. (Yes, I had online backup, but it was painfully slow to access.) He generously called me to give me the name of someone who might be able to help. I had appreciated that tremendously, even though I ended up not needing that person, and when he showed up in my office I was able to thank him again.

---

Last week I was getting a session of energy work, and my dear departed husband showed up and assisted, the first time he has tried that. My friend who was treating me received some messages from him. One of them had to do with my being special, and valuable to this planet. Apparently he was trying to encourage me to stay here, or to help make it less onerous to do so.

Both C and J gave me their permission to write about them.
Image by Gerd Altmann at Pixabay.

A Small Experiment In Walking Through the Veil

Comments on my post about the SoulPhone project included a pithy “the veil is there for a reason.” This phrase came from a person who is very knowledgeable about after-death issues, and it stuck with me and begged me to explore it. I decided to have a look and find out whatever I could about the nature of the interface between the worlds on my own, not depending on whatever sources on either side have told me.

I simply asked to be shown an image of the veil. What I saw seemed to contradict some other information that’s been received from the other side over the years. In particular, we’re told that “postmaterial” folk experience themselves as being more or less the same as before they died, in terms of having a solid-seeming body much like the one they’d inhabited on the earth plane. Other evidence has supported that in my experience, but that was not what this vision showed me.

The interface itself looked like a thin, black, semi-translucent rectangle, rather like smoky glass, which I saw tilted horizontally with the far edge toward the left. It looked a lot like this Plexiglas panel being sold at Amazon, but a bit darker:

There was an arm reaching through toward the right, a somewhat vague cartoon-like structure, but solid, showing up in a sort of pale orange hue. To the left, there was a blank space. Whoever was reaching through was invisible on that side.

Meanwhile, there was a figure on the right side of the rectangle that appeared to represent me, and “I” was reaching my right arm through in the opposite direction, from the material to the immaterial world. As my arm penetrated the interface, it disappeared.

So the same being could appear in material form, at least more or less, in one world and not in the other.

I tried visualizing a being from the other world stepping entirely into ours. The image on our side was of a whole human figure, with a fuzzy glowing outline— clearly delineated, but not solid in the same way as an earth-plane denizen. Like a ghost, the way they’re often pictured.

Next I tried seeing myself step through from my side, and I disappeared on the other side. I tried experiencing that in my own body, walking through to the other world, and felt my body dissipating into a mist and diffusing.

I turned the elements of the vision in various directions and tried to look at the scene from different perspectives. Everything persisted, as if I were looking at a “real” scene. No dreamlike morphing, and nothing going away. It felt like I was seeing something truthful, though I don’t necessarily understand all of it. I am presenting the vision not as an absolute description of reality, but as the way my brain found to represent an aspect of reality.

Early in this whole process, the thought occurred to me that wherever you go, you find yourself. There was a sense of being able to reach through the interface and back around to oneself from either side. I’m not sure how that fit in with the rest.

Encountering Electronic Voice Phenomena in Person, Part I

In the past couple of months, my boggle threshold* has been raised a few more notches. I’m getting more and more “whatever” as time goes on.

The annual conference of the Academy for Spiritual and Consciousness Studies was held October 4-7 in Raleigh, NC. I had belonged to the organization for about a decade, but had never been to any of their events. This time I felt that I needed to be there, and the second day in, the reason became clear.

While waiting to register at the beginning of the conference, I found myself sitting next to and chatting with Terri Segal, who told me she was there to present about Electronic Voice Phenomena. This was the first synchronicity of a series. The next afternoon, I went to see what she and her cohort Vicki Talbott had going on. It turned out that they were giving not just a talk but a workshop in which we were able to actually try out the process.  Here’s a description of the session: http://ascsiconference.com/team/vicki-talbott-and-terri-segal/

Electronic Voice Phenomena are a subset of Instrumental TransCommunication, a range of methods of recording images or sounds produced by discarnate beings by means of electronic devices. For those who hadn’t heard of EVP, it might be helpful to stop here and read these:
https://atransc.org/recording-evp/
https://atransc.org/about-aaevp/

The conference had two tracks of presentations at the same time throughout, so it was sometimes hard to choose between them. Only a very few people attended the EVP session, which surprised me as well as the presenters, because this is usually such a popular subject. (Later, a number of people said they hadn’t been aware it was happening, although it was clearly indicated in the program— I had the feeling they might have been steered away!) I was fairly familiar with the idea of recording discarnate voices, but hadn’t heard many examples, and didn’t know a lot of details or much about the technology involved.

As we started the workshop, I became aware of Fryderyk being vividly present at my side.  He seemed to be practically jumping up and down with excitement. It was the only time he was around during the conference, in fact the only time he had contacted me during a period of a few weeks. I had no way of knowing that he had already made the acquaintance of this group!  We got brief recordings of him during the workshop, but there isn’t anything earthshaking– except, of course, the existence of the recordings in themselves.

The recording process went like this: Vicki had each of the attendees in turn ask a question of one of the discarnates, then let the recorder run for ten seconds so that they had time to answer. The equipment used was very simple, a small, rather old-fashioned hand-held Panasonic recorder. At the time, nothing at all out of the ordinary appeared to be happening. We spoke our questions, and then there was no sound but the slight whir of the instrument.

The fun began when the recording was played back, and voices that had not been present before showed up. I witnessed this in real time.  Even though I was already familiar with the concept, actually experiencing it was positively freaky.  I’m including links to a couple of clips so that you can share my freaked-outedness.

My question for Fryderyk was quite simple. I told the group that I was in touch with someone who very much wanted to speak, someone who I knew had a lot of experience with direct voice and other methods of spirit communication. “I know you’ve been wanting to say something. What would you like to say?” His reply is unclear, to my ears; the only part I can pick up for sure is “it’s helpful” at the end of the message, but that part is definite. The fact that there was any audible reply at all was enough to leave me pretty stunned. https://app.box.com/s/t9j5uactcum3evvcvdzf368gqj1ms7ho

In addition to Fryderyk, we called upon Vicki’s son, Braden, and someone close to one of the attendees, unknown to the rest of us, who was not named. All three replied immediately. I didn’t get to really hear what was said by that third person, only that a voice had come through, and since it was none of my business, I didn’t ask further.

I wanted to ask Braden something, and as I did so, I got to wondering if I could perceive him somewhere in the room.  I looked around, and my eyes stuck to a patch of air near the ceiling, about two feet wide, that looked somehow different from the rest.  As I was realizing that the odd patch was Braden, he suddenly reached out toward me with a considerable amount of energy, so that the effect was that he bopped me between the eyes!  It didn’t hurt, but I was knocked back a little in my chair, and everyone saw that.  I explained to the group what had happened.

Later, Vicki found that the discarnates were talking about Braden bopping me, just before I told her about it.  You can hear “he’s tapped her” near the beginning of the clip, and “I’m quite amused”; the rest is fuzzy to me.  https://app.box.com/s/0w9achce66o378g022t6x998mojh4xq6

Although Vicki is addressing Braden in this clip, I am reasonably certain that the voice saying “Very good. It’s me here” belongs to Fryderyk. That message is 100% audible and definite. https://app.box.com/s/seb9mfix0585y4zq1dvbultwey80r37f

Let’s stop a minute and contemplate this. After 25 1/2 years of contact with Fryderyk, struggling to get verbal messages, his voice, physical vibrations of sound, captured in a form that I can not only store and listen to myself, but can send to you. His voice, so similar to the one I had heard in the Leslie Flint recordings, where I had never been absolutely, entirely sure it was him.

When I was next in touch with him after the workshop, the first thing he conveyed to me was immense relief at the ease of communicating directly instead of through layers of cumbersome instrumentation. It struck me, though, that the brief messages that come through by EVP are not so different from the almost aphoristic verbal messages I receive from him, when I can get any definite words at all. It seems to me that when he is able to convey words directly to me, he’s put thought into boiling the concept down into a short, pithy phrase. It must take a lot of energy to get even such small transmissions through my thick skull.

There is a significant difference, though, between getting advice from him inside my head, especially controversial advice— say, being told that it’s fine to experiment with styles of trills and have fun with them— and hearing it objectively in an .mp3 file. The physical recordings have a unique value.

You will notice, if you listen to even a few examples of EVP, that sometimes the voices sound pretty ordinary, sometimes they sound electronic or robotic, and sometimes there’s a lot of fuzz, rather like a phone call with a really bad connection. Sometimes individuals are easily recognizable, sometimes not. Researchers use a witness panel to rate the clarity of the messages and to make sure there really are words in the first place. Some “scientific” folk say that there is only noise and listeners convince themselves that they’re hearing words because they want to so much, but I think you can already tell, if you’ve listened to even the few clips I’ve linked here, that this is simply not the case. The phenomenon is quite real, and one must deal with it. Nonphysical beings can manipulate physical sounds to create verbal messages. We are way past arguing whether this is actually happening. Now we need to understand how it can be possible, what the physics of it is.

You’d think I would be over the moon with joy at receiving even a few electronic words from my old friend. Instead, I found myself near weeping and in a kind of shock. It was strangely hard to deal with this new evidence of his existence. Suddenly, despite all the overwhelmingly intense moments I’d experienced with him over the years, he was somehow more real than I could handle. And although I knew very well that he’d worked closely with other groups and had multiple intellectual and emotional connections, walking into this room and finding him engaged in a major project with people who were complete strangers to me was also a little more than I could take in at first.

(It was not the first time I’d observed Fryderyk messing with electronics; that had occurred back in 2009. You may recall the anomalous behavior of my printer when it spat out three portraits of Chopin, which were not on the document I was attempting to print. https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/fryc-in-print/ That constituted a form of ITC, I would think. The EVP was just another order of magnitude weirder for some reason.)

There is also the frustration of trying to understand the meaning of the messages. Sometimes the words sound perfectly obvious, yet the message is still obscure. One of the later clips of Fryderyk that Vicki sent me sounds to me for all the world like “I’ve made a cologne for her.” Here it is:  https://app.box.com/s/izaal6l0fhwyqqbgo37ixq08gwapn8ob  Can you make any better sense out of it than I can? And if I am hearing it right, exactly how am I supposed to obtain this otherworldly cologne? (I haven’t experienced any anomalous scents lately!) My husband jokingly suggested that he’d made me a clone— that would be great, I could get so much more done!

After the conference, Vicki and I began a correspondence, and I was interested to find that her impressions of Fryderyk, who she knew little about as a historical figure, were identical to mine— including his dry sense of humor. And I was amused at the idea of him joining forces with Braden, who is also a composer, but in what seems like a diametrically opposite genre, hip-hop. So Chopin is collaborating with a rap artist these days….

Like Fryderyk, Braden— as you might have guessed from the bopping incident— is a comedian as well as a musician. I mentioned to Vicki that Chopin used to do a Victor Borge-like act at the piano, something she hadn’t been aware of. She replied, bemusedly, “So that’s why they wanted me to watch that Victor Borge video on YouTube….” (Both of them left the planet before the existence of YouTube, but it seems that is irrelevant.)

*The boggle threshold is the level of weirdness at which one’s brain freezes up and can’t process what it perceives any more. Thanks to Michael Tymn for the concept.

https://www.transcommunication.org/index.php
https://atransc.org/big-circle-recording-sessions/

Dead Sexy

 

I finished this back in 2009, but it never seemed like the right time to publish it.  A couple of days ago, at the Academy for Spiritual and Consciousness Studies “Aspects of Consciousness” conference, I heard Miles Edward Allen give a presentation on sex in the afterlife (to the extent that we know anything about that).  His attitude is that we need to stop stopping ourselves from talking about sex.  I can’t argue with that.  I guess now it’s time.  Everyone quoted or mentioned here gave consent for me to write about them publicly, so I’ll give myself permission too:

“It happened in the late 1970s. At the time I had the flu and was running a fever. I was in bed for about three days. And one night I just woke up realizing that I was orgasming. My boyfriend was asleep next to me and wasn’t touching me, but I felt like a person was on top of me, like I could feel the weight of a person, even though there was no one there. I thought I had been having a dream about making love, but when I woke up it was continuing and it wasn’t a dream.”

Catherine’s story reminds us that contacts with the unseen worlds can take on a vividly, even disconcertingly, physical quality. It’s not particularly unusual for frankly sexual events to occur, and often they are indefinable and unclear in nature. For example, one woman told me about being slowly kissed all the way down her spine, one vertebra at a time, by someone unknown and invisible. We may not know who we are with, or why.

Catherine’s account also illustrates the slippery way that spirit experiences can intertwine with apparent past-life memories, raising questions, or maybe providing answers, about our own identities:
“I had the sense that it was a man, and that I wasn’t exactly myself. I felt that my name was Frieda. I don’t know if the other person or being had a name, I don’t remember. It seemed like we were Nordic somehow; it’s pretty vague. It happened more than once. I thought it was mildly interesting, but I didn’t have any interest in encouraging it. I told my boyfriend about it, and other people that I was living with, but we didn’t really dwell on it.

“We had just moved into a very, very old log cabin out in the country, that had been hand-built a very long time ago. I don’t know if that had anything to do with it.

“I was in a mask-making phase from about 1995 through 1997, and one of the masks I made I named Frieda. I’m only now making the connection—I didn’t think about this at the time. I would make a plaster of Paris mask by having a friend lay the strips of gauze on my face, and then I would go into a meditative space and ‘let the mask paint itself,’ so that I never knew what the finished project would be. Sometimes I would glue things on the mask. Each mask was a healing experience, would heal some part of my life or some episode; sometimes I wasn’t sure just what it was, but it felt healing. One of my favorites, if not my very favorite, was the one I called Frieda. It was a very strong, protective female spirit. I told my husband, ‘This is Frieda. She’s the guardian of children and small animals.’ It just came out of my mouth. Whether I just made that up because it seemed to fit the mask or not, I have no idea.

“I was so moved by the Frieda mask that I made a cast of my torso to go with it, sort of like a shield. I wanted to make it more of a person, sort of fill it in.”

 

A Reiki student of mine, now someone I respect as a colleague in healing, reported a clear encounter with her deceased boyfriend. She described this to me after a Reiki class with another teacher, who had told her that she had a ghost on her left shoulder. The student, Patrice, took exception to this. She told me that not only did she not believe there was anything around her left shoulder, she was perfectly capable of perceiving such things for herself, and had done so many times before.

“In fact,” she said, in a conspiratorial tone, “I knew when my ex-boyfriend was dead because he showed up in my room and was trying to have sex with me.”

“Well, that’s not necessarily such a bad thing….” I replied, hesitantly.

“But he was DEAD!” she cried, sounding truly horrified. She explained that she had reacted by immediately and firmly telling him to hit the road. She didn’t have any trouble getting rid of him.

Oh, well, he was her ex. She wouldn’t have wanted him around if he had shown up in the flesh, either. But I was amused to hear that the fact that he was dead made such a difference. I guess I’m used to thinking of “dead” as not necessarily one of a person’s more socially important characteristics.

 

And I have a much more positive feeling about my own deceased ex.

One night in February 1993, as I was lying in bed, ready to go to sleep, I had an impression of a hand stretching toward me out of the darkness, and I reached out to take it. I didn’t know what I was inviting. The experience began with an intense, electric tingling at the base of my spine, and, well, it went on from there. It was as completely pleasurable as anything I’ve done with a physical person, and I welcomed the pleasure at first without reservation. But when I came back to my senses a bit—to find my invisible companion still at work—fear took over. (It didn’t help that my husband was sleeping no more than two inches away.) “Please,” I thought, “I’m not ready for this, please stop!” But it didn’t stop, not for quite a while. Eventually I slept.

I woke up with a case of the willies, thinking about demonic possession, incubi, and so forth. I felt vaguely violated, even though I had, at least at first, invited the experience. I knew that I had been perfectly lucid and had not been dreaming or hallucinating, that in fact I hadn’t even been sleepy when it began. It had been so real. I felt that I had been unfaithful to my husband!

Or had I? I wondered if Bob might have been dreaming about me or something, but he said he didn’t think so. “Well,” I whispered darkly, “something touched me last night.” I decided not to go into any more detail than that! Bob reacted with a total lack of surprise, as if he had known all about it. “You weren’t hurt in any way, so why worry?” was all he said. I felt a little better after mentioning it to him, though it seemed odd that he was so nonchalant.

Still, I was distinctly uneasy. I called my Reiki teacher; I thought she might either have had such an experience or known someone who did. I gave her a short summary of what had been going on with my spirit contacts. I had a lot of trouble getting around to telling Elizabeth about the racier aspects of my experience, but she understood where I was heading and was able to get it out of me. “Well, you know,” she said, “it is creative energy.”

I’ve already told you that soon after Fryderyk first came to me, he began to approach me in a clearly erotic manner. It’s so hard to decide what, how much, I should say about this. I want to tell the truth. I think it’s important to tell this in some detail, because I am trying to get at the clearest possible picture of what spirits (we, I mean) are capable of. However, while prudishness is not a habit of mine, I don’t want to be any more indelicate than absolutely necessary. In saying this, I have in mind my lover’s very private and reticent nature during his Earth life; surely, I think, he would prefer not to have his most intimate secrets and activities broadcast—although, during that life, come to think of it, they were.

I also want to avoid unnecessary disrespect toward my husband, who has already put up with more than I think should be expected of him. No matter how I present it, this puts Bob in an unavoidably awkward position. He knows everything, and he accepts it all. But if I had a “real,” completely physical, male human lover, I expect that he would not show the same degree of tolerance. (And is there really a difference?) Above all, I would never want my husband, that noble being, to be seen as laughable or ridiculous.

On top of all that, I find that I’m rather nervous to write about this because out of all the crazy-sounding things I am describing to you, this may be the craziest. But it’s time to take the bull by the horns, or some other part of its anatomy.

I keep asking why a ghost, or whatever we want to call him, has any interest in sex whatsoever. His interest seems most enthusiastic, and it doesn’t necessarily correspond with the timing of my own. Sometimes he comes to me at the most inconvenient moments imaginable, when I can’t go along with what he suggests. Some other times I long for him but can’t find him no matter how hard I try, or if he is with me, nothing erotic occurs despite my suggestions or even pleadings. I get the impression that it is only at special times that the worlds are aligned in such a way that he can get this kind of connection with me. At some of those times, he seems almost to materialize.

Naturally, a lot is missing from this experience, but the part you are probably thinking of does not seem to be missing. I can’t easily kiss him, hold him in my arms, do anything to any specific area of his (non)body, because I usually can’t see him and don’t quite know where his body is, except in a very general way. But when I feel distinct thrusting, as often happens, I at least know where that one part of him seems to be.

Sometimes I only feel tingling and buzzing around my root chakra; sometimes, very rarely, there is clearly and incontrovertibly a man in my bed, impossible to ignore. There can be any degree of physicality or solidity from a feathery breath to a weight that presses decidedly on my bed and on my flesh, though it is a light weight indeed. On occasion I feel him sit down next to me, seeming to depress the mattress ever so slightly, then stretch out and lie close beside me or just above me. At such a time I’m likely to feel that slight weight settle onto my hips, and I know that he is about to enter my body.

I have proven to myself that I cannot produce these effects on my own, through imagination or any other means. If I could, I surely would, because I enjoy the experience so very much.

But again, why would he want this? Why should someone without a body desire this most physical of acts? It’s clear that libido is extremely variable, that it can change dramatically with shifts in hormone levels and other vagaries of the body. I remember, for example, that for a while during my pregnancy I had no interest at all, and then, when I started lactating, that interest came roaring back despite the fact that I had a huge incision in my belly and a newborn to keep me occupied. None of those changes had anything to do with my relationship with my husband or any other “real” factors in my life; they were no more than shifts in my internal weather, of no ultimate importance. And now, in my journey through perimenopause, I notice wild ups and downs as well. All these things are purely, totally of the body.

I wonder sometimes if he does it only for my sake, because he wants to please me. Or perhaps it’s because this is one of the few ways he can communicate with me. Maybe it’s even just to show that he can. It’s probably quite a technical feat. Some biographers have made snide comments about his ability as a lover—something they could have no real knowledge of—and it may amuse him to prove them wrong. But I think the most likely explanation is that he feels this need because during his Earth life he was largely deprived of sexual expression. At times I have come into contact with aspects of him that feel profoundly painful to me, connected to his sexuality and the frustration and difficulty he experienced.

I don’t know what, if anything, Mme Potocka may have contributed to that frustration. I find it hard to imagine her refusing him, given her own overheated nature. I do know that the first time he came to me in that way, the night I described above, there was an edge of anger, as if he was looking for some sort of revenge. It was a feeling of, “Aha! Now I’ve got you!” I’ve never been sure what to make of it. I was uncomfortable about it for a long time, for years in fact. It’s not that there was any violence or anything remotely like it. He was perfectly, wondrously gentle—but utterly relentless. I didn’t understand what was going on, and I didn’t even know for sure who was with me or why. I was thoroughly enjoying the experience anyway, but after a while I started to get nervous. I asked him to stop, and he wouldn’t stop. In fact, he kept going for so long that I eventually drifted off to sleep for a little while. It’s very odd to remember that now. It seems like I should have been more frightened than I was, if anything. I guess I was pretty sure who he was, and somehow it seemed natural to relate to him that way, though I had no clue why that should be the case. But I still thought that he should stop when I insisted on it. It’s possible that he didn’t understand, but based on the rest of our communications, that seems unlikely.

There have only been two instances when this kind of experience went on for any substantial length of time, and I’ve just described the first. The second time, years later, I lay there on my stomach, utterly blissed out, for so long that I pushed my jaw out of place and needed to see the chiropractor the next day. That is the only harm I have ever suffered, to the best of my knowledge.

Most of the time, in the first few years, the feeling was somewhere between making love and being struck by lightning. There was great intensity, but it was over within a few seconds. (Some of you ladies are no doubt thinking that this sounds like your normal, everyday experience….) It could be tremendously satisfying on every level, or it could leave me high and dry, having just started to get interested. I had no control over any of that.

As I said, the timing was often quite inconvenient, as well. Most often he would come to me when I was settling down to sleep, and that was fine, but he also showed up at random times when I was not at all available. It took me years to realize that I could say no. This is truly strange, because I’m an assertive person, and I don’t take well to being coerced in any way. I suppose I didn’t want to refuse him because these episodes were rare and I didn’t know when there might be another opportunity. And he wasn’t causing me any serious problem, usually quite the contrary. I was a little bugged, though, and I thought that it would be nicer if he could approach me a bit more gradually and slowly and give me some warning. Eventually I got smart enough to simply tell him that. Ever since, he has asked first. There is a sort of little tap on my aura, and I either tell him to go ahead or let him know that I’m in the middle of something and can’t be with him right then.

Months can go by between these escapades, even as much as a year. Then there are stretches of a few days at a time where he approaches me over and over. During March 1998, the month in which he was almost constantly with me, so much as almost to make a pain of himself, I started to get used to the idea of having a second, steady lover. I started to think, why not? He was around so often that I began to rely on him and expect him to please me, which turned out to be a mistake. (I suppose that would also be a mistake with a “real” lover.) I think I gave the poor creature a case of performance anxiety, and I myself started to feel disappointed sometimes instead of elated and full of love. It was not fair or realistic to expect him to fulfill that role for me.

And again, there was the guilt. It has waxed and waned over the years. At the times when he and I have achieved a more nearly physical connection, I have tended to feel worse about it, more like I was truly cheating on my husband. I have often felt more comfortable with receiving only a little tingle or two, just enough that I know he’s there and still interested. I’ve tried to discuss this with him, but I’m not clear about his point of view. More recently I’ve decided that I just don’t care, it’s not worth feeling guilty about this, and I want everything that I can get, or everything he wants to give me.

Although I do worry, my extracurricular activities have had mostly positive effects on my marriage. My body has become more responsive, and my heart infinitely more open. I have become more appreciative of men as a species, and I have come to see my husband, with his solidly molecular but transient, fragile human body, as more and more precious. I take nothing for granted. I understand that we can never be truly lost to each other, but I also see more clearly the vastness in which we travel and can appear to be separated.

Technically, it’s been good for us too. When I observe Fryderyk doing something interesting, I figure I can learn to do it too (well, except for that pianist-composer business). I’ve experimented and tried to understand how he gets the effects that he does, and sometimes I’ve come up with surprising new tricks. When this all started, Bob and I were not new to the idea of relating to each other on a purely energetic basis, but seeing that more was possible, we expanded our perceptions and our skills. Our interactions gained a depth and profundity that we would perhaps not have developed otherwise.

Knowing how I can create a particular effect myself doesn’t mean that I am sure how Fryderyk is doing it, though. When I feel that slight weight against my body, I’m reasonably sure that he is “lying” there with me, but at other times, from his point of view, he might be standing somewhere across the room or not even in the same world with me. I don’t know. Although there have been a few times when I had a vague visual impression of him, and once, just once so far, I saw his face, most of the time I perceive him only as a mass of Qi, an area of warmth, where the air is “thicker.”

Once I asked him how he sees me, that is, does he perceive me as a solid human being, seeing my body more or less as I do, or does he perceive only a mass of energy, more or less as I usually perceive him? He was able to give one of the clearest and cleverest answers I have ever received from him. First he lit up the entire surface of my body—yes, he does see me as a human form. Then he lit up my aura all over, out to a few inches from the surface—yes, he sees me as a glowing energy field too.

There was one time, only once, that he really seemed to pay attention to my body in and of itself, not just my energetic structure. It was late at night. I had just gotten out of the bathtub, and I did something I don’t normally do. I felt too tired even to look for my nightgown, and I flopped down on my back, quite uncovered, on my bed, to rest a little before making that supreme effort. Immediately he was there with me. Most often it happens that when he comes to me in the mood for this sort of thing, it’s bedtime, and I am settled down cozily wrapped in nightgown and blankets, feeling warm and safe. I felt weirdly vulnerable being naked with him—how odd! But perhaps that made things a little easier for him. That one and only time, some pleasant attention was paid to specific spots on my skin.

And once, something incredible happened to my lips. It was like being kissed by an aurora; beautiful lights in blues, purples, and greens, with an electric glow, played about my mouth. The pleasure was exquisite, delicate, and yet so powerful, as is true of so much that he does. This was many years ago, and nothing like it has ever happened again. But kissing has never been the same for me since. My lips seemed to wake up and perceive everything differently, to blossom into intense sensitivity. Another wonderful gift—and one I can share with my husband, too.

I have done my best to find out what Fryderyk gets out of all this, but there is little I can report. During one of the rare moments that I’ve been able to have a verbal exchange with him, I told him that I wanted very much to give him pleasure, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it because, among other things, I couldn’t perceive the structure of his “body.” “It doesn’t matter,” was the reply. “I feel pleasure with my whole being.”

Some of my psychic friends have expressed doubts about whether it is all right for an erotic relationship to go on between the worlds. Early on, they were concerned that Fryderyk was some sort of lower spirit that was taking advantage of me. Like an incubus—whatever that really is. Having gotten to know him well, Mendy Lou has concluded that everything is fine. However, despite her own experiences, the woman I referred to as Catherine still believes that something is terribly wrong, that Fryderyk must be evil or twisted. I think, or at least would like to think, that her discomfort is mainly an expression of our society’s overall attitude toward sexuality. Sex is seen as low and distasteful, whereas spirits are supposed to be more advanced and high-minded, so in that view the two cannot possibly go together. I see lovemaking as one of the highest functions of human beings, so to me there is no such conflict.

Or I am making excuses for my lover and for myself.

This issue comes up in Rosemary Brown’s writings. Liszt expresses the opinion that once the body has fallen away, its physical needs do as well, and that includes sexuality. I can only say that he appears to be incorrect. He must be telling it as it is in his experience, though. Oh, well, Liszt got plenty of lovin’ while he was on the planet, and perhaps it’s just that he himself no longer feels the need for more, not that this is true of everyone. And after all, he did become a priest in the latter part of his life.

Despite my comments about hormones, I myself no longer see sexuality as primarily physical, and haven’t for years. Perhaps as I get older this will be even more the case. And as I get older, if my erotic connection with Fryderyk should persist, I suppose we will look sillier and sillier together—that is, if anyone who can actually see both of us happens to look. He appears to be perennially somewhere in his late twenties, and here I am, already old enough to have a son that age. Despite the fact that we must both be well into our hundreds, or even thousands, this thought gives me a little distress!

And then there is the inescapable thought that perhaps he doesn’t want to be with me at all, he wants to be with Delfina, and I’m no more than the closest available substitute. I’ve tried to remind him that I’m not her, can’t be her, can’t substitute for the one he knew and loved then. This issue comes into the brightest focus when he puts himself in the role of lover. But perhaps the totality of our relationship is far beyond the temporary forms of either Delfina or me—or him—and it’s not even meaningful to worry about this.

 

In the case of my interactions with Fryderyk, I’m completely certain that there is an independent, actual living being visiting me. However, it’s entirely possible that sometimes we are projecting the apparent entities ourselves, even in frankly sexual situations. Here, Patrick tells of an encounter that is not quite like anything else I’ve heard of. He also offers some potential insights into the reasons why such experiences may occur:
“The first experience happened while I was in college for my second degree, about 11 years ago. At the time I was exploring various forms of inner work. I practiced Daoist yoga techniques of sexual energy transmutation, in effect learning how to take the energy that would go into ejaculation and reverse it, direct it up your spine and disperse it through the energy field. I was also exploring techniques for out-of-body experiences, including how to form a double of yourself out of your own essence. At the same time, I was doing Toltec recapitulation and emotional clearing techniques. So I was doing various things to shake up the status quo of my interior language.

“I had resolved as much as possible not to have intimate relationships during school, because it was such an intense program and there just wasn’t time for that. So I was cultivating this sexual energy practice while not having any intimate relationships, and I thought I should have some kind of context, some way to relate to a female presence. And in one of the books on astral projection it said how you could have an astral relationship with someone else who is also astrally projecting.

“This was the most intense experience. I wasn’t trying to bring it about; it just occurred as a result of doing all these things. I was sitting on my bed one night, I think I was meditating or maybe just sitting quietly, and one by one I was visited by four different female presences. It was interesting, first, because there were four of them—I mean, one’s enough! They were from different cultures, which also was an interesting effect, because if I fantasize it’s generally about white women. [Patrick is white.] So that was something of a confirmation that this at least wasn’t being formulated by my conscious mind. One by one they sat in my lap, and we basically had energetic sex, and I felt like I do when I hold my ejaculation and have an energetic orgasm. I didn’t know them from anywhere. They were just beautiful women. I could see them in a ‘mind’s eye’ kind of way.

“I never had another experience quite like that one, that had that quality of spontaneity and that sort of unfamiliarity with what appeared. I didn’t intentionally try to make anything like that happen again; for one thing, it didn’t have anything to do with intention in the first place.

“It was a very positive experience, a very whole-making experience, rather than, ‘Oh no, I’d better watch out.’ I didn’t have to be on my guard or anything. One way among many of thinking of it is that I was doing so much work—I mean when you’re doing all that sexual energy work without a partner it can get real intense. I wasn’t real good at dispersing the energy so that it didn’t become a source of rage or a headache or something like that. It wasn’t till I started doing Cheyenne’s work [Cheyenne Maloney’s work with the Assemblage Point] that I was able to really disperse sexual energy in a way that was seamless for me. So here’s all this intense sexual energy rising with no female energy to interact with. Perhaps that whole experience was magnetized by the fact that that there was all this polarized male sexual energy without a feminine, balancing aspect.

“I would say that my relationship to my sexuality, shame, and guilt has changed enormously in the last five years. It’s the kind of thing where you think that something is behind you and you’ve had some kind of resolution, but you’ve just taken the lid off of something that has an even deeper layer under it. It’s an ongoing process. About five years ago, I finally realized the energetic experience of what guilt and shame is—I could finally feel the vibration of it and not just the emotional ramifications. Once I was able to feel that vibration, I was able to consciously modify my responses to guilt and shame in sexuality. For example, I would sit down with a pornographic movie and watch that energetic start to occur, the shame of watching pornography, and I would catch it and bring it into my heart, so it wasn’t something separate for me anymore. Which is my perception of what guilt and shame does, that it slices the experience in half, so that I’m over here and the experience is over there and we’re not one. So that I can’t have the experience without having the accompanying ‘I’m a bad person’ thing.

“My perception is that the shadow side of our culture’s sexuality is vast. The way our culture makes a pretense of being open-minded and at the same time clamps down with oppressive beliefs and institutions—that perceived open-mindedness is just a sham. I had to start to see how my own relationship to sexuality was a reflection of my culture as well.

“Recently, there was one thing that was recurrent and very powerful. As I started allowing more fluidity between what I previously thought was spiritual work and what I thought was profane or purely for physical gratification, as I started to allow those to overlap in my meditation, I started having this recurring fantasy of having sex with a Catholic nun. I went to Catholic school from kindergarten through high school, and there was one particular nun who was my music teacher. She was the only nun I can ever remember thinking was an attractive woman. So I would sit down to meditate and without consciously trying to, I would find myself in this fantasy. It literally had a life of its own. It would just surface in the meditation. And once more it became a source of channeling sexual energy during the meditation. So my meditations became, and still pretty much are, about cultivating and dispersing sexual energy through the energy field. But the fact that this fantasy kept recurring was kind of like someone knocking on the door and saying, ‘Will you open the fucking door?’ I knew I had to act this out in my life, and I did (not with a real nun!), and I haven’t had this enter my meditation again.

“At the risk of trying to interpret the experience, I’ll say this: I believe that there are aspects of oneself that are repressed, and when allowed to rise into consciousness, some need to be experienced viscerally, others can be experienced in fantasy or just as a mental concept, intellectualized. This one was not going to leave me alone until I experienced it physically, that was clear.

“It had a fantasy type of context, and yet it felt like it had its own agenda. Again, it felt like an aspect of me doing its darndest to make me recognize it. Once this started to surface in the meditation, I would just go with it, because I felt that not doing that would be just another way of keeping separate. What would be the point of that, especially in meditation? It seemed like another way for the self to become whole, and so I just feel that it was a natural surfacing of material that came out of letting go of shame and guilt. I mean, I probably would have tried mightily to suppress it if I had still been in that state of ‘oh my God this is bad.’ I would have used a great deal of energy to keep it out of the meditation.

“I haven’t had an experience yet that I thought was something other than an aspect of me or the ‘greater me.’ So whether these beings had their own objective existence, I don’t know. That is a total mystery to me, because the more I am, I hope, waking up a little bit, the more I see that we are these incredibly vast presences. And what we can hold and create— I mean, even just the tip of the iceberg is vast.”

But shame and guilt certainly do tend to show up in this context. Here is an anecdote from Rob, a married man who is crazy about his wife: “I was—I believe—astroplaning (which I am not good at and maybe have experienced what I think is less than a handful of times)—and met what I would consider a more feminine spirit. Sex WAS the issue.  I then recall saying to the entity, ‘But I am married.’  The session abruptly ended and I awakened very EXCITED and yet quite upset with myself—since I could have had a ‘good time’ without all the baggage of an affair.  Never had that experience again. Told my wife about the experience— she was smiling.  I told her that I am even faithful in an area where I don’t need to be!”

It’s not necessary to give up your physical body, or your partner’s, to experience an ecstatic energetic blending. We are quite capable of this in our present forms. In fact, I think this is one of the most accessible ways to experience ourselves as the unlimited spiritual beings we truly are. Two people who love each other can merge energetically to any degree they wish, either erotically or not, and I highly recommend it! You are sure to deepen your relationship and appreciate each other all the more.

So many changes, including menopause, have gone through since I wrote that, and my perspective is somewhat different.  But the eternal is still the eternal– and that includes us, no matter how much transformation we experience.

STTNG “Sub Rosa”: Predatory Love

I wrote the following in May of 2010, as part of a letter to a friend, and today I ran across it while looking for something else. It seems like an appropriate story for Halloween and Día de los Muertos, almost a ghost story but not quite. 

There has been so much news of sexual abuse and coercion lately, and our group mind is busy chewing over what constitutes abuse and what possibly is just a matter of being a jerk instead. For my own rather different reasons I have been considering this question as well. The situation in the STTNG episode I describe here is pathognomonic of abuse: one being takes control of another and prevents her from living her own life. Yet, as in real relationships, things aren’t absolutely cut and dried.
**************************************************************************

The other night I had the opportunity to record a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode that I’d been wanting to get my hands on for years, “Sub Rosa.” I hadn’t seen it in probably a decade or more. This time around, I found myself thinking, “Was Gates McFadden’s acting really that bad?” [sorry] and “I can’t believe they piled that much makeup on those poor women,” and “Why did they give Deanna Troi SO much hair?” and “Geez, none of their uniforms really fit.” Somehow the show, which honestly was high-quality overall, seemed even more dated than Classic Trek from the ‘60s!

But the story was still of interest to me. It was about almost exactly what an ex-friend and colleague insisted was happening to me: a disembodied being was making inappropriate and harmful use of humans, while claiming to love them and take care of them. The story began with Dr. Beverly Crusher, the Enterprise’s chief medical officer, beaming down for her grandmother’s funeral. The planet where her grandmother lived had been terraformed into a replica of the Scottish Highlands– which I guess was someone’s idea of the perfect environment– and the clothes and houses looked like they came from around 1800.

When Dr. Crusher read her grandmother’s journals, she discovered that this century-old lady had had a handsome lover, a guy in his 30s! Very soon the lover made an appearance and offered his services to the granddaughter. He represented himself as a ghost, a regular human spirit, nothing too untoward. She quickly fell under his spell. For short periods he would appear as a corporeal man, but then he would dissolve into a green mist and sink into her body, merging with her in a way that looked eerily familiar to me. They didn’t make it clear whether this was an overtly sexual act, but it sure looked like Beverly, squirming around most sensuously, was having a wonderful time.

The green mist guy, whose name was Ronin, asked Dr. Crusher to stay with him on the planet so that they could be completely joined forever. She was so messed up by that time that she instantly resigned from Starfleet and did as he asked, having no problem with leaving all her friends and everything she’d ever worked for. But by that time the captain and others were on to Ronin and trying to get Dr. Crusher out from under his influence. They had figured out that he was not a ghost at all, but an alien being made of “anaphasic energy,” a (made-up of course) kind of energy that was unstable and couldn’t exist without some kind of physical host. (Making one wonder how such a creature could ever evolve in the first place.) He’d been preying on the women in Beverly’s family generation after generation. They had a sort of candle, a family heirloom, that was where he lived when he wasn’t invading their own bodies.

And that’s when Ronin started attacking people, even killing one, to save himself. Finally Dr. Crusher had to kill him herself– of course, what else– blowing him away most dramatically with her phaser.

But at the very end, looking at her grandmother’s journals again, Dr. Crusher commented wistfully that whatever else he’d done, he had made her grandmother very happy.

Star Trek at its best has often managed to find stories that resonate for a great many people, at some deep subconscious or even mythological level. In this case, the plot concerned something that does appear to happen, a disembodied being interfering in the life of a human, but it also can be taken as being about physical-world relationships that are obsessive and controlling. It’s kind of the ultimate in codependent relationships.

And it’s very close to the kind of relationship my ex-friend accused me of having with Fryderyk.

I don’t have the slightest worry that I am being preyed upon or abused, but this story did make me take stock yet again. What would I be doing these days if Fryderyk had not happened to me? Would I have followed my “plan A” and studied jazz bass? Would I be a really hot lutenist? Would I somehow have become more myself if I hadn’t been concentrating on him? It seems like I might have saved many thousands of dollars by not buying a grand piano and not taking so many lessons, but then, I was already taking lessons and teaching, and I might have done all that anyway.

I do think that I’ve been significantly happier than I would have been otherwise. Maybe the happiness of romance is nothing more than a bunch of oxytocin circulating through the system, but it’s happiness nonetheless.

Love, Fear, and Viruses: Some Ways We Make Ourselves Ill or Well, Part II

“If you believe in love and acceptance, you cannot judge another for choosing fear and rejection. If you do, it means you are guilty of precisely what you are accusing others of.” — Alexander Loyd, Beyond Willpower

 

There were deeper emotional connections with those recent respiratory illnesses, too, no surprise. The thing that turned out to be the main issue was a major surprise, though. James Rolwing did a distance treatment for me, and he found something that confused both of us: that I was reacting to someone making a “bigoted statement,” and I’d had trouble dealing with the darkness in her and in myself. I don’t usually hang with bigoted people, so I couldn’t figure out who that might have been, but it made sense after a little consideration. I’d been reprocessing something that had happened over 30 years earlier, the incredibly nasty end of a relationship with someone who had been hugely important to me. Just a few days before I’d been reminded of that in a big way. The “bigoted statement” had to do with my sexuality and her rejection of that and pretty much everything else about me. She never spoke to me again and I never had any opportunity to resolve anything. Faced with love, she chose fear.

This seemed to get intertwined with the general climate of hatefulness and intolerance in this year of Him Who Must Not Be Named. I could not digest the poisons in the atmosphere. (Wait— the way that sentence came out mirrors my statement in Part I that “air felt irritating and threatening to my damaged tissues.” No wonder.) Until then I had thought I’d left the pain of that rejection behind, but it had more lessons in store for me.

It gets weirder. About six weeks later, the husband of the woman who had rejected me died after a shockingly quick illness, and I heard about it through mutual acquaintances. I can’t tell you much about either of them because I want to respect their family’s privacy, so I’ll have to describe the ensuing events in a very general way, but I think it’s an important story to pass on to you.

As I said, the extremely unpleasant event had happened over 30 years ago, and I hadn’t seen either the wife or the husband in the past few decades. I read the man’s obituary and the glowing tributes left by his friends and students, talked with my own husband about him, wrote some memories down myself, and found that I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I supposed that it was because I was worrying that something like that could happen to my husband, at any moment. But as this continued over a few days and nights, I began to wonder what was going on. The night of April 12, I was particularly agitated and barely slept, and he was constantly on my mind. The next morning, I had a polarity therapy appointment scheduled, and I snagged a photo of the deceased from Facebook and brought it along.

“This man I barely knew died and I can’t stop thinking about him and it’s got me really messed up,” I told the therapist, the very intuitive person I’ve mentioned to you in the past. She did her stuff, and at the end of the treatment, she took a deep breath and told me, “The reason you can’t stop thinking about him is that he’s present, and he’s trying to get through to you and you’re blocking him.” She continued with a question I’d never have expected. “Is it possible that he had feelings for you?”

Oh, my. Suddenly everything fell into place. “I wouldn’t have thought so,” I replied— and I still don’t— “but it’s what his wife believed.” I told the therapist a bit about what had happened between us. She gave the opinion that the rift was more about the wife’s attitudes than anything I had said or done. As we talked, I became inescapably aware of the presence of the gentleman in question. I couldn’t block him out anymore.

I still wanted to, though. The whole thing had come out of far left field and I didn’t know what to do with it. The rest of the day was busy wall to wall and I didn’t have a chance deal with him anyway. I felt pressured by his need to communicate with me and the mass of strong energy that was right up against me, and I figuratively clapped my hands over my ears and repeated, “La la la, I can’t hear anything!” As soon as I had a chance, I called Mendy Lou Blackburn, my psychic mentor, and asked for help.

During the day, I considered this earth-shattering development whenever I had a moment, and got more comfortable with it. This was not an evil entity, after all; it was just a guy, someone I had known to be a very decent and highly intelligent person. I could easily handle visiting with him. And of course he’d only been deceased for about a week and a half, so I couldn’t expect him to have much control over his “volume level” or understanding of the etiquette of spirit contacts.

When I went to bed and had time and quiet, I opened a conversation. I was feeling hostile, surprisingly so, and since one cannot lie or hide emotions in this situation, I acknowledged that and went from there. I told him that I was perfectly willing to talk with him, but that my mental and physical integrity had to be respected. I heard, “I’m sorry.” I tried to communicate further but fell asleep.

The next morning, the sense of pressure and invasion was gone, and I felt normal all day, no longer agitated and obsessive. Mendy Lou had time available in the evening, and as soon as I arrived, the gentleman made himself apparent. I want to make it clear that I don’t mean just that Mendy Lou reported messages from him, but that he was decidedly right there in the space with us, as impossible to ignore as if he’d still been physical. He was powerfully, intensely present as a mass of warm, vibrant energy, mostly at my right side. I was feeling him inside my hands as well, but I wasn’t discomfited by it, as by that time he seemed familiar and friendly and he wasn’t trying to force the interaction on me.

Mendy and I spent about three hours with him, during which he stayed steadily focused in the room. I was amazed at how long he was able to keep up the clear contact, as well as how intensely he came through, since he was so new at this business of being a disembodied spirit. (Did he have help? We didn’t perceive anyone else in the background.) We were able to talk through a lot of history, and he confirmed that the breakup hadn’t been my fault. It was a relief to know that and to be able to explain my actions to him. It turned out that the reason he had contacted me was that he’d always felt bad about the way things had ended between him and his wife and my husband and me. He’d liked both Bob and me, and would have preferred to stay friends with us, but his wife wouldn’t allow it. He transmitted a lot of heavy and troubling emotional content, which, again, I can’t share because of privacy concerns.  I will say, though, that he expressed a great deal of frustration, and we wondered if that might have contributed to his illness.

I can tell you that beyond all else he was worried about his distraught wife and was hoping that I might be able to help him get through to her, or to comfort her in some way. That must have been why he’d clamored for my attention so. He had tried to communicate with her but hadn’t been successful, something we hear often from those who have recently passed. I was very concerned for her welfare too, and could hardly begin to imagine how much pain she must be in. But even assuming that I could contact her at all, I could only have been a further disturbing influence. As tempting as it was to try, I had to decline.

It was beyond astonishing that, first, we had been important enough to this man that he made an intensive effort to contact me, and second, that he was able to find me. Why did he even consider looking for me? I didn’t do any kind of psychic work back when he knew me. Perhaps we have deeper connections that consciously I know nothing about. Mendy Lou kept telling me that none of this was my responsibility, that I had no obligation to help. I agreed, but the fact that it happened at all must mean that I am involved, and I have been wondering if I acquitted myself properly and adequately.

It was heartening a few days ago when one of my elderly patients told me about a similar situation, but one involving someone much more central to her, her brother. The brother had married a woman who was very concerned to keep him all to herself and away from family members who for some reason she thought were unacceptable. He went along with this and didn’t speak to his sister for decades. “It was all jealousy,” said my patient. The brother passed on, and at that point he did come to talk with her. They had a good conversation, “talking without words,” she told me, and they worked out their differences. What a wonderful relief that was for her, and probably for him too.

My own experience is still working its way through my psyche, and I don’t think I’ll be done with it for a while. Some things are clear to me, though. As I’ve written before*, it’s best to get right while you can with everyone, if at all possible, while you are alive. But there is always hope, always another chance. And if we can put aside fear, there is always love.

*https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2014/01/07/get-right-while-you-can/

An Invisible Patient

I thought I’d be writing Part II of my last health-care post at this point, but meanwhile something fascinating came up that I’d like to share with you.

More and more, I’m being called upon to do psychic work with my patients, although I never advertise or warrant that I can do that. They assume I can do it and trust me to come up with something useful, even when I don’t trust myself. Two weeks ago, on September 3, a patient asked me to help with something that seemed a bit outside my abilities. She, and the other person involved, have authorized me to tell about our experience.

The other person involved was my patient’s dear friend and business partner, who killed himself a couple of months ago after grappling with intractable mental and physical health problems and other frustrations. I’m going to call him G for Ghost, and his friend simply P for my Patient, even though in this case the patient was actually the ghost himself.

G has been in persistent contact with P since his death. Not in a frightening way, not any kind of possession, no attempt to control P, but he’s just always around. He’s talked with her often, with perfect clarity. He’s even commented on conversations she’s had with other people, which were not intended to include him, leaving her a bit peeved. When P asked if she could bring G to my office so that he and I could communicate, I didn’t understand what she wanted. Since she could hear him so well, and I likely couldn’t, why would it help for me to try to converse with him?

“He needs to talk with someone who isn’t me,” she told me firmly. The truth of this became obvious later when we had our meeting.

I’d already met G, briefly, at P’s last appointment. It’s not particularly unusual for spirit entities of various flavors to come in with patients, but finding myself nose to nose with a recently dead human being was still a little startling when it happened. I asked G if he had anything to tell us, and he hung his head and repeated, “Sorry sorry sorry sorry….” Poor guy, I thought. I tried to tell him that nobody was judging him and everything was OK now.

Later, P told me that G had been feeling terrible, both before and after his passing, about how much he had needed her to do for him, how much of her energy and resources he’d taken, and how he had hurt her by committing suicide. She said that the “sorry” message was very real and I had heard correctly.

It seems that G has been making every attempt to be helpful since, but his helpfulness may not be any more balanced or healthy than his guilt and shame. I wasn’t sure what to make of the message P relayed next, that G wanted to help me with my “balance of giving and receiving” because he felt that my patients were draining me. OK, I can somewhat see where he’d be getting that, but overall it’s not the issue he thought it was, and at any rate it wasn’t happening at the treatment he’d observed me giving to P.

I set up an appointment with P, and tried to prepare every way I could during the time leading up to it. I sent out repeated calls to Fryderyk, requesting his presence at the event; I had the feeling that things would be difficult, and I was hoping for backup. I got very little response.

P and I agreed that if nothing happened, we would just accept that and not worry about it. I set our chairs on either side of the treatment table, as if we were about to work on a physical patient who was lying there. On the table was the MacBook on which I’m writing now, with GarageBand open to record the session. We needn’t have worried that nothing would happen– as usual, G was right to hand.

G immediately reiterated his desire to be of assistance to me, and a moment later he was inside my body, trying to move my hands and look out through my eyes. This would have totally creeped me out if I hadn’t had such experiences with Fryderyk before; as it was, I stayed utterly calm. I didn’t think that G was any threat to me or that he had any ill intent, but still, this was exceedingly inappropriate. I told him in no uncertain terms that he was not allowed to use my body in this way.  It was useful that he made the attempt, though, because that showed me where he was coming from and what he was trying to do.

I told P what was going on, and added a bit about why I thought G was incorrect in thinking that he needed to save me from being drained by my patients.* P marveled that even after death, we can still project our own issues onto others. Well, as we discussed, we’re still ourselves when we die, and we don’t immediately become hugely enlightened, though I hope we can get a bit broader of a perspective even early on. G, it seems, had major issues with being able to ask for help and to feel OK about needing it. I can understand that, and it’s not foreign to me by any means, but as I told him, I get a great deal of help from both Earth-based people and the spirit world, and I’m very aware that I couldn’t manage without it.  Anyway, I thanked him for his offer, but made it clear that we would not be working together in that way, period.

It was becoming apparent to me that G believed he needed to work through a physical body, even though he had given up his own. I tried to convince him that he was far less limited in his present form, and could do whatever he might want or need to accomplish perfectly well. “I don’t even work in my own body half the time!” I exclaimed. But G looked to me (through my mind’s eye, not as a vision in the room) like a small, contracted, grey figure, not a powerfully glowing ball of energy, which is how I see a person in a healthy state. He didn’t look like he could accomplish much of anything, he was so closed up and shut down.

“Isn’t there anyone helping him?” I asked P. Normally, we all have our connections to current family, ancestors, guides and so forth, and we’re always told that when we die someone comes to take care of us and show us the ropes. I could not detect anyone or anything around G, and P couldn’t either. This seemed unimaginable, but my own vision, the messages P received, and her subjective experiences all said that G was completely alone except for his connection to his one friend. When I asked G about this directly, I heard the only verbal message I got from him that day, which was an impassioned, “I LOVE [P]!!!!”

Feeling perplexed, I set about trying to help G open up to the universe beyond the small area in which he’d confined himself. Right away, I sensed extreme resistance to this. Looking further, I discovered that G believed that if anyone out there saw him, any higher beings, they would immediately judge and reject him. I did my best to convince him that this was not the case at all, but he wouldn’t take that in. I talked about other messages I’d channeled and been told about, in which I’d heard how valuable and beautiful and precious an individual human personality is, and how loved we all are, as well as how much fun he could have in his new expanded state of being and how much good he could do. P and I kept up this encouraging conversation for a good while. At the same time, I kept doing energy work, as I would with a physical patient. I brought a column of illumination down into him (best I can describe that), and G began to expand and light up a bit. He still seemed extremely skeptical about what we were telling him, though.

At this point, I felt like I really needed some outside support. Unable to find anyone naturally connected with G, I sent out a plea toward Fryderyk, who I knew had done this sort of work before. I felt only a vague tendril of contact; it appeared to me that he and G reached their hands toward each other, but the connection felt tenuous, and I wasn’t sure anything was really happening.

Over an hour had gone by, and we were all beginning to feel that we’d said everything that could be said in that session. I knew that G still wasn’t the least bit ready to Go Toward the Light, but I had no more incentives to offer him. P reported that G was telling her, “She needs to go and have lunch.” I was feeling that way too. It was a day of 7 patients in a row with this in the middle, and I definitely needed a break.

When I checked my laptop, there was a message on the screen saying that GarageBand had crashed because there was too much data coming in too fast for it to handle. A simple recording of one track of ambient voices, with a lot of spaces between sentences– how could that be too much or too fast?

G left the room, and there was no question in my mind that he was gone. I didn’t feel that there was any residue left in my body or in the space. P felt him go, as well– giving her a little break! And the moment he was gone, Fryderyk was all over me, embracing me warmly, almost overwhelmingly. No words, but a feeling of “Good job! I knew you could do it!” He must have been observing the entire time. And really, I could do it. P and I were both completely capable of handling this sticky situation, and we both felt fine afterward.

But we didn’t succeed in helping G on to the next phase of his existence. When I saw P a week later, she reported that he was still around. All. The. Time. Her strategy at that point was to sit in her yard and meditate, expanding her own energy outward, trying to model this behavior and encourage G to do it along with her. It sounds like a reasonable response to the situation. This is all I know so far about the results of our session.

 

**************************************************************

 

As you know if you’ve been reading my posts for a while, I am all too familiar with the feeling of a malign entity invading one’s system. (See “A Case of Possession.”) G isn’t like that, and I don’t mean to lay any blame on him, at least not much– he’s doing more than enough of that himself, after all. He’s just confused, as far as I can tell. When my other patient died at her own hand last year, she had become much clearer and in a way well by the time she passed over**, but G died in a state of great distress, as far as I know, and didn’t have a chance to resolve anything. I don’t know how typical this is of suicides, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens a great deal.

I am also familiar with the feeling of having an invisible friend hanging around for days on end. Now that I don’t get a lot of concentrated time with Fryderyk, I’m nostalgic about it, but early in our relationship there was occasionally almost too much togetherness. Sometimes, after it went on for a while, I would begin to wish for time to myself, like can’t I even go to the bathroom on my own for gosh sakes? It was not unpleasant in any way to have him around, and I didn’t experience any interference with my daily activities, but I would just start to feel like I needed a little more room to breathe. I can certainly empathize with P’s desire to have her own space again.

There is another close parallel with my experiences with Fryderyk: the form that my interaction with P and G took was exactly like the “afternoon teas” Mendy Lou and I used to have with him. In both cases, the other embodied person in the room was getting verbal messages and for the most part I was not, but I was clearly picking up emotional and energetic impressions. Combining our two streams of communication, we were able to put together vivid and complete pictures of what was going on. The similarity says to me that the type of communication I received from Fryderyk when we were with Mendy Lou was more related to my personal mix of abilities than to his specific way of interacting with us. I’m still much more an empath than a telepath, and still a pretty small medium, I’m afraid.

As I worked on this today, I couldn’t help but radiate wishes to spend some quality time with my dear departed, and apparently those got through to him. When I settled down to rest for a while, my wish was granted. I’d been hoping to ask him about a subject that had come up in the past couple of days, the types of keyboard temperament (tuning) in use in his time. I wondered what sort of tuning he had preferred. It was a fairly technical question and I didn’t know if a reasonable answer was possible, but I asked anyway. The first answer was that if an instrument could be competently and completely tuned in some temperament, any temperament, and stay that way for a while, that would be great! Yes, for sure…. So then I asked him, “If you had an ideal instrument and an ideal tuner, what would you ideally prefer?”

As so often has happened, he gave me a reply that came in from a totally unexpected angle. Showing more than telling, he conveyed this to me: If he could have had anything he wanted in terms of tuning, what he would have wanted was to sing, to be able to shape the intonation and tone quality of each and every note without limitation. I felt a huge rush of air and sound through my body, vibrating everywhere, tremendous power and freedom. It was exhilarating, and it was something I want as well and have experienced all too rarely.

It was something his small, struggling body could never have done, but somehow he deeply understands what it can feel like. Perhaps I should see if he and I can try it together.

 
*This strikes me as amusing in light of what my former friend and colleague, whose patients I inherited, said about me– that because of the “evil spirit” Fryderyk hanging around me, I was draining the energy of my patients and everyone near me. Here another “evil spirit” was seeing things exactly the other way around.

**I had been pleasantly surprised, when I encountered her after her death, to find that she seemed peaceful, not stuck or confused. https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2014/01/07/get-right-while-you-can/

Get Right While You Can

On the night of November 5, way back last year, Fryderyk came to visit, and we had an intense encounter.  There have been very few times that he has been so nearly materialized, so focused in this plane.  It was so powerful, nearly blowing all my circuits, and I wondered if he could be experiencing something similar.  “What are you feeling?” I asked, during a brief moment when I could manage an organized thought.

The answer was not remotely what I might have expected.  He showed me the pain, regret, and frustration of “our” life in the 19th century, how he and Delfina had never gotten their relationship into balance and never finished what they needed to do or be with each other.  Why is he telling me this now? I thought.  In the midst of so much love and pleasure, why would he even be thinking of this?  We had been over it all so many times during my present life, worked out everything that needed to be worked out, it seemed to me.

The message seemed to be, “Get right with people while you can.”  I took it to heart, and in the next few days I took steps to do just that.  There was one person in particular with whom I had been avoiding some much-needed communication, and I thought that Fryc might have been trying to give me a push to deal with that.  Otherwise, I felt that I was OK with most people and they were OK with me; the very few with whom that was not true had resisted all my attempts to get back in touch with them, and there was nothing more I could do about it.  I told Bob about Fryderyk’s message, and said that even if he or I were to die in the next five minutes, there would be nothing that needed to be fixed between us.  He agreed.

Then, on November 8, my colleague Michael Spottiswoode died suddenly of an aneurysm.  When I found out, I had the sense that Fryderyk, unstuck from linear time as he is, was trying to tell me something about this future event as well.

None of us DOMs knew about Michael till two days later, the day on which he was supposed to teach a class on his life’s work, a unique way of combining acupuncture and osteopathy.  Just a few days earlier he had posted on Facebook about how excited he was about the class, saying that he felt it was finally time to bring this work to the world.  He had put off teaching it before, as far as I know.  Why it all came to be the way it was, why he had to die no more than 48 hours before the class, is a great mystery to me.  It seems so massively unfair.  Why could he not have lived a mere 10 days longer and gotten through both sessions of the class?  Perhaps it made unconscious sense from his inner point of view, or from someone’s.

There was something I’d been meaning to tell Michael for a long time, and I had intended to say it on the day of the class.  It wasn’t anything of earthshaking importance, but I’d put it off and then I never did get to say it.  Michael, wherever you are, I really appreciate all that work you did on the NMSAAM website, and I wish I had made that clearer to you when I had the chance.

Our DOM community was in shock, but there was a blessing inside this terrible event.  As funerals tend to do, Michael’s memorial brought a large group of us together and generated a lot of positive, loving energy.

On November 22, our 12-year-old cat, Angel, reached the end stage of her kidney disease.  After a week in which she seemed to have much more energy and was more active and playful than usual, she abruptly became unable to use her back legs.  She got a bit better for a while, able to walk a little, then deteriorated again.  We couldn’t get hold of her vet, who works alone, without office staff.  Eventually he left a message saying that it sounded like “decompensated renal failure.”  Pretty much what I was thinking.

During the evening, I did energy work for her, and she stayed next to me, propping herself up against the back of the sofa, because her poor legs wouldn’t even hold her for sitting.  She seemed calm, interested in everything and not in any pain.  Strangely enough, she ate normally.

I had some hope that Angel would die peacefully during the night.  That was the night that we had the severe cold and snow with 50 mph winds, and I didn’t think it would be helpful to stress her by taking her out to the emergency vet hospital.  I didn’t want to take her to be put to sleep without my mother going along, either, because Angel was very much her cat, and I didn’t want to put my mother through a trip like that.  So I just waited till the morning.  I told my mother, “If we take her to the vet, she probably isn’t coming home.”

Angel was still with us in the morning, and I found that Petsmart’s clinic had an opening for her.  Bob and my mother and I bundled her into her carrier right away and got her there.  The very kind vet said, “I think we need to have the end-of-life conversation.”   “We had it last night,” I told her.

It was my mother’s 89th birthday, and she spent most of it in tears.

When we had to face this with Rico, our cat who had cancer, some years ago, it was a terrible day.  We’d waited as long as we felt like we could, until we thought it would be cruel to let him go on, but he still didn’t seem ready, and he fought the sedative with everything he had.  I never really got over it– I hope he did.  So I tried to give Angel a choice, or at least get a sense of what she would want.  I’d never had a great connection with this cat, but I tried to make contact as best I could.  I visualized needles and tubes and trying to keep her alive for a few more days.  That didn’t feel good at all, very agitated and uncomfortable.  I visualized, as best I could, causing her to die right away.  She relaxed under my hands; my mother said it looked like she was going to sleep.  “Let’s do it,” I said.  To Angel, I said, “I won’t leave you.  I’ll stay with you as long as you need me.  Hang on to me if you want to.”  I didn’t know whether I was getting through to her in any way.

When Rico died, I felt nothing, saw nothing, even though I was holding him and I paid attention.  This time, as the drug took effect, I felt something rush toward me.  Afterward I could still feel her if I tried to find her.  Over the next couple of days, whenever I looked for her, this small, warm presence was still nearby.  At some moment, I had a brief vision of her.  She was moving quickly and her coat was silky and smooth and healthy-looking as I had never seen it in life.  Since then, nothing.  And that’s OK.

Angel’s death was hard on my mother, but the suddenness of it was a relief for us, and our quality of life went up immediately.  It bothers me a little that I was so glad to be rid of the litter tracked everywhere and the gobs of fur all around and her astonishingly loud screechy voice.  Not to mention the smell from her inappropriate use of the carpeting.  She was an inconvenient cat, frankly, and she didn’t give a lot back, in part because her illness left her little energy for fun.  When we were deciding what to do at the end, I did my best to get clear about what she needed as opposed to what was easiest for me.  I hope we got that right.  I think we did.  She had an excellent quality of life during the three years she was with us, and other than the days when she was obviously ill, I think she must have been content.

And I think this preparation was important for me in dealing with what was soon to come.

The week before Christmas, the life of one of my patients reached a somewhat similar denouement.  One door after another closed for her, and she concluded that it was time for the end.  As she had often said, we would never allow a dog to go on in the painful and hopeless condition she was in.  She should have had the option of the kind of quick and painless solution Angel was given.  Unfortunately, we don’t live in a state that allows assisted suicide, and she had to make her own plan.

No one close to her argued with her decision; we all knew it would be for the best.  Once she did decide, in a way, she became well.  She was still in tremendous pain, but somehow she didn’t seem to be suffering in the same way.  She became calm and completely lucid, and the brain damage from her illness seemed to recede.

I had the opportunity to spend a few more hours with her during the last week of her life.  The whole atmosphere of her house had changed to a new peacefulness.  “Is there anything I need to do to make amends with you?” she asked.  I thought and felt around, and replied truthfully that we were fine with each other as far as I knew.  I hope I didn’t miss anything that I myself needed to make amends for.

Before I left, my patient asked me to scan her and see if I found anything energetically amiss that needed to be cleared.  My own emotions were getting in the way, but I did my best.  There didn’t seem to be anything to worry about.  What I did find was an entity hovering around her left shoulder.  I couldn’t tell what it was, but it felt like someone helpful.  This was reassuring to both of us, and I said “Thank you” to the being.  It was odd to simply go out the door that evening, not to stay as long as possible, but she was getting so tired, and I would have done harm by staying longer.

During the next few days, I was on strange pins and needles, not sure what would happen or when.  I wrote the following:

Glad that most of my body works most of the time.  I am annoyed at the instability in my leg that keeps letting bone hit nerve and cause damage over and over and over, but the muscles are strong and the leg carries me.  Right now I seem to be getting a cold.  Viruses have come to live and grow in the mucosa of my nasopharynx, and they are doing their little virus things, while my own cells are doing their best to give them the boot.

Life is bursting all over, even now in the darkest days.  It’s like what Jesus said in one of the apocryphal gospels:  “Hallelujah, I eat.  Hallelujah, I am eaten.”  Hello, viruses.  Please move on now.

This lady died very early on December 23.  About that time I felt a wave of extreme distress and anxiety, then total calm.  I figured it must have happened, but of course I couldn’t be sure.  The next day I found myself kneading cookie dough with one hand while holding the phone with the other, talking with a deputy from the sheriff’s department.  The authorities handled everything with great kindness and with excellent efficiency too.  The job of informing her family fell to me.  I’d never had to do that before, even though it is a basic part of the work of doctors.  It was all stressful and painful and terrifying and a great gift and privilege and blessing.

I have many jobs left to perform for this patient, because her family is far away.  There is so much to do with her home and her property.  There again, it’s a lot of stress, but I’m receiving a great deal too, spiritually as well as materially.  I have been feeling a circle of loving support around me, my friends and family and hers, and I need to remember that I can rely on it.  2014 will be the year of learning to delegate, I think.

A few days after my patient passed, I went to visit with Mendy Lou.  Immediately I could feel Fryderyk at my right side, but something seemed different and I couldn’t put my finger on what.  “Who’s here?” I asked Mendy.  She was confused by the mixed signal for a moment, too.  We soon realized that someone else was there, behind Fryderyk.  “It’s small.  It’s a human person,” I said, meaning that it wasn’t an angel or deity or other type of wondrous being that is likely to show up at Mendy’s office.

“Wait a minute, who did you say just passed away?” Mendy asked.  Yup, it was my patient.  At first it felt like she was scared and apprehensive, but that was because she was afraid I’d be mad at her for “leaving such a mess” to be taken care of.  I assured her that she’d done a great job of organizing everything and made it much easier for those of us who are still here.  As far as Mendy and I could tell, she was as well as anyone could be under the circumstances.  She said that she was getting clearer all the time and getting out from under the confusion and negativity her illness had caused.  I could feel that this was true; there wasn’t any sense of disturbance or suffering about her.

It surprised me that she had come along with Fryderyk, because I didn’t think of him as having any connection with her.  But of course he did– he couldn’t have missed the many times I had asked for help when I was treating her, or the angst I had gone through over and over when there was nothing I could do to make anything better for her, or the exhaustion I had felt because her situation was so draining for me.  Of course he would try to assist us both, just as he always has.  We are in good hands.

In some ways it is much easier now to grieve and to deal with even overwhelming practical matters than it was to try to help keep my patient going against impossible odds.  And I notice that the “inconvenient” aspects of her life, as with Angel, seem completely irrelevant now.  They are transcended, wiped away by a kind of transforming grace.

Thank you.

When Is an Entity Not an Entity, and Does It Really Matter?

2012 Marigold Parade, Albuquerque

Día de los Muertos and my dear departed is nowhere to be found.  I am dispirited.  Dispossessed.  Ghostbusted.  Sigh.  But he’ll be back.  He always comes back– so far.

I’ve written a lot about the tremendous, invaluable help Fryderyk has given to me over the years.  My point in this post is going to be that no matter what They “really” are, the positive effects of spirit entities can be huge.

The most obvious and well-studied help comes to those who are bereaved.  I’ve been reminded of this lately by two of my patients.  One has been reeling from the death of a young family member for almost a year, and is still deeply enmeshed in the grieving process.  Other family members have started working with a medium in the recent past, and they’ve received clear and evidential communications that certainly appear to be coming from the deceased.  While this has not wiped out their grief, it has caused a definite shift toward healing.  My patient has not yet had this direct experience herself, but hearing about it has comforted her substantially.  I’ve read about this kind of thing many times, especially in connection with Induced After-Death Communication*, but this is the first that I’ve seen it in action.

Another patient, an 85-year-old lady, was musing about her deceased husband during her last appointment.  She is doing poorly lately in some ways, and she’s been thinking a lot about the fact that she “knows more people in the next world than in this one,” as she puts it, and what it may be like when she moves on.  She had a number of vivid sightings of her husband after his death, which she authorized me to share with you.  He had suffered severely from diabetes and all the worst it can do to a human body, including having his legs amputated.  She particularly appreciated seeing him in one piece in her visions, with both his legs intact, looking happy and healthy.  That was what she emphasized to me when I saw her last, that it meant so much to her to know that he was no longer suffering.

Here are a few of the notes that she jotted down for me about her experiences over the years:

“1998  No. 3… Walking towards me on Stillwell, I had Skipper [dog] walking to him… he had both legs, and he looked good.”

“No. 12, July 1999– Saw him, he was waiting for me with his arms open to me– made me very sad.”

“No. 14, Nov. 1st, 2000 (11 am)   I did not see him but I felt him there at 8711, I was by [daughter’s] bedroom and there was a distinct loud thump in the closet by his gun room– I opened the the door and found [other daughter’s] duvet comforter that we had been searching for.  I know he was there, I could feel him close to me.  His love reached out to me.”

“No. 15, Oct. 10th, 2004   I saw him just for a few minutes, he was very agitated and did not speak to me– it was the day [cousin] had a heart attack– he was running back and forth– I had not actually seen him in four years.”

Communication with the “dead” is so common that it barely makes a blip on my radar anymore, and it is relatively easy to understand– a dead person is fundamentally not so different from a live one.  But so many times Something or Someone is there and the situation is not nearly so clear.  There has been a spate of patients bringing in entities of one sort or another in the past couple of months.  I don’t mean that I was perceiving something around them on my own to begin with, but that they told me about it themselves and asked me to help them with it– fully expecting that I could.  If you’ve been with me for a while, you know that I’ve had terrifying experiences with a demonic entity and that I had no success whatsoever in dealing with it.  (See my post “A Case of Possession.”)  I haven’t tried to work with anything like that since, and I’ve pretty much assumed that I couldn’t.  However, apparently the universe has decided that it’s time I learned and that I have to get some practice.

A gentleman about my age complained of feeling attacked by other people’s negative thoughts being aimed at him, envy and resentment and similar discordant stuff.  He has a strong background in healing and spirituality himself, and is psychologically strong and capable of dealing with difficult people, but he couldn’t shake the feeling of being battered by these unpleasant intentions.  I took a look around him and saw a clear image of an arrow, like one might see on a sign, pointing downward toward his head.  It had definite edges and was almost palpable, appearing to be about a foot and a half long and a few inches wide, in a solid dark blue for whatever that’s worth.  I would interpret it as a thought form, but whether it had been created by the patient or by those who were causing problems for him, I can’t say for sure.  Perhaps I was seeing his perception of what was going on, or perhaps the image was formed by my own brain’s attempt to make sense of the situation.  At any rate, this was not a being with its own agenda so much as an energetic sculpture of sorts, and it was a relatively easy thing to clear.  The next week this patient reported that the feeling of oppression and negativity was mostly gone.

It was more difficult with another patient, a lady who has some particularly draining family issues to contend with, and who is very aware of her own usual spirit companions.  Fighting tears and looking absolutely exhausted, she told me that for quite a while she had been feeling like something was obstructing everything she tried to do, hanging around her and keeping her from moving forward in any way.  She had had no luck trying to get rid of it or learn anything about it.  While she was on the table, I looked and found something that gave me a genuine scare.  There was a mass of energy hovering over her chest, creating a heavy pressure.  It wasn’t directly touching her, but that was only because she was constantly pushing it away with all her might.  I joined in and tried to dislodge it, but it was a serious challenge.  It seemed really determined to get at her, and it pushed back with considerable force.  In this case, the thing seemed truly to be an entity separate from the patient, not simply a creation of her own.  But why would it be trying to harm her, and what could we do about it?  I used every strategy I could think of, asking what it was, what it wanted, whether it represented someone close to her, and so on, but I couldn’t find out anything about it and couldn’t get it to move.  Did it represent the difficult family member?  That didn’t seem to be the answer.  Had it simply hooked on to the patient because she was in a weakened and vulnerable state?  I never did get any clarity about what was going on.  Between the two of us we did manage to clear it away, though, I think through sheer brute force– not the way I would prefer to work.  It took everything both of us had to do it, but she did feel much freer afterward.   At her next appointment she told me that she still had the feeling that it was waiting around nearby to get at her again but that she’d been able to keep it at bay.  I am cautiously optimistic but more than a little unnerved about this experience, and will continue to monitor the situation.

++I broke off writing this to zip over to an Albuquerque Baroque Players concert, where Fryderyk made a liar of me by showing up during a set of Handel arias and sticking around for a good while, keeping me warm and contented.  Or perhaps I should turn that around and say that he confirmed that I was telling the truth when I said he always comes back.   I’ll never stay away long either, Fryc, I promise.++

The most colorful of the recent entity experiences came about during a difficult session with a very traumatized mid-school-age boy who has been through a life-threatening illness, someone with a huge imagination, a taste for and wide knowledge of mythology, and a family background that includes some shamans.  He and I were trying to find a way to work with his intense fears about any medical treatment, including the acupuncture he used to accept so easily.  As we talked, he suddenly exclaimed, “I see a demon in that corner!  There are glowing red eyes!”

Oh, crap, I thought, because when it comes to anything that might be a demon, I’m pretty traumatized myself.  The kid had already detected the dragon that sometimes people perceive around me, and I had other reasons to believe that his intuitions were right on track.  So I took him very seriously, and gazed at the area he was pointing toward.  Yikes, I was seeing the eyes too (in my own mind’s eye, that is).  Something was there.  Interestingly, he was pointing directly at my defunct clock, which is covered in a painting of a dragon with red eyes that stared straight at us, but the clock was hidden behind a little tapestry, being used to prop it upright.  The patient couldn’t have physically seen the dragon, but it may have contributed to the imagery that came up.

The glowing red eyes seemed independent of the dragon picture, though.  I tried telling the entity that it needed to leave, and it quite obligingly started walking away.  It looked to me like a flat black silhouette, with a round head with a serrated margin as if it had cartoon fur, and skinny stick-like limbs.  There was no detail other than the eyes.  The thing didn’t seem very scary, I was relieved to see.  On the other hand, as we continued to talk about what we were seeing and what the boy was feeling, and I worked at clearing whatever I could, it was still there, still appearing to be walking away but not actually getting any further from us.  There seemed to be no more progress.

It was as if we were having a shared dream and moving through it together.  Much like what happens when I do “normal” psychic work with patients, but not quite the same.  At length, the creature turned and came back toward us, setting itself directly in front of the boy.  I was alarmed, but then it turned so that it was facing away from him, its hands raised with claws at the ready.  It was trying to protect him!  We had tamed this beast and brought it into service for him, it seemed.  By that time it appeared positively cute and winsome to me, not threatening in the least.

My take on this was that the creature provided a way for this patient to crystallize his feelings into a form he could deal with, in a visual language he understood.  I’d like to say that there was a dramatic transformation in his PTSD, as I hoped at the time, but it turned out to be only one step in the process; he’s still very fearful.  I will be fascinated to see what develops the next time I see him.

Sometimes I’m the patient myself, and invisible beings come to treat me.  Usually it’s been my familiar musical being, or another entity who has been formally introduced to me in some way.  I’ve complained of not always knowing how to tell who is who.  I mentioned this to Christine the other day (see my post “Here Be Dragons”), saying that she is better at recognizing and distinguishing them than I am.  She laughed and said, “I think I just don’t care as much”– that is, it doesn’t matter to her which one is who.  Touché.  Perhaps I am too concerned with understanding intellectually.  But inquiring minds want to know!

In the past few months I have struggled with some new physical discomforts and difficulties that have slowed me down considerably at times, but I have also had a new source of assistance available.  I’m not sure exactly when it was that I started to be aware that there was an unfamiliar entity trying to make contact with me.  She– I had a sense of femininity for reasons I can’t describe– felt distinctly different from Fryderyk, who can come in with a good deal of force.  There was a feathery softness in her touch that wasn’t quite like anything I’d experienced before, surrounding me in the gentlest imaginable way.  I wondered if she might be defined as an angel.

One night in August, not long after my mother had been hospitalized and I’d been ill enough myself to make a trip to the emergency room**, I came home from an unusually long day of seeing patients in the western part of the state with my personal fuel gauge on E.  I’d been OK most of the day, but at that point I realized I had really done myself in and was in a state that was starting to get me a little worried.  It was hard to breathe and my chest hurt.  The angel or whatever she was made herself apparent and went to work on me right away.  Almost instantly I was out of the scary state and becoming much more comfortable, starting to feel normal again.  After a little while Fryderyk came in as well, and I was interested to see how distinct they were from each other.  Whatever they did, it put me completely to rights, and I was deeply grateful, especially since I was scheduled to go out to see my most fragile and difficult patient, an hour away out west again, the next morning.  I feel certain that I could not have managed that without their help.

I can hardly describe how momentous this was, despite my years of experience with Them.  What did I do to deserve this near-miracle?  How did I attract this wondrous being?  I have no idea.  I can only say that there is a kind of healing circle or chain in which someone supplies me with energy and I pass it on to patients and they pass it on to the people in their lives who are in need, and it goes on and on.

The next time I encountered this being, I tried my best to get a look at her and to ask who she was, but I got no insight whatsoever.  Within another week or so, I again had an energetic crash, not as bad this time, with the chest discomfort very prominent.  She touched a spot there  and the discomfort vanished instantly (and then was completely gone for weeks).  It didn’t even feel like she had done anything in particular.  Pretty slick!  By this time I was extremely curious, and I asked again who she was, dropping into a channeling state as best I could.

“I am she who is the embodiment of wisdom,” I heard.  Oh!  I thought.  Sophia!  I already knew someone who channels the goddess of wisdom.

OoooKkkk… here we are again with the same problem I had over contacting Kuan Yin.  A goddess.  Uh huh.  Right.  I don’t really know what to do with that concept.  Maybe something Mendy Lou told me when I described this experience will help, though.  She wrote, “But as for Wisdom, I think that it is not something that we can possess, but rather a thing which we allow to enter into us or perhaps come upon us….”  Maybe personifying Wisdom is not so strange.  But Sophia, as I am choosing to call her, seems very much a person in her own right rather than a personification.  I await further enlightenment on this matter– still, having made little or no progress with understanding it since I wrote about Kuan Yin and the beginning channeling class a couple of years ago.  I try not to worry about it too much.  I have Friends in High Places, and that’s worth a lot whether I understand it or not.

Wisdom and discernment are always needed and in all too short supply, but I think I can benefit from an infusion of wisdom even more than usual right now.  One thing I know is that I can’t run my batteries down to nothing all the time and expect someone to swoop in from the heavens and save me.  I still have to show some sense.  I am infinitely glad to know that They are watching out for me, though, and helping me to watch out for others.

Thank you.  Thank you.

*Information on Induced After-Death Communication can be found at the site of the originator, Al Botkin, http://www.induced-adc.com/ 

You may also want to look at my posts on IADC from March 2010.

**Nothing serious was found and they were able to reassure me a lot; my symptoms have been inconvenient and uncomfortable but there is no major threat to my health.