Originally posted November 2, 2009 at Gaia.com
I’m far from the only healer to pick up entities from patients, or at least to believe that this has happened. Here, Patrick, a chiropractor, gives us a vivid account of a series of events that occurred while he was working at a student health center at a university. This story may possibly tell us something about the origin of possession experiences; at the least, it enlightens us a little about how we may generate our own dark forces. Patrick writes:
“When I stuck my head out of the clinic door to see if my next patient had arrived. I glimpsed a slightly-built man about 40 years old and immediately felt my hair stand on end. He had a distinctly bug-eyed, reptilian appearance and I knew I was in for a memorable afternoon.
“I’ll call him ‘Richard.’ On entering the room he got onto the treatment table and immediately went into a full lotus position. This image told me more about him than anything he could verbalize. Here he was, assuming the posture that the mind associates with the transcended yoga master, and yet there was two feet of open space between him and the floor. For me it was an indelible portrait of the massively ungrounded spiritual aspirant.
“I started the interview with the usual ‘So, what can I do for you?’ His response was, ‘I’m here because I want to rid my body of every last bit of tension.’ What do I say to that?! ‘Okey dokey, then, let’s get started’? I don’t actually remember what my reply was because I did not want to touch his answer with a 10-foot crystal. The rest of the interview was not notable except that he peppered it with phrases like, ‘I send my energy out into the universe’ and such stuff. It was evident, however, that he was on a perceived spiritual path that was all about purifying oneself. It was all white and no black, and he was extremely arrogant about it all.
“Now, as I’m talking to Richard I start having the undeniable sense that there is a third presence in the room, and it’s not pleasant whatsoever. In fact, it’s starting to fill the room and distract the hell out of me. I can only describe it as a sense that he is so unconsciously divorced from his shadow– all of the traits and behaviors that he is suppressing in order to feel pure– that it has become a separate palpable presence. Not only that, but the ‘presence’ feels like an entire entourage of characters that are following him around.
“So, the next 30 minutes became a very odd blend of attending to Jonathan’s spine while at the same time trying to keep the noxious presence off of me. It was extremely exhausting. My defense consisted of trying to ground like a bastard and keep my energy body as tight to my physical body as possible. I had such a mixture of repulsion and compassion for him. I could only imagine the degree to which his version of spirituality was ruining his life.”
Patrick’s response to this was to go home and work on himself within the spiritual system he was studying. The mudra he refers to below is a position of the hands intended to help center oneself in one’s heart. At this point he was seeing Richard as the sole cause of the problem “presence.”
“After he left I felt like a punching bag that seriously needed a shower. On coming home, I immediately went to do the mudra so I could feel halfway human again. I spent the entire time removing and transmuting what I had convinced myself were ‘entities’ in my field. After another session of this the next day I felt basically like myself again.
“I realized that Richard had been a profound mirror for me in the sense that I saw where my own life could’ve ended up had I gone off the deep end with my kundalini yoga practice 15 years ago. So, my ego got a hold of that thought and convinced me that the next time I saw him it was my duty to tell him that he was on the highway to hell with all of this purification nonsense. (Can you believe it!!?)
“I knew that Richard would be back to the clinic to see me at some point for a follow-up visit. Each time I was at the clinic I would check the patient list hoping he would not be on it. I gradually worked myself into a terror because I dreaded the conversation I felt I needed to have with him and having to deal with his dark companion. Luckily, I expressed my concerns to one of my colleagues who challenged the wisdom of me discussing with Richard the ‘error of his ways.’ That was the voice of God coming out of her mouth, let me tell you. I realized how ridiculously arrogant I was being and I dropped the idea entirely.
“Finally, a couple of weeks ago Richard showed up for his next visit. Remembering the beating I took energetically on our first meeting, I had resolved to protect myself properly this time, gosh darn it. ‘He’s not going to get me this time!’ I said to myself. What followed was another farcical exercise in trying to provide health care while engaging in a fencing match with Richard’s B-team. (Thank God I can laugh at myself.) Try though I might, I was not able to emerge from Richard’s second visit without feeling like there was a thick coating of psychic sludge all around my body and an elephant sitting on my shoulders.
“Feeling like a failed spiritual warrior, I returned home and promptly went to the basement to mudra. Once again I set about methodically extracting and transmuting the ghoulies, thinking that was what was going to ‘clear my field.’ But it didn’t work this time. Each time I felt I’d shooed away one of these creatures, another one would materialize. I began to grow desperate, feeling that I’d been infected with some sort of entity virus that I couldn’t handle on my own. I thought, ‘Maybe I should call Cheyenne [his teacher] and see if she can do some sort of remote work on me or something.’
Cheyenne Maloney and her students work with the “assemblage point,” a structure in the energetic body that is thought to select and construct the elements of our personal realities. Different positions of the assemblage point are associated with different overall perceptions of the world, and one person’s set of perceptions may affect or even override another’s. This is what Patrick concluded had happened to him.
“Finally, at the height of my distress, a not-so-subtle voice shouted in my ear, ‘IT’S AN ASSEMBLAGE POINT POSITION!’ This jolted me out of my sleep state and I scanned myself to see where my assemblage point was located. Lo and behold, when I checked my upper left quadrant (waaaaay high left) I found three definite locations lined up in a row horizontally. [The upper left area is associated with visions and psychic perceptions; an extreme position could correspond to a psychotic, hallucinatory state.] I pulled them into my heart and, wouldn’t ya know it, the entities went away immediately.”
By this time, Patrick was focused mostly on his own responsibility in creating the experience and on what he had learned from it. “First of all, I treated Richard like he was the enemy rather than an aspect of myself that was not integrated. I was so hung up on the fear that he was going to harm me that I almost missed what he was trying to teach me. This was truly a person who deserves compassion more than anything.
“What I had interpreted as an assault on my energy body was really my assemblage point moving to a high left position. All I had to do to halt the assault was to pull myself back to center, but in the midst of the drama that simply did not occur to me. Even though I don’t know what an entity is or whether they really exist, I was asleep in the belief that this was the source of the problem. I was ‘seeing entities’ because that was the reality filter of the high left position.
“Richard is one powerful dude. And the source of his power is not the transcendental experience that he’s chasing, but rather the mountain of black that he’s standing on, which grows more and more powerful as he seeks to become increasingly pure. It’s running him and it’s way out of control. I went right into his dream even though I saw it coming. I can easily see now how entire cultures can be swayed and political movements driven by the same mechanism.” Indeed, imagine the millions of people on this planet who are invested in believing that they are intrinsically sinful and impure, and what must happen if huge numbers of them do as Richard did. Perhaps this is like the popular evangelists who meet their downfall when they are discovered to be involved in lurid affairs. Their suppressed urges seem to overpower them in a most dramatic way. Maybe they believe in their own purity and spiritual power so strongly that they think they can do no wrong. Or maybe the forcefulness of the suppression makes those urges stronger and stronger till they feel irresistible.
I am intrigued by the interplay of causes, or possible causes, for Richard’s unpleasant manifestations. Patrick takes responsibility for his own unhealthy beliefs and perceptions, but at the same time, he sees Jonathan’s suppressed dark side as a real energetic phenomenon which is affecting others in a real way. This is as close as I can get myself to understanding the whole business of “you create your own reality”– we each build a world, for good or ill, and our individual worlds interact and form what we see as consensus reality. That may not be strictly correct, but it’s the best I can do.
I would rather think of demons as distillations or accretions of the shadow sides of individuals, or of the collective unconscious, than as independent malevolent beings with their own evil agendas; that feels safer and more understandable somehow. Perhaps both could be true– the nasty parts we have pushed away from ourselves might progressively gain strength, glomming together and taking on lives of their own. Perhaps the nasty parts of others have no power over us unless we have some matching vulnerability of our own which allows them to take hold. I hope.
Patrick’s conclusion after this challenging learning experience: “Humbling as hell. Grateful as hell.”
Elene Explores 