honey and sting

Well folks, it's been an amazing month. I got to assist at two weeks of "Trance Camp" - an intensive hypnosis training, held in a lovely resort with lake (ducks, swans, egrets and other birds), with the result of re-asserting my sense of my professional skills and reminding me of what I love to do and am good at (just in time for the job which may in fact be opening soon for me), do my own poetry workshop for the day between weeks 1 and 2, and attend the 3rd week of advanced training. I met wonderful people from around the world, and with each passing week, doing therapeutic work with each other, the atmosphere got larger and more rooted in love and understanding. It's extremely difficult to convey what an incredible thing this was. One example -- after working intensively with a "pod" of two others for a week, one of them, a man from Germany, took my hand and said, "we are the children of the war generation -- isn't it amazing that we can be friends?" I hadn't even thought too closely about it - the child of holocaust survivors and the child of -- well, who knows who this man's father was in the war? I didn't ask --because it wasn't relevent. On the last day, my "pod", with coaching from the teacher, did a healing session with me, supported by the group (a number of us, drawn by lottery, got to have their sessions "in the center" of the group, rather than off in break-out sessions). I wanted to work on healing of the energy/emotional patterns that underlie the physical illness I've had trouble with most of my life (flare-ups of Crohn's Disease, an auto-immune inflammatory disorder), and that landed me in the hospital twice last fall. Using hypnotic trance to find the layers beneath the thoughts and the words, but not go so deep to get "too spacey", a pattern emerged -- thoughts of realizing my power, and my right to "live my own life" were followed immediately by a hard clutching cramp in my abdomen, and a little voice that said "you don't deserve that." When I was able to move more deeply into trance to "make space" for those thoughts and feelings without that clutching reaction, I clenched in my throat instead. It was a choking feeling, choking off my voice, so hard it hurt. I recognized these patterns as having permeated my life -- sometimes in more subtle form, but always there. The shadow of the feelings of others in my family was obvious, going all the way back to the earliest dream I can remember, which involved a man sewing children into heavy plastic bags so they couldn't breathe. With a great deal of care from my team and a kind of meditative, exploratory consciousness, I was able to "rewrite" the emotions and energy patterns until I could hold those thoughts (e.g. "I am okay, I get to live my own life") without the punishing reaction of my body.

It's now a week later. Two interesting things, medically. One happened before that session, in the two weeks where, each day, we spoke our healing intentions out loud to at least one other person. Mine was, 1. Be a servant of the Light, and 2. for my nervous systems and immune systems to make more useful distinctions. In the second week, a tiny scar that I have between my heart and stomach area, from a cut at least 5 years old when venetian blinds fell down, got red and raised as if it was a new scar. After two days, it dissappeared to the point where I can't find it anymore. The possible significance of this is that a large part of the trouble from Crohn's Disease is the narrowing on the small intestine from repeated inflammation and scarring, making obstructions more likely. What if there was a similar healing of those scars, inside? The second thing was noticeable yesterday -- I can now poke my abdomen, in the spot that has been sore for the last twenty years, where the Crohn's-affected tissue is -- and it's NOT SORE.

There is one last thing I want to say about this -- I believe two things are true about healing. One is that it can happen all at once; in one moment of consciousness, intention, and openness to what is out there and available to us, great things can occur. The other is that there is a practice I must uphold -- Keep breathing into the feeling of goodness that I found "in there" -- Keep the spacious feeling I found in my spine, my breath, my throat. Use my awareness and my love to keep finding the center of my talent, my love, my power, and extending it into the world. There are indeed choices to make -- it takes a healing experience to learn them, as they are subtle compared to the bludgeoning and stomping force of "everyday" reality. I mean that without in any way denigrating the everyday -- this, on the other hand, is like learning to hear music in a different scale -- Balinesian gamelan, for instance. At first it's hard to discern any pattern to it other than a lot of clanging. Eventually, one hears the musical themes, their introduction and development, the subtleties of performance and style.

That's all for now. I had some hesitation in sharing at such a personal level, but hope that my inevitably clumsy attempts to describe something so out of the ordinary may be of use to someone reading this. Offered in love.