Diary entry 9

(Diary entries are intended to be read in order)

Having pinpointed the source of this hole as being my mother, I was able to focus a reiki session on this issue with the intention of healing my heart and mind from the trauma of growing up with the hole of perpetual fear, despair and loneliness inside me, which, probably, in combination with the other inhospitable conditions of my childhood, was the greatest source of my adult suffering. Once healed, I thought, I ought to be able to function in life on a more level playing field with other people, thus, hopefully, ceasing the perpetual series of waking nightmares that I was trapped in. Thus, I set aside a reiki treatment for myself in which I focused on this “hole.”

I carried out this reiki session on myself thoroughly. It was the longest session I have ever done. The results were immediate, effective and surprising.

I had already been reiking myself with quite successful results for a month or two. I had been feeling very optimistic and “up,” feeling I had left my depression and suicidal thoughts in the past, with the one exception of waking up in the mornings before the beginning of the day with the usual sinking feeling of doom and despair, fear and futility. Despite these relatively mild morning experiences of this “hole of doom,” I felt relatively happy and optimistic during my waking hours.

The Mother of All Healing Crises

So, I reikied myself concerning this hole on a Monday morning in February, without specifying a source or a cause for the hole. By the time I went to bed, unbeknownst to me, I began to feel the effects of my reiki session. I felt a cold coming over me. During the night as I slept, I became increasingly ill. I developed a fever with full-blown flu symptoms and a horrible headache.

When I woke up in the morning, I was hopeless and depressed. I woke up realizing that, after barely surviving the devastation of Lucifer and after coming within a broken foot of killing myself, I was pursuing a new life purpose, which was not truly my heart’s desire. I realized that my heart’s desire was a dream that fate and the nature of my past would not allow, or at least I acknowledged that I had this belief. I acknowledged in that moment, as I lay in bed with my eyes still closed, my belief that the spiritual love I had dreamt and lived my whole life for could never be. Thus, I basically woke up crying, and sick.

Not only this, but I fell as deeply back into suicidal depression as I had been the preceding spring when I had planned to kill myself (see My Suicidal Foot). I stayed in my room all day crying inexplicably and feeling horribly ill. Emotionally, I had regressed to how I had been throughout my 30’s—I would burst into tears with no sign of a reason, perhaps something on TV, something that was not even visibly sad. I cried a lot that day and for the days that followed. I learned soon that this sickness was no usual cold for me, because it did not follow the pattern of a cold. It did not let go of me easily. It stayed for over a week, going away very slowly.

On the Thursday of that same week, I had an appointment with my psychologist, during which I had a complete emotional break-down. I just cried and cried. It was on that occasion that my psychologist observed that my depression was suppressed anger I harbored towards my mother. Her observation seemed to support the previous observations I had made of my own behavior in the context of love relationships and of the inner feelings that gave rise to my behavior within love relationships.

During that week, I should mention, I was also engaged in a struggle with my mother, which magnified the depth and intensity of the hole, leaving me feeling scared and alone, desperate and abandoned again. The hole was sucking me up again, sucking me up.

Due to the massive emotional breakdown I had suffered the previous year, during which I quit my long-despised job and that had led me to therapy in New York City, I was being supported financially by my mother, who, along with my step-father, preferred not to have me residing in their home, despite the cost of rent my mother was paying for me.

At the time I did this reiki session on myself, my mother had begun to express vexation and resentment at me for having to sacrifice some of the abundance of her money to support me. I felt myself falling through that really thin film that was supporting my weight as I stood upon that hole. I, with no ability, emotional or otherwise, to take care of myself, began planning my death again, or at least began planning a life on the streets, which would inevitably lead to my death.

The Blessed Light at the End of the Tunnel

After one week, my sickness had subsided and after about 2 weeks, my depression began to subside. I noticed a new emotional experience in myself—or lack thereof. I was waking up in the mornings in an emotional void—a true hole. What I had always believed to be a hole, I saw now had really been a black hole, a vacuum that was actively sucking into oblivion all things positive, for what I was experiencing these mornings was a true hole—a hole is empty, not filled with fear and despair. I was now awaking with emptiness—no fear, no despair, no doom, not even a little tinge, but there was no good feeling present in the hole either. It was a marked improvement over a hole of despair, or a black hole that sucked up positive thoughts and feelings and left me with the most horrible, devastating feelings, thoughts and fears about myself and my life. I felt the nothingness was quite ok. It left me feeling a certain kind of relief.

A few days after waking up with emotional emptiness in the place where used to dwell the greatest doom and fear of my life, in a meditation, I felt Angel Mother begin to fill in the new void in my heart with love. I felt it more and more every day.

And this is the story of how I healed what I believe to have been the greatest source of my suicidal depression. This constitutes a massive milestone in my healing process.

Diary entry 7

(Diary entries are intended to be read in order)

My dad had had a girlfriend when I was little named…Julie . Given my dad’s nature, he and Julie inevitably broke up. Julie went off to live her life and basically did something similar to what I’m doing—she went to New York City to devote herself to therapy and getting herself and her life in order. In this process, she was drawn to a form of energy healing. She attended a school for energy healing and became the only genuinely peaceful and happy person I have ever seen in my life. Moreover, she had qualities and interpersonal skills that I looked up to, admired and aspired to. It also helped that she was more similar to me than anyone in my immediate or extended family, and, like me, she had never managed to find a working relationship with a man, albeit for a completely different reason; she was single and not just happy, but joyful and full of love. I have often wished that she had not disappeared almost entirely from my life throughout my 20’s and 30’s; she could have helped me immeasurably, altering the course and events of my life.

Anyway, I basically wanted to be like Julie—I should be so lucky to be that content with myself and with my life as a single woman, when I had always known at a profound level in my heart and soul that I had been created to love and tend to a husband and a family. Thus, it was basically via Julie that I was initially drawn to energy healing. I saw her and how natural she was interacting with people and how content she was with herself and I wanted to do energy healing, like she did, so that I could let my love flow and become free and joyful, like her, even in the lack of living my life purpose.

Last summer I looked into energy healing schools and quickly found out I could neither afford the time, nor the money required. At that time, I had no idea what reiki was. I had the impression that it must be some inferior form of energy healing, since learning it didn’t require a special school or four years of my life at $10,000 a year. However, at roughly $400 for a 2-day reiki level 1 and 2 class, reiki fell into my accepted price and time range, thus, I took it.

At the beginning of December, 2008, I attended a reiki level 1 attunement class on a Saturday, and a level 2 attunement class on the day after, Sunday. That weekend was a transformational experience for me. Not only did it open up the world of energy healing and reiki to me, but it put me in touch with a “me” I had never experienced before—a joyful, more sociable, free and natural me, a me that could feel love and a me that felt like she had finally found a field that she actually felt natural and competent in and people that she could fit in just a little better with.

In my opinion, the only noteworthy event of the class, and, in fact, the only element of the reiki class I have intended to share in this article, is the attunement. The reiki attunement is the essence of the class. The reiki attunement is a process which permanently opens the recipient or student up to the reiki energy flow, and once opened to this flow, one can call on it at will and practice reiki on oneself or others, animals and even situations. The following is a concise definition of a reiki attunement from this site:

What is a Reiki attunement?
This is the process whereby the RM passes on to the initiate the ability to channel the Reiki energy. Without such an attunement whatever healing modality is practiced is not Reiki. Normally an attunement comes with instruction in the various techniques involved in practicing Reiki. However, nowadays this need not be the case, especially with reputed “distance attunements”.

They say that every person has a different experience of the attunement, and some experiences can be quite uplifting or unearthly. My personal experiences of the attunements (and classes) follow:

The Reiki 1 Class
I walked into the seminar room as I would have walked into any room full of complete strangers: unsure of my social footing, unsure of myself, and looking out at all the happy, socializing foreigners from a solidly protected and sealed-off sanctuary of speechless silence and of mute observation deep within myself. As natural as my breath, by virtue of their mere presence in my awareness at that moment, I emotionally scanned the group to achieve an understanding of each individual and for my own personal reference; who might I feel comfortable with, who might I not? I chose my seat then, accordingly, next to those I thought I would feel most comfortable with.

I took a seat in the semi-circle that was being formed around the teachers and the class began. To my dismay, the teachers asked us to introduce ourselves before the group, giving our names, jobs, places of residence, a little background and why we are learning reiki. As usual, I was totally removed from what the people preceding me were saying, as all the slow little brain cells in my head were frantically scurrying around in panic mode, trying to put together the words for my own introduction and piece together what I would say and then remember all the pieces and the order to say them in. Meanwhile, my heart began beating faster and faster and I began to shake as I sat there. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, afflicted with this charge of having to speak in front of these strangers, who were, themselves, nonetheless speaking perfectly naturally, smiling and pleased to be the center of attention for a moment, with no panic in sight.

I survived the ordeal, but I felt as I always do: awkward, socially inept, nearly voiceless, having made a fool of myself and having forgotten to say certain things. I did explain, however, that I was in New York City for therapy and healing (and reiki) because I had suffered an emotional breakdown in the summer (2008).

We began our attunements with our teachers (they were a husband-wife team) instructing us in a meditation with meditation music playing. The class and the teachers meditated for 5-10 minutes. Something about the setting enabled me to go quite deep in my meditation and I felt very peaceful, calm and deep. After the meditation time had passed, as the students remained in meditation, the teachers got up and began to go around to each student to perform the attunement itself, which seemed to be passing on of some healing energy (I don’t know exactly, since I haven’t taken the more advanced reiki classes yet).

My personal experience of this reiki 1 attunement was not earth-shattering. As I sat meditating with my eyes closed waiting for the teachers to come to me, I felt anxious about what would happen when they got to me. Then I felt them at the people next to me. I felt intense heat from them and as they drew near to me, and then in front of me, the silhouette of them that formed in the vision of my closed eyes was that of a bright white light. I knew this was a good, something real, but intangible, was happening and I was happy about it, but, like I said, it wasn’t earth-shattering.

After the teachers had finished, we all came out of our meditation and, God help me, the teachers asked us to go around the room taking turns describing our experience of the attunement. So, once again I had my heart in my throat. “At least I have an experience to describe,” I thought. But it’s still not easy speaking with your heart in your throat. Like the first time, I also survived this, but I was a shaking, nervous wreck each time, and that was audible in my trembling and timid voice.

Attunement Aftermath
I can’t really describe well the nature and the intensity of the sensations I was feeling in my body after the attunement. The class was dismissed for lunch and I went to lunch with a small group from the class, as a wealthy man who was taking the class with his daughter offered to buy all of us lunch . While we were at the restaurant waiting for the food, I was overcome with physical experiences so potent that I couldn’t function. First of all, my whole body was “tingling” profusely. I had experienced the inner tingling of energy moving in me before, from EFT and yoga, but this tingling was intense and thorough, over my whole body. I was physically shaky, but not from nerves. I was exceedingly light-headed and dizzy. I had a feeling of being intensely “buzzed,” or very spaced out  (as when you drink too much and become very dizzy, disoriented and light-headed and cannot focus your eyes or your mind).

I asked the others if they felt anything, but they didn’t. I was a little surprised by the teachers’ responses when I asked them about it. One suggested I was catching a cold, the other suggested I was too hot; very strange, considering even I knew it was a direct result of the attunement.

The Reiki 2 Class
Saturday night, after the reiki 1 class, I went home and got a good night’s sleep. Everyone returned early the next day for the reiki 2 class. This time, however, others had finally reported feeling effects of the previous day’s attunement. One girl reported having a migraine, the likes of which she was not accustomed to. Another girl returned with a cold. None reported the physical sensations I had “been high” on since the day before, and I never got ill in any way either. I was certainly fortunate to have the experience of it that I had, because it was really a wonderful sensation, as long as you’re not driving .

Once again, we all had to take our turn in describing how our night was after experiencing the attunement. With the success and downright fun and delight of my personal experience, I was opening up, becoming less afraid to speak and more natural in front of the strangers. There was a feeling developing amidst us from the energy healing which I felt opening me up, making me feel as if I might fit in, or at least making me feel it was safe for me to be more natural there.

Reiki 2 Attunement
For me, the delight of the reiki 2 attunement began even before the attunement began, but even during the meditation. We sat, as before, in meditation to some meditation music of the teachers. I went into a profound meditation, it was wonderful. As I was meditating, however, I began to see a golden light shining in the periphery of my left eye. The golden light was spherical, with halos, as radiate from bright lights, and just entering my line of vision at my left eye. It would move further into my line of vision, appearing as if someone were holding an illuminated light bulb in front of my eyes and moving it slowly back and forth before my closed eyes. There were several times I believed that the teachers were not sitting in meditation, but that they were passing in front of me, somehow creating this light effect before my eyes. I was bewildered and puzzled by this light.

After the meditation, I opened my eyes and I, shy and insecure as I was, spoke up and asked the teachers if they had been sitting in their seats this whole time, to which they responded yes.

My deep meditation and peculiar vision of light continued while the teachers were going around giving attunements to each student. Not only did this vision continue, it developed. In my meditation, as the teachers were circulating among us, the golden light I saw shining in the periphery of my left eye continued and I began to feel real heat on my face where I saw the light shining. I was dead certain someone had opened the curtains and there was sun shining on my face. I sat with a smile on my face, as if basking in the warmth and light of the sun. Several times I opened my eyes to find the sunlight, but there was no sun on that cloudy, windy day, and the shades were drawn closed. I marveled at how this was possible. I felt heat on my face as real and as strong as the heat we feel on our face from the sun. I had determined that it was bad for me to keep peering out from my meditation to look for the sun, so instead of opening my eyes, in my continued disbelief, I would take my hand up as I sat in my meditation and I would pass my hand in front of my eyes to determine an outside source for my vision and for the heat. Amazingly, when I would pass my hand in front of my eyes, no shadows would come before my sight as I sat with eyes closed, and the flow of heat was not interrupted. Somehow, I was seeing and feeling inside myself a source of light and heat that was not in the outside world! Now this was fun!! I didn’t ever want to come out of that meditation! I was beside myself with delight and excitement and couldn’t wait to tell the class what I had experienced! )

When the time came for me to tell my story, I know I was smiling and beaming through the whole thing! Some others seemed to have possibly more interesting experiences than I had, but I loved my experience and I was overjoyed with it!

Weekend Conclusion
By the end of the day on Sunday, I had already gone through an enormous transformation. I was so open that when it came time for us to all leave, I was crying . I had such a wonderful and altering experience with the others and with the attunements that it was as if a long time had passed in the course of two days and I had emerged a different person, and I couldn’t imagine it would even be possible for me to become how I had been just 2 days before. Towards the end, the teachers were discussing the changes that had occurred in people over the weekend and the vote in the class was unanimous; I was the one who had transformed the most, and I was so embarrassed as all “the strangers” looked at me with such approval and acceptance, that I smiled more widely than one would think I was capable of and I began to cry…again.

As I was packing my things to leave (with tears in my eyes), a girl from the class came over to me and offered to help me in my endeavors to heal myself and get my life back on track. She told me that, from what I said in my introduction (despite how shaky and bad I thought it was) she was amazed and impressed that I had come as far as I had, that I was there seeking healing in reiki, and that she thought I had a lot of courage and determination to be where I was.

All in all, this was the best $400 I have ever spent in my life and the experience I had that weekend will go down in my history as one of the best and most positive and transformational experiences of my life.

Please note that the comments are closed on all “My Diary” entries. This category is to read like a book, and each post as a chapter. Please feel free to use the contact form on the “Contact” page for any feedback.

Diary entry 6

(Diary entries are intended to be read in order)

The mundane and socially acceptable solution for healing was psychotherapy, which I engaged in to appease family and to have someone to talk to about ten years of secrets and living hell. I was lucky, for the first time in my life, to find a competent and compatible psychotherapist. I began seeing her last summer and continue to see her to this day.

Other methods I tried included EFT and reiki. Things didn’t go very well with my EFT practitioner, so that business relationship only lasted about two months.

While the psychotherapy, as expected, didn’t yield any groundbreaking results in and of itself, I found my psychotherapist’s insights and therapy sessions to be a great complement to the creative aspect of my independent healing efforts (which mostly took place in my imagination in association with visualizing my goals), and also to the energy healing (reiki) which I began to do later on.

I have, however, identified three milestone developments on my healing path thus far. I see these milestones as key steps upward on my healing path, as well as blessings. Without each one of these blessings, I would not have been able to progress in my healing to this point or to continue to progress in my healing in the future.

My Angels
The first blessing on my healing path developed from my vision board. It was my angels.

From the first morning that I focused on my vision board, I experienced an alteration within me resulting from the “My Angels” goal. From that first morning, this goal came to life in my mind during my meditations and began to take on a life of its own.

For this goal, I simply used a picture of golden angels gathered around a bright, divine light, resembling the sun. The first two days that I closed my eyes and envisioned the angels and the light, as they were shown in the picture, I felt significantly uplifted and wonderful both days. After this, the “angels’ place” in the picture began to take on a life of its own. One day I had closed my eyes to envision my angels and I put myself into the picture among the angels. I wanted to be able to touch them and be closer to them. Things began to happen. I began doing things in the angels’ place, which had ceased to be a picture, but had become a place that I could go to at will when I closed my eyes. I began to think of my angel meditations as visits to my angels’ place. Each time I went to visit them, something different would happen. Sometimes I would go and the place would be bustling with angel activity. Other times I would go and it would be deserted, so I would call to the angels and usually they would come and I would speak to them, asking them to help me. Other times the angel place would be deserted and I would wander beyond the angel place and into the open spaces there and I would have different experiences.

Most or all of my initial visits centered around my angels healing me or me seeking support, comfort or healing from them for an immediate situation, such as in the following accounts I recorded in my diary:

- 15.06.08
Vision board meditation this morning: I saw myself again amidst the group of my angels. I hugged some, then I stayed, and while hugging one, I tried to detail the feeling. Then she let go and put her hand on my heart to heal it. This is the deepest I have been involved with them yet.

- 19.06.08
I got very upset and angry at Joan earlier and I still have no lodgings for tomorrow. So I closed my eyes and went, very upset, to my angels. It was odd; I practically came staggering into the angels’ place. I couldn’t even walk and angels were there, as if they had been expecting me, like hospital staff in those ER shows. Angels rushed to my side to support me and help me walk. There were angels everywhere. They put me on a golden-light sort of fluff bed; they were doing stuff. I never said a word, but I was crying a little from my upset as I sat in my chair. Angels were very busy around me. They moved me to a different place, to a bed. One angel began caressing me, around me, around my body, head to toe. Then I felt my upset calming as she caressed and I felt some peace settle in me again. Later, after all that was over, I asked the angels to resolve my lodging problem.

- 29.06.08
Visit: I went to my angels’ place, but I couldn’t see anyone there, so I went wandering, calling out to my angels that I was lonely and that I didn’t want to be alone. I came to an overpowering, shining gold and white light. I had to walk toward it. I was thinking “This light won’t lead me to my angels, so I don’t want to continue walking to it,” but the light felt so warm and I couldn’t let myself turn away from it. Then, to the left of the light, I saw a tall, slender white-light figure approaching me from a distance. I think it was a “he,” but it’s not certain. He was very calm and noble, very dignified and regal-looking. He was taller than a human and appeared more clearly to me than the angels. He spoke not a word. He led me out of the path of the light, off to the left. I was blabbering like an idiot, of course. Then I stopped and said “Can I touch you?” My intention was to feel inside him. He let me touch him in the places I reached out to touch—his sleeve, arms, and head too. And I became filled with a beautiful peace. I said to him that I wanted to be more like him, that he had a peace that radiates from wisdom and understanding, and I wished to have his wisdom, understanding and peace too. However, he lacked the feeling of warmth and love that my angels have. I was filled with great relaxation as his peace overcame me, and then he led me to my angels and disappeared along with the peace he had brought.

Each visit to my angels held a new experience for me. Eventually, and influenced by one of my therapy sessions, Angel Mother emerged from among my angels. Angel Mother, and several angel sisters, who have now fallen away, surrounded me with love and safety and promised me they would take care of me. They told me to forget earthly parents, because I am with them now. Whether imagined or real, Angel Mother would play a key role in my healing from my most profound past wounds.

Email
The next groundbreaking blessing on my path of healing occurred in October of last year, in an email that I had received from Lucifer. Bear in mind that throughout all of the preceding months, I had maintained email contact with Lucifer. Honestly, I could not fathom or imagine an ending to my situation with him in which I did not kill myself. The way things had played out between us and the way he had chosen to deal with me over the years, I could not imagine an ending in which I could let go of him, leave him and all he had done in my past. Thus, of all things that I have experienced in life, I feel like this one email was the single-most miraculous and merciful thing to ever happen.

There was nothing intrinsically spectacular about the email. After nearly five years, Lucifer had finally been possessed, by what I think could only be called a Divine mercy, to write some truthful words to me. The second I read the words, I was surprised, my heart sunk and I released him, on a superficial level dismissing almost every word he had ever written or uttered to me as insincere manipulative lies, while on a deeper level, resigning myself to the truth of not ever really knowing in this lifetime which of Lucifer’s words were true and which were designed to manipulate me. In my email response to him, I informed him that I would leave him alone now and he was free of me. And I breathed a laden sigh of relief to also finally be free of the whole situation.

This new development enabled me to get Lucifer out of my infinite present and file him in with the finite experiences from my past that I have to heal from.

If at any moment prior to that moment Lucifer would have been inspired to stop deceiving me and to be open and truthful with me, I would have been spared immeasurable and unspeakable suffering; and he, in turn, would have been spared a certain amount of suffering as well.

Not surprisingly, Lucifer maintained his own delusion when, in his response to my final email, he still reiterated that he loved me, would always love me and has never loved anyone else. I didn’t answer. I didn’t care.

With that, our communication ended.

Reiki
The third blessing that has come to me, or rather that I sought out, on my healing path is an energy healing technique called reiki. In the beginning of December, 2008, I received reiki levels 1 and 2 attunements. The experience was utterly fantastical and thrust me into a new realm of life. Reiki has not only facilitated my own healing and provided me with what I need to heal myself independently, without outside help or guidance, but it has also opened me up to a whole new world, an effective modality for helping others in their own suffering and pain and this has opened the door of one of my new life ambitions, one in which I hope my intuition can blossom and be put to full use and, hopefully, my full capacity to help others can finally be realized.

Please note that the comments are closed on all “My Diary” entries. This category is to read like a book, and each post as a chapter. Please feel free to use the contact form on the “Contact” page for any feedback.