I Have Not Been Entirely Honest

Before going on to talk about massage #8 with Jennifer at the Well-Being Center for Health on Hill Street, I have a confession to make: I have not been entirely honest.

You know that mysterious terror that comes when touched on the front or sides of my neck – that is now reduced to manageable apprehension through these first seven massages? Well, a couple months back, before starting this massage odyssey, there was a clue, in the form of another past life memory.

It went something like this:

Terry, a friend who is also a healer, came for a visit. After seeming to mull it over for a while he offered to do what he called a spinal cord clearing. 

“Okay,” I said.

I pushed pillows off the day bed that doubles as a healing table. I started to pull the bed out from the wall.

“Oh, that won’t be necessary,” he said, “I’ll just sit on top of you for this one.”  He sat in a chair in front of the window in his denim overalls, a mason jar with double bags of green tea cooling next to him. Terry is in his seventies. He grew up in the country and then had an awakening of his own. Like most of us, his spiritual journey has taken him a long way and then not so far from his roots. Among other things, he teaches fire walking – the art of walking on hot coals without getting burned.

“What!?” I said.

“You’ll lie on your stomach and I will straddle you so I can get to your spinal column.”

I had never heard of this. Terry and I have different training. His sessions have always been very good. I shrugged. “Okay.”

I lay down. Terry climbed onto the table. He started at my tailbone. He began pressing his thumbs into points on either side of my spinal column and turning them in half circles before moving on to another set of points higher up. As he worked his breathing became labored. He began to sweat under his overalls. Because he was not moving around much I guessed that the energy was intense. Either that or he was tuckered out.

After 10 minutes, I felt Terry press his thumbs into the skin on either side of my neck. As he turned his thumbs, I lost consciousness. I descended into myself and into a black cloud. Just as quickly the cloud dispersed. It flew outside my body and surrounded me like a halo. Within the cloud, I saw a hand so dark it seemed to be made of shadow or void. It reached over the top of my head, curled its fingers into the crevices between my brow bones and eyeballs and pulled upward. My chin lifted off the table. As I stared upward at the hand holding my head, another, just as dark, came from the right. It held a knife. In one motion it slit my throat.

Although I had been killed I was aware – as one is aware of the whine of an airplane flying in a distant corner of the sky - of Terry sitting on top me, breathing harshly, the smell of his sweat. As with the time a few weeks ago when visited by angels, at first I did not know what was happening. Was Terry the culprit coming to slay me or the healer helping to restore me? 

Because I had not seen this memory coming I was unprepared. For a moment, I lost track of my surroundings. Within terror I struggled to stay conscious. It was all I could do to restrain myself and quell the impulse to scream, flail, push Terry off of me and fight him for my life.

It took 10 minutes to resurrect this memory. Like tearing off a bandage it was that quick. And then, it was over.

As I came to, I registered just how hard Terry was breathing.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

He climb off the table and sat on the floor on his knees trying to recover his breath.

Terry emailed me later to say he had fainted after our session. He’s okay but we haven’t done any work since then.

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So, that’s makes the memory of drowning in a sinking car, the one resurrected by Richard in massage #6, memory number 2 behind the neck issues.

There, now I’ve told you a little more everything.