Others appeared stifled, dampened, even stiff against some pebbly snow, cutting winds, and soggy walkways. Before thinking, I found laughter hopping from within me: "Hee hee hee, ha ha ha, ho ho ho..." From a channel within, silly sounds relieved my brain and kept my body light. A "laughter yoga" workshop I arranged the night previous had reminded my body of tools I had discovered and used years before, to fend off flu viruses from co-workers -- and after sleep my body delighted in maintaining peace in my brain, cleansing blood, and easy defiance of the sloshy negativity that attacked my fellow students.

Love. It was in the air, and I soaked its nectar through blissful lungs. Though I had no "valentine" - and not once witnessed a love-struck soul, my imagination celebrated the society of elevated romance I imagined tucked snugly inside and hidden around corners. I blessed such people, and gave thanks to them for my ornate mood.

At evening time, however, was revealed the true source of my inextinguishable light: God wished my friend to be healed, and mine was the fortune to serve as her healer. Through three completely free and guided hours, God showed me more about healing than the teachers throughout my life combined.

I anticipated the blessing on the session at intervals through the day: never previously did my mind rest peacefully and strong as that day; rarely has raw energy coursed in my being so powerfully, as if with a purpose. My friend felt a contrast immediately. From her first comments on the "bright light" of my presence, in the half-hour conversation that ensued I was given sight of her disconnect from the core of her power; she struggled between controlling messages from her professors and the rawness of an urge to break free and manifest a vision as yet unformed in her consciousness. I spoke the perception given to me: short of connecting and living from the core of creation within her, school or pursuing a creative vision both could do nothing but crystallize as scaffolding for her to cling to. Instead, her peace would vibrate when creation sprung from her core - and she felt empowered to paint school, a creative endeavor, or any other circumstance onto the canvas of her life as an artist.

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The fog has cleared some; meditation and morning prayer finds me with familiar bearings this day, as God has graced me with a touch that soothes the anxiety that can sponge out of my grasp, and restored an inner rod on which I can hang my choices about this day. The five days passed since receiving words to introduce my healing experience last week have been filled by an old friend's visit; my greatest anxiety, least assertiveness, and poorest adherence to my own core comes when accomodating a companion's needs and agenda with my own. To prepare, I "give up" my needs, responsibilities, and grounding activities, to clear a space for "life together...." My strategy grows from anxious belief that my own needs take up too much time; if they overfill the time that is mine alone, surely they crowd out another's wishes. I bury them, then, as I buried my voice and needs through the 12 years of my parents' doomed marriage; I anticipate the end of the visit, or the relationship, with the same constrained breath that fixated on college as far away from home as possible.

Is it possible, then, to retrieve the wholeness that came before the crowded space? With the question, sadness leaks into my brain like rain into cracks in the sidewalk. Can I write with wholeness about a healed space that time and events have disconnected me from? Can the writing heal me, as celebration of the memory of a living God who came down to heal and save us - not 2000 years ago, in this case, but one week? Does ritual invite the living Spirit, or does it bear stains of mourning a presence that eludes us in the moment? I shall see, as I work to capture and convey "What God did when visiting" - and I sense a question the Gospel writers must have faced as well: do I write of God whom we last recognized among us 70 years (/7 days) ago or, with inspiration, of God also with me right now?

Attentive writing, then, has the power to invite God remembered into our act of remembering...

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Sprinkling blue "peace dust" through her body was the final balm; it quieted her sobbing. God fed it to my fingertips after telling me we had unearthed enough: "Stop now, that is as much as one person can survive." I had only placed my hand on her solar plexus, after a short time on her lower abdomen, and sensed the holding in her body, for which God gave me the words, "It's okay. You can let go of anything you don't need anymore."

A deep well of crying then opened up, and she continued for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. Convulsively, her body shaking, she would moan, "it's so hard, it hurts so much." My heart was open to her pain, yet the violent reaction that would usually frighten me - interrupting the healing energy - met instead a deep peace embracing my heart, my mind, and the wholeness in her that lay beneath her layers of sobs. This love was stronger, and did not fear the intense tremors. By that moment, God had met my higher self, and been invited through my prayers to comandeer my body. For more than an hour, a conscious part of my brain had observed thoughts that my mind shared with God's. Boundaries between human and divine had dissolved, and my hands had moved with the sureness and gentleness of the swirling energy of the Tao.

When she lay still on her stomach, earlier, God had shown me what I call, for lack of better words, how to "spring a leak." I had learned in healer school how to draw out long cords of toxic, tar-like energy through acupressure points or chakras; God slowly led my hand, hovering above her body, down from her left knee, along the meridian, to her achilles tendon. My other hand connected to the energy points in her right foot. I felt the grab of an energy cord with my left hand and began to draw it out. Instead of pulling a long distance, however, my hand rotated to turn face up, and with a flick of the pinky side of my hand, energy spouted from her leg, shooting up like a fountain. Her breathing grew deep and heavier. I felt energy feeding through my right hand, circling up through her body washing everthing out through the leak in her left achilles. My mind worried a moment, that all her energy was draining from her. I perceived it was only her toxic energy, of which there was much to clear. I remembered her stories of many surgeries, of the cancer. I continued to breathe, patiently, as the energy circulated through. She snored softly now. Finally, the force of the fountain trickled down. I cleared away the last of the toxic energy from her leg, and spiraled three fingers around, closer in, to souture the open wound. None of this did I know, or practice before. God guided me.

God called me to her lungs then. Standing above her, four fingers from each hand went down along the top arc of her lung area. Her breathing startled, then became deep again. My palms slid down flat to her back, and I received the image of vines sprouting within her. They weaved down her spine, encircling the branching nerve trees, lacing through her ribs. More branches of the vine wove around her large bones, down into her legs, continuing to sprout new shoots, with full, deep dark green life, interlacing to fill the empty vessel of her body. The vines multiplied and filled within her for a few minutes, until they could grow no more. My mind saw they needed now sunlight, and from through my hands came the whitest, brilliant light illuminating the spaces between the branches, causing the flora to glow. The light intensified and spread throughout, until her body became a full garden in bloom, in need of fresh air and water to continue to thrive. I made a mental note to remind her to use her breath fully, after the healing session.

From God came many new insights: I learned the subordinate yet crucial role of the human mind in the healing process. After my hands followed and guided the healing currents by waving above her body, my own body needed rest and sat down on the bed next to her place on the floor. My body curled and rested, while my mind continued to see the energy finding its way through and over her body. Though I "did" nothing, and seemed to simply observe the movement of an energy controlled from elsewhere, I sensed the crucial need to remain in attention, as if my watching of the process aided it. As if my mind were a magnifying glass, through which the light of God shone and focused into pathways and traces. The flow and particular movement of energy seemed to be created and decided along with the activity of my imagination, and yet the images flowing into my imagination were being given to me, not "imagined" by me. God was using me; the imaging possible through my mind was directed by God, who held and danced the magnifying glass expertly. All I had done was given myself over to be used.

As God let this process run its course, I asked her roll over to her back. She asked to use the bathroom. She remarked her body felt very heavy, as she got up. We simultaneously mentioned to change the music. Rather than stress about the selection, I again dedicated: "okay God, you are leading this all, you will pick out the right music now." I was led to the CD spindle, from which I lifted the top third of CDs. I felt the CD was somewhere in there. I removed CD's one by one from the bottom, feeling the weight of each. Each felt light, though I could feel the weight of the proper CD was still held somewhere in the stack of my left hand. Finally, the second from last CD came into my right hand, feeling at least twice as heavy as the others. I looked at it - "Tori Amos." Certainly not what my mind would have considered appropriate for healing. But I placed it in the CD player. Before she returned from the bathroom, the words of the first song already confirmed the appropriateness of the choice: "She feels the bowling ball in her belly;" symbolically, the same image I had been led to discuss with her before, about connecting with the power of her core. Throughout the next half of the session, throughout her sobs and healing, she later confirmed the words of each song progressively unlocked successive layers of painful self-awareness and self-forgiveness. It was a live CD she had had in her possession for many years, but never listened to all the way through before.

The final healing image God introduced that session was how it ended. The healing had finished, her body had been tried, exhausted, purged; to finish the session I found my hands circulating vertically above her body, moving from feet toward head, spinning a cocoon for her protection. Above her head, however, the cocoon did not want to be closed off. So it continued spinning upward, becoming thinner and thinner, until it would be tall enough to reach far above the heads of any other people, high above the toxic energies of others with which she often struggled. The cocoon tube spun upward until only God could find its end. A heavy weight then hooked to my left hand, which I could move down only very slowly. I progressed at a snails pace, to not lose the cord that I drew back down, past her head, neck, torso, and to the area over her lower abdomen. I smiled when I realized what God had made: a hook to place in her Dahnjon, connecting her to the source, to stretch upward, support her, and be her lifeline when other weights in her environment attached themselves to her body, weighing her down. She had the internal structure now to connect and remain rooted to something higher than the structures of the world.

These and other things I learned that night. Amen.

Varyu. 2007

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