The Experiments

Wretched virus. I've been down for the count since last Sunday with some kind of flu. It could be worse. I don't have a sore throat or tummy troubles. For the first three days I was in and out of a low fever. Yesterday afternoon I felt so much better I set my alarm to go in to work this morning. It was not to be. I'm too weak. I had to go back to bed. I'm getting sick of being sick. But like I said, it could be worse.

I don't like being off my schedule for so long. I'm an achiever. I get satisfaction from my weekdays based on how much I got done. Sitting on my butt for this long makes me anxious. What can I do about it? Sit on my butt some more and wait. :-p

For now, I'm going to tell you two stories. They explain how I finally concluded, to my satisfaction, that I really do pick up on other peoples' feelings with a sixth sense, not the regular five.

I'm a scientific woman. In high school I was that geek that got A+ on all my math, chemistry, physics, and computer science courses. I have a mystical side, but I'm not one to completely throw rationality and logic out the window. Even if I can't document these experiments so that others can duplicate them, at least I proved something to myself.

The first experience happened when I was taking a night course in intuition. I can't remember most of what we did in the course. It was pretty dippy stuff, some of it. The reason I signed up was that it was a pre-requisite for a "professional" two-year part-time program in psychotherapy at the same school. The school was New Age. Some of the things they taught had merit, and, in my opinion, other things were way out to lunch. However, it was the best school I could find at the time, so I tried to get what I could out of it.

On the last night of the course, we did this exercise. Half the class put on blindfolds and sat across from empty chairs, placed in a circle. The other half of the class walked around the outside of the circle until they received a signal from the teacher, at which time they sat down across from whomever they were closest to, musical chairs style. The sighted person gave one hand to the blindfolded person to hold. The blindfolded one had to talk for some time, maybe five or ten minutes, about whatever impressions they got from that hand.

I didn't know anyone in the class very well. When it came my turn to be blindfolded, I didn't even know if the hand I held was that of a male or female. One of the restrictions was that the sighted person was not to utter a sound during the experiment or give any type of feedback. I had no clue who was sitting across from me.

I started to ramble. It's very weird to talk to an unknown person for a long time about whatever pictures form inside one's head. I felt like I must sound crazy or stupid. I started describing a house that I saw, a very specific house. It was not in the city. It was in the country, near a lake. I saw that the main living room and kitchen did not have flat ceilings, but opened to the underside of a peaked wooden roof, like that of a log cabin. The kitchen had sliding glass doors at the back, opening onto a wooden deck, which faced a thickly wooded forest. I described a dog, and some other aspects of the house. I described activities I saw the occupant of the home doing, like jogging and embroidery. At one point the hand I held began shaking noticeably. I had no idea what that signified.

Finally we took our blindfolds off. I was sitting across from a 30-ish woman with her long hair pulled back in a braid. She told me that I'd just described her home as well as if I'd been there, including her dog and her hobbies. She said the only thing that was slightly off is that she doesn't do embroidery - she knits. The reason her hand started shaking was that she couldn't help but laugh with surprise at how clearly I'd seen her life.

I suppose she could have been lying, but she seemed genuine to me. I was pretty freaked out by that experience. I was convinced that I'd really tapped into something.

The second experience was at the same school, in the actual psychology course. We were learning techniques to use with clients to get to their hidden emotions. The technique being demonstrated that day was the use of non-verbal vocalization.

One student volunteered to be the subject, and the teacher played the therapist. They started talking about a certain topic, and when they were well into it the teacher invited the student to express her feelings vocally in a non-verbal way. The student, naturally feeling self-conscious, made a few odd noises, and then started to laugh at herself.

The teacher encouraged her to continue. She made a few more noises, and this cracked her up even more. The teacher also started to smile. The rest of the students, myself included, were seated nearby on a couple of old sofas in the corner of the room. My classmates had started giggling.

Meanwhile, out of the blue, I began to feel sad. I had felt fine when we all came back from lunch, and could not explain to myself why I had a sudden urge to curl up into a ball and hug myself.

The experiment escalated. The student up front kept sounding louder and laughing more. My classmates on the sofas laughed until they were holding their stomachs. The teacher was laughing. The student at the front laughed until she could hardly stand up straight.

I felt like I was going to burst out in tears at any moment. I thought I might have to leave the room. I distinctly remember asking myself what was wrong with me. I thought it was just another manifestation of my messed-up craziness that I couldn't join in with my classmates for an innocent laugh. I felt stupid and left out.

But then, just when I was on the verge of actually letting tears pour down my cheeks, something shifted in the room. The student at the front suddenly broke down. Her laughter turned to weeping; great wrenching sobs from the gut. This was the subconscious emotion that the teacher had meant to uncover. And I had been feeling her repressed feelings, until she finally let them out.

As soon as she broke down, all the sadness lifted off me in one wonderful, relieving wave. I felt completely fine again, instantly. Everyone else in the room calmed down, stopped laughing, and put suitably sympathetic expressions on their faces. Meanwhile, I was trying to absorb the meaning of what had just happened. It was moment of realization that I'll never forget. I can't imagine a more clear demonstration of the process. I was lucky to have been present at that class, so that I could finally understand the process of my own intuition.

I never did finish that psychotherapy course. This was years before I discovered any type of protection from all the unfelt feelings floating around in the ether, so I was a sitting duck. In that course a lot of touchy subjects came up, but there wasn't time for every student in the classroom to express their emotions regarding how the subjects of addiction, or sexual abuse, or violence, had touched their own lives. Sitting in that classroom was very difficult for me, because there was so much Other Peoples' Stuff swimming around just below the surface. I even developed physical aches and pains which I believe were as a result of all the emotional pain I was being exposed to.

I attended most of the classes, but declined to do the next step: 100 hours of case studies. I didn't think it would be good for my health to continue.

So there you go. Those are the best proofs I can offer of the truth of my abilities, for what it's worth. And I don't think there's anything wrong with asking for proof of some sort. There's way too much wishful thinking in the New Age movement. It'd be easy to get lost in a world of daydreams. I don't intend to do so.

Open

I'm starting this post without a clear idea of how I want to express my thoughts.

Verbal communication is a linear medium. Sometimes it's difficult to describe three-dimensional thoughts and feelings in two-dimensional words. There's so much that I want to get across all in one sweeping impression. The sequential nature of writing is frustrating.

A year ago I wrote a post describing my rudimentary psychic abilities. In the past year, with the spiritual protection of the loving force I know as God/J.C., I have felt relatively protected from the onslaught of emotional input that used to overwhelm me every day. However, those impressions not entirely gone. And they can still be temporarily overwhelming.

I've worked hard to try to understand how I am meant to respond to this type of input. I do believe that I have a gift, but it can feel like a curse when I don't handle it properly.

The first strategy that ever helped me at all was praying, so I continued to pray each time I felt overwhelmed by negative emotions. When there was a strong likelihood that these emotions were primarily originating from someone else, I would pray for "us", whether that person was a close friend or a stranger on the subway train.

That tactic helped. It was better than doing nothing at all. I was significantly more comfortable, but definitely felt that there was room for improvement. I still had many experiences of wishing that I could jump out of my own skin and run away from feeling other peoples' crap.

I believed the problem was that I didn't always pray very well. Sometimes I didn't feel like praying at all. Sometimes the words wouldn't come. Sometimes I felt awkward and self-conscious. I was trying to figure out the right words to say, but I couldn't find them.

A series of events began recently which led to an epiphany, which I believe is the answer I've been looking for since last June.

On July 19 the musical group I'm in lead the worship at my church. For the first time, we totally rocked the house. I haven't had such an incredible musical high since, no pun intended, high school. People were jumping to their feet, clapping, holding their hands to the sky, and some were even weeping. (From joy, you skeptics!) I was swept up in the intensity, and my heart flew wide open.

Since then not only have I been unable to contain my own emotions as strictly as usual, I have been much more susceptible to other peoples' feelings. Also, my thinking has been less linear. I have developed a hunger for the creative arts; poetry, music, and other things that don't make rational sense.

In the end, the problem became the solution. My real problem was that I was trying to think my way to a heart's solution, and that's impossible. My problem was that when my heart opened it felt so uncomfortable that I tried as best I could to close it up tight again. But really what I need to do is open it wider.

It came to me this morning, as an intuition. Instead of labouriously constructing a prayer from my head, I opened my heart and loved. When I was confronted with waves of anxiety coming from a nervous sales rep, I pictured myself physically embracing him with unconditional love.* Yes, it was a little distracting. I missed some of the sales pitch. But I was so uncomfortable feeling all his nervousness, I wasn't focused on the conversation anyway.

It worked for a while, so I stopped visualizing the hug and went back to listening. Within a minute, the anxiety was back. So I went back to my virtual hugging. I hugged that lucky sales rep (psychically speaking) for twenty minutes. Finally he was comfortable enough to relax and talk to me without constant energy-realm reassurance. It was pretty cool.

He reacted perceptibly each time I went back to the imagined hug. I was sitting completely still in my chair, just looking at him. Nothing changed except the energy. But each time he would get slightly distracted from what he was saying, and had to take a moment to recoup his train of thought. There was definitely something happening there.

It worked so well that I tried it on someone else I work with, to similar effect.

Finally, I get it! I couldn't, before, because my heart wasn't open enough. But now I see: I was coming at it from the wrong angle. I'm not supposed to start with prayer to get to love. I'm supposed to start with love, and from there prayer will flow naturally. If I care about someone with all my heart in a given moment, I won't have any trouble finding the words to ask God to love them, encourage them, and provide them with whatever it is they need to heal and grow.

I don't know if I'll be able to maintain this level of open-heartedness. But if not, I'll be asking God to take me back to it. This is the direction I'm meant to go in, and I'm so glad I figured out my next step. Incidentally, I've also been doing some simple exercises to practice clairvoyance, and the results are good. I believe that's another part of my gift that I'll be meant to use for God's work when the time comes. But that's another story for another day.

*It wasn't sexual, you skeptics! I'm smarter than that. If there were any chemistry in the air, I wouldn't be doing any hugging, energetic or otherwise. I don't need to play with fire like that. Life's complicated enough already.

Authority

The primary issue that had my brain (and my guts) twisted into knots for the past month was the question of whose authority to trust regarding matters of the spirit.

Frankly, I would love to find one earthly source to feed all my otherwordly needs; to answer all the hard questions; and to take the onus off of my own notably fallible judgement.  

In the past, I've searched high and low among New Age self-proclaimed gurus (and one Buddhist monk), hoping to find someone who actually lives up to their claim of having all the answers.  No luck there.  I had a very specific spiritual problem to solve,  i.e. my tendency to pick up other peoples' feelings and take them on as my own, so it was easy to tell what worked and what didn't.  None of these people, even those whose theories were very convincing, were able to give me practical tools to change my situation.  After several years of consecutive disappointments, I stopped expecting to find anyone who could help.

As you know (or if you don't, read the post I linked to above), I finally found someone who could help me, in the person/God who goes by the name of Jesus.  One answered prayer led to another and another, and now my days of feeling overwhelmed by psychic bombardments are just a fading memory of a nightmare.  It wasn't about faith to begin with: my first prayer was almost sarcastic, with just a sliver of hope, and I still got an answer.  I can't prove it to anyone else, but in my personal world it's a repeatable experiment with consistent results, proving that Jesus really does exist.

Will I ever get used to making that statement?  34 years of turning my nose up at Christianity do not fall away in an instant.  But how can I argue with what I personally know and have experienced to be a fact?

The Bible is another matter entirely.  Just because I believe in Jesus doesn't mean that I automatically accept everything else that comes along with any of the major Christian combo deals.  It's supposed to be pretty much a given that if you call yourself a Christian you're going to put some amount of faith in the Bible, but how much?

It appears that no two people on the planet, even including those who claim to take the Bible as the inerrant word of God, can agree exactly on a complete interpretation of scripture.  Every human who reads it has their own bias.  Not to mention that there are over 50 complete modern English translations of the original scriptures before we even get to divisions on the basis of personal opinion.

Unless you're someone who was born into a particular denomination and 100% accepts your church's interpretation of scripture from when you're first able to understand Sunday school until the day you die, your personal opinion is going to colour the way you read the Bible. Therefore, any person who disagrees even in a small way with the tradition they grew up with, or who converts to Christianity as an adult, makes choices about the way in which they approach scripture.

There is a very convincing argument which I have read from more than one source, critiquing the New Age movement and encouraging people to pick one faith and submit to its authority.  It goes something like this:  The New Age movement treats the world's spiritual traditions like an all-you-can-eat buffet.  New Agers pick and choose among the elements of each tradition that they find beautiful, attractive, comforting, and non-threatening.  This approach, the argument goes, will always result in a faith that cannot result in personal growth, because by definition it will never take you out of your comfort zone.

If you really want to grow beyond the limits of your own small soul, you have to submit to a greater authority and trust it to guide you through deep waters to a greater truth, the argument concludes.  

The bottom line seems to be: don't trust your own preferences, because they will limit you.  You have to set your judgements aside and follow a tradition that has accumulated wisdom for years equalling many times the span of your brief life.

But which one?  I mean, you have to choose to begin with.  And if you're choosing, you're still exercising your own judgement and preferences.  

This is where everything starts to get circular and confusing.  

Even within the first few weeks of my education in Christian theology, I ran into disagreements between interpretations of scripture.  I was listening to some podcasts from this source , and also taking verbal instruction from a pastor at my local church.  Which one of them should I trust?

Honestly, there are things that rub me the wrong way within both views.  So let's say, for argument's sake, that I went ahead and picked one of them to be My Trusted Authority.  If someone were to ask me why I picked that source as Correct In All Things, I wouldn't want to say "well I just picked one at random because you have to give yourself over to something greater".  I'd want to give some compelling arguments based in fact and logic to show that this was a basically trustworthy source.  The subtext of this is:  I have good judgement!  Therefore I made a good choice!

But let's say that there are some points upon which I disagree with My Trusted Authority.  I could put my own views on a shelf and try to force my mind to accept the view of the Authority.  If someone were to ask me why I was ditching the beliefs I'd held strongly for all of my life in order to embrace the theology of the Authority, I'd have to answer "I don't have all the answers, and I believe that one must give oneself over to a wiser tradition in order to grow spiritually".  The subtext of this is:  My judgement is flawed!  Therefore I must be protected from making bad choices!

Let's review.  I've made one choice, and someone has asked me two questions regarding that choice.  The answer to the first question ends up being "A" (I have good judgement).  The answer to the second question ends up being "Not A" (I have bad judgement). 

Can I tell you how many hours of sleep I lost going through these arguments over and over in my mind trying to find some way of breaking through the impossibility?

In the end what it comes down to is this:  I can't find any way of half-trusting myself.  Either I believe that my judgement is basically good and I check in with myself to see if things feel right before I believe them, or I distrust myself entirely and let myself be led.  If I trust my judgement even a wee little bit, I'm going to end up questioning things.  You can't have A and Not A at the same time.

And considering that I wasn't born into a Christian faith that I could accept unquestioningly for the duration of my life, exercising no judgement at all is not an option.  Not that I find that to be a problem.  I hated thinking that I had to force myself to throw my own feelings and opinions into the garbage when it came to controversial topics.  Before I'd had enough time to puzzle it all through, I thought that might be what God wanted.  

My judgement might not be perfect every time, but it's been good enough to get me this far.  I'm going to keep counting on it as much as I always have.

I do believe that there's a lot to the Bible.  The past 20 years have unearthed quite a lot of archeological evidence that supports the historical points in some of the scriptures.  And, when it's interpreted through the eyes of love, the wisdom contained in the Bible does come to life.  Oddly enough, I find that I enjoy reading the Bible, even when I find the content leaves me with questions.  

I came this far in my journey, hugely outside my comfort zone, without accepting any human authority as fundamentally superior to my own.  Sure, lots of people have more education, or do more good works, etc.  I can learn from them.  But the only person I'm willing to surrender to completely is Jesus.  I reserve the right to disagree with anyone else.

I realize this post leaves many questions hanging, but it's long enough.  Tune in next time, when I plan to get more specific regarding the disagreements which trouble me most, and hopefully answer any questions you good folks leave in the comments.

Mixing it up

In the comments to Testimony, the following was feedback from Karen.

And for me, someone who was raised Catholic, I find it amazing that you would find Jesus as a source of comfort or relief from what my religion considers a "pagan" sort of spirituality...

...Basically, Catholics are taught that psychic spirituality is bad and exploration in to that world is a form of false worship. You have found a way to mesh Jesus with the psychic portion of yourself - or Jesus has found a way to do that through you.

Food for thought, that. Because after I gave up on Buddhism, the next stop on my seeker's journey was the wild and whacky world of New Age spiritualism. The practices and theories I explored included everything from traditional paganism to idea that aliens have been pivotal in human evolution and are watching us even now.

(For the record, I was never a convert to the alien theory. However, it did make for some very interesting reading.)

I gravitated towards New Age people and books because they were the only resource I had to help me define and describe the psychic experiences that sometimes took over my life. Before New Age gave me a language to describe these occurrences, I felt like I imagine Helen Keller might have felt before her teacher taught her to communicate. I kept bumping up against these inscrutable experiences and emotions, which sometimes felt good, but more often bruised me, and I had no idea what they were, or how to cope with them. New Age at least got me started along the path to understanding.

I enrolled in a school for "psychospiritual development". I started out with just a couple of evening courses: meditation 101, and energy healing. I soon signed on for a whole raft of courses, including a 2-year part-time psychotherapy course.

Freaky things happened at that school. One thing I learned is that if you focus on psychic experiences, if you go looking for them and invite them, they will happen more often. I could give a dozen examples, but this one stands out:

We did an exercise in which the class was split into two halves. Half the students put on blindfolds. The blindfolded students each sat down in a chair facing another, empty chair. The other half of the class was asked to wander the room until a signal from the teacher, and then they each sat in the closest empty chair, in an approximation of random partner selection.

Only the blindfolded people were to speak in this exercise. The sighted partner was to give their hand to the blindfolded partner, and then the blind partner was to attempt a verbal description of the sighted person's life, based only on the psychic impressions they got from that person's hand. This was on the 6th evening of the course, so none of us knew each other very well, and even if we had, it's surprising how hard it is to identify someone from just their hand if you haven't been studying everyone's hands ahead of time.

I was blindfolded first. I got a random hand to hold, and literally had no idea who was sitting across from me. I couldn't even determine the gender. I felt like an idiot. I was supposed to say something. So I just let my mind wander and started talking. I described a house that I saw in my mind's eye. It was pretty specific. A living room with big windows and a skylight, with a pass-through opening onto a kitchen. There was no ceiling per se - both rooms opened up to a peaked roof made of wooden beams. The kitchen had sliding glass doors opening onto a wooden deck and then a forest behind that. (Keep in mind that most people in the class were from Toronto. No forests here! I figured I must just be daydreaming.)

I kept on going, blah blah, describing a dog, a spouse, hobbies. At one point I felt the hand start to shake slightly. The minutes ticked by. I was like, damn, this is foolish! I'm making an ass of myself. Finally the teacher said we could stop and take the blindfolds off.

I finally laid eyes on my grinning partner, a 30-something woman. I asked her how I did, and asked her why I had felt her hand shaking. Her reply:

"I was laughing because you were so bang-on that it was ridiculous. It's like you've been to my house. You also described my marriage and my dog. The only thing that you didn't get exactly right was that I don't knit - I do embroidery." She lived outside the city, which I hadn't known, and drove over an hour to get to the school each week. We re-hashed the reading, and she confirmed almost every detail that had come out of my mouth. I was completely unnerved by this result, but there it was.

I learned a lot about myself at that school. The interpersonal skills I got from the psychotherapy course come in handy just about every day of my life. And it was good to be able to discuss my psychic happenings with people who could relate. But I never felt that it was enough, in and of itself, to make that all-important connection to a truly loving and supportive higher power.

There were times when we created rituals, bringing symbolic objects from our lives and acting out the gestures of letting go, or accepting, or opening to new possibilities. We also invited in the spirit of this or the goddess of that, asking for help or guidance. I gave these things an honest effort, as much as I've ever given to anything. And while I did feel that I received some otherworldly guidance now and then, I never attained that feeling of being contained and filled by love that I so longed for.

What I've come to believe is that while clairvoyance and God are both roughly categorized as "spiritual" in the sense that both are intangibles, obviously there are many magnitudes of difference between the two. If God is a diamond, psychic experiences are clay. In my experience, Jesus and ESP are not mutually exclusive, nor necessarily working at cross purposes.

Phenomena of the human energy field and beyond are just one little step up from the material world. I'm betting that someday we'll be able to measure these fields, and they will become as un-mysterious as magnetic forces and gravity. In themselves, these phenomena do not constitute a complete spiritual picture. Every seeker must go further, to find whatever key fits the lock on their soul. Some people may be able to make a connection with the Powers That Be through Wicca or Druid practices, but not I.

For whatever odd reasons which may or may not ever be revealed to me, Jesus is my key.

And that is my clumsy attempt at articulating how this confusing mess of concepts all fits together in my head. It's not an airtight construction, and is ever flexible to accommodate new information and experiences as they arrive. If I get any more epiphanies, I promise I'll let you know.

Testimony

Until now, I had resisted writing about my spiritual experiences for fear of losing my beloved readers. Any of you who missed my last post would be well advised to check it out and read through the comments to see how I've come to be writing about it now.

This post will probably be the one that separates the leavers from the stayers. Because this is where you can either decide that I'm crazy, deluded, and even straight-up lying, or you can take my word for it that some really nutty stuff has happened to me and I'm giving you my honest truth.

A long time ago, I wrote a post about my tendency to pick up other peoples' repressed emotions. Here's how it seems to work, based on my admittedly unscientific experiences over the course of my lifetime.

If someone is feeling an emotion, and expressing it outwardly, that's a no-brainer. Everyone can see what they're feeling.

Second scenario: someone is feeling an emotion without expressing it outwardly, but they are aware of the feeling. They allow the feeling and don't judge themselves for it. For example, you missed your bus, you're frustrated, and you know you're frustrated. You accept your reaction without judging yourself. You allow the feeling to exist in your consciousness until it naturally dissipates. In New-Age speak they call this "owning your emotions". If you own your emotions, I won't feel them. You will.

However, if someone is feeling an emotion and is either not really aware of it or is aware but judging themselves for it, that's when things get messy. For example, you miss your bus and you're frustrated. But instead of just stewing for a few minutes, you tell yourself immediately that everything is fine and go back to reading the morning paper. You press your lips together, tap your food, and refuse to admit that missing the bus really bugged you, because you think you should be above that feeling. You have disowned your emotion.

Another reason why people inadvertently disown their feelings is that they're too busy to pay attention to themselves. If your baby is crying and you're also feeling upset, you'll probably attend to the baby and push your own feelings down as much as you're able to.

Picture your emotions as a bowl of pudding. Say you want to repress them. Picture your options for repression as a hand. Each finger represents one dimension in which you are trying to push down your emotions. You aren't expressing the feeling physically; you're not thinking about it; you're pushing it out of your heart; and you're not expressing it in words.

You push your hand down onto the pudding. But the pudding (emotion) is real and it doesn't just disappear. It has to go somewhere. What happens is the pudding will surge out between your fingers. The spaces between your fingers represent the dimension of yourself that you're not in control of. If you're like the vast majority of people, you're not conscious of and/or cannot control your aura. That's where the emotion will find expression.

Once the emotion is in your aura, if you and I are in close enough proximity for our auras to overlap, there's a chance that I'll pick up on it.

Has anyone decided that I'm crazy yet? I'm trying to lay this out as logically as possible...

Personally I believe that many people pick up on energetic traces from others, but they're not aware of it. If you're an introvert, this could be one reason why people exhaust you. I happen to be sensitive enough that I couldn't maintain my ignorance, but it took a lot to convince me that this was what was happening.

If you're with me this far, let's go to the next step. What types of feelings do people usually repress? All the shadow stuff. Anger, Sadness, Fear, and all their myriad variations. Some really uptight people also repress their joy, but mostly what gets squished out into our shared public places is a lot of horrible crap. And I am vulnerable to picking it up and feeling it, like a psychic version of Sponge Bob Square Pants.

All my life I've struggled with the burden of feeling other peoples' crap. It was MUCH worse when I didn't realize what was happening.

Once I gained awareness, I had the advantage of understanding what was occurring, but I couldn't find a way of protecting myself from the effects. Being around people was constantly draining and exhausting. Sometimes the stuff I picked up made me feel physically ill. Even standing next to someone on the subway, if their aura overlapped with mine, was enough for me to feel their anxiety churn in the pit of my stomach, or their frustration could turn me into an angerball for the rest of the day.

I tried to protect myself. I tried crystals and Buddhist meditation. I tried psychotherapy and drumming and yoga. I tried visualizing white light, blue light, gold light, and grounding rods. I tried Reiki, which actually made things worse by increasing my sensitivity without adding any protective measures. I tried mantras. I tried prayer to "the powers that be", even though I wasn't sure who that might be. Nothing worked.

Honestly, it was like having an invisible disability. Everyday life was always hard, unless I was completely alone, and I didn't want to have to be alone so much.

One day, at work, just a few months ago, I had a confrontation with a customer. He was trying to be polite, but I wished that he would straight-up yell at me because I was getting all his desperation and feeling it sink right in through my abdomen. By the time I got back to my office I was feeling too overwhelmed to focus on my work. Again. In desperation, and I can't tell you where the impulse came from, I prayed to Jesus for help.

In an instant, the bad feeling vanished like it was never there, and I felt totally calm and centered. This, to me, given all my years of suffering and helplessness, was nothing less than a miracle.

Since then, I have been praying to Jesus for help throughout each day. My life has changed, and I get the feeling I've only just begun on this path. I have much more energy, physically, mentally, and emotionally. I'm able to cope with people, even crowds, as long as I continually check in with my spiritual connection. I can support my mom without feeling drained. And I'm not limiting my social engagements so rigidly as I did when I had limited coping abilities.

My connection with the light of Jesus Christ's love is not a passing whim. It's not optional. It's essential for my survival. I didn't go looking for Him; He came to me, for which I am ever grateful. Every day I receive multiple proofs that He's got my back and is always there when I call for him. Sometimes I even get a warning that something intense is coming up, but that's another story for another day.

And that's how it all started.

The Beginning.

Spark's Ghostly Tips

These tips are based on the shows "A Haunting" and "Ghost Hunters", and also some personal experience.

1. Never mess with a Ouija board. With your luck, you'll open a portal to the demon dimension that can't be closed without professional help. Those guys are just waiting by the border between the realms, hoping some fool will crack open a door so that they can bust in and bully everyone.

2. If you are shopping for a new home, and one house in particular seems to enchant you and draw you to it with a magnetic force, turn around and run the other way. Especially if it's a huge, gorgeous old house built at least 100 years ago, the prettiest one in the neighbourhood, and it's on the market for a suspiciously low price. Either there are serious problems with the foundation, or the place is possessed. Either way, you don't want it.

3. When a family experiences paranormal experiences in their home, it's invariably the dad that takes the longest to be convinced of the problem. He will find ways of dismissing everything experienced by his wife and children as overactive imagination or "the house settling". A coffee mug can spontaneously fly across the kitchen and smash against a wall, and the dad will sigh and go "It's just a draft. I'd better caulk that window." Finally a demon will grab him by the throat and lift him off his feet, and as his toes dangle above the rug he'll rub his chin and croak, "Honey, what was that you were saying about a demon?."

4. Never hire the inexperienced exorcist. He'll screw it up and then you'll be worse off than you were before. Nothing angers a demon like some dweeby guy standing inside a pentagram made of salt, trying to chant all the evil out of the house. Punishment will be swift and nasty. Do a little research, pay an extra few bucks, and get an exorcist who's been at it for at least 10 years. It's good value for your money.

5. Of course it's also possible to find "paranormal" occurrences where there are none. At around 3:00 am, when you're on a stakeout of a supposedly haunted house, every little thing starts to seem like "evidence". But that scary sound you heard in the master bedroom? That's actually just the homeowner's cat who's sleeping at the foot of the bed, snoring.

6. Disembodied spirits who are still hanging around on this plane are often desperate to be acknowledged. It's a bad idea to acknowledge them unless you're really sure that you want to interact. For example, Ken saw something in a hospital that looked like wavy lines of heat distortion. He whispered "I can see you", and it zipped right over to him. Scared the crap out of him. If you're not sure what it is, play dumb and pretend it's not there.

7. Not all energy phenomena are intelligent spirits. There are blobby things that are like the dust bunnies of the energy realm. They roll around like tumbleweeds, sometimes coming to rest for a while where you can see them (if you're Ken) or feel them (if you're me). They don't really do much, and can be shooed away without incident.

8. I've never seen a ghost, and I'm grateful for that. I personally know 3 people who claim to have seen ghosts. One of them is into Wicca etc. so I'm slightly skeptical of her story. She would want to see a ghost, and so might be swayed to embellish if her experience was ambiguous. The second is Ken. The third is Ken's dad, who is a practical man with no time for nonsense. (Rule #3 is not ironclad.) None of them got any pleasure from their ghostly experiences. All three claim were scared shitless.

9. If you live in a haunted house, the best possible outcome is that you get rid of the bad spirits and carry on with your normal life. The second best outcome is that you have to move, and can carry on your normal life once you settle into your new home. The worst outcome is that you move and the spirits move with you. That really sucks.

10. Watching "A Haunting" and "Ghost Hunters" late at night is not such a great idea, especially if you're alone in the house. They re-run them 12 hours later on Saturday morning. Watch then with the sun streaming through the window. Demon stories are less scary if you hear them while eating a bowl of cereal.

The Psychic

If you go waaaaaaay back to the posts from my blog's infancy, you'll find this one, in which I do my best to describe some sensitivities I have that fall into the category our society labels as "supernatural". I don't like the associations that come along with the words supernatural, psychic, premonition, etc. but those are the words I have to work with, so I use them.

I don't trust the theatrics associated with many professional psychics. I'd say at least half of them are either full-on fakes, or that they aren't able to be consistent, so they fake it enough that eventually they can't tell the difference between their intuition and their imagination.

Four years ago, I was struggling to understand the invisible forces that continually impacted my life. I had already figured out that most so-called experts in the field couldn't help me. But I was desperate to learn how to protect myself. So when I kept hearing about this one guy, let's call him Hans, who was THE BEST PSYCHIC EVER! according to everyone who'd ever been to see him, I figured I'd give him a chance.

I called and made an appointment. Here was a shock: his fee for a one-hour session was $200. This had better be worth it.

His home "office" was totally creepy, like a funeral home. Dark wood, paintings on black velvet, religious icons. He ushered me in to his consultation room.

Hans's deal was that he supposedly channeled a higher entity who gave him access to privileged information. I neither believed nor disbelieved in this phenomenon. I went in with an open mind.

Hans settled himself into a large, leather recliner, asked me if I was ready, and then closed his eyes. He began to twitch and grunt. After a few moments, his entire body spasmed. Then he settled down again, and began to talk with a different accent than before. He kept his eyes shut throughout the session.

I was immediately suspicious, because throughout his dramatic, physical show of embodying "the entity", I felt nothing. If something that powerful had really happened less than ten feet from me, I would expect to feel it. I have taken Reiki lessons from two different teachers, and I had trouble being in the same room with each of them because their energy fields were so powerful. With the Reiki masters, I felt dizzy and overwhelmed. With Hans? Zilch, nada, zip.

He proceeded to answer my prepared questions with the most mundane possible advice, things anyone could have told me. Thinking of starting a psychology practice? I should take a business course at the University of Toronto Continuing Studies Department. Like I really needed a psychic to tell me that!

He also answered some other questions, ones that were more "out there", with answers that anyone would want to hear, for their $200. I had been a Buddhist monk in a previous life. I had been a master, and my mother had been my student. Sure. Who wouldn't want to hear that? It's always nice to have one's ego stroked. But I didn't buy it.

Finally my hour was up. Hans went through his spasm routine again, and then showed me out.

It was a lovely, warm afternoon. Hans's home was just a few blocks away from Toronto's Beaches, at the shore of Lake Ontario. To clear my head, I walked south until I got to the water, and then made my way along the boardwalk. The longer I walked, the angrier I got.

He was a fraud, of that much I was sure. He had just charged me $200 for a personal improvised theatre skit that was neither original nor entertaining. When I thought back to the dozens of recommendations I had received, I realized that they had all come from women. Hans was extraordinarily attractive, and suave. I strongly suspected that this was a big contributor to his success.

At least I learned one thing from that session, and in hindsight, maybe it was worth the $200 after all: I don't need to hire psychics. I'm my own psychic. I know myself best, my instincts are trustworthy, and my predictions of the future have been at least as accurate as anyone else I could pay to do the job for me. I don't need an appointment, a velvet tablecloth, or a crystal ball. I just need to pay attention.

I believe that unusual events in our lives occur to move us forward in some way, through personal growth and learning. I have since spoken again to other women who consulted with Hans, and they felt that he helped them a great deal. If that was the role he was meant to play in their lives, then I'm glad that they benefitted. He doesn't need to be a channeler to give good business advice, or encouragement to people who need it. And if that's the way his clients prefer to receive their guidance, who am I to judge them?

But it's not for me. When I got home that day, I took the tape of my session and slam-dunked it down the trash chute. That felt great. And I haven't consulted any psychic but myself since that day.

Consulting the Magic 8-Ball

Sometimes I dream about a place before I’ve been there. In the dream, I’m in a confusing, unfamiliar environment. Then, a year or so later, I’ll look around myself at some point and think: “Oh yeah, this is where I was in that dream.” I’ll recognize certain elements, like a pile of colourful cubes in the dream turn out to be plastic storage bins in real life, or a bouncy floor turns out to be the padded floor of an indoor climbing gym.

I’ve had other experiences which could be described as “psychic”, or “supernatural”. I’m not sold on those labels. Dogs can hear sounds that we can’t hear, and bees can see colours that we can’t see, but that doesn’t make them magical or specially gifted. Their sensory mechanisms are just tuned to a different range. And to me, that’s what real “supernatural” experiences are about. I happen to be more sensitive to certain energies or vibrations which science cannot yet measure. But I’m betting that someday in the future, we’ll find a way to measure these things. And then they’ll just be “natural”.

I don’t enjoy these experiences. For example: I have an unfortunate tendency to pick up other peoples’ emotions just from being physically near to them, especially if they are repressing intense anxiety, sadness, or anger. I know it can be argued that I’m just projecting, or guessing peoples’ emotions from their body language, but you’ll have to trust me on this. It has happened time and time again, even when I’m not in visual contact with the person, or even when the person is close but on the other side of an interior wall. Suffice it to say that I thought I was a moody basket case, until I realized that I was picking up on other peoples’ crap. Now I find it a lot easier to differentiate between my own moods and other peoples’ disowned negativity. I’m still a somewhat moody person, but I don’t feel crazy like I used to.

There are a lot of New Age-y folks out there who work hard to become more psychically sensitive. I want to tell them: don’t go there! It’s better to be oblivious. I spend my time and energy building healthier boundaries.

For a while I went to a New Age night school that gave me a language to describe my experiences. But mostly, that school made me feel frustrated. When my fellow students found out how much information I could get during our practice “readings”, some were jealous. They thought it made me “more special” or something like that. No one knew how to help me when I occasionally got overwhelmed by what I was receiving. Eventually I stopped going to the classes, because the experiences were just too intense.

My point is that romanticizing these experiences, whether you want to call them psychic, supernatural, occult, or whatever, is wishful thinking. Would we understand this realm better if it weren’t so inextricably entwined with dramatic fantasy? I don’t know. I’d like to think so. Shall we try it and see?