Winning Hands Massage

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Language, Beliefs, and Mind-Sets

Psychic Connections – Dispelling Myths and Fears

The problem with a lot of this “stuff” is that it is couched in religious or mystical terms. And as anyone who has ever studied language or communications knows, words have power. They carry emotional charges and can cause physiological reactions. Awareness of the power of words is a key element for anyone in business, trained in human relations and performance evaluation. And the same word can mean different things to different people, evoking entirely opposite responses and reactions.

The word “psychic” certainly meets this criteria. For believers, it might evoke awe, wonder, and the thrill of discovery. For total non-believers, it might instead cause fear and revulsion. Unfortunately, the “power” of the word can also close someone’s mind to all critical thinking, whether that person believes or not. On the one hand, it can be a blind acceptance bordering on faith alone. On the other, it can be total rejection to the point that no proof is possible.

For purposes of this discussion, I am going to use the following definition from my previous post: “Of or pertaining to extraordinary, especially extrasensory and nonphysical, mental processes … Outside the known laws of physics.” In terms of this definition, you have to understand that I believe neither in miracles nor the supernatural as most people think of the supernatural. On the other hand, I believe equally strongly that seemingly miraculous and/or supernatural things happen all the time. My acceptance of this seeming contradiction is that I believe that nothing happens contrary to “natural law,” and if something does happen which appears to be in contradiction or is an exception to that rule – it just means that we simply don’t yet understand the underlying cause or mechanism.

There is an absolutely ridiculous saying that “the exception proves the rule.” What an utter bunch of garbage. The only thing in my mind that an exception proves is that the rule is wrong. A very strong belief in this principle has been an equally strong guide for me for most of my life. It has certainly been more than a little bit influential in “molding” me into whatever it is that I am today. Whatever the basis for my “belief system” at the time, if I got hit with an “exception to the rule,” I started questioning everything about it and then moved on to something else. But in one sense, no matter what “basis” I was under at the time, I have always been a “seeker.”

Barb and Cindy both did a pretty good job of describing me, and my personality. I am most definitely analytical and logic driven, and absolutely accept nothing on faith. Cindy may have been content to stick her hand up the mule’s butt and turn it inside out like a hand puppet. I probably would have dissected the mule and looked at all its parts under a microscope.

After sending my long post two days ago I got thinking that it had so much of the “scientific basis” slant to it that it probably didn’t totally destroy whatever credibility I might have built up in recent months with the list. I then got thinking that, since I have already at least opened the door to my own closet (in Cindy’s terms), I might as well just jump out into the room and do a “flash and streak” with everybody. If this one doesn’t destroy any lingering shreds of my credibility – nothing will.

I just scratched the surface the other day and have spent most of the last two days sitting here trying to decide where to start with this. So I guess I will start at the beginning – way at the beginning. From the time I was old enough to reasonably understand the spoken word (and deemed safe enough to take out in the general public without totally embarrassing my parents), until I went off to college the first time, I was raised as a Lutheran. This included Sunday school, church, youth activities, choir, and all that goes with it. When I was in High School, I gave very serious thought to becoming a Minister.

In High School, however, I started what has since become a life-long study of what can best be described as “the enigmas.” The world around us is not always as it seems at first glance, or as we are taught to believe. Enigmas come in many shapes and forms but are essentially just “things” that don’t fit the then currently accepted ideas or beliefs. Museums around the world have backrooms that are literally vast storehouses of enigmatic artifacts.

The easiest way I can illustrate this concept is that, since about the turn of the last century, the accepted archaeological tenet has been that man crossed the Bering Strait ice bridge about the end of the last ice age (about 10,000 years ago) and migrated into the North American continent. In the last several decades, there have been hundreds of man-made artifacts that have been found in strata that carbon-date the finds to MANY thousands of years older than that. Did this cause our learned academicians to question the validity of the ice bridge dating? Not at all - the finds were simply hidden in a store- room, out of sight and hopefully forgotten. Well, in the last few years, there have been some very significant digs, one in Mexico, one in Chile, and a third one someplace in the States but I can’t remember exactly where off the top of my head. These digs have conclusively pushed the dates back to around 20,000 years, totally trashing the accepted theories of the previous hundred years. As a side note, the person who discovered the dig in Mexico several years ago had her career totally ruined because the dates she came up with didn’t match what was then accepted as “true.” She has since been vindicated, but it was too late by then to resurrect her career.

Crap like this happens all the time and in all of the scientific, academic disciplines. Those, who by profession, should be the most diligent seekers of truth and knowledge are all too frequently the most close-minded of all because of “vested career interests.” At least today, all that gets ruined is a career. There have been many instances in the past where things like burning stakes came into play.

I also got very interested in myths and legends over the years. One thing I have come to believe about them is that, however far removed from reality they become over time, there is a kernel of truth somewhere in them that started it all to begin with. In other words, legends tend to be stories about actual events that have become embellished over time. Over long enough spans of time, legends evolve into myths. Take a look at the saga of Helen of Troy. This was viewed for years as nothing more than a classical Greek myth – until Heinrich Schliemann actually found Troy. And we as a society make a very grave mistake when we fail to look for those kernels of truth in our cultural and cross-cultural myths and legends.

A very heavy part of my study of myths and legends has had to do with cultural creation myths and stories. Every culture in the world, and I mean literally every culture in the world, has its own story of “creation.” Even more interesting is that they ALL share common threads, including stories of a great flood. Be that as it may, there are essentially only three creation “stories“ once you distill them all down to their bare essence. The first falls under the category of Creationism – the world, and everything in it, was created by the Divine (however one defines the Divine). The second is called Evolution, most commonly epitomized by Darwin’s theory. The third is called Catastrophism. This can best be summed up as a “belief” that everything came about by “natural” processes but that life has not evolved over millions of years, it has plodded along and made quantum jumps along the way as a result of cataclysmic change in very short time spans.

In addition, I have done an extensive amount of reading over the last 50 years about things psychic and extrasensory. The only reason I didn’t pursue it in college (at the J.B. Rhein Institute for Parapsychology at Duke University) was that Stanford gave me an academic scholarship and Duke didn’t. Money-grubber that I was at the time, I took the cash and went south instead of east. But that’s a different story.

I’m now going to do a bit of a side-step here. What does any of this have to do with psychic connections and beliefs about them? Nothing at all – and everything. It was all just a lead-in to say that we all are products of our belief systems, me no more and no less than anyone else. Our beliefs may be based on faith, logic, hard science or a combination of the three, and usually are. I went from the pure “faith base” of my early upbringing to the “prove it to me” of my middle years, to the melding of the two where I am at today. Truth be known, my personal belief systems have encompassed all three of the above “creation” categories at different times in my life.

I treated my study of psychic phenomena the same way I did my study of enigmas and myths, and as just another part of what I considered interesting, unexplained phenomena . I found the whole subject fascinating – as an academic exercise – because I had not one shred of psychic ability personally. Up until less than two years ago, the sum total of my personal psychic experiences had been one, what I have since come to consider legitimate, out-of-body experience (although at the time it happened I discounted it heavily because I was practically delirious from a 105 degree temperature for five straight days), and two intuitive “flashes” that could just as easily been good guesses. These three, and watching my mother-in-law humiliate my father-in-law by finding a broken water main by dowsing for it.

I will readily admit that I found the subject more than just fascinating. I had a whole library of books on the subject, history, theory and practice. Auras? Out of body experiences? I thought it would be the neatest thing to be able to see auras and do OBE’s. If I found a book that said it gave lessons in how to, I would buy it and read it. But no matter how many times I tried to do both, and believe me, I tried – nothing; no way, no how.

After I got into the massage program, I started getting some really good results with the family. But there was nothing extraordinary about any of it. The fact that I was getting results where a number of doctors over quite a few years had failed simply meant that I was using some sound bodywork techniques that they had neither tried nor suggested. But the point is that there was a sound physiological basis for what was happening when I was working on the family. It all made perfect sense and was completely understandable.

Then, about 18 months ago, I came home from a class and worked on Barb … and things happened that I couldn’t explain. And it quite frankly scared the living crap out of me.

Why, after close to 50 years of trying with no success at all, did I suddenly start to sense at least something that qualified as out of the norm? I know why. I started doing some basic acupressure and was getting solid, physical results. On a sliding scale, basic acupressure can be considered at the very bottom of a wide-ranging “system” of belief. I did not need to feel or sense anything and I did not have to believe in anything to have it work; apply pressure to the points, get results. After a month or two of working with it, I suddenly asked myself – if this works and I accept it, why am I rejecting everything else that goes along with it? I didn’t just jump in and immediately start accepting everything else. What I did was suspend my disbelief. I stopped just automatically rejecting the rest of it and, frankly, started treating the whole subject with an open instead of closed mind.

As soon as I did that, somebody or something tossed me on a roller-coaster and I have been on one wild ride ever since. And my life started getting even stranger … and scarier.

My logical mind-set being what it was/is, I was faced with a real dilemma. I had some choices to consider and decisions to make. I could turn my back on it all and simply walk away. Or, I could branch out in my continuing education studies and try to learn as much as I could to see if I could come up with some answers – like how and why?

So I started taking more classes – and things just kept getting worse. Almost every time I took a class, I would come back and find out that my “power level” had gone up another notch. I was able to feel more and do more than I could before – and what I was feeling and doing just kept getting stranger. Time after time, I was faced with the same choice – walk away or learn more.

The direction my studies have taken me was prompted in many respects by knowing that studying and learning was the only thing that was going to preserve my sanity. And I am not exaggerating on this point. One of the things that can happen during bodywork is called an emotional release. Without going into a long discussion on it here, it simply means that there frequently is an emotional component associated with physical dysfunction. Releasing the physical dysfunction sometimes means that the emotional dysfunction has to be released first as part of the treatment.

Some of them can be pretty gut-wrenching, as I can only too well attest since I have personally gone through at least eight in the last 18 months. I am not talking about a tear or two or a couple of tame whimpers. I have shed enough tears on massage tables in the last year and a half to fill a five-gallon bucket. They have been tears of joy, tears of anguish, tears of pain … and tears of fear. I have had my body jack-knife with convulsions, go rigid as a board, and lay there with silent screams to the point it felt like my very soul was being ripped out my throat.

Every one of these cases involved someone working on my right shoulder. I have had chronic, constant pain in my right shoulder for literally years that would not heal, no matter how many times I had it worked on or the type of treatment. And in five successive classes I had either a classmate or instructor ask me if I wanted to know why it wouldn’t heal and every single one of them then told me “It’s because you are not doing what you are meant to do.”

I didn’t retire a year ago because I wanted to. I retired because I HAD to. Whatever was tormenting me drove me to it. All I knew was that I had to make a change in my life to preserve my sanity. So I retired. And kept taking classes. And kept having my power level increase. And kept having my life get stranger and stranger. And - kept getting the crap scared out of me. You have no idea how many heart-felt conversations I have had with instructors where I have basically asked “what in the hell is happening to me?”

Today, I fully understand (at least to the point of being comfortable with it), what I was doing and the mechanisms by which it was happening when I had my first experience working on Barb that I couldn’t explain. Not only that, I routinely do things today that two years ago would have sent me blithering down the hall in terror. Being able to reset subluxed bones or to make pain go away by simply touching someone would have definitely brought me up short back then. Today, I do it all the time and never give it a thought. Today, I know about such things as entrainment, bioelectromagnetic fields and field interactions. Some of what I do today definitely qualifies as “psychic” by definition because it involves something other than the five standard senses. On the other hand, I don’t consider it either miraculous or supernatural in the standard spooky context. Two years ago, I would/might have, because I had no rational, logical basis for it back then. Now I do.

Barb posted a story about a women’s self-defense class where every single person was able to detect the presence of someone coming up behind them. Is this a psychic ability? They obviously could not taste, touch or see the person behind them. So, assuming that they also could not hear or smell the person approaching them, their awareness was by definition psychic because they received information from something other than one of the five standard senses.

Do I consider this to be a supernatural ability? Not at all – I consider it to be a perfectly natural and perfectly understandable ability inherent in ALL of us. It is demonstrably a sixth sense, and therefore psychic by definition, but it is also perfectly logical and supported by hard science. Remember what I wrote about the body’s bioelectromagnetic fields and heart monitoring. Those “fields” extend beyond our physical bodies. The expression “getting in someone’s space” and that feeling of unease when someone is standing too close is nothing more than the interaction of our electromagnetic fields. Depending on who is standing next to you, you might feel all warm and cozy because your field is interacting positively with theirs. You feel uncomfortable when your fields are repelling each other.

The irony is that I have also now come full circle. I said at the beginning that I had a solid religious upbringing, that my education includes a very solid grounding in Christian fundamentals, including Bible stories in general and the New Testament stories of the miracles in particular. But as I got older and more questioning about everything, I drifted away from my religious foundations. Many years ago, I reached a point in my life where I rejected those stories because my logical mind would no longer accept them on faith Today, I fully accept those stories, and not as allegories but as actual events. And I don’t accept them today based on faith – I accept them based on what I have come to understand about a lot of the so-called psychic stuff the last couple of years. The healing miracles by laying on of hands? I totally accept their validity. Do I believe that the walls of Jericho could have come tumbling down by a blast of sound? You bet I do, because I know what sound vibrations are capable of. The halos one sees in classical religious art? What do you think the aura is? And so on.

Does that mean that I fully understand everything that I have done over the last year? Not at all. It just means I haven’t found the answer yet. I am still seeking. There is nothing sacrilegious, demonic or “unnatural” about any of this. It is simply a part of what it means to be human. Our modern, scientific bent in the last few hundred years has simply caused us to move away from things that were once commonly accepted (and still are in some cultures). Fortunately, “science” today is finally starting to catch up.

OK – I said early on that I was going to “flash and streak” and have hinted at things happening beyond what you already know about, including things that I can’t fully explain to myself yet. To avoid at least a dozen off-list emails asking for more – here goes.

Six months ago I worked on my cousin in California. The day that we got there was when she got her MRI confirmation of a gall-stone lodged in the duct. She had been in agony for close to three weeks and unable to sleep without taking some pretty serious meds. I worked on her for about 90 minutes that evening. During the session, I had my left hand under her (she was on her back) level with the gall bladder. I had my right hand finger tips pointed down onto the gall bladder. I could physically feel a hard, sharp, pointy lump. After a few seconds, I started getting a really vigorous energetic sensation, almost like a scrubbing motion. Then it switched to feeling like drops of water beading up on a hot skillet – very fine and very rapid. It then suddenly felt like everything softened and the energetic sensations stopped. We left the following morning and she went in to the hospital that afternoon to have the stone suctioned out through a tube down the throat. In the doctor’s words, not mine, he was shocked to find that there was no stone there – all that was there was a “sludge.” I have no doubt in my mind that the treatment I gave her the night before basically broke the stone apart and dissolved it.

Can I rationally accept this as real? Most definitely, and it has to do with vibrations. Can I prove it? Not a chance. Everything in the universe is nothing more or less than a “vibration.” Light, sound, and physical matter are basically just different manifestations of vibrations of different wave- lengths. There is nothing mystical about this at all. This is hard science and a basic principle of physics. If sound “vibrations” can knock down walls (and they can), and if ultrasound can be used to break up kidney stones (and they can), it doesn’t seem strange to me at all that my hands might have given off the appropriate “frequency” to take out a gall-stone.

A year ago, I had a very painful lump in my right breast, just to the right of the nipple. The lump was in the breast tissue, not the lung. Since I am well aware that men can develop breast cancer also (a very small percentage compared to women, but still frequent enough to cause concern), I called it to my doctor’s attention – three times. All three times, he basically just blew me off and ignored my concerns. I suppose I should have gone to a different doctor for a second opinion. I didn’t (and caught holy hell from my wife and daughter about four months ago when I finally told them the story). I simply went home, sat down in my recliner, cupped my palms over my chest, dropped into a meditative state – and started “running energy.” After about ten minutes, no more lump, no more pain. And I haven’t been bothered with it since.

Miraculous? It could seem to be if you didn’t have an understanding of the underlying principles and mechanisms of energy medicine. Remember what I wrote about SQUIDS and the measured fields given off by the hands of energetic practitioners? That the emanations are not constant or steady, that they scan a range of frequencies from 0.3 to 30 Hz? Now think back to my post a few days ago where I talked about EMPF therapy – Pulsed Electromagnetic Field – for treating slow healing bone fractures. Bone healing is just one example. There has been a vast amount of medical research in the last few decades regarding tissue repair and healing in general that has clearly demonstrated that the body’s healing mechanisms are a function of different “frequencies” depending on tissue type – organ, bone, etc. Again, there is nothing mystical about any of this – it is hard science. The work I did on myself? In my mind, it was simply a case of my hands scanning to the right frequency to get the job done.

I don’t think I need to mention anything further here about the work I did on Monica’s two daughters, Amanda’s knee and Lindsey’s shoulder. To all of them, it may well have seemed miraculous because none of them had an understanding of what was involved. It not only did not seem miraculous to me, I just took it in stride and moved on.

I still have not, however, answered one question that I suspect is out there. Since I have pretty much kept my closet door firmly locked for months, why am I now opening up to the list? There have been a number of posts from either Cindy or me about my being in Detroit. Most of them have involved the work done on Dylan, with just some fairly minor and innocuous references to the work Cindy did on me. I mentioned earlier that I have had at least 8 major emotional releases on massage tables in the last 18 months. Well, two of those 8 took place in Detroit and another one took place last weekend.

I have mentioned a number of times about having had a chronic, constant pain in my right shoulder. The first time Cindy worked on me, she addressed my right shoulder – and all hell broke loose. Mentally, I was suddenly back 40 years in time to a very painful period of my life that involved severe, suicidal depression, trips to the ER to get my stomach pumped – and one very specific incident involving a loaded .45 automatic. It isn’t necessary to go into more detail here, other than to say that the tension suddenly went out of my shoulder. Today? My shoulder hasn’t bothered me since I got home from Detroit.

Well, the above release is well within what I know and understand about emotional releases. It is exactly the kind of thing I would expect to have happen. I was not at all prepared for what happened the second time she worked on me.

The following morning, she decided that I needed to get “balanced” by working on my left shoulder. She said in one of her “psychic connections” posts that ”When I feel it, I pull white light from above and send it through my hands.” Well, that’s what she did to me. I am still trying to come to grips with what happened when she did. As a start, I suddenly started seeing lights in my head as a manifestation of energy. My initial reaction was “super” because I have never been able to see the lights. Many of my classmates in previous classes sense energy “visually” in the form of lights. I was familiar with the idea – I just had never experienced it.

Then things started getting strange. I suddenly realized that I could see all the way around the room – but my eyes were closed. I could see Cindy standing behind me and pictures on the walls – images that were outside of my field of vision with my eyes open. And then everything switched to a deep sky blue with billowy white clouds and I had the sense that my “awareness” was some place other than in that room. I had no idea where – just that it was someplace else. I didn’t feel like I was someplace else, just my awareness. Then I got a shimmer of pure white light at the foot of the table. The light kept building until it formed first a dome over me and then completely encircled me like I was in a ball of white light. And then, faint and fuzzy, I “saw” two people standing at the foot of the table on the right side and one more on the left side – and then very clearly heard the words in my head “It’s time to let it go. It’s time to forgive yourself.” After that, the light just swirled around above me and then spiraled down into my heart. I cannot even begin to describe in words the sense of peace that I felt.

I said earlier that I have had to make choices and decisions in the last couple of years to preserve my sanity. The path I took brought me to a level of comfort, understanding and acceptance of much of what I have done – and do. My logical mind has a certain hard science foundation for it and I can live quite nicely with that, thank you.

My logical mind does NOT have a hard science foundation for what happened to me in that second session in Detroit. I have been struggling the last six weeks with trying to decide whether (a) I had the mother of all hallucinations in Detroit or (b) there is another reality out there that I need to come to grips with and try to understand. Simply walking away from it is not an option for me.

Especially not after last weekend. I mentioned in an earlier post about having taken a three-day class last weekend. The reading material for the third day scared the crap out of me like nothing else has in the last two years. Considering what all has happened to me in that time, that says a lot. Without going into a lot of detail here, it was talking about using specific meridian points and differing sound frequencies to open up channels of awareness. I came extremely close to not attending the third day because I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I went, I was going to end up “going someplace” I didn’t want to go and facing something I didn’t want to face. I was absolutely terrified. I got to class early and ended up sitting in my car, crying and shaking for a good 15 minutes before I went into the room.

Well – my forebodings turned out to be correct. We always do a first thing in the morning check-in – go around the room and talk about the previous day’s session and how it might or might not have affected us after class – any reactions? How did we sleep? Things like that. When it was my turn, I told everybody about my reaction to the reading material and that I was scared to death to even be there.

And then I just seized up. I wasn’t even on the table – I was sitting in a chair – and I had the roughest (not strangest – roughest) emotional release I have had in two years of classes and treatment work. Again, considering what I have already described, that also says a lot. I turned myself into a good imitation of a human armadillo, except the armadillo was shaking and sobbing uncontrollably. At any rate, my instructor started talking me through it. Without going into a lot of detail here, I was once again mentally someplace else. But it wasn’t just someplace else – it was some “when” else, and that when had nothing to do with the here and now. And once again, there were very clear voices in my head saying, this time, “It’s not about this life-time.” And as soon as I heard those words, all of the tension went out of my body. Can I explain that one? About as fast as I can explain Detroit.

But in answer to the question about why I decided to come out of my closet now, I felt I HAD to. I have lost count of the number of times the last two years where I have felt like my life was no longer my own. I have been faced with having to make choices and decisions that at times were downright uncomfortable and scary. I have asked repeatedly, not only “what in the hell is happening to me?” but “why me?” I still haven’t got a clue on either one of those questions.

And like I said, if this doesn’t totally trash my credibility – nothing will.

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