My husband and I watched a documentary called Wake Up this weekend. The movie depicts a reluctant spiritual seeker, Jonah Elrod, who experiences an unusual phenomenon that changes how he interprets the world through his five senses. In short, he now has the capability to see — with his own eyes — the interconnectedness of all humanity through our normally unseen energetic connections. He can also see spirits, angels, and yes, even energy that is wounded and shattered. The film depicts his journey to make sense and find peace with this new-found capability. In the end, he calls on us to wake up to the fact that there is more to this world than what we can experience through our limited five senses or our rational minds.
After watching the movie, I voiced that everyone should hear Elrod’s story. My husband quickly replied, “Not everyone would believe it. It won’t make sense to everyone.” I said nothing in response, because I intuitively understood these might represent his thoughts. This left-brain intellectual who lovingly inhabits my life represents the majority of Western culture. If we can’t see, measure, prove or make sense of something, it doesn’t exist. And, in fact, it’s this limited paradigm created hundreds of years ago that closes humanity off from the extraordinary that lies beyond the mind.
In fact, at one point in the film Elrod visits with a Sufi Mystic, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Ph.D., in one of many attempts to understand his new reality. Elrod asks the mystic why the human race has lost contact with the level of consciousness he is experiencing. The Mystic says, “It happened over the last few hundred years…with the belief in science…with the belief in rationalism…and so, we actually developed a consciousness that created a veil between us and the spirit world and all of its manifestations.” In other words, we’ve forgotten how to be fully awake to all of reality — and this has been exaggerated with our love affair with science and rational thought.
As I reflect on this simple notion, I can easily associate this statement to one of my poignant moments where I expanded my own notion of reality. It was a cold December day last year and I was making my third visit to see Sally Pechstein who does healing energy work.
Like Elrod, I was a reluctant seeker. If you would have told me a few years ago I’d be spending a busy holiday shopping day visiting with someone who claims to clear our energy centers, I would have fell down laughing. But I’d already experienced my own awakening — and once you start to awaken — you'll want to awaken some more. So, I’d been exploring other healing modalities with great interest.
After my very first visit to Sally, It was clear that my own veil of consciousness was lifted just a little bit further. And therefore, I returned this day with the same openness, but with more deliberate intention. I’d just finished reading the book Journey of Souls by Michael Newton, Ph. D. The book chronicled a once mainstream psychologist who experiments with hypnotherapy to further the healing process and in return, stumbles upon a set of consistent themes regarding what happens to our soul after death: how our soul leaves the body, collect it’s life lessons and evaluates actions with those spirit entities who have watched over and guided us in the physical world. The book was absolutely fascinating, but my intellectual mind was reeling with questions. And yet, the notion that the soul exists beyond ones’ physical death made total sense in my gut. So, I went to see Sally that day to make sense of whether any of this was true. Sally humbly embraced my agenda.
As I had two times before, I lay down on the table and covered myself with the warm blanket. Sally started some relaxing music you’d easily find in the new-age bookstore and offered me a small lavender-filled pillow to cover my eyes. As the room morphed into darkness, I promised myself to surrender to whatever feelings, pictures or sounds my senses could grasp. Before you know it, my cognitive thoughts were reduced into a state of empty relaxation.
Sally started her silent work and I retreated inward further. (I want to be clear that I was in a meditative state, not in a trance. As a hypnotherapist myself, I know the difference.) It couldn’t have been more than 10 minutes before I was aware of the presence of others in the room. It wasn’t a sense that I could hear or see people that would appear if I removed my eye coverings, but that there was considerably more energy in the room. In fact, it was like being a crowded, darkened elevator and knowing, intuitively, that we’d passed the weigh threshold by three times.
After this awareness heightened, a slideshow started to play in the internal darkness of my mind. The slideshow was a montage of images representing my life — these weren’t pictures I consciously created. It was as if someone had hit the play button on a projector as I involuntarily sat in the theater watching my life pass through my mind’s eye. Like fireflies on a hot summer night, every challenging moment of my life flashed with rapid succession: my awkward childhood, failing in school, the heartache of my marriage, giving up my children.
As quickly as it started, the images were gone. In their place was a clear message in unspoken terms from someone who felt incredibly wise, “We were always there: in every challenging moment.” And, I knew it was true. Not because I needed physical evidence or a scientific study to tell me so, but because every cell in my body was basking in gratitude, love and a deep sense of knowing that this divine presence has followed me through my life. In response to this truth, my body felt overflowing with bliss: as if I’d consumed too much gratitude on a gluttonous Thanksgiving Day. So much so, I said silently to this presence, “Okay. Okay. I know you are here.” I needed a reprieve from the emotion and the physical pressure that surrounded me.
The intensity would subside and rise again on two more occasions in that session, leaving me with other profound experiences that culminating in an important message: I am here in this lifetime to learn, so I may teach others.
I would stay on the table that day well after Sally left the room. At first, I didn’t dare stand because I was still overwrought by awe, so I let the tears flow in hopes the sensations would escape my body. By the time I propped myself in the corner chair next to thin slice of light coming in from the window, my rational thoughts started to come into focus — what did I experience, was it real, what did it mean? So, I invited Sally back into the room and attempted to put my experience into words, but it was difficult to translate the indescribable into a common lexicon that didn't exist. I did my best. And in return, Sally shared her written account of what she’d experienced as the practitioner. Our accounts were almost identical.
But regardless of the fact that I know what I know about this profound experience — and that Sally corroborated what I experienced through her own account — most of our society will automatically discount what unfolded because it doesn’t make sense in the rational mind. I understand that, I do. I get that Jonah Elrod’s story pushes our boundaries. Years ago I would have discounted it, as well. But that was before a few years of experiences that have expanded my own understanding of how this world works. Making sense has its place, but in the process of paying homage to what science and rational thought provides — we lost touch with the universal laws of what’s really true and the magic of what’s possible.
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