God Tapped Me On The Shoulder And I Woke Up

Copyright 2009, Linda Gertrude Means

 

by Linda Gertrude Means, Ph.D., CMT

Peacehope Healing Arts, Monroeville PA

www.peacehope.com

 

Before: In 1996, Linda was a mother of two small children, working full time as a corporate research scientist developing artificial intelligence technology, which she felt little passion for.  Her marriage had fallen apart, she had cancer, she was drowning in panic and fear, with no emotional support network.  She felt like a prisoner in the life she had constructed for herself, and in the contracted emotional body that she inhabited. 

 

After: Today Linda does work that she loves and is good at: massage therapist, energy healer, teacher, writer, healing coach.  She is full of vitality, her health is excellent, she feels joyful and peaceful and grateful.  She is living a life of emotional freedom, free from fear, free from constraint.  Linda’s clarity enables her to conceive of new projects, set them in motion, and connect with the people and resources that help to fulfill them.  She never imagined this level of happiness and fulfillment to be possible, and rejoices in knowing that even further unimaginable levels await her.

 

 

The Wake-Up Call

 

God tapped me on the shoulder and I woke up on a Friday afternoon in June of 1996, when I was at work in my office at the corporate research lab where I was a staff research scientist.  The phone rang; it was the dermatologist calling with a biopsy result: malignant melanoma.  Need to come back next week for further surgery, need to schedule appointments with doctor for a physical, and with hospital for a full body scan, may need to cancel extended business trip to Belgium scheduled eight days from now.  Time stopped.  I knew immediately that my life was irrevocably changed.

 

My first thought, in the instant of hearing the news, was: I need to get out of this marriage; it’s killing me.  My second thought, an instant later, was:  I need to figure out what else is malignant in the way I’m walking through this world, and correct it.  They can cut, burn, poison cancer cells, but if I sustain a lifestyle that makes my body an environment that supports cancer, it will just come back.

 

The news about the cancer was utterly unanticipated.  I had seen the dermatologist four days earlier, to have a lesion removed from my leg, and I mentioned as an afterthought a mole on the side of my ribcage that seemed to have darkened recently.  The doctor glanced at the mole and immediately said, “That needs to come off right now.”  It never occurred to me that it could be melanoma, an aggressive and often fatal cancer.  When the dermatologist removed the suspicious mole, I figured that it was gone, and I never gave it another thought,  I hadn’t even thought about getting a biopsy result.  So my initial response to the news of the melanoma was a very pure thought-reaction, untainted by any anticipation of cancer.  It woke me up.  

 

Back Story

 

A married mother of two young children, I was supporting my family with an excellent job which I had held for 11 years.  Many healthy life practices: I had practiced yoga since I was a teenager, meditated regularly, had eaten a strictly vegetarian diet since the age of 24.  But my stress level recently had been through the roof.  Intensely unhappy in my 10-year marriage, I felt hopelessly trapped in the situation:  I did not believe that change was possible in the marriage, yet divorce was not an option with young children involved.  So I had allowed myself to suffer extreme emotional distress for several months, feeling stuck with no solution in sight.

 

My job was one of the best in the world, at a privately-funded research laboratory in a “Fortune 1” company, with generous resources provided for whatever relevant research projects I could dream up.  Yet my heart wasn’t in the work.  An inner voice had been telling me for years, I’m here on this planet to help, and I’m not helping very much.  I was devoting 40-plus hours a week to a technology-development job, which did not in any way address the human suffering that abounds in our society.  After reading a succession of newspaper stories about small children being shot and killed by a sibling who found a parent’s gun on the kitchen table or the couch, I cancelled my newspaper subscription because I didn’t know how to help, and couldn’t continue to know but not act. 

 

My personal life felt stuck too; my life-long emotional habits kept me shut off from family and friends, preventing me from feeling loved and nurtured and connected.  I grew up with impaired social skills.  As a child, I was shy and had only two friends through my high school years, with very little participation in any wider circles.  This pattern of social isolation continued into my adulthood; I had been emotionally stifled and depressed for decades.  I had been so self reliant all of my life that people seldom reached out to help me, because I didn’t appear to need anything from anyone.  Even when I was diagnosed with cancer, friends and family more or less just left me alone to deal with it myself, as I always had.   

 

Initial Steps

 

Cancer can be a brutal wake-up call.  The first year brought a near-constant state of panic; I knew that I needed to make deep changes in the way I related to the world, to other people, and to myself, but had no idea how to approach this process.  In the first instant of my diagnosis, I gave myself permission to divorce without looking back, knowing that my children would be better off with a mother who was divorced and alive than a mother who was married and dead.  I knew that if nothing changes, nothing changes; I was reminded of the reputed Chinese proverb that defines insanity as repeating the same behavior expecting different results.  At the same time, I knew that my emotional imbalances ran deep; I would need to effect a “personality transplant” as well as other life changes, and I had no idea how to approach the process of assessing my reality and manifesting significant change.

 

Several months of psychotherapy produced little benefit; I was so ashamed of my emotional incompetence that I felt inhibited about revealing the extent of my dysfunction even to a therapist.  Having grown up in an environment where I was belittled for expressing emotional distress, I didn’t understand that revealing my vulnerabilities could be the key to forging rapport.  My early emotional training taught me to bury my feelings so deeply that I couldn’t even find them, which many psychologists would view as a case of cancer waiting to happen.  In fact I was largely incapable of discussing my emotional experiences. Alexithymia is a label used for the inability to express emotional states.  If asked the question, “What are you feeling?”, my response would most likely be, “I don’t know.”  I was mystified by any request to explain my feelings aside from large categories like happy or sad, and did not know how to associate bodily feelings with emotional responses.  Abandoning therapy, with nowhere else to turn for help, I just isolated myself, drowning in panic, for the first year – the isolation being a familiar pattern for me, which just made me sicker.  

 

The first glimmer of understanding came from a book that my sister sent me soon after my initial diagnosis of cancer:  Cancer as a Turning Point, by Dr. Lawrence LeShan.  Dr. LeShan is a psychotherapist who had worked for decades with cancer patients, and asked them this question:  What is it that you’ve always wanted to do but never pursued?  The answer might be playing the piano, or doing photography, or writing a book, or just about anything.  Why did you never pursue this passion?  asked LeShan.  The typical answers are predictable:  money, time, family obligations.  Well, said LeShan, they’re telling you now that you only have a few months left to live.  Why not do it now?  What are you waiting for?  LeShan found that when patients could identify the inhibited passion and pursue it, tumors tended to shrink and disappear.  For me, this validated my initial instinct: that by changing my way of life, I could transform my body chemistry to become a healthy environment which would not allow cancer to thrive. 

 

In response to LeShan’s book, I became a self-archaeologist.  I began taking an inventory of every aspect of my life that didn’t serve my happiness, which produced a long list of dissatisfactions.  I also thought about the people in my life whom I most admired, and evaluated what my admiration centered on.  What did their lives hold that mine lacked?  Another long list, which provided some clues about directions in which to move: I admired people who created their own work that engaged their deepest passions, even if struggling financially.  I admired people living close to the earth.  I admired those who surrounded themselves with art and music.  I admired people whose adventurous spirit kept their lives dynamic and fresh.  I admired people who shared their lives with a circle of loved ones.  And I was intrigued by touch healers: Who were they?  What was it like to relate to people so intimately?  How did it feel to have people place their faith in your hands?

 

Healing Begins

 

A little over a year into this self-evaluation process came the turning point, on a trip to a technical conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico in July of 1997.  The conference was scheduled for Wednesday through Friday, and my sister C. in Texas planned to join me in Santa Fe for the weekend.  I called my old friend B. in Las Cruces, New Mexico, four hours to the south, and invited her to come spend the weekend with us up north.

 

I had lived in Albuquerque years earlier as a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, and hadn’t been back to Albuquerque in 12 years.  My plan was to fly to Albuquerque on Tuesday, arriving around noon, rent a car and drive directly to Santa Fe, with plenty of time to spare before the start of the conference on Wednesday morning.  I was looking forward to spending a few days in Santa Fe, and hadn’t given a thought to Albuquerque, as I would only be passing through briefly.  Living in Albuquerque, I had always loved flying into the city from the east, sitting in a window seat gazing at hundreds of miles of sparse desert, then swooping over the Sandia mountains and watching the city of Albuquerque suddenly come into full view.  But on this trip, as Albuquerque loomed out the window, I was surprised to find myself weeping uncontrollably.  Unable to identify the source of the distress, I felt embarrassed by my emotional eruption. 

 

This overwhelming feeling persisted as I collected my luggage and got my rental car.  As I drove out of the airport, weeping behind the wheel, instead of getting directly onto the freeway to head for Santa Fe, I felt compelled to drive through Albuquerque to visit old places I used to frequent.  I made a beeline for the University and went directly to the building that housed the computer science department.  Walking up the stairs, I felt more and more overwhelmed by my emotions, finally realizing specifically what I was feeling:  I had met my husband in that building, and got to know him there in graduate courses in computer science.  In my panic and fear during our divorce process, and my relief to be out of the marriage, I had never given myself the opportunity to grieve the loss of our love.  Now, returning to the locale where we had first fallen in love, I was feeling what we originally had and later lost.  I drove around the city to the places where we had lived, restaurants we used to go to, and felt and felt and felt and wept.  Only later did I realize that this unexpected catharsis was a necessary process to pave the way for the healing that would begin that weekend.

 

            In the year since I began my cancer journey, my immune system had been weakened by my unrelenting emotional distress.  I suffered sinus infections, urinary tract infections, and vaginal infections.  Paper cuts on my fingers refused to heal.  I got the flu, I got strep throat.  A few weeks before the trip to New Mexico, I had developed an infection in the right kidney.  In Santa Fe I was on my third course of antibiotics for this infection; the first two had not worked. 

 

In the hotel room on Thursday morning, the kidney pain was increasing.  I went into the bathroom and opened the bottle of antibiotics.  God tapped me on the shoulder again, as I looked at the pills and thought:  this is not helping, there has to be a better way.  And instead of taking the pill, I emptied the bottle into the toilet.  I had no idea what I was going to do to heal the infection, there was no Plan B, and I had no resources at hand to deal with the problem.  So I just headed off to my business meeting and let the infection take its course. 

 

On the phone that week I told my sister that it really didn’t matter to me whether I lived or died.  I had no thoughts of suicide, yet I could easily accept allowing my body to succumb to illness.  There had been acute pain in the area of my tailbone for some months, as well as heaviness and swelling in the region of the lymph nodes in the right armpit, but I hadn’t bothered to see a doctor to investigate these new symptoms.  I had checked out of the oncology system.

 

B.’s plan to come for the weekend from Las Cruces was problematic.  Santa Fe was more overrun with tourists than usual due to the recent opening of the Georgia O’Keeffe museum; there were few motel vacancies, and none that would allow B.’s dog Emma.  Nor could B. find a way to leave Emma at home: all of her friends who might care for Emma for the weekend were out of town, and the kennel was closed for vacation.  So Emma couldn’t come to Santa Fe, and couldn’t stay at home.  After exhausting all possibilities for a weekend in Santa Fe, we came up with another solution:  let’s spend the weekend someplace further south, between Santa Fe and Las Cruces, where we could either get a dog-friendly room, or B. and Emma could make it a day trip.  So on the phone, we got out a map and asked, what’s halfway between Santa Fe and Las Cruces?  One finger ran south, one finger ran north, and they met up on Socorro.

 

My sister C., who had just arrived from Texas, said, “I know a very interesting woman who lives in Socorro.  I’ll call M. and ask if we can visit her there.”  M. graciously responded, “Please come stay with me for the weekend, we have plenty of room and all dogs are welcome!”

 

As we arrived at M.’s house on Saturday, she greeted us in the driveway, saying, “We’ve just built a sweat lodge out back, would you ladies like to do a sweat tonight?”  I’d never been in a sweat lodge before, but why not?  We piled back into C.’s pickup truck and drove down to the Rio Grande to gather lava rocks.  Back in M.’s kitchen, she reported that her new next door neighbor, T., was an Arapaho medicine man, and he would run the sweat for us.  She also mentioned that he removes things from the body, like tumors and blood clots. 

 

I hadn’t said anything about my illness.  In the back yard I found T. tending the fire that was heating the lava rocks for the sweat lodge.  After introducing myself, I said to T.:  “I’m sick, can you help me?”  I didn’t describe the specifics of my problems in any way, no mention of cancer, or the kidney infection, or the problems in the axillary lymph nodes and the tailbone.  T. said, “Sure, let’s go next door, I’ll introduce you to my wife and we’ll get started.”

 

So the sweat that evening was a healing ceremony for me.  T. kept me out in the sweat lodge when everyone else went inside afterwards to shower and prepare dinner.  Alone in the sweat, he said to me, “There is cancer that I need to remove from your armpit and your lower back.  But first I need to remove something right here,” and he grasped my back over the right kidney, kneading and squeezing and with one great effort, yanked something out.  I felt immediate relief from the kidney pain which had been present for weeks (and which never returned).  Then he proceeded to pull things out of the areas near the tailbone and right armpit.  T. told me, “I can only remove four things at a time, and you have cancer in various parts of the body.  Can you come back again, and soon?”

 

During dinner that evening in M.’s kitchen, I felt lighter than I had in years, or maybe ever.  A picture taken that evening around midnight shows me sitting next to B., who looks happy but weary.  I am lit up like a light bulb, joyful and radiant.  I now see that as a picture of my re-birthday, the first day of my new way of life.  After a year of struggling alone with my panic and pain, healing sought me out, and brought me directly to its door through these lovely serendipitous circumstances.  I didn’t go to Socorro in search of a shaman; Emma the dog led me there!  But I had summoned this healing by rejecting the antibiotics in Santa Fe two days earlier, and leaving myself open to another solution.  And the catharsis in Albuquerque opened my emotional body to help prepare me for this shift. 

 

M. was thanking me for being there, saying that my healing was a blessing for her home.  What an astonishment:  these complete strangers took me in and facilitated my healing and fed me and loved me, and they were thanking me!  I felt so accepted in this environment, and I knew that this experience of unconditional love, completely unprecedented in my life, would be the ultimate source of my healing, more so than T. pulling anything out of my body.

 

More Healing Lessons

 

I immediately made arrangements to return to New Mexico in three weeks, then began travelling there for a long weekend about once a month.  M.’s family opened their home to me so graciously, and T. worked with me in the sweat lodge.  Several experiences with T.’s healing treatments validated the authenticity of the work.  On one occasion, T. told me that there were many tiny cancerous spots on my back, and it would be too difficult to extract each of them individually.  So he wrapped me in his healing blanket and sent me off to nap for several hours.  When I awoke, T. said that the cancer was being eliminated from my body, and I should be very careful with my hands in the next few days, warning me not to touch my eyes or mouth, and to wash my hands frequently, because toxins would be released through the hands.  At home two days later, I was chopping tomatoes for dinner and saw that the three silver rings that I wore daily, two on the right hand and one on the left, were completely black.  None of these rings had ever tarnished before, as silver tends to not tarnish much when it is in daily contact with the skin.  Sitting in a late afternoon meeting just an hour earlier, at a conference table taking notes, I was looking down toward my hands frequently and would have noticed then if the rings were black.  So apparently the rings had blackened very quickly.  This was clear indication that T.’s work, as strange as it seemed, was definitely effecting a response in my body. 

 

On another New Mexico trip, I arrived at M.’s home late at night, after the whole family was asleep.  They were expecting me and had the guest room ready for my arrival.  During my travel day, I became aware of increasing irritation in my right eye, which by nighttime was sore and felt infected.  Because I arrived so late, I saw nobody that night and so did not mention my eye problem to anyone, nor did anyone see my eye.  Early in the morning, M. knocked on the bedroom door to tell me that T. was waiting for me out in the sweat lodge.  I dressed, went out back, and crawled into the sweat, which was fairly dark inside.  T. said, “I’m going to remove cancer from here and here and here” (indicating various areas of my body), “but first there’s something I need to remove from your eye.”  He put his hand over my right eye and pulled something out.  I asked, “What was it that you removed?”  “I dunno,” he replied, “it looked kinda like a piece of macaroni!”  The eye felt better immediately; it was completely healed when I left the sweat. 

 

The research scientist in me had queried T. several times about the nature of his work: Does he remove something physical?  Energetic?  What does he know about what he removes?  T. didn’t know much, except that by looking into the ashes of the fire he could see where in the body something needed to be extracted, and if it was black it was cancerous.  There was no factual information to be had, so I turned off my analytical mind and accepted the unknowability of this healing process.  It was a real departure for me to not analyze, to just allow, and it was a relief.  My intellectual mind was tired of always having to delve into details and figure everything out.  This was my first experience in embracing the ineffable.

 

On one of my early visits to New Mexico, T. worked with me on Saturday morning, then said, “Come on, we’re going to a meeting this evening up in the mountains.”  Okay, I agreed, having no further information about our destination or purpose.  T.’s family and M.’s family piled into two cars and we drove for several hours into the mountains of northern New Mexico.  I got a kick out of sitting in the back seat of the car, shaman at the wheel, listening to Elvis tapes as we cruised down the highway.  I got a bit more information about our trip:  we were going to a meeting of the Native American Church, which had been organized to help a friend’s son with his healing.  We arrived in the early evening at a remote home in the mountains, many people already gathered and eating soup.  Peeking into the tepee which had been erected just that afternoon, I saw final preparations being made for the meeting, including the construction of a half-moon sand altar encircling the fire pit, and the water drum being assembled by tying an animal skin over a cast iron pot. 

 

            At sundown, we all entered the tepee and settled into our places.  Only then did I find out that the meeting would last all night, ending after sunrise in the morning, and that I would be required to sit all night, more or less in one position, with no opportunity to move around, lie down, or doze off.  There were maybe 15 people seated in a circle inside the tepee, all dressed warmly except for me.  After three hours of singing, drumming and praying, although the ceremony was riveting and I felt honored to be there, my back felt exhausted, I was shivering from the cold night air leaking in under the bottom of the tepee, and there was no end in sight.  When we walked outside at midnight to circle the tepee and honor the bringing in of the water, I whispered to T., “I can’t do this, I can’t make it through the whole night.  I’ll just go lie down in the house and sleep.”  “Oh no,” replied T. “You’ve begun this process, you’ve already put in a few hours, and if you leave now, you’ll just have to come back another time and do it all over again from the start.  So you have to stick it out tonight.”   I made some further feeble attempts to back out, but to no avail; ultimately I knew that T.’s presence in my life as a teacher was invaluable, I’d waited my whole life for this miraculous intervention, and my back would heal.  So I stepped back into the tepee and made it through the night, painfully and gratefully.

 

            In the morning, when we emerged from the tepee to greet the rising sun, we all shook hands and said “Good morning.”  A few people, knowing this was my first time, asked how the meeting was for me.  “It was hard,” I said, not complaining, just commenting.  One very kind man nodded his head thoughtfully and agreed, “Yes, it is hard.”  His tone of voice conveyed total acceptance: yes, it’s hard, and for that it is all the more precious.             

 

I continued to attend meetings of the Native American Church on several subsequent trips, and always felt blessed to have the opportunity to spend the night in that circle.  It was easier to endure when I was psychologically prepared to sit all night, and physically prepared with warm clothes.  I valued the responsibility of sitting all night and the sacredness of the feeling of surrender to the process.  The Church only exists when it is called into being for a specific healing purpose for a family or an individual.  Phone calls go out to people far and wide, asking them to drive, sometimes hundreds of miles, on a Saturday, spend all night sitting in a tepee, then drive home on Sunday with no sleep.  The tepee is erected on Saturday on a tepee ground at the home of a family who has dedicated the use of their property for this sacred purpose, wood is gathered, soup is cooked, the altar is built, the water drum is assembled, people arrive.  The Church has become.  Although I only had minimal understanding of the significance of the elements of the ceremony, I felt that just by sitting in the circle all night, I was an essential link in the chain of healing.  After breakfast in the morning, the water drum is taken apart, the tepee comes down, the Church is no longer, its purpose having been fulfilled.  What a blessing to participate with this community of people who devoted their time and love to care for one another in this way.

 

One morning, after a meeting had just ended, a man took my by the hand and walked me over to the doorway of the tepee, saying, “Come, look.”  He pointed out how the night in the tepee mirrored the process of birthing a baby: as we sit on the bare earth all night, removing ourselves from ordinary reality and shedding the ego, the fire burns and its ashes are spread to fill more and more of the fire pit within the half moon.  In the morning, when the firepit – the womb -- has been completely filled with the ash – the energy of the fire --, we exit the tepee door to the east and emerge out into the new morning with a purified spirit.  Rebirth! 

 

Another New Mexico experience helped me gain some understanding of my emotional body.  I read book after book on emotional healing, but my intellectual brain couldn’t grasp the reality of storing emotions in the body.  M.’s neighbor was building a small house on the land where he had been living in a trailer for a year or so following his divorce.  Sorely wounded by his wife’s departure, J. was hiding out from women, but he invited me one beautiful August evening to come down to his place and check out the house he had just finished framing that day.  We sat on the patio under the wide starry New Mexico sky, drinking beer and watching the meteor shower.  Although J. claimed to be rather allergic to women, he opened up to me about the emotional fallout from his divorce. 

 

Around midnight, he asked if I had seen the movie Shine.  I hadn’t, and agreed to go into the trailer and watch it with him.  When the movie ended at 2 a.m., J. insisted on walking me back to M.’s house a couple hundred yards away, but first he needed to secure his five small puppies to protect them from coyotes.  The five-week-old pups were roaming freely inside the framed house during the day, and J. had constructed a wooden crate to keep them safe at night.  We went into the house, rounded up all puppies, and gathered them into the crate.  The door to the crate was a wooden board that fit into slots on both sides.  As J. dropped the board into the slot, just at the very last moment, one puppy stuck its head out.  J. saw it happening but could not react quickly enough to stop the pup’s head from being crushed.

 

The injury was so severe that it was clear the puppy would die quickly.  As J. held the dying puppy in his lap, I stood behind him cradling him in my arms.  J. was devastated; he had killed that puppy with his own hands.  Eventually he stood up, put the dead puppy down, and secured the others in the crate.  He said, “Let’s go inside so I can wash my hands, then we’ll get the mother dog and show her what happened, and then we can bury him.”  In the trailer, after J. washed the blood from his hands, I put my arms around him again.  We were both paralyzed by grief and shock and couldn’t move or speak; we just held each other.  J. and I stayed like that for two or three hours, allowing the feelings to wash over us, occasionally moaning or crying, and just holding each other. 

 

In the early morning, we took care of the dead dog, and walked back to M.’s house.   As we sat at the breakfast table and related the story to M. and her husband, I noticed that I felt no emotional charge.  The heavy emotions had been relieved, I could move forward without carrying that horror with me.  I was glad that if J. had to have that awful experience, that I was there with him and somehow we both had the instinct to just stay with those feelings all night and allow ourselves to feel the full impact.  I knew that if J. had been there alone, he would have quickly pulled himself away from the experience emotionally, finding activities to distract himself, and the grief would have been buried in his body. 

 

Even with all of the healing experiences in my New Mexico life, I had another occurrence of cancer two years after the melanoma, this time an intraductal carcinoma in the right breast.  But this time I felt much more hopeful about my ability to move forward on a path of healing, because I knew that my journey was being guided somehow; I had been miraculously catapulted out of my mundane life into the world of shamanic healing in New Mexico.  I still felt stuck in terms of not knowing how to get down to the nitty gritty of my unhealthy emotional patterns, but my life had taken on a new course that was directionally correct.  So I just stayed on the path. 

 

Discovering My Life Purpose

 

In August of 2001, I went to a meeting of the Native American Church for M.’s healing.  I was so happy to sit in the circle that night to support this dear friend who was like a sister to me.  In the morning I emerged from the tepee and was engulfed by a sudden surge of sadness, which was not unusual; the Native American Church ceremony always seemed to tap into wells of emotion that I normally kept shut.  While the others drank coffee and chatted, I lay in the back seat of the car and wept.  I continued weeping all the way back to Socorro, and all the way home the following day. 

 

This malaise lingered and festered.  The events of September 11 the following month gave me a concrete reason for sorrow, and anthrax in the mail heightened the collective anxiety and fear.  By the start of October, I was feeling gripped by depression, which was worsening by the week.  Although I didn’t have a clear plan in mind, I committed myself to a course of action to turn the situation around.  Looking at the calendar, I saw that I had enough vacation time left that year to take off one day a week, so I would use every Monday as a day to work somehow on my emotional healing.

 

The first week, I looked at the ads in the local alternative healing newspaper to find an energy healing practitioner.  I had heard good things about Reiki master Joann Tatum, so I called and made a Monday appointment.  Joann greeted me at the front door and led me into her healing room.  With no chit chat, and no questions about why I was there or what I needed, Joann instructed me to stand in the middle of the room.  I stood with my eyes closed, for two and a half hours as it turned out, while Joann did a Reiki treatment in silence.  She spoke only once:  “You need to pray to heal the part of you that desires separation.”  I stood puzzled, wondering why she would say such a thing.  I don’t desire separation, I reasoned, I experience separation but I desire connection.  This baffling statement was the only communication from Joann, during two and half hours of standing upright with my eyes closed, so it stayed with me.

 

The following week, I decided a massage would be nice.  I had a minimal amount of experience receiving Swedish massage, maybe a massage a year for the past five years, and didn’t know any good therapist locally.  So I got out the alternative healing monthly again, and scanned the massage ads for something compelling.  God definitely tapped me on the shoulder again as an ad about five inches long caught my eye, with the headline “Healing Everything.”  Massage therapist Jan Rapoport listed dozens of modalities, from hot stone to raindrop therapy to Thai yoga massage.  Somewhere in the middle of that list was “Esalen Massage,” which then had no meaning to me.  I did like the sound of “healing everything” though, so I gave Jan a call. 

 

On Monday afternoon, I lay on Jan’s massage table and received my first Esalen massage.  It was stunning.  I could not comprehend how a total stranger could know me so well, could nurture me so deeply, could touch my soul through my muscles.  I came back the following Monday, and every Monday for the remainder of the year.  By December I was no longer depressed, and I felt so inspired by the healing power of Esalen massage, I decided to sign up for massage school.  Although I had never, ever contemplated being a massage therapist, I understood that the emotional connection and the unconditional love that I experienced during those massage sessions were exactly the kind of spiritual therapy that people with cancer needed, and I knew that I had to provide that service. 

 

I checked out the massage schools in our city, of which there were several.  At open houses, they talked about attendance and financial aid and textbooks and homework, but they never mentioned the part about healing people.  I interviewed school directors and received student massages, and they did some nice work on my muscles but never touched my heart.  Finally I told Jan about my wish to learn the kind of work that she does.  “You need to go to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California,” Jan advised.  I got online and signed up for a five-day Esalen massage workshop in January.

 

In the Monterey airport, waiting for the Esalen shuttle, I wondered about what awaited me, not only at this Esalen workshop, but in the new life that I was about to embark upon as a massage therapist.  I had some doubt as to whether I could do the kind of work that I had experienced with Jan, but was not fearful about it.  There was a curiosity about how it would feel, to what extent I would give myself over to the force that compelled me to attempt this, and what I would need to leave behind of my old self in order to accomplish it.  I recognized this workshop as a momentous milestone in my life: I was empowering myself to become a healer, and announcing my intention to the world by enrolling in a massage class.

 

And the Esalen Institute itself, oh my.  Free, evolved, open, loving, real; sun, light, waves, flow, dance.  Esalen was founded in the early 1960’s as a center dedicated to the study of human potential.  The Institute embodies in its subculture the ideals that are pursued there intellectually and experientially: emotional freedom, release of limitations, spiritual connection, enhanced awareness.  Just as life should be lived, a small pocket of spiritual sanity in an otherwise fear-centered world.  Esalen teachers cultivate an atmosphere of acceptance and safety that quickly facilitates open exchange and emotional intimacy.  The Esalen land, sheltered by the mountains and supercharged by the power of mountains meeting the sea, adorned by the loving touches that have been scattered here and there: crystals embedded in rock pathways, wrought iron artwork, the joyously painted artbarn, benches carved from California redwoods.  The constant sound of the ocean as accompaniment to massage.  The incredible experience of giving and receiving Esalen massage: flowing, connecting, listening, responding, accepting, releasing.  Esalen massage guides your body into a place of reawakening memories of wholeness and optimal functions; it helps the body to re-member itself.  The giving and the receiving of Esalen massage are both spiritual practices with the potential of reconnecting us with our DNA, the fount of our whole human capability.

 

When I returned home, there was no question of going to massage school locally; knowing about Esalen, it was the only choice.  Even the geographical distance -- 2500 miles from home – wouldn’t prevent me from pursuing this passion.  I applied for the monthlong Esalen massage certification course coming up in April, and persevered in overcoming all obstacles that might prevent me from going.  My manager at work didn’t want to let me leave for a month because of critical deadlines we were facing that spring; I promised to knock myself out to meet all deadlines before making the trip to California.  Because I wasn’t free to use four weeks of vacation time during the month of April, I requested an unpaid leave of absence, for the first time in 17 years.  My manager relented, and handed me a piece of paper to sign, stating that I understood that my job was not guaranteed when I came back.  I signed without hesitation.

 

Comprehension

 

The month at Esalen forced me to confront my patterns of emotional repression.  The Esalen culture in general, and the emotional intimacy of Esalen massage practice, made it difficult to sustain the cocoon in which I liked to hide myself away.  I found myself recalling Joann Tatum’s message:  you need to pray to heal your desire for separation.  At Esalen, other people seemed to bond very easily, while I sat on the sidelines watching wistfully, longing for that ease of connection yet feeling like I was watching through a glass window.  I noticed how, at the end of a month of daily massage practice with 19 classmates, I cried at saying goodbye, though I had made very little emotional connection with any of them.  My tears, I understood, reflected my longing for the connection that they had all forged with each other.  It became clear that my experience of separation from others originated with me, not with them.  Yes, there was a part of me that desired connection, but there was another part, usually stronger, that created separation.  I still didn’t understand the motivations for this self-imposed exile from human bonding, but I was developing the courage to be honest enough with myself to recognize the role that I played in creating this reality.

 

Part of my reality check came from Gestalt processing experiences at Esalen.  It was there that I first discovered the possibility of checking in with my body to discern emotional responses, and began to devote my attention to the subtleties of feeling my feelings.  Reading books on emotional intelligence and directing my awareness into my emotional body opened a whole new world of personal experience, the experiencing of my person. 

 

A few weeks after my monthlong Esalen stint, I awoke in the middle of the night thinking, Oh my God, I spent the first four weeks of my life in an incubator!  I had known this fact for years, but had never before allowed myself to consider the implications, to know the impact of that experience on my emotional self.  In the 1950’s, touch was considered to be detrimental to the development of premature babies, so hospital practice was to touch incubator babies as little as possible.  By the 1970’s, it became known that touch was essential for infants, and hospitals revised their incubation protocols to include as much contact as possible.  But I was welcomed into the world by being placed in a box and never touched, and in order to get out of that box, I had to grow.  So my first lesson during the first month of my life was to learn how to thrive on isolation.  This realization horrified me, and explained everything about my deeply ingrained emotional and social patterns. 

 

I began searching the Internet for information about the emotional development of incubator babies but found nothing.  A couple of days later, I flew out to New Mexico for a long weekend.  J. picked me up at the Albuquerque airport, and as we drove to Socorro, I remarked, “I spent the first month of my life in an incubator.”  “Me too,” replied J.  “Really?”  I said.  “Do you ever think about that?”  “All the time,” said J.  “I just started thinking about it yesterday,” I informed J.  His response:  “Uh oh!”

 

It helped to know the source of my emotional dysfunction, and to allow myself to sit back and witness the effects of this pattern on my social interactions.  But how to release the pattern?  I still had no idea how that might happen, though I knew that the psychological insight was bringing me closer to a breakthrough. 

 

Liberation

 

I received my first Esalen massage certification in August 2002, after completing 30 practice massages at home.  Now I was trading massage sessions with my friend Jan, and she asked me, “So now that you have a massage certification, how are you going to get your life in line with it?”  I hadn’t thought that far ahead yet.  How could I start using my new massage skills?  I was a full-time corporate employee, supporting myself and my children, giving my prime time to work and family obligations, leaving no time or energy for a second career.  Jan asked, “What would you like to see happen?”  The answer came quickly: “I would like for my employer to offer me a buyout and pay my salary for a year and a half.  That would tide me over long enough for me to start building a business as a massage therapist.”  I had no reason to believe that this might happen, it was pure wishful thinking.  “Well, let’s just put that out to the universe,” said Jan, “so be it!”  “So be it!” I echoed.

 

In September, my eleven-year-old niece was hospitalized with a life-threatening illness, and I found I couldn’t concentrate at work, I felt distraught and spent hours every day researching her condition on the Internet, looking for information to help my brother make a decision about her medical treatment.  With three and a half weeks of vacation time available, I decided to spend the month of October with my family two states away, helping in whatever ways I could. 

 

At the start of November, I returned home and went back to work.  My first day back was hectic; we had invited several potential suppliers to come for the day to conduct a competitive test with their software systems, part of an evaluation process to select some new technology.  In the middle of the day, my manager pulled me into his office for a quick powwow.  “Linda, I have an offer to make you: we are trying to cut headcount by ten percent, so I am authorized to offer a buyout to employees who may be in the wrong profession, or might want a change of lifestyle.  I hope this isn’t unwelcome, we don’t want to lose you and you are absolutely welcome to stay, but I know you went away to massage school in the spring, and I thought maybe you would appreciate this opportunity. We’ll pay your salary and benefits for a year and a half, beginning February 1.”

 

The understanding that my life was being guided through divine intervention was now reinforced unambiguously.  I said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!” and rejoined my business meeting.  Business obligations occupied me so completely for the rest of the afternoon that I completely put the buyout out of my mind and focused on the task at hand.  At the end of the day, I escorted our visitors to the exit, went back to my desk, gathered my things, and walked out of the building.  Getting into my car, the full impact of my new reality struck me:  I’m free!  I can be my own person!  I don’t have to be a corporate slave anymore!  I have complete control of my life!  I’m going to be a healer!   Driving out of the parking lot, I opened the car window and shouted, “Thank you, Jesus.”  Then, thinking that I may not have shouted loud enough, I rolled down the window again and repeated, at full exuberant volume:  “THANK YOU, JESUS!”

 

A few days later, there was an article in the newspaper about Saddam Hussein opening the gates to Iraqi prisons, allowing prisoners to simply leave.  The photo showed men running down the street, arms in the air, eyes and mouths wide with astonishment at their sudden, unexpected liberation.  I knew just how they felt!

 

People occasionally say to me, “It must have taken a lot of courage to leave a job like that and set out on your own.”  In fact, there was no need for courage.  I had asked God, out loud, specifically for a buyout with salary paid for a year and a half, so when this was offered to me two months later, against all odds, it was unthinkable to reject this divine gift.  Easy.

 

I had been a slave to a paycheck my whole life.  I had always had to work in order to have a roof over my head; my time had always been under the control of an employer.  Although I had an excellent job, the only reason I went there every morning was for the income.  In my new life, I promised myself that my choices regarding work would be based on my passion, and not on compensation.  I would do the work that my heart desired, gratefully accepting whatever compensation might come from whatever source.  The buyout income for the first year and a half made it easy to establish that pattern, because I didn’t need to attach monetary value to my work, so I did a lot of pro bono work for people who could benefit from loving touch. 

 

I discovered early on the therapeutic power of this principle:  I had first experienced unconditional love as healing on my first visit to Socorro, and observed the same effects in my clients who received my work as a gift from my heart.  When a healing session is experienced as a love transaction instead of a money transaction, the love is undeniable and works in a deeply spiritual way therapeutically.  Even today, though I need to charge for bodywork in order to pay the rent, I approach the work as love therapy.  My focus is on helping the client to feel totally loved and nurtured, and in the client’s gratitude, he wants to compensate me.  Even though money is exchanged, the spirit of unconditional love dominates the transaction. 

 

On a couple of occasions, clients have asked suspiciously, “Why are you being so kind to me?”  The response, “Because it makes me happy!” may be mystifying to them at first.  But it’s the truth, and I pray that that truth will seep into their hearts and lead them to the first steps on the path of their own self realization journey.

 

Breakthrough

 

My newly jobless state gave me the opportunity to pursue further training at Esalen, so I enrolled in the 500-hour massage certification program, travelling to California several times a year for two years to study massage and energy healing with some of the best teachers in the world.  Although each of the workshops was a professional training course, I also was immersing myself in the spiritual healing energy of the Esalen environment, and on each trip became more participatory in the emotional openness of the Esalen culture.  When I registered for a Chakra Integration workshop with Lioness Parizek, I set my intention for personal healing as well: to use the workshop to heal my desire for separation.  But who knew that it would happen on the way there!

 

I was scheduled to fly Sunday morning from Detroit to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to Monterey, and take the Esalen shuttle to Big Sur in time for the chakra workshop beginning Sunday evening.  Getting out of my car in the parking structure in the Detroit airport, I saw that someone had left an airport luggage cart right next to my parking space, so I gratefully used it to carry my baggage into the terminal.  With the luggage cart, I had to use the elevator to go up one level to Ticketing.  I pressed the call button, the elevator doors opened, I wheeled in my luggage, and the doors closed.  Looking around, I found myself surrounded by six men wearing military fatigues, carrying automatic weapons.  Six big men with big guns looking at me, all of us closed up together in an elevator.  One of these men said to me, “Does this make you feel safe or scared?”  “I think that in this situation I’d rather be safe,” I replied, “so I choose to feel safe and not scared.”  The doors opened, I laughed and pushed my luggage cart out. 

 

At that moment I felt a rush of energy surge up my spine, so powerful that it practically sent me reeling.  I felt electrified, and eternal.  I knew immediately that I had just experienced a kundalini awakening, the rising of spiritual energy which had been residing dormant in the root chakra at the base of the spine.  And I knew why:  I had affirmed out loud, “I choose to feel safe”.  Not “I feel safe,” but “I choose to feel safe.”  I created a reality for myself in which feeling safe with people was a choice that I could make.  I believe that the man who asked me that question in the elevator was an angel with a big gun, sent to park that luggage cart next to my car to get me into the elevator, and prompt me to say those words aloud.  God tapped me again, this time on the tailbone to activate my kundalini, the energy of purification and transformation.  In the yoga tradition, kundalini is described as a form of energy, usually dormant, coiled like a snake at the base of the spine in the root chakra.  Kundalini awakening occurs when the sleeping serpent moves out of the root chakra into the sushumna, the central energy channel which runs through the spinal column.  As kundalini moves upward, chakras are activated, blockages are cleared, psychic senses open, and deep transformational healing occurs on every level. 

 

As I walked through the terminal, with every person that I looked at there was a radiance flowing back and forth between our eyes.  I felt safe enough with strangers in an airport to allow a divine love connection through my eyes, and many people felt safe enough with me to sustain this connection for several seconds.  I felt ecstatic, I was in love with everyone, it was so easy, it was the opposite of the effort that I used to force myself to make with people.  In a moment I had become liberated from the emotional shackles that had bound me for my entire life.

 

In Los Angeles I headed to the Northwest Airlines gate indicated on the monitor for my flight to Monterey.  More than an hour before the departure time, the gate area was entirely vacant except for an airlines agent at the podium, and a teenaged girl sitting next to the wall.  I approached the agent and told him I was on the Monterey flight.  He asked for my boarding pass, and I told him that I wasn’t given a boarding pass in Detroit.  So he asked for my ID, looked me up in the computer, and printed a boarding pass for me.  A middle-aged Pakistani man, his manner was impersonal, disinterested, maybe slightly gruff.  He motioned me over to where the girl was waiting, told me to take a seat and he would be with us in a few minutes to take us down to the secure area where we would get a shuttle to the commuter flight terminal.

 

After some time, the gate agent came over and said, “Follow me,” leading the two of us through a security door and into a secure elevator.  As the elevator took us down to  the tarmac where the inter-terminal bus awaited us, I looked over at the gate agent.  This man who had been quite indifferent toward me minutes earlier was now gazing at me in wonder, a megawatt smile lighting his face, with radiance flowing from his eyes.  We stood there looking at each other like that, completely unguarded, love pouring between our eyes, the whole time the elevator descended, and sustained this eye contact as he walked us out toward the waiting bus.  He finally spoke:  “You don’t have to go yet, you still have an hour until your flight.”  “Well, the bus is here now so I might as well go,” I replied.  “There will be another bus in ten minutes.”  “Oh, but I’ll just go now, the bus is here.”  “Please,” he implored, “I need to talk to you.  Just ten minutes, then I will make sure you get on the next bus, you have plenty of time.”  “Okay,” I agreed, so we ushered the girl to the bus and returned to the terminal, all the time allowing pure love to stream to each other’s eyes. 

 

Back inside the terminal, alone in the secure area, the gate agent hugged me over and over, saying, “I need to know who you are.  I see thousands of people come through here every day, but I’ve never seen anyone like you.  I don’t want you to be my girlfriend, I just need to talk to you and find out who you are.  The next time you come to California, please call me and we can talk.”  He wrote his name and phone number on my ticket folder, and continued to hug me.  I knew that this man was completely sincere; I experienced the pure kundalini connection with his soul. 

 

After ten minutes, he walked me back across the tarmac to get on the bus.  Waving goodbye to this man, I started laughing, realizing that my life can be like this every day, if I just to choose to feel safe with people.  This was emotional freedom, freedom from fear, living in the love realm. 

 

Arriving in the Monterey airport, I had an hour before the Esalen shuttle would arrive.  My third airport of the day, I wondered what would happen here.  I went upstairs to sit alone and meditate in a quiet area to prepare myself for whatever awaited me next.  I took the stairs, no elevator this time!  As I exited out the front door of the terminal to the passenger pick-up area, I turned to walk over to a bench to sit and wait for the shuttle.  A man sitting on the bench stood and walked toward me, once again his eyes shining with love, transfixed on mine.  “Do you need a ride?” he asked.  “No,” I replied, “I have a reservation on the Esalen shuttle.”  “I own a taxi company, I can drive you to Esalen,” he said, gazing at me awestruck.  “I can’t afford a taxi, it costs twice as much as the shuttle,” I said, all the while sustaining this radiant energetic connection through the eyes.  “I’ll take you for half the cost of the shuttle,” he said.  “Please, I need to talk to you, and I love driving to Big Sur.”  “Okay,” I agreed, and we spent three hours making the one-hour drive to Esalen, stopping to sit silently together on the beach and allow the experience of loving connection to permeate our field.  I arrived at Esalen feeling like I had completed the Chakra Integration workshop on the way there! 

 

Miracles

 

Two months later, on a subsequent trip to Esalen, I took my first workshop with Maria Lucia Sauer, a Brazilian trance medium who teaches an energy clearing treatment called Spiritual Massage Lightbody Infusion.  I had not met Maria Lucia prior to the workshop, but had heard about her from Esalen friends, and I knew that her work, in which she channeled healing from an old Brazilian slave named Father John, was beyond my realm of experience.  Once again, I received divine preparation for my Esalen experience en route to Big Sur.

 

I had spent the weekend in the Santa Cruz mountains with my friend K., who was also going to Maria Lucia’s workshop on Sunday.  K. was not a healer, but he occasionally took assorted classes at Esalen.  This would be his first meeting with Maria Lucia too.  On our way to Esalen, we planned to stop at the New Brighton State Beach in Capitola, and shopped at a market in Felton for groceries for a picnic lunch.  Leaving the market, we put our purchases into the back of K.’s pickup truck, and drove twelve miles on Highways 1 and 17 to Capitola.  Arriving at the state beach, K. reached for his wallet to pay the entrance fee.  The wallet wasn’t in his usual safe-keeping place in the center console.  I produced the entrance fee and we drove into the parking lot.  “What did I do with my wallet?” mused K.  “When we put the groceries into the back of the truck, I took off my jacket, I took the wallet out of my jacket pocket, and put the jacket in the back.  I hope I didn’t leave the wallet on the rear bumper,” he said, clearly concerned. 

 

As we walked to the rear of the truck, I knew with complete certainty that the wallet would be there, so it didn’t surprise me at all to see it perched on the bumper.  K. was astounded, so much so that he seemed upset to find his wallet, instead of happy.  “This is not possible, how can it be here, I was driving 70 miles an hour on the highway, it’s not physically possible for a wallet to stay on the bumper like that,” K. sputtered.  I was laughing with glee from the excitement of the touch of divine intervention.  “I don’t know how it happened,” I said, “but I can tell you why it happened:  we are on our way to Maria Lucia’s workshop, where we will need to suspend disbelief, and we’re just getting a little practice on the way there!”  (Years later, when I became familiar with the spirit Entities that work through some of the Brazilian healers, I could imagine them flying down the highway behind K.’s truck, hanging on tight to hold that wallet securely on the bumper.)

 

The week prior to Maria Lucia’s class, I had taken a Process Acupressure workshop at Esalen with Aminah Raheem.  I had the opportunity during that class to receive a healing session from one of Aminah’s faculty assistants, and got on the table with the intention of releasing the chronic tension in my jaw.  Using acupressure to guide me into an altered state of consciousness, the practitioner began to address questions directly to the blockage in my jaw:  How long have you been there?  Who put you there?  Why?  Does it benefit Linda now for you to stay there?  The answers came from someplace other than my mind:  my jaw became constricted when I was a small child, through the intention of an adult in my life who wanted ro suppress me from expressing myself.   And no, that constraint no longer served a useful purpose for me. 

 

In Maria Lucia’s workshop the following week, I expressed out loud my healing intention for a session that I was about to receive:  I want to release the blockage in my jaw.  After two friends guided me into a deep trance state, I had a mental conversation with the person who had created that blockage, asking for love and acceptance of me this week on Thanksgiving.  Then Maria Lucia came over to our table, and began to extract something through my feet, stepping away from the table repeatedly to cough and spit, then returning to complete the extraction.  For as long as I could remember, my jaw had been clenched; I could not consciously relax it.  When I sat up after this healing session, my jaw muscles were soft and comfortable.  It felt like there had been an object inside my jaw that the muscles had been gripping, and now there was just open space for the muscles to soften into.  Over the next few weeks, the jaw muscles still had the habit of wanting to clench, but I could now simply touch those muscles with my hands and remind them to soften, and so they did. 

 

Expansion of Consciousness

 

These healings which enabled me to release old patterns of emotional constraint transformed the quality of my life regarding my relationships with family, friends, clients, and myself.  Over time, as I continued to integrate the healing and erase old psychological and emotional patterns, I became more comfortable expressing myself fully and opening myself to people.  This new ease was essential for my effectiveness as a healer, enabling me to help clients feel connected and listened to in our healing sessions. 

 

Years of study of Buddhism educated me about non-attachment, and my sincere desire for happiness motivated me to apply this principle in more and more areas of my life, enabling me to feel more comfortable with uncertainty and more interested in processes than results.  Years of celibacy gave me opportunity to develop heart-based relationships with men, which provided a model for the spiritual quality of future romantic relationships.

 

My physical health improved steadily over the course of these several years, as all old health problems disappeared, to be replaced with strength, vitality and stamina.  My immune response is so strong that I never suffer from infections; any bug that gets into my system is knocked out within a day.  My eyesight has improved so much that I got the restriction removed from my driver’s license requiring corrective lenses.  I feel calm, happy, and free from fear.  Although I occasionally have slight emotional disturbances, they are mild, infrequent, and quickly released, like shooing away a mosquito.  Depression and stress are such vague memories that I cannot relate to them at all.  My new motto: I’m here, I’m clear, no fear!

 

After I began travelling to Abadiania, Brazil to visit John of God, a trance medium who channels dozens of spirit Entities for the healing of thousands of people each week, the spiritual quality of my life soared dramatically, resulting in a feeling of direct connection with the divine forces that are guiding my life journey.  I began to get clarity on the directions that my work should take, and to gain the motivation and courage to carry through with the work.  Writer’s block dissolved, enabling me to fulfill my agenda for public communication.  Miracles, small and large, occur in my life so regularly that magical occurrences have come to feel normal.  Synchronistic events take me to places and people which fit perfectly into my life.  Timing manifests precisely; divine order prevails.  I feel so deeply loved and guided that I have no fear about my future, and it makes life easy: I just try to get out of my own way and allow and follow. 

 

My healing work reached new levels of therapeutic effectiveness, enabling me to facilitate spiritual and emotional breakthroughs for clients.  After my second trip to Brazil, when I helped a friend during his kundalini awakening there, my clients at home began to experience kundalini activations on the massage table.  The awakening of kundalini is an evolutionary process of spiritual growth and holistic healing.  Kundalini works with an innate intelligence that knows the path to optimal functioning of the human organism; it carries the possibility of realizing our full potential as enlightened human beings.  Most of my kundalini clients are people who had expressed a sincere desire for spiritual transformation in their lives, so the kundalini charge that I carry in my healing work is a great gift to facilitate their growth processes.

 

            A decade ago, when I tried to envision what my ideal life might be, I never imagined that my future might lead me to a place of such joy and peace.  The most overwhelming emotion that I tend to experience now is gratitude, which sometimes drops me to my knees and makes me weep and laugh and shake my head in disbelief.  And I know that there is nothing special about me that allows me to live this blessed life; step by step I arrived here.  You can too, and you, and you, and you.