Training Session

Eighteen hours later I am finally back in Julian’s office. My first official training session.  I’ve been up most of last night, trying to imagine what training in energy healing will be like. Will I get to work on healing a person? Or watch Julian do it? Will there be more books, more theory to learn? Now I’m tired-wired, three cups of coffee in, yawning but excited. I wiggle my toes, resisting the urge to get up and pace around the tiny room while Julian makes both of us tea. “Caffeine-free for you” he says as he hands me a cup of lemon-lavender-mint. I grin and put the tea down next to my chair.

“I’m curious about this experience of dissolving you were having last time.” Julian states. It’s not really a question, so I don’t know what to say. “How did things go with that after you left?” he follows up. “Did the state remain? Or change? How is it now?” I grimace. “It’s mostly gone now”, I say. “It was there for a while, but then… I don’t know what happened.” “Did it stop suddenly?” he asks. “Or gradually?” I blush. “I’m not sure”, I say. “Gradually, I think”, I say. “I think it was still there when I went to bed that day, but mostly not the next morning.” He nods. “That’s fairly common”, he says.

“What is that state?” I ask. I’m a little worried that he’s disappointed. Maybe I should have tried harder to hold on to the dissolving. In the future, maybe. “I think it’s something I call Stillness”, he says. “A state in which thoughts don’t cling to you. How did it feel to you?” I think for a while. “Yeah, stillness fits with it. Like I could watch my thoughts disappear, some of the time. It was peaceful.” Talking about the state actually makes me miss it rather a lot. “Why did it go away?” I ask. He shrugs. “Usually it takes a while for states like that to stabilize”, he says. “At first you’re in and out of them. Then, over time, they become easier to access all the time. You learn the pathway into them, so to speak. Here, try this.” He sits up a little straighter, his eyes half-closed. Then he takes a breath and makes a deep humming sound on the exhale. It feels relaxing somehow, drawing me in.

He keeps humming for a while, a few minutes that feel long, or maybe short. Time has taken on a quality of ambiguity, like touching something that is so cold that you can’t tell whether it’s hot or cold. The hums are a little gutteral, like I can feel them in my bones. Julian gestures for me to join in. I hum shyly, trying to match his pattern of breathing. Julian uses his hands to gesture at the timing, lifting his half-open hand to in front of his face with the in-breath, holding it there to indicate a small pause, then dropping it slowly during the out-breath. There’s something very precise about the gesture, as if he is conducting an invisible orchestra that only he can see. Except that maybe, maybe I can see it too, or feel it, at the edge of perception. Like I can almost, almost tell, if I stretch myself in just the right way.

“Is it back?” Julian asks after another few minutes of humming. I nod. Something, at least, is back. There’s a clarity to my vision, all of my senses really that wasn’t there before. As if my senses themselves have become still, more quiet than normal. Or sharper, maybe. Like I could hear far-away sounds I can’t normally hear, or see far-away things. “My senses feel sharper”, I say. He nods. “Your actual senses?” he asks. “Or your mind senses?” I think for a moment. It hadn’t occurred to me to make the distinction he is making. “With my mind senses”, I conclude. I like the idea of mind senses. It fits somehow. It also makes me feel less crazy. Seeing things that aren’t there seems like a problem. Mind senses seem more… chill.

I close my eyes, humming a little bit more. The darkness envelops me, calms my fraying nerves. I did have a lot of coffee. The darkness feels protective somehow, familiar. It reminds me of sleep, or the space just before sleep, when the hypnogogic images come and time dilutes, or fractures. Oddly enough I’m not tired now. Just very relaxed. “Try humming into your forehead”, Julian advises. I try humming into my forehead. Somehow that instruction makes sense, even though I’m pretty sure that technically I must be using the same resonating spaces as I was before. My attention sharpens in my forehead, takes on a more precise quality. I open my eyes. Things in the room feel less real than normal, less physical. Like I could look through them if I really wanted to. Julian, too, feels less real than normal. Less like a person I’m relating to, and more just like a bundle of person-related sensations. Like I’m watching the patterns come and go, in dark, slow waves.

Later, at home, I’m still surfing the black waves, when I got to bed. I’m determined not to lose them overnight again. But there is something about the waves that is a little disconcerting. Like I’m not quite sure where they’re going to take me. They feel a little too outside of my control. Like a dream that could turn into a nightmare. Or not. But ultimately I don’t get to decide whether the dream is good or bad, safe or scary. I drift a little deeper into the blackness as I come closer to sleep. Some of the edges of my consciousness feel sharp and slightly dangerous. Some of the edges feel soft. I let sleep take me.