The last month or so has been a real upheaval for me. I was puttering happily along in my life, gearing up with jewellery and doing well at work and seeing a boy or two here and there. Then this guy, a friend of a friend, and I started chatting online. After a 2-hour online conversation (Jan 29th, I looked it up for posterity!), we met for some coffee that turned into a four hour talk in the parking lot. It was way more fun than I’d expected. He was way funny and way gentle and way sarcastically adorable; to be honest I’d originally thought he didn’t actually like me, but he does the same thing I do: if I’m saying something at all mean, assume it’s sarcasm. After this, he openly declared war on my peaceful dating scheme with his intention to have me as a girlfriend. Although I was intrigued, I certainly wasn’t up for anything like that. I told him so, despite the fun we were having. But we kept talking about it, and I was panicking a little because he was all, “we have so much in common,” and I was all, “ack ack that’s how it started with kevin and look how THAT turned out!” … so we’d back off. And then we had a conversation about my buying socks online that ended like so:
Laird: it makes me want to kiss you on the nose..but im still gonna make fun
Me: that sentence, right there? exactly why i didn’t laugh at you when you said the word “girlfriend”
Still holds true. Anyway, in what seemed like a long time but looking at our chat history was really only about a week, we had started spending nearly all our time together. Neither of us has a place to really hang out, parent-free, so we spent a lot of time in tim horton’s parking lot. We had lots of fun, for sure (and burned a LOT of gas trying to keep the car warm). But Being A Girlfriend? I really didn’t know. What made it worse was the more I liked him, the more I had flashbacks of how it started with Kevin and it would throw me into a blind panic because I could not, would not, go through that again.
It was at around this point that a friend of mine went for an Integrated Energy Therapy, or IET, session. She found it a complete epiphany. The woman, Kathy, helped her by cutting ties with her ex and healing some of her issues using vocalised mantras and energy work. I was thinking that I should probably give that a try, because all of the hurt and anger at kevin was being pulled out of the dregs of my psyche due to this new guy, and I was worried that I was rejecting him unfairly; and in any case, obviously stuff was bothering me that I didn’t know was still there. I figured some tie-cutting might just do the trick. So I made an appointment.
Now, this might be the part where I lose some of you. I know y’all aren’t into the metaphysical as much as I am; some of you might think it’s malarkey. But this is what happened. The way Kathy described it is that even though she uses Angels, really it’s your higher self doing the healing work, which makes perfect sense to me.
The idea for the IET is that your negative experiences live in your cells and you have to remove that energy and replace it with positive energy. My friend had a complete epiphany during her session, and in the meantime I was having all this angst about Laird being so awesome and me being so freaked out. There were specific issues but y’all don’t need to really hear it, it’s kinda personal.
So I thought it was time to get rid of some issues and it seemed like this IET with Kathy might be the way. I mentioned it to Laird online and subconsciously clenched waiting for the mockery, and instead he says, “I could open your chakras for you if you like” !!! Turns out he’s wiccan. Or he was, he is a little out of belief these days. But still! I have all these preconceptions of him based on past relationships, and it wasn’t fair to either of us and I really needed to get rid of it all before I could move in any direction. So I called up Kathy and went to see her.
We discussed all of this and my insomnia and my knee/shoulder and my inability to make any decisions, ever, right down to “I have to eat AGAIN??” … she decided that the first treatment would be Reiki to cleanse out some toxins. It was really relaxing and amazing. She worked on my shoulder and knee and they felt tingly and like they were being cleaned out. She also did this thing called the “Healing Codes,” aimed at my insomnia. There are a certain number of “issues” with “codes” to fix them, each illness or whatever linked to a certain “issue” - and when we looked up insomnia? It was Love. Self-love, in fact. Oh my. So the “codes” are using your fingers as little laser beams and pointing them at certain areas of your body - mine are the forehead (the third eye), jaw, temple and adam’s apple. You do it in a certain sequence, and there’s a sort of meditiative phrase you say and you imagine white beams of light from your fingertips. She did it for me first and when she did the forehead, it actually BURNED. I almost pushed her hand away. It was really intense. I’ve been doing (or just visualizing) these “codes” each time I go to bed, and I’ve slept every single night since then.
In the middle of the Reiki treatment, she did a thing where she “cut ties” with Kevin for me. The idea was to visualize him above me, with our solar plexes connected by cords - she says these cords attach to anyone we have relationships with, and sometimes when the relationship ends they get torn and jagged and you leak emotion everywhere - anyway, I was supposed to visualize him but the thought of it made me clench and it was too hard, so I just listened to her. I tried but it was hard and I was going to cry and I didn’t want to. I felt like I should have. She aimed happiness and light at him, and then cut the cords, and pushed the jagged edges back into me, gently pressing on my solar plexus, healing them and saying out loud that she was returning my power to me. As much as I didn’t want to think of him, when she cut those ties it was a really strong feeling of relief.
At the time I didn’t think it worked because I couldn’t - wouldn’t - visualize him, although she said not to think that, she knows it did anyway; but now that I think of how I’ve felt ever since, I think she was right. I felt lighter and happier. I didn’t distrust Laird anymore (because the only reason I was experience with others; his own behaviour put the lie to it), and was completely happy when we were together without thoughts of how it’s all going to fall to crap soon so don’t enjoy it too much.
So then life went on. I had my thirtieth birthday and took four days off work, which was really nice and relaxing. I spent some time (OK, all my time) with Laird, some of it snuggled on a bed, even! And this past Wednesday, I had my second session with Kathy, where we were going to do the actual IET.
Before we started, she went over what we did the last time - she’d obviously made notes after I’d left. She asked if I’d had any residue from the tie-cutting, and I wasn’t sure what she meant but an episode on Saturday popped into my head.. she explained that after cutting ties with someone, we’ll often think of them or see them or hear about them. So on Saturday, hanging out on the bed with Laird, I started to get fierce panicked urges to cry, and I finally gave in - poor Laird held me while I sobbed; held me hard; but I was thinking that the last time I was in a bed with anyone it was Kevin and he spent six months pointedly not touching me, and it just came in waves; and of course every time I cry I think of Ethan and it gets worse, and I thought oh screw it, I haven’t had anyone to hold me while I cry in years, so I’ll just let it out until it’s gone. Anyway, Kathy says that’s the residue she meant 
It felt good to put a name on it.
My knee was viciously sore, and I was limping that day, so she did some Reiki on it first. She put her hand about two feet above it, in the air, and said it was full of congested energy and that it was spiking - and she pointed to where it hurt most - and I said yes, it’s throbbing. So she pulled all that out and I could feel it going, which was totally wild.
Then we got into the IET. I picked three cards with Issues on them that were what I had to work on. She read out each card in sequence and had a little thing to say about each as she did her hands-on/Reiki type deal. I asked her yesterday to send me the mantras for the issues I picked, and she very graciously did so:
Guilt: clears feelings of having done wrong in some way that has never been forgiven. Guilt over past actions or inactions. Birth beliefs or sinful actions. This results in limitatons in life and creates a feeling of being separate from Spirit.
Heart: Clears feelings of having our love rejected or having the love we are experiencing cut off. On the mild end this can be experienced as disappointment, on the severe end. iIt can feel like betrayal (stabbed in the back). Often related to issues of Trust.
Stress and powerlessness: Clears feelings of being powerless resulting from a physically or emotionally dangerous situation that we can neither fight nor run from. Prevalent in dysfunctional families, relationships or work environments.
For Guilt, which I actually thought, “WTF, I don’t feel guilt!,” she laid her hand on my forehead and spoke about removing guilt.. and I could FEEL her pulling the guilt out of the top of my head. I couldn’t see her but it felt like ropes being pulled out of my skull. Crazy. I don’t know where the guilt came from, but it was huge and it was there. She said I let go a lot at the beginning and then it dissipated.
When she got to the heart, and read out that mantra, I just about bawled, because that was exactly what was wrong with me. I felt like there’s no way Laird could be real, that he’d turn and change his mind and leave me hanging. She put her hands on me, my chest and back, and surrounded my heart and asked for the mistrust to be gone, and to fill it back up with love and to be open to receive the love I deserved. When she was doing this, I felt an actual stabbing pain in my heart.
At some point in the evening, she said most people don’t feel anything when she does this type of thing.
For the stress and powerlessness, I was hanging onto it apparently, but only on my female (left) side; I joked that my right side (”male” energy is stored there, she says) was messed up due to my eye, knee, and shoulder; she stopped and said that was due to a past life in which I’d been crushed and was feeling blame and trauma. Yikes! That part’s pretty sketchy, she said she saw it.. but hey, whatever works. She replaced guilt with innocence, and mistrust with the ability to allow love in, and stress and powerlessness with power and strength.
Then she asked if my wrists were bothering me, and I said yes, this repetitive strain injury in here.. and she said she’d do a hand massage. HEAVENLY. Then it occurred to me to ask what made her ask me that.. she said she saw a pain in my wrists. Ok!
So then we cleared that up.. and she checked my chakras, and my heart chakra was all closed …but it opened as we were talking. Actually.. it just occurred to me that that happened after I said out loud that I’d closed my heart and that was exactly what was wrong with me. Huh. Also, she determined the exact same state of my chakras via pendulum that Laird predicted by method of simply knowing me.
Then I sat up and we chatted and drank some water (she says it restores energy) and I could feel this shuddering, shivering muscle thing happening across my chest muscles. She asked if I was shivery, and I said yeah, it’s weird.. I can’t figure out what it’s like.. it’s like I’m FROZEN but I’m not.. but it reminded me of something else, I couldn’t figure it out. She said that it was me letting go of all the mess, and the healing was taking place.
So THEN I picked a card out of another deck, like tarot only not - and it was “Time to Move On”.. HA! Talk about getting hit by a clue-by-four. It said it was time to let go of the old and leave room for the new. I picked another card and it said I was craving body movement - like, I dunno, the dancing I was looking forward to on my birthday and didn’t get to do?
And THEN, as I put on my coat, i started to laugh because I realized what that shuddery feeling felt like: Christmas morning! That excited, happy, exhausted, sleep-deprived, happy happy feeling I got on xmas morning when I was a kid.
HOLY.
On the way over there and back, I’d been listening to this CD Laird had made me with his crazyass metal music on it, with all kinds of commentary in between being all sweet and funny and I just about burst my cheeks with the smiling and laughing.
When I saw Laird I told him to ask me again.. and now, I’m a girlfriend Yay us!
