This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, entitled Strange Happenings: Journal of a Starseed.
During the same summer that I'd begun to learn and practice Reiki, I took a Child Psychopathology class at my university. The class had a textbook that we used, and as this was a subject that really interested me, I kept up with the reading assignments given (which is more than I can say for many other classes I've taken throughout my long and tedious academic career.)
Textbooks today all have a basically similar layout – there are chapters further divided into sections, and every now and then, a little text box is inserted onto a page, often in a different color that marks the text box as being an addition. This text is not the same dry, intellectual discussion as the rest of the chapter. It is usually made up of a personal experience or an example of something. These, therefore, are the best parts of the book. I have to wonder if more students would complete given reading assignments if the book were reversed so that the actual, personal information took up the majority of the text with the dry, academic-speak in those little boxes!
Anyway, I forget the subject of the entire chapter I'd been assigned to read, but no matter – what actually matters here is one of those little text boxes. This one spoke of two brothers, ages 5 and 8, roughly (I don't remember exactly what the ages were, but they were around there.)
The brothers were walking home from school one day when they were overtaken by a group of slightly older bullies. The bullies wanted to take money from the older brother. Somehow the kids all ended up in an abandoned building with the bullies holding the younger brother out a high window – 4 stories up, perhaps? 6 stories maybe? It was high enough, in any event, for the following to happen. The younger brother was dropped out of the window and the older brother ran down the stairs, hoping that he could catch him. Of course, he was wrong, and the younger brother died.
That was all the text box said. And yet, something happened to me so that even typing about it now gives me a sinking feeling in my stomach. For days afterward, I would have small, silent, unpredictable panic attacks thinking about this event. My mind's eye could see the event clearly, and with added details that weren't given in the book – the sight of the younger brother falling, the younger brother who trusted his older brother to take care of him. The older brother, who had always taken care of him, racing down the stairs, flight after flight. I could feel his breath panting, his heart racing, his sneakers pounding against stairs as he ran, faster and faster, repeating words in his head.
Please. Please. I can make it....
And then his explosion out of a door, and the sight-
There I can't stay with the vision anymore because it is as if a bomb goes off in my mind. There's a tearing, a rending, and a wordless, soundless anguish that is all-encompassing and beyond true verbal explanation.
This anguish would hit me walking across campus, or getting out of my car at the grocery store. Sitting at my desk at work my mind would slide to the side, feeling that racing heart and hearing those words repeated, mentally, in that passionate whisper.
Was I imagining this?
Why would I imagine this?
It wasn't as if I could just stop – this feeling and flash of memory would overtake me at completely unexpected times, rendering me speechless and sticking in my mind like a splinter, so I was unable to think clearly about anything else.
I went to my Reiki teacher and asked her what was happening. Susannah told me about when she had initially began to practice Reiki years ago – she said that she hadn't gotten her “screens” up enough so that she didn't literally feel others' pain while she worked on them. One woman, I was told, had been tortured by many bones in her body being broken, one by one, deliberately. As Susannah worked on this woman, she could see and feel the physical trauma until she was exhausted and deeply in physical and psychological pain.
Susannah told me that she'd spoken to her guides, asking that screens be put up in front of her, so that she could see what she needed to see to perform a good healing, but not so that she would be injured or debilitated by helping someone who'd had bad things happen to them. After she learned how to set up her screens, she said, she hadn't had that same effect come. Perhaps I could try that.
It didn't exactly work for me.
It took me a few years to be able to both witness another's pain and not be paralyzed by it. For me, this does not happen from using screens, but rather from remembering that yes, suffering happens, it does every day, it's happening right now, but ME feeling this suffering does not make it stop. In fact, if I did feel everyone's suffering, I wouldn't be able to get out of bed in the morning. The way that I can help, however, is to yes, see and witness the suffering (and sometimes even feel it,) but keep myself divided enough so that I can still hold enough strength and health within me to actually be a beneficial presence. Sometimes a word or a touch is needed to help another person, but sometimes all I'm supposed to do is be there, pumping in as much light as I can to whatever area I find myself in.
Once I realized that keeping myself a little closed off was actually helping others, it was an easier thing to do. Nowadays, yes, I still experience things deeply – for instance, while writing about the brothers, I felt that old sinking and despairing that so impacted me before – but I can also swim up out of it without leaving part of myself behind. Hurting oneself does not make another person's pain less. Remember that, and we'll all find our way, once we figure out what works best for us.
