Tales From a Healing Session gone Bad.

Hello. It’s me again. Two blog posts in a week, say Whaaat? I find that I blog more in January and February. I enjoy this lull after the holidays, the cozy days indoors by the fire, and SO MUCH to contemplate. From an astrology perspective, Capricorn has never been my season, and Aquarius has always been it for me. I have also found my relationships with Cappies to be a little complicated. I apologize to any Cappies out there. I do respect that Cappies are Earth signs though, and TBH I’ve never put too much emphasis on Astrology because I’ve always felt like my sign (Aries) and I were never well matched. Three out of four of my grandparents are Scorpios though which could explain a lot. However, anytime I have checked into Numerology, wow! Spot on. Mind blown. Also, Angel numbers. Apparently, my angel number is 11:11 because I see this number all the time. I challenge any readers to think of a number that reoccurs repeatedly in their lives, and to Google it with “angel number,” you may be surprised.

So, other than writing an intro about Numerology and Astrology, I bring this to the forefront because I am noticing a lean towards mysticism, the stars, energy, the Chakra system, patterns, and symbols because I’m trying to find greater meaning in life. Let’s face it, since the dawn of time, man has been looking towards the heavens and when times are sketchy that is when one truly contemplates, “What does this all mean?” Ha-hum… and with this political climate, sickness breathing down our necks, global warming, climate change, catastrophic tornadoes, fires, hurricanes, and the statistical data on Covid alone it doesn’t take a deep dive into the human psyche to configure why spiritual movements are taking off.

I had to write an interesting paper in college once about the emergence of Frankenstein and how oddly, that novel written by 18 year old Mary Shelley may have had something to do with peculiar weather patterns that were due to a volcanic eruption in Indonesia which were later dubbed “the year without a summer.” Weather was very central in the telling of Frankenstein. It makes one ponder, what great works are going to come to the forefront from the Coronials or the Covid years.

I recently watched Don’t Look Up on Netflix which was a complete satire on climate change, social media, and the human condition during great times of duress. It’s interesting trying to analyze what is happening now in real time versus how these times may be perceived in the future. Even weirder, do we even have a future and my hunch is telling me that if, god willing, there is some future humanities course on these crazy as F times, there will be much to say about this Great Global Awakening.

I don’t have the answers. I wish all the mysteries of life could be summed up in a blog post. I do know that there are multiple resources out there that claim to have all the answers on WHAT is the meaning of all this, and here’s your path to peace. I’m just going to say, that I am seeing an emergence of influencers, retreats, shamanic healers, gurus, holistic healers, and energy workers of all kinds. There is so much happening right now to each other and to this little world of ours that could use an intense amount of healing. It’s tough as nails being part of a world that seems hell bent on destruction.

I am not going to be one to knock another off the road to higher meaning, you do you. I mean really…that is the whole point of this blog post. I have been on this road to higher meaning, and ultimately I have come to the conclusion that it’s not linear. Spirituality is being pitched like everything else and one should not take this matter lightly. There are also so many purveyors of peace and spirituality out there that it’s becoming increasingly noticeable that not all of those “pitching” spirituality and healing have our best interests.

I recently read an article, about a group that would tell their followers to watch a speech and if someone blinked their eyes three times that was a sign, or if certain numbers presented particular patterns that was a sign also, and ya-da ya-da. The bottom line is people blink at random, and you can find patterns in MOST ANYTHING. Someone can tell you they’ve had contact with your dead grandmother who started with the letter R, who was named Rena but it turns out it was Ruth but hey… it was close, it started with an R, so you will give them the benefit of a doubt and BOOM people are on the hook. There are multiple rabbit holes people can go down and opportunists know this.

Personally, I know people who are hurting who have lost loved ones and who are desperate for answers and closure, or any word of any kind. I’m still baffled as to why they’d feel going to some psychic and paying exuberant amounts of money would suddenly open a portal where these strangers would suddenly have on the spot access to family members that their closest and dearest family members did not. Are these spiritual realms really a pay to play?

I have yet to see a Disney movie where there’s a talking willow or a dead grandmother appearing to a grand daughter at sea where the grand daughter had to pay exuberant amounts of money first. Not that spiritual realms should be defined by Disney, but come on. In essence, if Christianity itself were my chosen path I’d have to say two things have struck out for me most when seeking mentors or guides.

1). You will know them by their fruits

2). Well you know…there’s that temple story where Christ was upset about the exchange of money in exchange for God.

I attended an Emergence seminar earlier this year for intuitives, healers, and empaths of all kinds. Like I said, it was a mixed bag of tricks. At the close of the seminar, a woman went “under” and therefore her spirit guides took over and spoke to us. I found it interesting that her guides mentioned YOUTUBE, accessing spirituality via social media, and a few pitches for the woman’s book. Also, my gut was telling me something just wasn’t quite right. I mentioned this later in a social group and I was told (or rather gas lit) into believing that this was probably due to my own trauma, or that this woman had brushed up against my own wound, and my inability to embrace the message was something I needed to heal within myself. I was left perplexed, bewildered, and confused by that too.

I was gifted a free healing session by someone in exchange for favors I had done for them. I was reluctant at first because I was seeing signs of instability in the person offering the session. I don’t take that stuff lightly. Call me superstitious but If someone says they are going to open a portal to the spiritual realm, and a bunch of healing energies, spirits, or ancestors are going to come into it, I want to make sure that the right people are going to show up.

I had convinced myself that I was overthinking things. What could be the harm in showing up to a place where there were just a bunch of candles, incense, Crystal grids, sage burning, chanting, and placement of stones on my body. I mean, after all I was being “gifted” with this energy session which was out of character for the healer and they were offering me something meaningful to them to me and here I was shooting them down. I thoroughly believed the intention for the session was good so I decided to proceed.

Prior to my healing session I was told that I was an empathic intuitive who had many gifts but I had “blockages,” “dark chords,” “past trauma,” and “so much fear,” that were preventing me from becoming my higher self. I needed to stop running from what I could become and rise up into my divine self. There were words thrown around like “earth angel,” “star seed,” and “Queen of the faeries.” My healing session was to be done on Winter Solstice at my divine angel number-you guessed it, eleven.

I felt uneasy honestly, but convinced myself that this was because of past trauma and growing up in a patriarchal “cult religion.” I had issues with those who had contact with the spiritual realms because quite honestly, I have relatives who claimed to see things or “who talked to spirits” who are now dead because of it, so the lines between spirituality and quite frankly mental illness are very obscure for me.

The night before I had my session I prayed. I can’t say i am the most fervent prayer or that half the time I even know who to pray to but I prayed because you know…here I was going out on a limb to have a healing session so why the hell not. I was so overwhelmed with life, my children, other things, etc. that I just asked one simple question, it was pretty much, “Hey-I don’t have the time to do a deep dive ponder into this, and this thing is happening tomorrow, so if there’s any reason why I shouldn’t do it-hey, just let me know,” and I went to sleep.

Okay folks, if you have read my blog post to this point, Kudos to you because this is where the story GETS REALLY WILD. I had a dream. Okay, night terrors are not new to me. I have them frequently. This one felt real, beyond real. This was one of those where I could not tell if I was dreaming or awake, and I woke up yelling with my heart pounding, and and I was screaming, and my husband was waking me up telling me everything was okay, God bless him. I went back to sleep.

The next day, I was at odds with myself. I mean I had a healing session at eleven. I didn’t know if I should call the whole thing off or what. I decided to listen to some comforting music before my session and I brought a few items with me because I’m superstitious I guess. I also wore some crocheted hand warmers my mother had made me for Christmas. Everything I wore and did before my session felt intentional.

My attitude was the same as it was before I said my prayer the night before, I guess you can say I was testing god, the universe, or whatever. I was like, if there’s any reason why I should not do this session intervene, or at least I’ll play it be ear. I felt weak honestly, and I really felt that the answer would be to just show up and I’d know what to do when I got there.

I get there. I had decided that there were two things that would exceed my comfort zone. I was not to ingest any substance offered to me, and if this was a situation where “someone else” was going to be doing the session I was to back out. I also decided that I would mention my dream before the whole thing got started.

I get to the session. I realize immediately that 1). I did not like the energy in the room, like it literally took me back the moment I stepped into it. 2). The scents were so not me. They were over powering and I’ve always been highly sensitive to scents. Like, they felt sickening, like they’d be with me hours after the session was over and even after taking a shower. These scents felt all wrong and incompatible with who I was as a person even after I was told they were divinely chosen specifically for me.

Okay, so there was the scent thing. I mentioned the dream thing and that was blown over like it was nothing. Well, that didn’t feel like nothing to me. I was actually basically told that my “fear” was keeping me from my higher self. Then two things happened that made me REALLY uncomfortable. I was told to take off my hand warmers and I immediately became defensive. WHY? Why must I take off my hand warmers and I was told “someone else” would be doing the session. “A higher spiritual being” or whatever. Those were my boundaries. I asked why the person doing it couldn’t just do it and they immediately became exasperated and angry with me.

Here is one thing I will say that did make me feel comfortable. There was a playlist of songs that I shared with that person that I had chosen that they integrated into my own session. Songs that always gave me peace way before my session was even a blip on the horizon. For some reason, they had set my Crystal grid up as a selenite cross beneath my chair. Their were prayer candles among many other things. Actually prayer candles I had gifted this person on an outing we had on another day. Prayer candles or all things Catholicism have never been part of my religious upbringing but I always found peace in them. The Jesus candle was at the center and on each side of the prayer candles there were Frankincense and Myrrh candles, one to warm each palm if one were so inclined. Before walking into my healing session I grabbed a handful of snow in each hand. Having no idea why.

OKAY. I’m not going to say what happened. I’m just going to say that my session started and it did not finish. Without knowing anything about energy work or healing, it turns out there was a great deal of significance to the hands. Apparently my palms were needed, that is why I was told to take off the hand warmers, and I opened my giving hand but refused to open my receiving hand so the session could not continue. I did end up putting my hands over the Frankincense and Myrrh candles to warm them and bring closure because honestly I felt that was my only ticket out of there. I felt completely trapped.

Our session closed with with some dialogue, some uncomfortable and unexplainable realizations, some writing on paper, some burning, and a farewell. I thought the session ended on a positive note but apparently it did not. Basically my intention for the session was that the things that needed to go would go, and the things that needed to stay would stay, as it turns out, a friendship ended. Our friendship was over.

I left the session confused and bewildered and saying to myself, WTF just happened? I knew it would be days to process what had just happened. Quite frankly, I am still processing this. So I am writing this one out and blogging this sh*t. I mean, after my session I felt exhausted, like physically drained and exhausted and I was right, the scents did not leave me. I had trouble sleeping, and I felt discombobulated. I struggled to make sense of all of it, and I felt like something significant had been taken from me that I can’t put my finger on, that is coming back slowly.

I can’t even say the session was the worst part although my very first impression the moment I walked into my session was that it was powerful and not in a good way. It felt overpowering, in a way I did not want to be overpowered by. It was everything that was said afterward that I truly struggled with. I was told that I did not respect the healers craft, that I needed to look inward, that the session never should have happened, that I tried to take control of the session the ENTIRE time. That I planned a take over from the very beginning…I was struggling with my ego.

Those words felt like a hairpin on a trigger to me and it snapped. I was like, “LOOK, first of all this was MY healing session. How DARE you tell me how my healing should be managed. I have autonomy over myself at all times and I submit my will to NO ONE if it does not feel right PERIOD. ” Also, I had a dream. I have NO CONTROL over my subconscious or how my OWN INTUITION manifests itself to me. The answer was no.

They then tried to interpret my dream for me and it was so off base and out in left field but also brushed against an old wound I had told her previously in confidence. I was like NO. Nice dream interpretation but no. I went to bed with a specific question in mind and the answer was NO, there’s nothing deeper than that. It was very specific. So stop trying to use my own wounds against me to whip me into submission. That was the end of it. That was the end of the conversation.

A week later, they apologized to me for doing the session in the first place and again I reiterated that the worst part was the stuff that was said after the fact and they told me that I “had made that whole entire conversation up in my head.” I had “imagined” everything. So there I was, being gas lit. Then they said something that reminded me of that scene in Stardust where Michelle Pfiefer’s character eats the chicken laced with truth serum. She mentioned something to me so casually and offhandedly and it completely reminded me why I hadn’t trusted her in the first place nor should I trust her now, then, or maybe ever. She was oblivious to it. I caught every damn word.

Okay, so this is not a blog post intended to be a she said…I said….I despise those kind of loops, but the loop I have struggled with the most is how do I go about this whole damn mess now. I took her advice and looked inward. I made the rounds of asking myself what was it in me that resonated with someone like her? How was I taken like that? I also pondered the parts of our session that felt supernatural and scary and wondered about “spirit” and “mental illness,” and the difference between the two. I even pondered if I needed to find another shamanic healer to fix the whole mess.

All of this brushed against old hurts with mental illness within my family and how perhaps subconsciously my draw to the entire thing was that I thought I could gain insight into her that I never got with my own family. I traced and retraced those circles and my final conclusion was what it was with my own family members I had lost previously to mental illness. The answer was that sometimes you are just never going to make sense out of crazy.

My sister gave some valuable insight. She was like, “Rachelle, maybe you are looking at it all wrong. This was a healing session. Your past hurts have been about being too complicit and generous with yourself to your own detriment and not using your voice. You found your voice. You set a boundary and a strong one. This is not your journey anymore. If a “healer” can’t see that or that the session was also meant to give them sobering insight into themselves as well as you than they are not the healer they say that they are.

I am proud of myself, truly I am. Each day, all of this becomes more clear. I consider myself to be a rational person in normal circumstances. I have had things happen in this life where I have felt hurt tremendously because someone close to me was not the voice of reason in the room. I strive to be the voice of reason in the room. I feel in these crazy times the voice of reason has left the room A LOT. Current events have been very triggering. This feels like my “Don’t Look up Moment.” How do I discern truths when even the masses seem to be at odds with what I know to be right within myself?

So, my rational self tried to research my way out of this. I looked for articles on energy healers, which led me down this bizarre path to cultism. I tried to look for articles published by others who had negative experiences with energy healing, wholistic healers, spiritual realms, Gurus, shamanic healing, Reiki, etc. I scanned through books at Crystal shops, fell down a Q anon rabbit hole again, and I’ll tell you what, I didn’t find a lot of negative articles about people who had small beans suburban healing sessions like the one I had. I did find a few articles about retreats but for the most part they were positive.

I did notice that large groups like Q-anon are sounding alarms, and recently the downside to this is picking up steam in Hollywood. Take for example Nicole Kidman in Nine Perfect Strangers or the Movie Midsommar. I ran across an interesting article in Vanity Fair about a female Kundalini Yoga leader who just recently died titled, The Second Coming of Guru Jarat which HBO intends to make a docuseries out of.

I mean, I did not want to get too far away with myself. There are the inner circles within the larger circles and the cults within the cults, and just because spiritual movements may arise say within say a local Crystal shop, a retreat, or a Yoga Community Center it does necessarily make these things harmful. I did however, run across a few articles about self-centeredness and Narcissism that seem to have psychological attributes in the Wellness community. Scientific American ran an article last year titled, The Science of Spiritual Narcissism. The title of the article is followed by this eye opening statement: “Self enhancement through spiritual practices can fool some of us into thinking we are evolving and growing when all we’re growing is our own egos” (Kaufman).

Basically, the best article I found on my small beans Shamanic/Reiki healing session was posted by Awake and Align titled, The Spiritual Narcissisist: Exposing the Toxic Messiah(and their Mind Games…) In essence, the article stated that spiritual movements are not necessarily bad, but narcissism and spirituality are a toxic mix. This was an excellent reading and I will cite below. I would love to paraphrase the whole thing but won’t, one must really read the article. It has helped me immensely. I will go over a few points that I wish I had known.

1). Spiritual Narcissists try to establish a co-dependent relationship. You will find yourself becoming more alienated from your friends and family, they try to monopolize your energy.

2). Things will seem idyllic at first, but approval can be withdrawn in an instant. Emphasis will be placed on personal development where you will be reprimanded and gaslighted, and your worthiness will be tested. Their flaws will be projected onto you. You’ll be reminded that you are not putting in the work, you are not surrendering, or you have no self awareness. Sound familiar?

3). Blind faith is a must to obtain higher knowledge. The cost is giving your power away.

4). There is an intense amount of charisma and magnetism. They are gifted and speak a modicum of truths that aren’t entirely fiction but they abuse power.

5). You will be love bombed and praised. Spiritual Jargon, and reverent ambience will make it hard to decipher the “smoke and mirrors.”

6). You will drop your boundaries and share intimate details about your life that they will use to manipulate you or work in their favor. You are reprimanded for questioning, your life conforms to theirs, your lifestyle choices become familiar, hive mentality is initiated, and independent thought is reprimanded as “not having higher knowledge.”

What I loved most is this article is that it not only gave really great pointers on how to spot spiritual narcissists but how to HEAL from them, and the answer is very simple. CUT THEM FROM YOUR LIFE. No half-assed measures, cut them from your life. You also need to distance yourself spiritually, you need to let it go. These people can not dwell rent free in your head. Learn from it and keep the focus on you and not them. Introspection and hindsight are everything. You can’t heal these people. You must heal yourself. Learn to self source or source from something that is the source of everything where ego minded spiritualists love to take all the credit, but the credit was never theirs. What a journey, what a lesson. So, my advice to anyone right now is to seek higher realms and understanding all you want within these current mind-blowing and drastic nuances to life, but be careful, be very careful, so many of us are exceptionally vulnerable right now, myself included (obviously).

Until Next Post!

Rachelle Whiting

Link:

Boomer, Sam. “The Spiritual Narcissist: Exposing the Toxic Messiah (and their Mind Games…) Awake and Align. https://awakeandalign.com/the-spiritual-narcissist/. Accessed 6, January 2022.