Cindy plopped down in the chair in my office and we started to talk. She was a corporate finance manager. She disliked her job, but was committed to staying on because she was close to retirement. Her energy field felt warm, yet also curiously brittle. Being around her felt like wearing a beautiful coat that was made out of very fragile material.
Cindy told me she had tried all kinds of standard allopathic medicines and drugs over the last ten years to help with the colitis. Nothing seemed to work very well. So she was exploring energy work to see if it could help.
Lately, the pain and bloating had gotten progressively worse. She also complained that her sleep had been chronically poor. In fact, she could not remember a time recently when she had had a good night’s rest. She also had some problems with TMJ, from grinding her teeth from tension.
Intuitively, she already knew that stress aggravated all of these issues. Yet she felt stuck, in terms of how to move forward.
I asked her what was going on for her these days. Cindy told me that she had recently married, and already the marriage was experiencing strain. There were ongoing issues with her new husband on money, on what he felt she should be doing with her time, and in other areas. Cindy felt rejected and very alone in a house with a new husband who did not seem to understand her. Then there were also two teenage stepsons who had their own ideas about how they should treat their new step mother. She felt alone and sad.
She told me that a major theme she had always had throughout her life was the feeling of being rejected by other people because she was “too different”. She had not felt she fit in when she was single, and she did not feel she fit in now that she was married either. She felt “too different”.
I asked her to tell me more about what she meant by being “too different.” She said it was as if other people did not appreciate the side of her that felt strongly about things. They didn’t particularly like how drawn she was to being around people who were different from her, she said. Cindy had always been drawn to people a bit off the beatnen path, people who were different than her standard white, middle class suburb upbringing. Indeed, she chafed at the conventionality of her life, yearning for adventure and being able to be a bit more free, somehow. She loved foreign language and culture, things that her immediate family did not. A talented actress, she loved participating in theatre, something her family had never approved of. And I noticed her fierce support for the causes of people not accepted by the mainstream, how she staunchly defended those who were being oppressed in the world.
Cindy expressed her sadness that others around her did not wish to see this part of her. In fact, she said, it was as if other people found this intensely vibrant and unconventional side of her rather unbecoming, or “too much”. She said it was as if other people felt uncomfortable when she got too excited about things that interested her.
I could feel that part of her rejected this part of herself as well. the whole thing was all rather “silly” of her, she said. She had grown up in “white bread America”, she said, and she had tried to fit in with expectations of others. But inside, it hadn’t always worked very well.
I tuned in to her energy field as she spoke, and noticed some shapes and patterns in her aura. They looked like colorless or light-colored blobs around her, extending out from her body. One came out of her abdomen, the others were in her chest area. I also had the feeling that for some reason, I needed to do a more shamanic style of work with Cindy than I might otherwise do with a new client. I could feel a deep, silent yearning coming from her. It was like having two conversations simultaneously, one with the Cindy who was talking, the other with Cindy’s spirit in a silent way. The silent conversation told me that Cindy needed help reconnecting with her spirit. Although I knew I could have applied some technical energy healing approaches to help her with the inflammation, I had the distinct feeling it was more important to help Cindy reclaim some disowned, unaccepted parts of her self. Until this happened, the physical things would not shift easily.
There were a number of ways I could have worked with her, energetically. I could have chosen a cognitive or belief-based way, or a body meridian/EFT way, or a completely undirected way. For whatever reason, it felt like a more ancient and organic way of working with spirit might reach Cindy best. So I decided I would do a simple soul aspect retrieval process.
I commented to Cindy that it must take a tremendous amount of energy to keep so much of under wraps, in order to fit in and be loved.
She nodded and started to cry. “It’s so exhausting,” she cried. “It’s always been like this. It’s just who I am.”
Cindy got on the table and I held my hand in her energy field over her abdomen. I felt a burning heat coming out of the 2nd chakra. It was literally like holding my hand next to an oven. The 2nd chakra is often where we store issues related to tribe, family history, and intimate relationships. In this case, I knew the heat was because of the inflammation due to the colitis situation, but the dense, prickly quality of the chakra also told me how much emotional stuff was compacted there as well. I suspected the colitis was related to the internal conflict of how she felt about not fitting in anywhere. Cindy was having trouble digesting her own feelings about who she really was inside. It also explained why her field had a certain brittle quality to it.
I showed Cindy where I noticed things that looked to me like clear balloon-like blobs hanging around her body. I explained that these were what I called “soul aspects”, which is just a fancy term to describe pieces of our spirit and energy that have left our bodies for safe keeping. This often happens when there has been trauma. From a shamanic perspective, they’re parts of ourselves that have been rejected or disowned. They hang outsie of our awareness until it feels safe to come back into the body. In soul aspect retrieval, these pieces are reclaimed and invited to come back into the body. And when they do, people typically feel a burst of deeper connection with who they have always been, more whole inside. On a physical level, people often feel remarkably better too.
Retrieving is a simple process, though like in many things in healing and spiritual work, it can be quite profound. It is one of the basic components of shamanic healing work.
In Cindy’s case, I could see that these unclaimed pieces of herself were related to things that happened many years ago, perhaps in teen years. Yes, the marriage had some issues, but it was only triggering other times when Cindy felt rejected for being who she was. In order to try to be loved and accepted, she had shut down her most alive parts of herself, to try to fit in. There was also distinct quality in her field of wanting to be “perfect”. The perfect wife, the perfect step-mother to her new step-sons, etc. And apparently, her natural vibrancy did not fit in with her idea of how a perfect her should be. So she was at war with herself.
I asked Cindy when she first remembered feeling this need to amp herself down, in order to be loved. Sure enough, some significant things occurred during her high school years. Her strict, conservative father had been very distant with her, and that had hurt her deeply. She felt he had never quite accepted her the way she was, and Cindy had always felt that she was an embarrassment to him.
“He kept wanting me to be more ‘normal,’ whatever that means,” she said. “And so I tried to be.”’ Yet no matter how hard she tried to be like everyone else, he never gave her the approval she so wanted.
Meanwhile, the rest of the family mocked and criticized Cindy’s grandmother, who, on many levels, was very much like Cindy in temperament. Cindy couldn’t help notice this. It was as if other members of the family scorned her grandmother’s bohemian spirit. Meanwhile, Cindy and her grandmother had always been very close. When her grandmother died when Cindy was a teenager, Cindy mourned that loss deeply. Cindy said that, to this day, she still felt that her grandmother had been the only person in her life who ever truly understood her. Cindy had felt like a misfit all throughout in high school, and that the feeling of being a misfit had carried forward long after she graduated.
One of the blob balloons I saw in Cindy’s field seemed to hold a lot of energy from Cindy’s creative center, which is the 2nd chakra or the digestive and abdomen region. This blob was pulled to the right about 8 inches outside of her body. It was hanging out there because it felt unsafe to be given its fullest expression in Cindy’s life. Probably because it was too scary to show up fully in life and risk being rejected again. My sense was that this blob held a lot of Cindy’s natural creativity, as well as her passion. It explained why Cindy had trouble connecting with herself. In as sense, she wasn’t “home” in her feeling center, the 2nd chakra.
I joke with my clients sometimes when I see this, to try to explain it. I’ll say, “It’s as if Elvis has left the building. That is why you can’t hear his music.” What I mean is that it is hard for people to feel themselves when they aren’t fully “there” for themselves. This is very common.
I asked Cindy how things might be if she were to let this part of herself back in her life. Did she want to re-integrate this piece of her aliveness back? It left the building because it was afraid people would reject her if it was fully expressed. She said yes.
So I walked Cindy through a simple exercise of helping her reclaim this piece of herself, to bring it back in to her body. I helped ground Cindy so that she could finally hold for herself that it was now safe to be more fully who she has always been. Perhaps it had not been safe at one time to do so, but it was safe now.
It was a poignant, intense experience for Cindy. She cried and cried some more while I gently supported her. I knew she was experiencing a good cry, the kind when one has finally felt through and let go of something painful to find precious parts of oneself again. Meanwhile, I could hear and feel several spiritual presences in the room around us. I knew we were getting help from the other side in this process.
Cindy went home feeling calmer and more clear. I didn’t hear for her for a while.
A few weeks later, I ran into Cindy as she dashed in for an appointment with the MD next door.
“Adele,” she said, grabbing my arm. “It’s gone! I haven’t felt any pain since our session! All the colitis is completely gone! This is nothing short of amazing!”
I was glad to hear that she had a good result. Cindy went on to say that she no longer needed some of the medications she had been taking for years for the colitis. She still had some digestive things going on, but they were minor and not nearly like it had been before. And in addition to feeling physically better, she had had some significant changes happen in her emotional life. She felt more empowered to show up for herself and to be ok with who she had always been. Things with her husband were better, she said. Although they were still working through some adjustments, she no longer felt the suffocating need to be perfect or to fit a mold of how she thought she should be.
I’ve had good results with other clients who were dealing with similar things. Fromy pov, the 2nd chakra is one of the most emotional centers. From my perspective, it isn’t really about fixing peoples’ colitis or whatever the condition is. It’s more about helping people reclaim their own wholeness so that the body can heal itself the way it was always supposed to. Illness is often just an energetic pattern, and patterns can be changed.
Before you go … Would you like a great way to feel better fast when life gets tough and you’re stressed?
Adele Wang
Certified energy healer and mentor, helping smart, intuitive, perfectionist women create happiness and success in an imperfect world
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Copyright © 2010-2016. Adele Wang. All Rights Reserved
thank you very much! i cried so much while i was reading.
the best of the luck to you!