Jump Girl

by Salicrow

  37

  Brillo Pads and Fire Hoses

  My days had begun to meld into each other. I was hardly leaving my house, slipping into spirit work as soon as my kids headed out the door for school. I was changing so rapidly that I couldn’t keep up with all that was happening.

  I was also coming apart at the seams. Shortly before my psychic opening, an emotional bomb had landed on my marriage. It was a mountain to climb, but eventually it showed Noel and me a whole new horizon. But that’s how I see it now; back then it was a fresh wound, one that needed constant tending, reassurance, and love.

  My life consisted of Reiki, yoga, journey work, and talking to the dead. I began to have psychic episodes three or four times a day in which I would experience pressure and expansion in my third eye, become very tired, and suddenly feel as if I had to lie down. When I lay down and closed my eyes, I immediately started on a journey. Though it was always the same kind of journey, the places I went were different. In each excursion I saw the lit-up infinity symbol and then found myself locked into it, circulating along its cosmic orbit. As I followed the infinite loop of the eight, I fell deeper and deeper into a trance state.

  Sometimes I felt the room spinning like a top and my spirit shifting out of my body. The sensation of spinning generally makes me feel sick, and I avoid whirling rides at fairs. These journeys required massive concentration to move past this obstacle. I had to stay in control so as not to get sick, and yet I had to release control to allow the process to take place. I have learned techniques through dance that help with this sensation, and I also maintain a control point out of habit. Releasing that control is not always instantaneous.

  With trance work, Reiki, and yoga I was vibrating in an elevated energetic place for most of my day. Spirits were teaching me new things left and right—altering my perceptions and opening my senses, both neural and psychic—so that I was able to hear them more clearly, see them with my eyes and in my mind, and even smell them. I felt them next to me and could locate them in the room whenever I let myself extend my energy outward. I developed a broad awareness of their presence. I was starting to see and hear spirits everywhere. I spent hours just practicing talking to them.

  Different spirits came to visit me, but as a general rule I communicated with five whose jobs were to teach me. I named my opening the November Incident because it was cataclysmic. It brought down walls, broke through beliefs, shredded my concept of reality, and showed me the deep, dark bits of myself that even I didn’t like to look at. It also showed me the design of the cosmos, or, to be more accurate, the lay of the land of All That Is.

  I became aware of the game-changing fact that someone disembodied was watching me all the time. Also, because spirit communicates telepathically, an entity could be listening to my thoughts at any given moment. This made me more conscious of the ramblings of my own mind. Every petty notion that passed through my brain, every mean thought directed at myself or others, was potentially under a wiretap in my mind. At times I was truly embarrassed. Imagine saying everything you think: every smart-ass thought, mean dig, lustful impulse, and narcissistic tale spoken aloud for the world to hear. I became acutely aware of the power of thought. I began to understand the need for our word to be impeccable and for our thoughts to match our words. I saw that thought-forms could be tangible things and that we must not waste energy telling white lies, even to ourselves. I became aware of how readily I did so, lies that meant nothing in themselves, spoken to make conversation politer, such as giving a made-up excuse when declining an invitation. To avoid speaking untruths, I began to simply say less.

  I apologized to my friend Stacy for the way I had wronged her when we were children, for how I had carelessly used my charisma for selfish purposes and was cruel in my words and actions. I showed up at her door with gifts to make amends.

  I was cleaning out the skeletons in my closets while becoming aware that, cosmically, I lived in a glass house. Things were not only coming to light; there were also spectators to the process. I was on display like a player in a stadium. The spectators might have been on my side, but they still knew right from wrong. They knew well intentioned from—no way to sugarcoat it—fucked up. This did not make me paranoid in a government-surveillance kind of way; it just made me witness and purify myself.

  It became clear at this point that I was not okay. Above and beyond my good-mom, good-citizen, good-wife act and my psychic development, something more was going on. I was manic and spoke rapidly, spewing out my thoughts, the ideas in my head, the recognition that spirits were always with me, listening to the ramblings of my mind, compulsively driving me to make amends.

  In the case of people I owed apologies to who were no longer part of my life and who I didn’t know how to find, I set up altars and did deep healing work in the spiritual realm, utilizing the Prema Reiki symbols, connecting to past lives, working to expiate karma, and realigning with my higher self so I would be ready to walk my true path. That was a good thing, because I’m sure it would have seemed even crazier if I had come bearing gifts and apologies to people I didn’t know as well as I knew Stacy.

  The day I came to Stacy’s door, she looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Are you okay?” Then she listened to me describe my situation, and she tried to understand it. She did as good as job as anyone could have, considering that I didn’t understand it myself. She had known me a long time and had watched me go through other difficulties. She was present for my eating disorder, my parents’ divorce, my self-destructive bullshit, and now she was questioning whether I was all there. Her concern indicated that I looked as bad on the outside as I imagined I did. My manic, spinning mind, while breaking through barriers and rearranging its beliefs, showed chaos to the outside world. I was losing the illusion of normal reality.

  My experience was becoming so intense that Noel was starting to hear spirits too. He was speaking both to his guide, Damin, and to Peter, as if the energy coursing through my body was so intense and the change I was going through so overwhelming that it was dragging him in as well. Sometimes when I woke in the middle of the night, my body vibrating with energy, Noel would wake up too.

  I was raw, but I was getting clean. Soon I felt the cleanest I had ever felt in my life. My hidden bits and dirty laundry had been scrubbed and line-dried in the light of day. I had nothing left to hide. When you have nothing to hide, a great deal of fear is lifted from your shoulders. You no longer worry that your thoughts will be revealed or that people will discover how mean and uncompassionate you really are. Although we might blow these worries out of proportion, when we carry them with us they sabotage our growth by telling us we are really a piece of shit. We look pretty mediocre when viewed from their fearsome places in the shadows. I was happy to be rid of them. My psychic lens was becoming shockingly clear.

  38

  Joe the Shaman

  Feeling clean is not the same as feeling balanced. I was still raw, vulnerable, forgetful. I had started giving Reiki treatments out of a fitness center in Lyndonville, a local shop handcrafted by a lady who loved fitness and was into year-round tans. It was not hip or trendy. It had carpeted floors and posters of tropical beaches and heavily bronzed women on the walls. The owner was a client of mine; I had done psychic readings out of her salon for groups before.

  I understood that many people didn’t know what Reiki was, so I began introducing them to it for free to build a client base. I was already seeing clients when I had my great Ouija-board Peter-Sarah opening.

  When I was doing Reiki or a reading, I was clear. The spirits Damin and Tamin were both willing and able to join in. I began to notice Peter’s voice in my readings and realized that he had been helping me with them for years. In the moments when a situation didn’t quite make sense to me and then I was suddenly awakened to a new way of looking at it, it had been Peter showing me what I was missing.

  Because of these intercessions, my face appeared to be transformed during healing and communications;
I saw the face of Joseph or myself from another incarnation superimposed over mine. I had become comfortable with watching myself shape-shift and with the odd techniques that I sometimes felt compelled to do, like blowing into people’s chakras. As Joseph, I had been a healer, a medicine man, a shaman. That was then, not now; but it was still inside me.

  One night I was working late at the fitness center, doing Reiki on a client I had seen before, a nice woman in her fifties who suffered from depression, lack of relationship, and hating herself for being extremely overweight. There was no one at the fitness center except her and me. I was working on her crown when images began to fill my mind. I was used to seeing images while working on people; in fact, I started most healing sessions by telling my client that I sometimes saw things while working on clients and would share that information with them at the end of the session if they liked. This time was different.

  As I relaxed into my work, releasing any expectations about what should happen, I felt my body shift. Images flashed through my mind, rapidly communicating a story connected to my client. I felt myself release from my body, as I had done many times in my journey work, but the destination of my travel was different this time. I didn’t go into my past lives; nor did I revisit the chapters of my current life. Instead I journeyed into my client. I found myself within her story. I could clearly see the wounding that had generated her pain. I saw the way her ex-husband had controlled and demeaned her, and I saw how she had transformed her pain into a thought-form attachment, which is a being or object created by the power of our mind when we project energy into something we fear. The thought-form is palpable and real, but it isn’t concrete or visible to ordinary sight. Tibetan Buddhists call similar projections tulpas.

  Being able to see her wounding made it easier to dissolve it. I cannot explain how I did it, because I was working intuitively. I simply worked her thought-form loose like releasing knots in a necklace, a chore Grammy Brown had given me as a child.

  When the session ended, my client said she had never felt so good. She went on to lose a great deal of weight in a short amount of time and soon got into a relationship that led to marriage. It was the most powerful healing session I had done to date. I should have felt good, but after she left the room, I noticed that I felt horrible. My spirits were yelling at me: You have something wrong with you. You picked something up from her, and you need to get rid of it.

  Like so many other times in my life, when I get out of my own way, I step into lessons I learned in lifetimes past. The problem in this case was that I had only remembered part of the work. I remembered how to remove energetic attachments from people, but I didn’t remember how to dispose of it afterward. I had taken her thought-form into my body, and I now carried it.

  By the time I got home, I felt heavy and lethargic, as though I weighed forty pounds more. My energy level was low, and I just wanted to cry. I reached out to Lawton, my Reiki Master, and explained what I had done. He agreed with the spirits. I had taken my client’s energetic burden onto myself and was carrying the attachment.

  I had to step into the shamanic world that Joseph inhabited and cross a line I knew was inevitable. My actions had made clear that I had no choice but to learn. I was not surprised that my door to shamanism was so marked, as I had always been a jump girl, making my decisions to go forward impulsively, following the trail of my intuition. I jump, blindly, with faith. If inside myself I know something to be part of my path, I plunge boldly forward like the Fool in the tarot deck, confident that I will make it out one way or another.

  I have the ability to differentiate what is fated from what is malleable, so I could see that the shamanic arts were something I was destined to pursue. My sense of adventure and embrace of wonder led me to the threads that were already woven into my pattern. These are the strands I planned, the events I deemed important enough to write in Sharpie into this lifetime. They mattered—literally. Plus, I wanted to see what kind of tale I was telling and living.

  Removing the client’s thought-form being from myself was quite easy, once we got down to it. I watched with my mind’s eye as Lawton removed the being and disposed of it. The experience was visceral, with a slowing of time in which the experience seemed both endless and momentary. As my mind watched the oily blackness being removed from my body, my body felt the tugging as it tried to resist, while my higher self went surfing through my memories. I watched as I too did similar things in many lifetimes and forms. I was Joseph; I was a völva, a Nordic priestess; I was a Druid; and I was myself, Sali.

  The memories I remembered most in this phase were those of Joseph, the Blackfoot medicine man and half-breed. As Joseph, I had been potent in my arts, an asset to my tribe. People came to me when they were in need, having faith that I would be able to help them. But they did not call me friend. The shaman is never truly part of the tribe. He or she is connected to the tribe in a responsible way as the objective spiritual caretaker of the people, like a steward is connected to the land.

  My fear around shamanism had not been about what I would see and experience in the other worlds. My fear had been in the shadow of my memories, the loneliness and isolation I had felt in my life as Joseph, a life where my only friends were animals and spirits.

  I came out of the experience knowing that I had to go forward anyway, feeling confident that I was ready for the journey and my evolution within it. I could be Joseph in the best sense while also being Sali, the jump girl, in the best sense. Lawton said I really needed to work with a teacher on this path, but I couldn’t take classes in shamanic healing. That wasn’t my way. I needed to learn on the job. Since I was a person who could talk to spirits at will, my teacher needed to be dead.

  On the way home, I called out to Tamin the Druid, a shaman and healer to his people. Approaching shamanism through this lens was strongly appealing to me. Between Tamin’s guidance and the memories I carried of Joseph, I found a deeper level of my experience as a healer.

  39

  Remembering Egypt

  One of the most remarkable things that happened during the November Incident is that I gained full access to a lifetime I had lived in Egypt. Unlike any previously discovered past life, it was full and complete, fleshed out and tangible. To this day I am meeting people important to me whom I knew in that lifetime. It is as if two lives are woven tightly into the same pattern, and the work I do now is connected to the work I did then.

  My initial memory of Egypt came shortly after Halloween in the early days of my spiritual opening. I had recently come across Nicki Scully’s book of guided meditations, The Golden Cauldron: Shamanic Journeys on the Path of Wisdom. I began taking those journeys, many of which were imbued with Egyptian mythology.

  In the first journey we were to be greeted by the god Thoth as the beginning of a process of transformation. I reached a state of trance in which I was no longer conscious of my waking body. I was lucid and clear, awake in my experience. As my voice led me out of the light, instead of seeing an ibis-faced god, I was looking at a handsome Egyptian man who embraced me like family.

  Next I was sitting on a riverboat gently floating down the Nile. I was topless, my skin was tan, and I was well-manicured, a person of importance. I had gold cuff bracelets on my wrist, and I lounged casually as my body was fanned by servants. The man who had affectionately greeted me was trying to teach me something. As the journey progressed I became aware that I was there both as the woman having the experience and as me, Sali. It reminded me of the feeling I’d had when I was drowning in the river and my higher self was observing. I was beginning to see that perhaps I was able to step into other lifetimes through the doorway of my higher self.

  What had begun as Nicki Scully’s Thoth journey had become a real memory. I watched as the man standing in front of me made a bird materialize in his hand. To this day, I don’t know if he actually did this or if he performed a clever sleight of hand. The “me” that was lounging on the river boat was unimpressed.

  I he
ard the man’s name spoken, Hanut (haw-noo), and I recognized it as the name of my father. The man trying to teach me about materializing birds was my father, and he was a teacher and a priest too. I received all this in the sound of his name. I also recognized that the Hanut was my son Kaolin in this lifetime. I knew this without question; it was a fact inside my mind. I also heard my own name spoken, Chazut (chaw-zoo). The name rang through my mind like an alarm, waking my memories and activating my cells. A word of power had been spoken in my presence, summoning long-sleeping parts of my being back into awareness. My aura took over from my brain and filled it with new information.

  Throughout my opening to spirit, my life as Chazut played out in dreams, journeys, waking thoughts, and even in the reflection I saw in the mirror. If I was relaxed in my movements, whether they be dancing, yoga, or sex, I could feel Chazut sharing my skin. It was as if I had not only awakened memories of her but she had also awakened to memories of me. We were simultaneously remembering and embodying each other. She held power, and I held salvation. We needed each other to progress, to become what we were fated to be.

  Chazut was incredibly arrogant. She had the ego of someone who saw herself as but a few steps below the gods. To stand in her skin was to stand in the consciousness of one who had been admired and seen as superior for her entire life. I recognized this feeling as my own shadow, the part of me that is arrogant and manipulative. My arrogance was tempered by having assimilated the lessons behind such experiences. Chazut had yet to learn them.

  Chazut was enticing and sensual. I loved being her. I loved the power I harnessed, the sheer amount of energy it gave me to work with. I held the essence of Egyptian deities, channeling them by ritual magic, allowing them to ride me and possess my body for their teachings and desires.