Strange Encounters

My first real job was in Lightning Detection. This was way back in the olden days when computers and satellite information were novelties. My job was to watch the computer screen as it downloaded lightning strikes on  map and then call the appropriate person to let them know where the activity was. We all promptly learned that rushing out whenever there was a blip on the screen was a complete waste of time and energy, and eventually the programmers figured out that the lightning strikes most likely to cause fires were caused by a huge build-up of positive ions on the ground. When a highly charged weather system began to push those positive ions in front of it the charge built up until it could crawl high enough up the nearest tall object to leap from there to the negative charge deep in the heart of the storm front.  When that tall object was a dead or dying tree and the wind was blowing but rain was not yet falling, there would be flames. Dry lightning storms in general are the most likely to start fires, but this explains why there could be lightning strikes powerful enough to start fires well ahead of any visible signs of a storm.

Having this in my brain, you would think I’d be able to figure out what was going on about ten days ago when I suddenly found my feet sticking to the ground and my legs unwilling to move me forward. I was leading the horse from the arena back to the barn at the time and he was thoroughly appalled to have his human begin to creep along in a peculiar sort of crouching gait and then very slowly fall completely flat on her face. Instead as I lay there on my face, I considered the possibility that the horse had run over me from behind and taken off. But when I looked at my right hand, the lead rope was between my ring and little finger with the end loosely wadded up in my palm. If I was being dragged by a 1400 pound horse, the knot should have tightened up. Besides, this is not my normal leading grip and frankly, I don’t have enough strength in my pinky to hold onto a rope tightly enough to give myself second and third degree burns .  I also had blisters on the heel of my palm, my forefinger and several more on my ring  finger where there was no contact with the rope.  Other than the blisters, I had not a single bruise or scrape so it was clear I had not been knocked down or dragged about.

While I was very slowly brought down to lie flat on the ground, like a ten-ton feather-bed was pressing me into the earth, the horse levitated and spun about. Apparently I do have high expectations of myself and my horse, because when he jerked on the rope as I began to get up it sent a jolt of pain up my arm. So we had a short lesson on do NOT take the slack out of the rope even if the sky falls, lightning strikes, the human falls over, or the world ends. My poor Thoroughbred was quite taken aback.  Grounding lightning strikes was not in the small print on his horse/human contract.  My Spanish Colonial horse on the other hand, grew up out on the New Mexico range and we had a lot of fun dodging lightning storms. Some of our best rides involved keeping the just right distance and speed to avoid fire and water but keep the rainbows hanging out slightly in left field.

Once I began to recover a bit I began to wonder why.   While the piece of land I am on does have a propensity to ground lightning strikes,  and I have had the occasional instance of feeling enough static electricity to make me and the animals jump when an afternoon  summer thunderstorm was brewing, this happened under clear skies at sunset in February. I have thought that perhaps the summer lightning strikes right here because there is a huge quartz outcropping that comes to the surface. When I read that not only does quartz have piezoelectrical qualities, it can translate mechanical force and pressure into electrical charges I had an answer for why there would be such a build up of electrical energy in February. New Mexico doesn’t have a reputation for earthquakes because the land here is moving all the time. The Sandia Mountains and the Rio Grande Gorge both change measurably each year, not to mention the not-so-very-dormant volcanic caldera of the Jemez Mountains. In geological terms, we are living on some seriously hyperactive rocks. So if the earth is shifting enough to create pressure along this immense quartz outcropping, it would be prone to release electrical energy.

But that doesn’t explain why the horse reacted normally by skipping about while I had such an atypical and peculiar experience. Despite my ongoing liver regeneration, I still have an enormous amount of traumatized tissue.  Having enough physical material backed up in the right spot in my liver to press on something important enough to radically reduce the amount of blood circulating, (hence the bloating up and recurring sludgy bile) has also meant that there is so much backed-up blood when I exert myself that there’s enough pressure to give me nasty headaches and bloody noses. And there has been tremendous resistance to clearing out that blockage that has steadily gotten more extreme over the last six months. Any kind of treatment or trying a new plant-friends has been pushing me into crisis mode that takes 6-8 weeks to recuperate from. Unhealthy tissue tends to build up a negative electrical charge (which further inhibits healing) so perhaps the reason I felt like I was being pulled to the ground was because the positive charge on the earth was attracting the negative charge in my body.  And, since the negative charge was trapped in traumatized tissue in the middle of my torso, instead of moving smoothly through my  energetic channels and dissipating into the earth my whole body was drawn down to the ground.

I had ongoing bursts of static electricity and heat afterwards and since acupuncture is all about moving and balancing energy in the body I decided that was the modality to try. A treatment did get things moving more smoothly in my body, but most notably opened up the energetic connection between the three realms of the Triple Heater (whose meridian starts on the ring finger where I have my blisters)  and is responsible for moving energy throughout the body. Unlike all the other meridians, it is not associated with any particular organ but instead with the space that contains the organs.  The yin  aspect of the Triple Heater creates the space and the yang aspect  moves energy through that space.

Which reminded me that years ago  I ended up spending a lot of time with a veterinarian who had come to Santa Fe to study Japanese acupuncture. I figured that if it worked on horses, it might work on me, but he wasn’t too happy with me because what he was learning was the Triple Heater doesn’t just make space for the organs, it makes space for our spiritual aspects. And I was burning my essence to ash and collapsing the space to contain it. Even worse, I was doing it on purpose. I had taken such a huge influx of unhappy dead into my energetic field after my father died that my own life force was sputtering out. I fully expected the effort to kill me, and that my genuine choice was about how I would die not how I could live. Since I felt I had a whole lot to accomplish before and as I died, I compressed the space in order to intensify and focus the energy.  A small fire in a big stove doesn’t appear to make much heat, but if you have the right kind of venting in a small stove, you can focus what heat there is laser-like and burn what fuel there is with extreme efficiency.  So that is what I did to clear the unhappy dead out of my ancestral energetic system.

It was very effective with the ancient dead, not so much with the living and/or recently dead as I found out shortly before my lightning strike. I had had an acupuncture treatment that woke up a part of my liver that must have died off when I was about 7 or 8 as I ended up reliving the hideous pain and fevers that no one could find any reason for at the time. On the physical side, a teeny tiny burnt rubber mold came out, an inner landscape in miniature.  On the visionary realms, the dead of my parents’ generation began to show their faces and depart. It was amusing in that I saw dark blobs moving down a lovely bluish white tunnel which may have been either my dearly departed going to the light or old bile working its way out my bile ducts. Perhaps both.

Then my mother showed up wanting me to join the dead instead of moving on herself. I was quite aggravated as we had already had this discussion several times while she was alive.  We finally got through the  “You are DEAD and I am alive” conversation and she went to stand with the dead.  And while there were a whole lot of dead people, all of them were people of my parents generation.  And all of them were fixated on the world of the living.  None of them had moved on to where ever it is the dead go or done what ever it is the dead do. They were just hanging out without any physical body being jealous of the living. While I wondered what to do with them, the starry night sky and pearly gates from my Heliacal Risings post appeared and began to shine down on the group. Each person looked up, saw their star, and  then shot up to take their place in the heavens. It was a great relief.  Unfortunately, even having gotten the dead to where they belonged,  my liver was still obstructed and I was still contracting the Xin Bao, the inner space that allows the energies to move so that we can manifest a physical body. And that leaves the San Jaio, the yang energy, with no room to move.

It turns out I haven’t been healing because  I have been compensating for both the physical block  in the physical organ of the liver, and the energetic blockage of the Triple Heater for most of my life, as well as wrestling the recently dead. And apparently, it takes a lightning strike to get things to moving in my case because this pattern of blocked and contracted energy was not overt until it was made quite clear that my body was NOT moving energy as it should.  On the physical level the post-lightning acupuncture treatment got a whole bunch more burnt hard rubber molds of  its inner landscape  out of my liver, which FINALLY relieved the pressure on the blood supply that has been seriously cramping my activities. Opening up the energetic doorways between the Upper and Middle Heaters was a grand and novel experience though.

It has occurred to me that the reason my liver was unable to heal properly from the original injury may well have been because of the energetic imbalance. I also realized that the reason I had been able to move my unhappy ancestors from the upper heater into the middle and keep them there until I had things in order was because my whole lineage had lost the energetic connection between the heaters.  When the people of the Oak tree  on my father’s side of the family refused their shamanic heritage, they shut down their ability to move and see energy. The Oak tree and the human Druids both ground the lightning to purify, revitalize and illuminate themselves.

I don’t know how much of the disruption is rooted in the physical destruction of the old Oak forests of Europe and how much is in the human trauma. What I do know is that the there has been a positive feedback loop between the two. The human trauma results in more damage to the ecosystem and the Plant people, and that damage retraumatizes the humans. The prevalence of chronic illness both mental and physical as well as the propensity to addiction for many generations in my lineage then becomes perfectly reasonable symptoms of an energetic disorder. And I now have the option to heal that fundamental disorder in the movement of yin and yang from energy to matter as do my living relatives.

There is a lot of online discussion about shamanism and religion. In my experience, religion can be left in the church 6 days and 23 hours out of the 7, but shamanism is about survival skills. So now you know that the reason I do all this shamanic stuff and pursue obscure archeo-astronomical observations is so that I have the knowledge and skill I need when lightning strikes and the unhappy dead drop in. And the  reason to share it all in an public blog? Well,  what better way to let the yang energy move down as it requested than to let it loose on the world wide web to be downloaded where ever there is a spark of recognition?

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