NEVER TO RETURN:
A MODERN QUEST FOR ETERNAL TRUTH
A Multimedia Spiritual Adventure Memoir
by Sharon Janis
Once we open up to the flow of energy within our body,
we also open up to the flow of the energy in the universe.
– WILHELM REICH
Chapter Six
FAITH HEALER
WHILE EXPLORING MY UNCONSCIOUS, I became more sensitive to energies. I could feel the energy that pulsed through my body with every breath, and eventually, I could even direct it to some extent. I believe this might be a skill anyone can acquire. It was a matter of intention and practice, no different from learning anything else.
I also unexpectedly developed certain paranormal abilities. Without having ever really considered the idea of faith healing, I now understood that it was possible to move my energy into other people. I was also able to move a person's own energy within their body using only my mental intention and willpower. Right there, on the University of Michigan's north campus, I became a faith healer.
Once I was called to a room down the hall to heal a girl who had caught a terrible cold. She was sneezing and coughing and could hardly breathe. With important exams coming up in her classes, she was too ill to study. Having heard that I was experimenting with healing people, she asked for my help. I held my hands a few inches above her head, and began to circulate my energy into her body with my mind. I moved my awareness into her sinus system and cleaned out the disease, almost as if I were sweeping debris from a hallway. I simply understood at a deep level how to do this. And just as a good gambler knows when they are right in the flow, I could tell that my efforts were paying off. There was a subtle knowing, a certain tangible sense that my intentions were creating a healing effect in her body.
As I continued to sweep away the cold from this girl's throat, she started to make small coughing noises that got clearer and clearer as I went on. Then I remembered that she also had some kind of recurring knee injury, and thought that while I was in there, I could help with that as well. I moved my awareness down into her knee and began scraping away at the illness. It was almost as though I were using a tool to do all this, except that it was a subtle, nonphysical tool being used by the intention of my mind. Since I was already in her leg, I thought it would be a good idea to move all the way down and just clear the whole leg, into her toes. I was standing behind her with my hands just above the girl's head, doing all this silently, when all of a sudden the young woman asked, "Hey! What are you doing in my toes?"
This was my first outward confirmation that my ability to move healing energy was more than just imagination or the power of suggestion. This girl had no reason to think I would be doing anything in her toes. I raised my hands away from her head and she opened her eyes. Her cold was completely gone – no more stuffed-up nose, no scratchy throat.
I didn't feel too terribly egotistical about the sudden appearance of these abilities. My focus was not so much on impressing people as on my search for what existed beneath surface appearances. Still, it was kind of fun to play the role of eccentric dorm psychic for a while.
Another time, one of the girls in the room next to mine was really upset. She had a term paper due the next day, which she had put off until the last minute. Now she couldn't find the note cards for this paper anywhere! She was in tears, having torn apart everything in the room. I offered to help. I could feel, once again, that I was in the flow.
I sat on the young woman’s bed and put myself into a trance state. Within moments, I could see an image of the index cards, sitting on the bottom of the wire basket that was molded into her desk. I walked over and began to take things out of the basket, and immediately found her note cards, hidden amidst some other papers. The practice of inner exploration seemed to have opened up latent abilities that had not been previously accessible to me.
While sitting quietly every day with an intention of exploring the unconscious, I began to dive beneath the surface waves of this external world. There, my awareness would encounter a stream of knowledge and profound insights about deeper patterns of this universe. Every now and then, I would try to bring an especially delightful understanding with me back into my normal consciousness. If I could bring back even one morsel of this treasure, I thought, it could transform the entire world. But by the time an insight came through the porthole of consciousness and was wrapped in the clothing of language, I would be left holding a frustratingly inadequate form of what had been so clear and lucid just moments earlier. It was as though I was allowed into this room every day, where delicious secrets of the universe were completely accessible. But when I left the room, only the smallest crumbs would fit through the door. These psychic and healing abilities were a few of those crumbs.
My newfound intuitive connection also had certain benefits in terms of schoolwork. After all, I was attending classes all day long, and was spending hours each evening exploring my unconscious mind. Who had time to study? I began to write my term papers in this altered, trancelike state. Most were written in one sitting. My papers didn't necessarily show the usual depth of outer research expected for college papers – with footnotes and bibliographies – since the investigation was done inside my mind. I would go into trance with the intention of receiving a personal vision regarding the topic of an assignment. After entering into a more expanded, more objective perception, I would cast my thoughts upon the topic. This would often enable me to see patterns or aspects of the subject matter that may not even be available through library research.
During my sophomore year, for example, I took a medical school course on the "Psychobiology of Epilepsy" with one of the world's foremost neuroscientists, who was visiting from Tel Aviv University. Technically, I wasn't even supposed to be in the course, since it was supposed to be for high level students. Everyone else there was enrolled in the university medical school, and many were already doctors. But someone had neglected to put the proper prerequisites into the computer, and I discovered the discrepancy and took this opportunity to see what the big kids were learning.
The entire grade for the course was based on one paper we were supposed to write throughout the entire semester. Just a few days before the due date, I sat before my typewriter with a slight sense of desperation over having neglected this important assignment, and moved into trance. I completed fifteen pages of personal insights about the topic in several hours, and spent the next two days expanding, polishing, and retyping the piece. The professor gave me a B+ for the paper and for the course. He later called me into his office to say, "I can't say that I agree with all your hypotheses, but it was the most entertaining paper I've ever received."
Around this time, I took a workshop based on the teachings of Milton Erickson, who is considered by many to have been the most skilled hypnotist of all time. Erickson was afflicted with polio as a child and had been confined to a wheelchair during his youth. From this vantage point, he observed the body language and subliminal speech patterns of people around him, and learned how to manipulate normally subconscious processes with conscious intention.
Fortunately, Erickson was a good guy who used these skills to help his patients, rather than to convince shoppers to buy a fluffier, whiter-than-white laundry detergent. Milton Erickson could put someone into a hypnotic trance just by reaching to shake their hand, using what he called the “confusion technique”. He would move to shake the person's hand, then pull back a bit and hesitate, and then move forward again, all with a very specific and skilled cadence. At the exact point when the person's mind had stopped in confusion, he would simply give the command to "Sleep," and the person would instantly enter a hypnotic trance.
Erickson would also tell stories with specific lessons, voice inflections, precisely orchestrated pauses, and word choices to heal a particular psychological difficulty his patient might be having. Often, these were simple stories from his own life. Many patients were healed of long-term psychological problems after hearing just one of his tailor-made stories. The implication I learned from this was that even the simple stories of life can be used as a kind of medicine to heal, which is part of my motivation in sharing these stories from my own life.
After taking this weekend workshop, I appreciated more than ever the power of my subconscious mind. I also began to notice how having a particular attitude would not only color my subconscious expectations and affect my outward demeanor in the world, but seemed to somehow get underneath the very fabric of life, creating undeniable modifications in the world around me. Although it would be many years before I’d encounter a philosophy that would explain this sense of personal potency, I nevertheless began to accept appreciate my own channel of input into the heretofore-random waves of life. I had discovered my own power of co-creation.
This was the time to decide what I really wanted. The doors of possibility opened wide. Should I become beautiful? Famous? Wealthy? Brilliant? Respected? Loved? I sorted through all the potential desires that came up, and one by one tossed them to the side. In an objective light of real possibility, each of these potential desires crumbled into insignificance. They were based on goals that had been injected into me by contemporary society; they were not my own.
What did I really want from life?
I wanted to do whatever was right, based on a big picture I could never see. I wanted to be whatever I was meant to be, and to be happy with whatever my destiny brought. How could I ask for specifics when I was embroiled in cultural illusions? How could I ever know what was really important in life?
After casting aside a long list of potential goals, I realized that all I really wanted was to be content. No matter what porridge of experience was placed before me, I wanted it to taste good. I wanted sweet times to taste good, and I wanted sour times to taste good as well. I wanted to move with the natural flow of life, instead of asking that my shortsighted desires be fulfilled. I wanted my desires and actions to align with whatever was meant to be. I wanted to be in tune with the universe. Clearly, the all-pervasive intelligence that guides the atoms and galaxies to move with such perfection could choose the best path for my life. My best course of action was to get out of the way of its flow, and to be happy with whatever unfolded. Unknowingly, I had tapped into the secret of surrender as a path to happiness.
It often takes time for the seeds of our prayers, affirmations, and personal decisions and choices to germinate and bear fruit. First, I had some disturbing lessons to learn.
On to
Chapter Seven
Back to The Table of Contents
