In 2008 I began a correspondence with a gifted healer who shared an understanding of energy and it’s benefits for us as human beings. I was recovering from an injury that had also served to help accelerate awakening, forcing me to remain still as my body healed.

It was against this backdrop that Ali and I discussed awakening and the many ways we can all learn to use this force in us to heal. She had already used her gift to let me know about a healer and teacher in my area who would help me significantly in accelerating my healing process. While she didn’t know the name of the person, she provided a description that her guidance was providing. I found out about this person the next day when a family friend invited me to come to a healing session with a person who sounded just like the person Ali had described the day before (from the other side of the continent). This led to an accelerated period of releasing stored emotion that is lodged in the energy body and appears to have a relationship to the body tissues as well.
A few months into this work as Ali and I were talking she begins to explain that her guides are telling her to do something. They don’t explain, they just tell her to trust them and to do as they instruct. I was to get off the phone, breathe deep and keep my mind calm. I had no idea what was about to happen.
So I complied. I was standing in the kitchen when I felt what I can only describe as a buoyant state of lightness and relief. I felt relieved of what I was aware as a certain degree of Painbody. Painbody is the energetic equivalent of the emotional energy that we have each stuffed down inside ourselves. This energy, since it was never fully felt, is stored and remains like a tape or program that can play over and over whenever events like the one that originally triggered it, triggers it anew…over and over. This condition lasts until the stored material is dispensed with once and for all through what are often deep states of meditation and willingness to just let it go once and for all.
The buoyancy was nice and I wondered what was happening. Then, after about a minute of this feeling, I felt what I knew was my old painbody….. except that as it returned to me, it felt as though I was being hit by a train. All of the Painbody that had left me came screeching back all around me. It was one of the most startling experiences I had up until that point in time.
What the heck happened, I wondered…
The way I was feeling Painbody was different now. In those minutes after it returned, I thought I was going to crumple from the pain. What I would realize in the aftermath of this event was that Ali had “adopted” my energy body signature and it looked like I had adopted hers. Where I felt relief, she described feeling like she was going to throw up. Her skin felt clammy, the pain was intolerable. She wondered how I made it through each day.
The truth was, I had grown numb to my own accumulation of inner pain, and this “switch” brought me back to a normal level of sensitivity. I was now feeling more acutely than I had before.
I felt my own energy body in a new way after this. I had daily pain, pain that I felt much more clearly and vividly. For as bad as all of this seemed at the time, it was a saving grace for me. If I had not had what amounted to a “reset” of my energetic sense of the presence of my own Painbody, I might not have had as much of a motivator to clear it all up. But clear it up I did. What choice did I have, right? Wincing through a pain in my heart, I got motivated to do more work.
I have spent years on this journey attending to every bit of this stored material and I have become aware of how we continue to store more of it even as we slough off decades of old ghosts from our past. 
In truth, by having my senses upgraded as they were in that day back in 2008, I was able to feel everything I needed to in order to heal. I think of it as a form of spiritual honesty expressed through feeling. It has helped me to detect the smallest of impediments and allowed me to focus on them for healing and release. All of this took place in just such a way as it needed to because if we both had known what we were in store for, I’m not sure either one of us would have agreed to it. It may have been the perfect therapy for me if I was to really see and feel ALL of it.
It’s been nine years since then, and I have been busy at work. Since then I have eliminated nearly all of the Painbody, layer by layer, energy center by energy center. I am thankful for having this level of sensitivity because I doubt I would have been able to feel where all the material was stored away inside of me. As I write this, I feel a triple twinge in my right hip that, as it turns out, corresponds to three acupuncture points along one meridian. Like a small traffic jam, I have been working the last three years on clearing the blocks there, like digging through rock strata a layer at a time. Each release bring greater flow, a clearer mind/body/heart and a change in feeling. 
I know that this hip block corresponds to the most recent feeling of loss I felt during what became a fractious divorce with my ex many years ago and led to the alienation of one of my children from me. It’s not been easy to learn how to forgive my ex for behaving in such a petty mean-spirited way. But even as I say this, I know that I entangled myself in my ex’s broken story and can’t be surprised that I might have become a casualty of it. 
The next step in healing asks the most from me. Unless I do that, it’s enough to attract, like moths to the flame, other people who are broken in exactly the same way. It already has, and there’s nothing worse than having to face the same level of emotional dishonesty in people who are unable to own how they hurt those around them.
It seems that in order to forgive, to do it with my whole being and not just with my head or voice, requires the most of what I am. It seems this is required for something as hard to heal as something like that.
Whatever our stories, the journey from a suffering road to one of pure bliss remains as the road we each will walk. I’m very fortunate to have gotten “reset” when I did. I don’t know if it’s for everyone, but Ali’s guides were right.
So I would say, our ability to feel may have no end. How numbed have you gotten in your life? Awakened? Very excellent; are you really feeling as deeply and as honestly as you could? Do you feel like you are on pause, waiting and waiting for that next release to go ahead and complete itself? Go into breath and sink into yourself in quiet contemplation and ask your heart if there is more to be known, if there is a deeper story to be felt within your capacity to sense and feel deeper yet. The answer might surprise you, and it could free you, too.
Until next time…

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