Okay, I'm able to deal again. And I'm ready to talk about this: A couple weeks ago I had most intense massage of my life, and today I started to get what it was about.
First the massage: It started out with me arriving late, delayed by traffic: breathless and talking too much. John my genius massage therapist talks too much too, so we could just amp each other up, staying in the mind. But he is magic. His fingers find the spots on my body … at the top of my pelvis, on my back, along my spine, along my ribs, along my sacrum, on the side of my head, behind my heart. Just there. I couldn’t describe it without pointing and anyway, he is already there. Plus, he does this jostling thing that sends tiny tiny vibrations through my whole body, like I'm a little kid, sitting on the dryer. He told me “It does something to the autonomic nervous system that calms you down.” It does. It melts me.
That day, which was fast becoming night, after I finally shut up and undressed and the rain poured down outside and the dark crept in through the windows, he started working all the spots. You know how it is. You can smell the white terry cloth of the face cradle and the table is warm on your belly and your toes are a little cold and if you have a very good massage therapist, his hands are there where you didn’t know you needed healing. Everything was going along fine and then he did something he hasn't done before… See, he is also an acupuncturist and he put needles along both sides of my spine, all the way from the back of my ribs down to my sacrum and the ones at the waist I could feel them go in, I mean I could really feel them, like sparks… like you don't feel usually feel acupuncture needles.
John started working the special Chinese energy channels down my legs, long cords of pent-up stuff and though it was intense and I hadn’t known him long, I trusted him. He has gotten more healing and release from my bent-out-of-shape tissues in three sessions than people I’ve worked with for years.
But then, like lighting, a spasm of pain spread across the back of my waist. It was emanating from those needles. Acupuncture is supposed to move your chi, your vital life energy; the idea is that chi is the foundation of all health and the key to mending illness. It’s supposed to free stagnation and allow flow to restore the balance. I suppose when you’ve been in this much stuck for as long as I have, you outta expect a sort of major correction, but I didn’t expect this, because the lightning flash of pain was replaced by a rush of of hot hot boiling goddam hot!! All across the small of my back and my waist, and suddenly I wanted to scream “Take them out! “Take them out” but it was changing so fast, every second was different… so I just kept breathing and breathing and I suppose I must have been huffing a little or possibly sounding like I was birthing triplets, because John started trying to talk me through it, but he got all philosophical "Chi, energy, blood, matter, it’s all the same–" he said.
Which, pardon me, but fuck that.
“Don’t talk!” I bit out. “Just... don't talk for a second.”
I was at the edge of my tolerance. I was breathing, barely, but breathing and the hot spread across my whole back. And then John was holding a spot on my calf and a spot on my shoulder and there was a thrumming between, like he was pulling a thread that went along my spine underneath the needles.
That’s when I realized that I was missing part of my body.
That place between my sacrum and my solar plexus, there in the bowl of my pelvis, and in the soft curving landscape of my waist... there was nothing there. Only Blackness.
My shoulders and head and arms were above.
My hips and ass and legs were below.
But in between was a dark void, and I was not there at all.
This, I decided to mention, because WTF? I decided to tell John “I am missing part of my body.”
But as soon as I formed those words in my mind, I started sobbing, like sobbing. Tears streaming and snot and sucking noises and where did this all come from? Don’t know, but here comes another wave, rising out of my hip bones and washing up my back, deep and desperate grief taking my breath and my skin away and drowning me in it, drowning, drowning, waves over my head and weird noises coming from me… am I making those noises? Another wave and another, more noises, more bodily liquids….Until at last it receded and I raised my head.
I was emptied.
I thought:
Where the fuck did that come from?
I don’t know what that was, but I’m just glad something is happening.
Are those giant black stains my mascara?
That was about three weeks ago. At the time, I had no idea what that was, how it fit into this whole Escherian puzzle of initiation. I find this process confusing, I must say. This is NOT how initiation is advertised in the glossy initiation magazines… You know the ones: Breaking Through, The Test, Ordealist…
But I am happy to say that I mentioned this confusion in yesterday’s post and I got a message in a bottle from a friend who helped create and priestess an amazing rites of passage program for some of the most powerful witches I know. “This IS Initiation,” she said.
She would know.
But even a little hindsight helps. For example, today I suddenly understood that I’ve been sowing that darkness for almost six months. I’ve actually been calling it in. Last fall equinox, I started doing a new piece of magic inspired by that amazing, divine Goddess of No, of Destruction and Perfect Endings, Kali-Maa. I started doing that piece of magic because Kali turned Her gaze on me at BC Witch Camp last August and now I am reaping what I’ve sown.
And it’s a good thing… I think….
As I will explain tomorrow.