Sevenfold Silence

(last of the camping stories. for the rest, check the beltaine 2008 tag.)

Late at night on that camping trip it got very cold--not unbearably so, but to the point where sleeping wasn't really practical. I'd been sharing a tent with my unicorn friend for warmth, but eventually mammalian body warmth wasn't saving us. We hopped out of the tent, shivering, and headed over with blankets and coats for the campfire.

It was somewhere around 3 or 3:30am at the time, and there were still a handful of people up at the time, including a guy who accidentally self-initiated into Reiki I--he'd been doing it all his life without ever knowing what it was. (Open-Source Reiki people, take note!) When my friend and I settled in next to the fire shivering and bitching moderately, he set to work generating obscene quantities of heat from his hands and trying to step up our metabolisms a little so we'll quit shivering. Fireside reiki, in other words.

So he finishes up on my friend, and gets to me. And my carefully- and unwittingly-constructed psychic shielding, put up over the course of a long and checkered personal history, rejects it and sends it back.

He keeps on trying, and I guess it keeps on coming back to him. I don't control it--it just does. He's shaking and starting to freak out, and literally takes a few steps back. This is weird, he says, over and over again, as he starts to talk to me about it. It occurred to me that he was reacting to what I perceive to be my fey current, but I trust his judgment on this matter.

We talked for maybe half an hour amidst further periodic experimentation, about trauma, involuntary shielding, and how to start letting the shields down when you don't even know how they got there in the first place. He brought up some good points, some of which I'd considered before (get rid of the psychological/emotional issues, and you get rid of the cause for such shielding, and accordingly the shielding starts to go away), but it's good to have outside input/confirmation on this. He knows, too, he said, that reiki can be used to heal emotional/psychic wounds. But he doesn't feel competent enough to do that yet.

I am actually set to receive a reiki attunement and the corresponding training, in October. I hope I'll at least be able to drop the shielding by then. Not only will the attunement take better, I think, but I think it'll be healthy for me just in general. Not to mention that I think it'll make my 'kin side brighter, as it were.