by Janice Dent

Written in 2018, I shared my early experiences and eventual awakening, as part of a life writing project at the hospice where I was a volunteer.

It’s true what they say about volunteering: you get back so much more than you give. I hadn’t imagined how wonderful it could be making tea and toast for the day therapy patients at the Hospice. We have a giggle and do the activities together, which is what has brought me to this page. Global Wordsmiths came along and gave us all the opportunity to tell stories about different aspects of our lives. What I get up to outside of the Hospice may surprise a few here, but this is my story.

The first time it happened I was about eight. I was travelling in the family car.

In the back, my brother and I had designated sides, our territory defined by the leatherette arm rest which was always put down firmly between us, lest either should inadvertently sprawl beyond our jurisdiction. So my view was the familiar one of the back of my mother’s head. I was always secretly glad to be the one behind her, out of her field of vision and the scope of her judgmental eye. Car trips could get tetchy, so safest out of view.

The familiar profile of my dad was behind the steering wheel, eyes front, concentrating on the traffic, keeping us all safe. And my lovely brother to my right, two years my elder, quiet and thoughtful, holding his packet of polo mints prescribed to stave off his travel sickness.

I was bored. The mood was dreary, the weather was dreary, and the car slowed to a halt at a traffic light. The engine idled. I gazed mindlessly out of the window. And that’s when it happened.

Suddenly and quite unexpectedly, I found myself out of my body, floating over the clock tower of the building opposite. I was looking down at our grey Triumph 2000, sitting at the traffic lights with us in it. I felt slightly alarmed, but the floating sensation wasn’t unpleasant. I felt sort of spacious and I remember trying to make sense of this strange turn of events. Then, as I looked down, I thought, What if the traffic lights change to green? Gripped with sudden panic that I would be left behind, abandoned forty feet above a road junction, I snapped back into my body. Wide eyed and heart thumping, I was back in my seat.

I looked furtively at the backs of Mum and Dad, terrified I’d be in trouble, but strangely they didn’t seem to have noticed. I remember pushing my head as far back as possible into the car seat so that I could swivel just my eyes to look at my brother. Had he noticed my absence? Apparently not. He was just as I’d left him. I seemed to have got away with it. If Mum knew, I would’ve been in big trouble. Big trouble for getting out of the car, ridiculed for talking nonsense, chastised for making things up. There was nothing to be gained from mentioning it. So I didn’t.

I just sat there, slightly awestruck and rooted to my grey leatherette seat. To my eight-year-old self, it was a mysterious secret.

And so began a series of similar episodes of “leaving my body” and floating above it. Usually in school assemblies or lessons which I found tedious and I’d go a bit dreamy…and whoosh, up I’d go. But I never mentioned it to anyone. I assumed such things were taboo, like so much about the mysteries of life, which the fear of ridicule had taught me not to mention or ask about.

As my teens passed in a messy blur of exams, awkwardness, blue eyeshadow, and self-discovery, I’d almost forgotten this childhood phenomenon. Until aged nineteen, and I found myself at university.

I wasn’t quite sure how I’d got there. We were working class stock. It wasn’t expected and I’d never really wanted to go. I had no interest in the Chemistry and Pharmacology I was studying, but in the absence of a better plan and with the school’s presumption that “that’s what clever girls do,” there I was. A square peg in a round hole sitting in an Organic Chemistry lecture with about a hundred other 1980’s students.

I was frantically scribbling notes, trying to keep up with something I didn’t understand or even care about, until finally a wave of futility swept over me and I put down my pen. Defeated.

I leaned back and surveyed the sea of woolly jumpers and unwashed hair that stretched out before me in a hormonal fog. I wondered how many of these other students really wanted to be here? Was it really just me who didn’t?

I gazed down at the professor, delivering his monologue, a caricature in brown corduroy. Jeez, this is so tedious and pointless. Is this really what my life is all about?

And then, like all those years before, I was suddenly out of my body again, looking down at my despairing self, sat in the curved, terraced seating of the lecture theatre. I was in that same detached, floaty void and felt the same mild alarm. But this time it was different. I wasn’t alone. To my left I suddenly felt the presence of a fatherly old man and he spoke to me.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You can leave. You can go. Everything will be all right.”

I snapped back into my body. I sat perfectly still, trying to make some sense of what had just happened. All I knew was that I was profoundly touched that this man seemed to understand my plight and I was deeply comforted. I was so convinced of his support for me that I picked up my pen and drew a horizontal line under my notes and beneath that line, in capitals letters, I wrote THE END.

I sat through the remainder of the lecture in complete confidence that despite the uncertainty of what the future would hold, I would leave university that day and everything would be all right. I had never felt more sure of anything in my life.

I made an excuse to avoid lunch with my friends, and with that, I walked home, stuffed my belongings into my rucksack, and without a word to anyone, walked to the coach station and boarded a National Express to my future.

That future unfolded into the familiar tapestry of life experience. Working hard, seeing the best and worst of humanity, love, death, struggle, loss, triumph, facing fears, finding joy, and three beautiful children. And those twenty-five years completely papered over the memory of those strange out of body experiences of my youth.

So at forty-four, and in the calmer waters which followed the storm of my life, I knew I needed to stop, reflect, and take stock. I looked at the leaflet next to the computer on my desk. It had been there a while. It looked back at me.

Meditation Class, Weds Evenings 7-9pm, South Notts College.

“A Scandinavian method based on western psychological and scientific understandings.” I could cope with that. I’d worked in a pharmaceutical laboratory and in property renovation, and I wasn’t interested in any spiritual hippy nonsense.

So I went. There were sixteen of us. A motley assortment in a Portakabin with fuzzy grey carpet tiles, our exploits illuminated by unforgiving fluorescent strip-lights overhead. What could be so hard about sitting with your eyes closed for half an hour? We bonded and laughed over the trials and tribulations of an activity which sounded so simple but transpired to be anything but, as we explored our inner landscapes together.

And then one evening in a beautiful, nostalgic bolt of wonderment, on a blue plastic chair in a Portakabin, I slipped into that long forgotten out of body void I hadn’t visited since that Chemistry lecture in 1982. I was as awestruck as that girl at the traffic lights in 1972. It was like a homecoming.

Wikipedia:

“Astral projection (or astral travel) is a term used in esotericism to describe a wilful out of body experience that assumes the existence of a soul or consciousness called the astral body that is separate from the physical body and capable of travelling outside it throughout the universe. The idea of astral travel is ancient and occurs in multiple cultures. There is no scientific evidence that there is a soul or consciousness separate from normal neural activity or one that can consciously leave the body and make observations. “

The next ten years of my life were an exploration of the scientifically unproven.

My daily meditation continued. It was the spaces between the thoughts, not the thoughts themselves, which lured me and I accessed my void at will. Somehow I felt connected to something greater than that which we all subscribe to. A different, higher level of ‘flow’, but for which I had no words to adequately describe. My hands would get hot and the whole experience felt energetic. Long forgotten memories resurfaced complete with the emotional intensity I’d felt at the time. It was quite disconcerting.

My meditation teacher could offer no insight. The class eventually wound up when she returned to Norway and I was on my own.

I confided about my funny meditations to an old school friend over a coffee one day. “You should try Reiki, Jan,” he said. “That’d be right up your street, that’s all energy and stuff.”

I’d never heard of it.

My ego resisted violently as I googled Reiki. “New age hippy rubbish,” it chided. It took some courage to sign up to a weekend course and sit there imagining balls energy and columns of light, but I did it.

And I learnt that we have a human energy field. Energy pathways that run through our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual bodies, and that these all interconnect.

And that we can channel energy that is all around us to enhance our own energy fields, promoting better health.

So it dawned on me that I had been inadvertently channeling energy and self-healing all this time. Clearing out emotional blockages, releasing old traumas. The baggage large and small of the last forty-five years began to transform. And I’d never felt so good.

Reiki was in the right ball park, but I knew it still wasn’t exactly “it.” So I carried on undaunted with my energetic version of meditation, until one evening when I cleared out an experience so traumatic and confusing that I was at a total loss.

In my void I was a man in a damp, drizzly field in medieval times. I was ambushed by two men in long tunics who speared me through the chest with a broken tree branch, and I experienced what could only be described as a hideous and terrifying death, drowning as my lungs filled with blood. I relived it in graphic visual and emotional detail. Afterwards, I collapsed onto my bed, quaking and spent, panting and rocking in the foetal position. My eyes were on stalks. What the hell was that?

“How long ’til dinner, Mum?” came a cry from the other side of the door. And I was back in my more usual reality.

This was bonkers. I was put in touch with a spiritual teacher by the Reiki lady. He phoned me and explained that I had experienced a death from a previous life and suggested that I might want to come and see him. Adrift in a world now way beyond my understanding, I agreed.

And so I found myself sat cross legged on a big floor cushion, trying to disguise how painful it was, as I hadn’t sat cross legged since I was about six. There was a big, purple amethyst to my right, some rainbow-coloured pictures adorning the walls, and relaxing bongy music in the back ground. I was anything but relaxed. I was like a rabbit in headlights. What am I doing here? I didn’t say a thing. Yet I was sat opposite a slight man of indeterminate age, who seemed, reassuringly, to know what was going on with me. He smiled kindly over his glasses and told me I was very brave. He said one day I would be sitting opposite people this way, only I would be the one doing the talking. He smiled again at my blank and clueless expression. He said I was a spiritual healer in the making. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

With his help and guidance over the coming years, my opening up accelerated and I learnt a new language. That of the scientifically unproven spiritual world.

As in the chemistry lecture all those years ago, I started encountering other non-physical beings in my void. A Mongolian guide; my late father and other spirits; dead people who passed on messages in mirror writing (which explained another childhood peculiarity—a compulsion to write reams in mirror writing). I encountered cheeky monkey spirits just messing around, as well as more malevolent entities. I didn’t know what the point of all this was but I trusted my teacher, who said that I was just passing through all this and not to worry. He didn’t say where to and I didn’t ask. It felt important so I just carried on.

The rest of life rolled on, too. My eldest children left for university, and I had a new part-time job in a shop, but I only told a trusted few open-minded friends about the goings-on on my meditation chair after making the lunch boxes and washing up every night.

My teacher said I had a powerful psychic presence. I felt too silly to actually ask what that was. I would make mental notes of many things he said and then Google them at home.

I then found that I only had to think of another person and I was in their energy field. Without them being physically there, I could bring energy into them in the same way as I could bring it into myself. My hands moved around and as the energy pushed through blockages in their auras, I felt the emotions coming out associated with their traumas which had caused the congestion. Just as I had with my own. I was now crying out other people’s grief, terror, and shame and experiencing every nuance of their emotional pain as it passed harmlessly through me. Sometimes I would get vignettes, as I called them; visual pictures and other information about what was going on during the trauma.

With experience and understanding I gathered confidence, and gradually started working directly with people. It felt like a big responsibility. It was profoundly moving. It was healing.

Along the way I learnt about other realms beyond the awareness of most. I was introduced to angels and visited a space of timeless love where we exist beyond the constraints of our physical form. I learnt about past life phenomena and all of it was beautiful and humbling.

I knew there were spirit healing guides working through me doing this work. I had encountered enough spirits by then. And besides, I had seen them. An older man and two women, Native American shamanic healers. Their personalities are now very familiar. I like them. All three work together through me now like a team, clearing out energetic debris and stagnation, making the energy flow healthier and returning lost and fragmented soul parts to gradually make people more whole.

A person ultimately heals themselves, and their own higher consciousness will take what they need for their highest good. I know I am only a channel for this energy. It is not for the faint hearted. It can be an emotional ride as energies are stirred up, sorted out, and settle into the new energetic framework. Healing hurts. But it is short lived and worth it as new ways, free of old limiting patterns, become possible.

And now, as my spiritual teacher predicted, I sit opposite people and talk to them, calling my guides in to help them. I support them on their journey. I know it’s what I’m here for. It’s my purpose and I am truly grateful.

That’s my story of becoming a spiritual healer. So if you’re sat at the traffic lights and notice your child on the roof opposite, don’t be too quick to tell them off.

Love, Janice

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