January 28, 2004

• My Mental Block

  
  

  I’m “sensitive” in the psychic sense, as everyone realizes who knows me well and has experienced having me answer their questions before they ask them.  My former neighbor Willa, a professional psychic herself, used to get freaked by that.  I remember when we’d only known each other a few months, one day we were just talking and she got this funny look on her face and yelled at me, “Will you STOP answering my questions before I ask!?!” 

  
  

  My trouble is that I don’t realize that’s what I’m doing.  I have cultivated the habit of saying what pops into my mind, and that is what has gotten me my reputation as a psychic.  As my mentor Dick Sutphen says, there is no little red light in your head that lights up to signal when one is receiving psychic input.  That input is there all the time, unless one is physically or chemically impaired or in an inconducive brainwave state.  Generally speaking, when your receiver isn’t working your transmitter is.  There’s a state of relaxed receptiveness, and there’s the opposite state of terror or anguish when you broadcast vibes like a beacon.  Some of us seem to have a natural ability to switch on one state or the other, and anyone can learn how to… but I digress.

  
  

  When I was a student nurse, I felt my patients’ pain, their anxiety and that of their families.  I didn’t feel it where they felt it.  I felt it in my gut.  When my kid gets hurt, I feel it like a shot to the gut, a little electric shock to my hara, whether he’s nearby or not.  My gut gets uneasy when big events (like 9/11) are happening at a distance, or when lesser troubles happen nearby, such as the winter night my neighbor was drunk and pulled his snowmachine out of the bed of his truck on top of himself or the day when one of the Iditarod mushers had gotten off the trail and gone missing for 14 hours.  Where the mental block comes in is that I often unconsciously choose not to recognize these gut feelings for what they are.

  
  

  I woke this morning feeling nauseated.  Checked myself for fever because it felt like I was getting the flu.  No fever, just a queasy feeling.  I had our neighbors, J. and S., on my mind.  That seemed natural enough.  Greyfox had intended to call J. because we’re running low on firewood and he still owed us part of a load from last fall when his saw broke before he finished up our order.  I reminded Greyfox when he got up, and he called.  S. answered the phone, crying.  Greyfox asked for J. and she said he was “gone”.  Someone else came on the line and said it was a bad time, he’d call back.

  
  

  My queasy feeling increased and I had the nagging feeling that “gone” didn’t mean they’d had a fight and he packed up and split.  Sure enough, when Greyfox went to the general store later, he learned that J. hanged himself, and S. had found him, cut him down and tried to resuscitate him.  I can’t honestly say that what I felt when he told me was relief, but at least then I knew what the queasy feeling was about.  It has been growing all day as the whole neighborhood picks up on the news and responds.  That one note in the psychic symphony that I have identified as S. has gone numb.  Maybe someone medicated her.

  
  

  When Greyfox came in with the news, I was here at the keyboard writing this morning’s blogs.  I stopped briefly to discuss it with him and then finished up what I was writing.  I kept thinking about it, and when I was all done and Greyfox was passing by, I said to him, “I wish I was more psychic.”  He said, “If you were any more psychic, we’d have to move to Chicken.”  That’s a remote town up north of Northway, by the Yukon border.  It had been a plan years ago for my ex, Charley, and me to move up there farther from civilization.  Moving here from Anchorage was the best we could do at the time, for economic reasons.  It was far enough from the city that I didn’t have that psychic uneasiness 24/7, but the population keeps growing and we still talk about Chicken.

  
  

  I was thinking that if I was more psychic, I might be able to identify that gut feeling as soon as it comes on.  That, I thought for a while this morning, would be more comfortable for me and would make me more effective at helping others when they are in crisis.  I’d be more responsive to their crises… and then it hit me.  That logic has a hole in it big enough to drive a 747 through.  I do “respond”.  I respond by shying away.  I avert my third eye from disaster, don’t tune in to trauma.  I have at my disposal shamanic techniques to enhance my perception.  I use them when I do readings.  I suppose that if I really wanted to know what was going on I’d use them when I get that gut feeling, but I don’t

  
  

  Around the beginning of September in 2001, I had a feeling something big was about to happen.  For about a week or so, I reached for the remote and switched on the Today show as soon as I awoke, to catch the news.  On the eleventh when I woke I didn’t reach for the remote.  I didn’t even think about it.  I got up, got coffee, dressed and then turned on the TV and watched the second tower fall live and the replay of the first one.  I don’t know if that “mental block” is some sort of psychic survival mechanism or just a form of laziness.  It’s insulation, as I see it, a firewall.  I’m not sure I want to disable it, not sure I don’t.  Not sure.

  
  

  I am trained in disaster response.  My Red Cross First Aid certification has aged out, but it was at the Instructor level at a time when we trained to suture wounds and really treat trauma, before the liability insurance bean counters took over and first responders started being trained to call 911.  What I’m trying to say here is that on one level I am prepared to deal with disaster and trauma.  I truly desire to be of service and will lend a hand whenever I stumble upon someone in need.  At another level, I guard my own tender emotions.  I avoid the full impact of other people’s pain as long as I can.  I’m just not ready for it, not ever.

  
  

  This may be a valid insight here.  It popped into my mind earlier as I was thinking about averting my eyes from disaster.  I may have gotten that aversion to other people’s pain while riding my father’s shoulders.  He monitored police, fire and ambulance frequencies and drove to the scenes of fires and wrecks.  He never drove past a wreck on the highway.  He always stopped, got out and got close to gawk.  I recall the wreck of a bakery delivery van on a freeway when I was only about two or three.  Looking through the broken windshield, I thought all that red was strawberry jam until he told me it was the driver’s blood.  I also recall a hotel fire even before that, late at night, people screaming, jumping from windows.  I hurt remembering it and I hurt for my neighbor S. and for the whole neighborhood.  J. was a good man; his woodcutting work was a public service.  He is missed.

  
  

  

  
  

  P.S.  Doug is at least as sensitive as I am.  He went to bed shortly after I got up this morning, after reminding me that the firewood pile out there is running low.  When he got up this evening, I told him about J.’s suicide.  He said, “That explains my dreams.”

  
  

   

  • 12:53 am
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