Awakening Retreat in Mentone - Saturday

From my original blog, "Elementals" July 2005:

On the advice of my new friend C., I drove to Mentone early on Saturday morning on the spur of the moment to attend an informal gathering/retreat on Awakening, the life-work of the late Ron L.H. I had been scheduled to attend an Awakening workshop in NC back in April, but he died the week before the retreat.

I already knew some people from my town who were attending: R. and his new girlfriend, S., D. and his ponytail, Tall C., and C., so I was among, if not friends, then good trustworthy acquaintances.

I arrived at about 8:30, which is a miracle for me since it was about a two-hour drive, and I am definitely not a morning person. But I was keyed up for this. The retreat center is the private home of G., one of the attendees, minor poobahs of this group. It's a beautiful place perched on top of a bluff with lots of space, windows, gorgeous scenery, decks, hot-tub, and rooms and facilities for about 20 people to stay comfortably. I was immediately warmed by the place and by the inviting house, if slightly on guard since I didn't know many people and didn't know what was going to transpire.

The morning started off with a small discussion about previous night's events which I knew nothing about and mostly ignored. Then, we were going to do a group meditation. Or so I thought.

We lay down on the soft carpet to the strains of some new-age music with singing bowls or something, and I thought, "OK, I'll just do my Sacred Silence thing and that will be that." Well, I immediately had some interesting visual feedback which I wasn't used to receiving, but I put that down to too much coffee. My normal meditation lasts about 20 minutes and has me visualize a certain landscape and do a sequence of events. I found that I couldn't merge with the landscape like I normally did; everything was hazy and indistinct in my mind's eye, and I kept snapping back into my body from time to time in the oddest way that had never happened before in these meditations.

In my meditations, I am usually aware of other people who are near me. This time, I noticed that when I was trying to 'sense' the presence of others in the room, certain people would sort of 'go transparent' as if they weren't really there, though I could sense their outline. It was as if no one was home. Odd, but again I put this down to caffeine and nervousness. At another point, I tested myself to see if I could sense other specific people in the room, and so looked in my mind's eye for C., my new friend. My image of him is of him with wide, unseeing eyes, clutching his present reality, holding on for all it was worth. I also did a physical scan of the room (all in meditation, all with my eyes closed) and noted that someone had brought a set of crystal singing bowls. I counted seven of them.

The meditation went slightly long, I figured it was about 30 minutes or so. It turns out that we were meditating for two hours total. Now, that's a loong time to meditate, especially if you are only used to twenty minutes at a time. But it didn't really seem that overly long to me in this instance. We all 'came back' and 'shared'. Ugh.

Unbeknownst to me, Spirit Guides were planning on using this meditation time to 'work' on us. My initial reaction to statements like that are that they're hooie, as my Granddad used to say. This time it made a lot of sense: as we talked, I understood that during this 'work', we're put in some sort of etheric 'bubble' to keep us safe in some sort of way. This 'bubble' prevents certain things, such as my attempts to go to my Sacred Place, or to venture outside and explore the physical world while I'm in meditation. I could sense the room just fine, and indeed there were seven singing bowls, and indeed my friend has the color eyes that I say in my inner vision while meditating.

OK. So now I'm getting a little bit unsettled.

We ate lunch, had free time (C. took some of us to a very cool valley nearby where he had camped earlier in the year), then had dinner together, after which the main Awakening sessions of the day would commence. Before dinner, however, one woman, B. was being worked on, given an Awakening session while some of us quietly lounged around the main area. Suddenly she began shrieking, weeping, and flopping around like she was having a seizure for a while. Then she quieted down. Unnerved, I returned to my reading. In a minute she began weeping uncontrollably again and shrieked, "He killed the children!". WTF? I was growing uneasy.

What is an 'Awakening', you may ask? I still don't really know. What I do know about it is that it is esoteric energy work that involves 'clearing' past lives, waking an individual up to his or her true essence, and is sort of like a super-duper Reiki session. Oh, and you have to wear socks. Didn't get the part about the socks, but it was one of the 'rules'. Even though there apparently are no 'rules', and 'anybody can do an Awakening on anybody else, you don't really need any training'. Hmm. So, why do the classes exist again?

Keeping skepticism at bay, I vowed to keep an open mind during the sessions. I hoped that I might actually experience an Awakening session myself, and the prospects looked pretty good: we had two massage tables and about 8 experienced awakeners at work at one time. It looked like there would be 4 sessions of 2 people each, which seemed fine to me.

The first session opened with a prayer to "the trinity energy of Michael, Melchizedech, and Metatron", and we were off and running. When the prayer had concluded, I began ringing one of the singing bowls. If you've never rung a bowl, it's pretty amazing: the sound builds as if from nowhere and resonates throughout a room in an amazing way. I had done some reading about music therapy and singing bowls, and had actually bought one at a local store back in the fall. They are said to amplify energies, and I was pouring energy ('holding energy' for the other workers) into my ringing of the bowl. It is mezmerizing and tends to help a meditative state, I think.

During the next two sessions I rang a bowl, sometimes two at a time, and others rang intermittently, too. The bowls seemed to want to ring louder or softer at times, corresponding to some energetic thing that was going on at the two tables just a couple of feet away where the awakenings were actually happening. At times, the energy in the room was so thick that I thought I could actually feel it.

Once, I looked up from my bowl as D. was working on J. with a small, slender crystal at his throat area, near the throat chakra. I would swear to my grave that I saw pulses of light shoot out of the end of that crystal. I blinked and looked again, and damned if I didn't see it again! Through the course of the evening I saw a couple of other minor visual manifestations that still make me question myself, but I saw something; that I'm sure of.

Ringing the bowl seemed like such a natural adjunct to the work that I didn't even think about it. I knew that it amplified energy and intention, so I figured that they used them all the time. To my surprise, two of the workers approached me after the session and said what a wonderful addition to their work it had been. They had never had bowls during their sessions, and they loved it! The woman who was jockeying for head-honcho position in the hierarchy didn't seem very pleased.

Session two was much like session three with the exception that I rang different bowls, and experimented with finding combinations of tones that seemed to fit what was happening energetically in the room at the time. Again, the bowls seemed to want to be loud or soft on their own accord. Volume didn't seem entirely under my control.

Session three, with B. and A., a couple, on tables simultaneously was a little different. Our start was interrupted by B. (the shrieking one from the mid-day session) announcing from the porch that she had seen a UFO. So, naturally, everyone had to go look for it.

In this session, both B. and A. had major emotional releases that made me personally uncomfortable. I ignored my discomfort and just channeled a 'helpful' energy over to the two tables and kept ringing my bowls for all I was worth. Ringing a bowl for three hour-long sessions is quite a work-out; I was slipping into snoring and light sleep after this session was over with. Also, she-who-wants-to-be-important-in-the-hierarchy thrice told me not to ring certain bowls 'because they're too loud'. I honored her wishes. I also played the remaining bowls as loud as was fucking possible.

Then it was my turn to be on a table. Now, since this Awakening business centers around past lives, and about a transition from 3D to 5D and 7D (what that's about I have no idea), I was determined not to be led by any of the workers into any implanted memories about past lives. Ho ho. So, my session starts. I center myself with the intention that I be 'reconnected' to something. This has been such a desolate year that I have been praying with a certain desperation about being shown what I'm here for, for a clearer view of my ultimate purpose.

D., whom I've come to like quite a lot, is one of the primary workers at my table. This comforts me. Until she starts talking to me about a 'past life': "you weren't responsible; the catastrophe happened, but you weren't responsible, although you took the blame onto yourself'. Then she started talking about crystals and my affinity for them, and "crystals in your body". This I didn't make any sense out of at ALL until I remembered what I silently prayed for when I began teaching at the massage school.

On my first night, and on subsequent nights early last year (2004) as I began teaching, I prayed and visualized myself as a huge, clear, quartz crystal that was merely refracting white, divine light in such a way that each student received a perfect rainbow spectrum from me. I remember thinking that all I had to do was be absolutely 'clear' and not put too much of myself in the way and I'd be fine. I had a vivid image of myself as this giant crystal refracting rainbows onto everybody.

This image came leaping back into my memory during that session. Immediately, I looked inside myself and saw places in that 'crystal' that I'd envisioned myself to be where there were flaws or occlusions, so I mentally cleaned away the dirt, or repaired the flaw.

Another issue that's been on my mind as of late has been the way in which I limit myself simply because of my sexuality. I close myself off from certain expressions of love or friendship because I think that the other person couldn't handle the fact that I'm gay. A cosmic, "Ha ha" from the universe on that one: C. is a big, burly man who is very opinionated and who drives a vintage Harley an sort of looks like a bad-ass leather boy from time to time, is trained as an Engineer from GA Tech, yet who is also very hip to arcana and esoteric stuff such as this. He also has one of the most open hearts that I've encountered so far in life.

So, during the session, another worker, G., says in my ear that I've 'closed the doors'. 'The doors are locked'. 'Open the doors'. As I look inside myself, I envision locked, closed doors, but have no idea what she's talking about. Then she says, 'You've closed them voluntarily'. Oh. I get it; it's the sexuality thing. So, I 'mentally' open those doors and eliminate the barriers to any part of myself that's self-imposed and due to my own phobia about other people's acceptance of my sexuality. That's their business, really, not mine anyway.

At points in my session, I felt as if I were a tungsten filament, hooked up to divine energy flows and glowing with incandescent light, radiating into the house and grounds. Whoever was playing bowls (C. and B., evidently) was doing an excellent job; my session seemed to crest and trough on the sound of them.

During our after-session wrap-up, I spoke with both D. and G., and talked about pertinent things. The 'opening-up', they said, happened right after G. had used the word, 'voluntarily', and I had then 'mentally' opened the doors. They both said that they could feel an immense shift at that point. And so could I. The crystal metaphor I didn't put together in my mind until after my session when I was drifting off to sleep, and so haven't discussed with D.

One interesting thing did happen after the session though: as I was drifting to sleep last night after having had a brief soak in the hot tub with J., D., and C., I initiated my normal before-sleep meditation. But I had a rapid-fire slide-show of images that I couldn't attribute to anything. Then, just as I was going to sleep, I saw a brilliantly white round spot in my mind's eye about the size of a quarter. Inside that quarter was a crystal-clear movie of three people interacting in a non-threatening way, something that I can't quite recall. I thought it strange because I neversee images this vivid. Ever.

This morning at breakfast, J., one of the other men at the retreat recounted an almost identical vision that he had had upon waking.

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