Welcome to this week's SATURDAY SESSIONS, featuring The Compromise, the story of a past-life regression.
If you missed the beginning last week, it's about a guy whose unhappy life is now made even worse by a recent diagnosis of terminal cancer. Having decided to avoid traditional treatment, we find him attending his first session with a past-life regression therapist.
The Compromise, # 2
Sometimes, what you dream about is a past-life fragment, Lucy tells me. Even people you meet, places you see, déjà vu, they resonate.
I'm sitting comfortably in the dim-lit room, eyes closed, the outline of the Dali print on the wall still before me in my mind's eye, the soft strains of sitar in the air, Lucy's mellifluous voice telling me to enjoy the peace, let the light flow down through my body, and so on.
Maybe I should have told her that I can't be hypnotised. Too sceptical, cynical even. Nevertheless, I believed everything I looked up on the Internet, about cancer, I mean, The Truth About Cancer, how all the money spent on cancer research is going down the toilet because they're looking in the wrong places. They're barking up the wrong tree. I believe that. I really do. All those carcinogens in the air and in the food and in the water are the triggers, of course, but not the cause. You have to get to the cause. I really do believe that cancer is the result of unresolved issues in one's life or past life.
But as for the soothing music, the spurious recall of what it was like to be in the womb, the opening of a huge, heavy, wooden door into a beautiful garden, nah, not for me, thanks. Sorry, sorry, sweetheart. No, don't say that. Don't say sweetheart. She might get the wrong idea. But I should really call a halt now and tell her. Oops, there she goes again, she's counting down again. Where am I supposed to be now? Garden? Ah no, I'd better stop. In all honesty, I'd better throw in the towel, tell her the truth, just tell her the truth, tell her the pure and simple truth that hypnosis just doesn't work for me.
I sit up abruptly and raise my two arms in a gesture of surrender. I apologise and tell her that I should never have come. Lucy is smiling sympathetically. She's so lovely, Lucy, so calm, composed. I'm ashamed of myself for disappointing her. She offers me a cup of tea. I sit there waiting for a few minutes, sulking, pondering my petulance, and she returns with the mug of tea and a delicious slice of apple and blackberry pie.
As I savour the pie and sip the tea, she tells me that although some people are not predisposed to entering the theta state for various reasons, there's nothing special about hypnosis; at any time of the day we can find ourselves in a mild state of self-hypnosis, when we are about to sleep, the hypnogogic state, or when we are just waking up, the hypnopompic state, or in a milder form, when we are daydreaming or watching a captivating movie, or even a commercial on TV.
I can believe that about the ads, I laugh. We finish our tea and tart and I thank her graciously for her time and take out my wallet to pay the fee. The sitar music on the CD is still playing in the background but within a moment, within a few moments, Dear Reader, the next track on the album will precipitate a change, a profound change, no, more than that, a tectonic shift of cataclysmic proportions leading to nothing short of the most decisively life-changing event that has ever taken place in the past forty-four years of my miserable existence.
(Continued next Saturday!)
P.S. LAZARUS is the extraordinary tale of a man who raises his son from the dead - but at a cost. It's published by Smashwords as an e-book. If you'd like a free copy, just pop me an e-mail and I'll be happy to send it to you!
Greg
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