Welcome to Other~Wise

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OTHERWISE BLOG

Welcome to Other~Wise, an exploration of uncommon wisdom. The term "uncommon wisdom" is used here to describe knowledge and practices a bit outside of most peoples’ standard day-to-day lives. The topics here one has to read up on, exercise one’s perceptions and paradigms, and perhaps visit specialists such as herbalists, shamanic practicioners, traditional healers, and the like.

I want to share useful information here so I'll stay away from theoretical "things I heard" and stay with what I've learned along my own path and what's been most helpful in my own practice. I do love good stories, but the focus of this blog is to share things I can speak to first hand that will hopefully be helpful to others with similar interests and pursuits.

Here's a brief introduction to how I came to do the work I do. As a child I read everything I could and was most interested in folklore, mythology, traditional wisdom, ghost stories, a smattering of humanities, and general sciencey stuff. I wanted to know how things worked and how the pieces fit together.

In 1996 I woke up in a rather dazed state on the floor after a workplace accident. The day after the electrocution I was compelled to take a roadtrip to Chehalis, Washington and somehow found myself at the crop circle that had appeared there the previous night. It was fun to wander around in the formation taking in the strangeness of things before the local farmer chased us out of his field. I can't say with any certainty if these two incidents contributed to the following phenomena, but it's funny how these things all happened at the same time. Who can say?

After the above incidents I noticed that my left hand (the one that had been the contact point of the electrical wiring mishap) was sensitive and would tingle whenever I touched items of metal, or that held some deep significance to people. At first this was kind of fun. When I worked at a comicbook shop I was very popular with people completing their sets of foil-enhanced collector's cards because if a package tingled they knew they were going to get one of the rare cards hidden away in there. Eventually the sensitivity became unmanageable and touching items of special significance to people could tingle to a point of ...'unpleasantness', and if I bumped into someone with my left arm it could put the whole arm to sleep. What's a guy to do?

Through serendipity I was directed to a class teaching the Healing Touch energetic healing modality. I hoped that if I learned about energy sensitivity I might be able to tone down, or learn to work with whatever I had going on. The first attempt at the class ended early when I became overwhelmed as if a floodgate had opened and swept me away in...'bigness'. I didn't have a good way to explain it then. For several days I had symptoms that were very much like the wrung out feeling one feels after a long illness. I studied grounding techniques and tried the class again the next time it was offered. This time it was a really amazing experience. When I "tuned in" the feeling was akin to jumping onto a moving freight train. If you've never gone hobo and tried to jump a freight train, think of what it felt like as a child to grab the merry-go-round and leap on as it spun around. That feeling of being lifted asunder as the world moves by around you is similar on a much smaller scale, but much safer than playing with trains. Feeling this out and learning to interpret the signals was very helpful to the HT energetic work, and freed me from the troublesome overloads I had been experiencing.

While I was learning more about energy modalities, I thought it would be fun to make a side project of movie shorts spoofing paranormal investigation shows that were so popular at the time. I had the good fortune to have after-hours access to a local office building with a reputation for being haunted. I would explore the areas people had seen the ghost using my EMF meter (electromagnetic frequency) and my own hand to check for tingles. Dogs wouldn't go in a certain back filing room, and a child had seen the woman's ghost there. One could regularly hear footsteps ascending the stairs, always up, never going down. I saw her once walking down the hall past the doorway I was about to step out of. I found I could communicate with the spirit on a very basic level, and eventually I sought to help her cross over. This was a mistake.

The spirit shared that she had been diagnosed with cancer. After overhearing coworkers talking about how the cancer was deserved because she smoked so much, she killed herself in the office. I thought I could help her cross over and put the earthbound spirit to rest. Sounds good, yes? At first the office was quiet and I felt good about what we had done. But after a few days, she came back, and she came back angry! I heard the sounds of an office being ransacked. I could hear boxes of papers being flung around, things being violently thrown around, but when I flung open the door...it was an empty office with a bare desk. There wasn't a single scrap of paper there, and not even a vent to carry sound into the little place. On another night a person alone heard the same sounds from the upstairs corner office, but when she touched the doorknob an intense cold shot up her arm paralyzing it. She called out that the ghost could have the office and she was going home, but she had to sit in her car for some time before her arm would move enough to drive again. I didn't know what had gone wrong, but I knew I had to fix it.

I studied. Good intentions are a good starting point, but it's helpful to have a real idea of what you're doing. One of the helpful books I found was “The Unquiet Dead”, by Dr. Edith Fiore. The next time i communicated with the angry spirit I learned that she had indeed crossed over, but didn't receive the warm welcome she wanted. Feeling even more isolated, she returned to the familiar office to rage. Here’s what I explained to the spirit. That spark of creativity, The Great Spirit of Creation, God, whatever name you choose, is in all things. Because it is in all things, it can't turn its back on itself, and therefore can't really "turn its back" on you/it. When we feel separated from that eternal energy, it's because we put walls around ourselves, walls of doubt, of fear, of anger, of guilt. These walls prevent us from seeing that light. The biggest lie religions teach is that you can be separated from God. When we take down those walls, the light is there and ready for us, but we have to do that. When the spirit crossed over, she was still waiting for someone else to make a change for her. Hearing this is enough for most earthbound spirits to "get it" and many will instantly move on with this knowledge. Some take a little bit more to get brave enough to move on, but this is the gist of it. The spirit crossed over, this time successfully.

I learned a lot from this experience. I'm still learning and fine-tuning what I do. I continued working with energetic healing modalities and I regularly practice and teach Reiki, so much of what I share here will come from the perspective and experiences of a Reiki practitioner, but we've all got a lot of tricks in our bags to draw from so there's a lot to share. So there it is, this is how I came to do what I do, and where I'm coming from. I hope you'll find something useful in this growing collection.

Try to be good to yourself and others, always and in all ways.