She was so pleasant and friendly I ought to have remembered the oriental-looking woman’s name, but I was new here and had met so many people in such a short space that the introductions hadn’t stuck. But no matter. It seemed she wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer; I was expected at the seminar to which she’d invited me. I supposed I could relax there a little, and make a point this time of learning everyone’s name.
She led me to the seminar room. The organiser was a high-powered professor who had made his name in quantum physics. On my right sat an expert on the chemistry of calcium, particularly limestone and the process by which organs calcify inside the living body. Almost everyone at the seminar had published a book in a distinctive series of volumes that was bringing together knowledge in all these various fields. I wondered if I wasn’t a little out of my element, but the oriental woman and the physics professor both seemed happy to have an occultist on the team.
On my left sat a expert from South America on heart massage techniques. He offered to demonstrate his skills and reached inside my chest. He grasped my heart and palpated it with his fingers, working around and behind to release – he said – the significant tension that had built up there.
These sensations reached a point where they were no longer pleasant, and I turned to him to ask him to stop. But instead of doing so, I woke up. I lay awake with my eyes open, the dream dissolved, yet I still felt the sensations in my chest just as strongly.
Something has changed in my heart chakra. It doesn’t feel as it did. The way it used to feel, like a small fuzzy stone in my chest, has given way to something more inclusive. It’s not simply as if something is in there; it feels like something is working on me, exactly like the image in the dream of an expert hand doing something on the inside.
I’d scoffed a little at accounts of people who imagined they were going to have a heart attack when it was only their chakra working. I won’t be scoffing again! There was a tightness across my chest that put me in mind of cardiac warning signs. It did indeed occur to me that perhaps I was about to die, but I noted how the sensation was focused dead-centre in my chest, rather than to the left, and it wasn’t exactly ‘agony’, although it was uncomfortable and weird.
Also new was the way the feeling persisted into normal consciousness. I’ve never experienced this from the heart chakra before. Usually I feel it only during meditation, and it fades quickly as soon as I get up. Now it was lingering, well into the rest of the day, and I kept noticing the sensations whether I wanted to or not.
I’ve written on Open Enlightenment recently about my thinking – so far – on what chakra experiences are. But the occasion for the article was sensations I noticed gathering strength in my heart chakra again, after a long period of quiet. It seems now that this renewed interest and practice has borne some fruit, or has at least triggered some kind of change. Unless I keel over tomorrow from a cardiac arrest. Time will tell.
