Hands.

Hey up, you deep-as-a-puddle, know-nothing, self-obsessed jackasses, it's that time again! Yep-- the time when I remind you that I'm a chaos magickian on a cheapshit 8-week Reiki course, and I'm still more spiritual than you sorry lot. Sell all your worldy goods and go and live on a commune, quick.

So anyway, some interestingish stuff happened on Thursday night. (You got the usual rant'n'whine because I was tired and still processing.) We covered scanning, whereby the Reiki person moves their hands over the recumbent client and plays Spot The Manky Bit. In their aura. Stop laughing.

It was my go first. I was pretty zonked out, what with the hot room, the weapons-grade joss-sticks and the jingly new-age muzak that my teacher likes to put on (bless her heart). And the scanning took place with the client (in this case moi) lying on their back on a massage table. I'm prepered to accept the idea that this first bit was all a figment of my dozing brain. After the scanning, I recieved a Sekim Reiki healing, which was when things went a bit peculiar. A healing sesh starts with the healer placing their hands on your head, over the crown. They hold that for a while and them move down the body, chastely switiching from hands-on to hands in the 'aura' over your naughty bits to avoid embarassment and/or litigation. The woman I was working with had got as far as my shoulders when she took her hands away. I had my eyes closed, and I could feel the warmth of her hands over my face. I assumed that she'd gone into hands-off mode (either because her hands were chilly or because it seemed like the thing to do). This went on for a while, and then suddenly I felt another pair of hands on my knees. So I opened my eyes and my classmate was down the other end of the table, with her hands on my knees. Nobody else was near me. Yet I had been absolutely sure that someone had their hands over my face.

So anyhow, we swopped places so I was working on her. I was scanning away, going "Auras, yerright, pfftt" as I got further and further along without anything happening. Then suddenly my hand stopped, and was pulled over to the client's right. (My eyes were closed, so I couldn't see exactly which bit of her my hand was hovering over.) "There you are," said an inner voice that sounded exactly like mine, but wasn't. I opened my eyes and moved my hand up and down in the air over the spot where it had halted. The teacher came over. "Have you found something?" she said.

"Yeah," I said. "I mean, I think so."
"If you think you have, then you have," she told me. She put her own hand over the spot. "Yes," she said. "Now find where it starts."

I moved my hand up and down in the air, about a foot above the woman's right abdomen. And I swear, I felt, physically felt, where it stopped. I'm holding out my hand, palm down, in thin air, and here it's warm and here, a fraction of an inch upwards, it's not. It wasn't body-heat because my hand was too far away. It wasn't some trick of blood circulation or pressure on the nerves. It wasn't something to do with currents of air in the room. I thought of all that. It was a perceptible temprature difference that I can't explain in any ordinary way. Afterwards she told us that she'd been suffering from a viral infection which had originated at that exact point on her body.

I'm not a stranger to this kind of thing, of course, having been a ritual magickian (on and off) since forever, and on the grand scheme of things I guess it's not "VOOP! Lazarus! Come on dooowwwwwn!" or anything. But it was thought-provoking, nonetheless. I'm starting to wonder about some stuff. For instance, my teacher's always banging on about angels, how there are angels with us when we're healing and angels find her parking spaces and blah-blah-blah. And of course I'm all Yerright, angels, pfft. But now I'm thinking that maybe there are things around us while we're doing this stuff... which begs the question, who or what might they be and what are they after?

Fragments of ourselves, perhaps. Outer Entities. Fractal elves. Hell, maybe they just like cheap incence and whalesong tapes. Who knows.