Earlier posts in this series are here and here.
Before I published this article, Julia checked it for accuracy and made a few changes. She told me, “I got goosebumps and felt tenderness in my heart while I read it because this was the night my heart chakra opened.”
How the vasana got created
Julia met her father for the first time when she was five, after he was awarded visitation rights in his divorce from Julia’s mother.
For the next six months, Julia’s father picked her up at her house every other Sunday and took her on wonderful adventures. She loved him and loved these visits. He taught her to skip rocks across a pond, showed her how to feed grass to a cow from her baseball cap, and took her to movies.
The visits stopped after six months because his schizophrenia became worse.
She never saw him again. For the next year or two he sent gifts — wonderful gifts which she still remembers — on her birthday and Christmas. Then around age seven the gifts stopped. She never heard from him again.
Nobody explained to her that he had stopped communicating because his illness made it impossible.
Julia assumed her father had stopped loving her.
He died about 25 years ago.
The vasana was compounded by her grandmother’s hatred of him and her mother’s refusal to talk about him.
Hatred and silence are fertilizers for pain.
How the vasana got destroyed
This was the first vasana of Julia’s that she and I destroyed together. We didn’t plan this. It happened unexpectedly.
One night, after we made love, Julia went into samadhi. This happens to her pretty often after sex. I mention this to make people aware that sex can be of value spiritually. The power that can be found in women’s orgasms is a tremendous resource. Love-making can bind people together on deeper levels than the ordinary one, and those deep levels, once they are noticed, become available just as they do when they are found with sadhanas. When Julia goes into these states, I’m affected by them too in a way that’s difficult to explain. Sometimes I can feel part of what she’s experiencing.
For a while she couldn’t speak and then she said that “Keith Haring lines” (see the picture above) were emanating from her body; warm energy was moving from her solar plexus to her heart; a shimmering white blanket of light covered her body; and she was that light.
Then she sank deeper and stopped talking again. Suddenly she said, “Fred, heal me, you have to heal me.”
For a moment I had no idea what she was talking about. Heal what? I asked the Goddess for help.
Then I realized, “The thing that needs to be healed is Julia’s feeling that her father didn’t love her.”
For a moment I was aware of the vasana. My attention was on it. I’ll say I “looked” at it although I don’t mean “looked” literally. Almost instantly it ceased to exist. As incredible as it may seem, my act of looking at it, my attention, destroyed it. In some strange way I could “see” this happen.
Vasanas die in the light.
I barely did anything. I wasn’t trying to destroy it. I was only trying to see what Julia was suffering from. All I did was notice and pay attention. But I did that while I was in a deeper state than the ordinary one. The whole process, if I can call something so simple and effortless a process, took just a second or two.
I felt that I “knew” that this happened but I couldn’t be sure that I wasn’t imagining it. Later my “knowledge” got confirmed by the fact that Julia’s life changed radically and permanently that night.
Julia stayed in a deep state for several minutes. For a while she talked out loud to God. It was apparent that she was experiencing something extremely profound.
Later Julia verified that the vasana got destroyed that night. Her life changed that night.
From Julia’s point of view
I’m going to report Julia’s perceptions in some detail to give an idea of how elaborate these sorts of experiences can be.
As you will see, her experience had many symbolic elements like a dream. But it turned out to be a dream that transformed her permanently.
It might be more accurate to say: this dream-like experience was her mind’s attempt to represent the process of transformation as it took place.
Right after she asked me to heal her, she felt the disappearance of two heavy hooks which she had been dragging around. Then she saw me come out of red light. I lifted her above my head on outstretched arms and offered her to God. She turned into a golden bird with a plume and a red band around its neck. She shot toward God and landed where God resides with one arm reaching forward toward God and the other arm pointing behind her to remind her where she came from.
Julia felt a weight on her chest. There was a line on her neck going to infinity and a line on her solar plexus extending horizontally. She understood that the weight and lines meant, “Pay attention to this place.” The weight and lines were anchors to bring her attention to the heart. She was very aware of her heart, and it was very open and expanded.
She knew she was in God’s presence. His presence was like a frozen waterfall. The waterfall was bright but not blinding.
After being in God’s presence, Julia could see her heart chakra and its whirling funnel in the front of her body. She saw her grandmother (the source of lots of pain in Julia’s life) reduced to a paper doll that dove into the whirling funnel. (This occurred two days before she destroyed a vasana involving her grandmother which I described in an earlier article. I wrote these two articles in the opposite order from which the events occurred.)
Aftermath
Later Julia told me:
Thank you for healing me. I am aware now that my father always loved me. There was an empty hole in my heart that is now filled with love that my father had for me. I feel such relief and gratitude knowing that he always loved me.
Even though my father died many years ago, I now feel his presence and love in my life.
God was frozen, but he’s not frozen. The frozen waterfall doesn’t mean anything; his love is all around me. You opened up my heart chakra with love, it’s a two-way street here. I’m loved by God and I love others in return. It’s like he’s funneling his love through me. My job is to share it with others.
I asked how it feels to have her heart chakra open?
She said, “Wonderful. Wonderful. But it’s not an entirely new feeling. I believe it has been open. It’s just that I’m more aware of it now. It’s a totally natural feeling for me. I am feeling so surrounded by love now.”
I asked how it feels to have her vasanas gone. (We had destroyed five or six of them in about a week.)
She said, “Lighter. Closer to my grandmother and father. Huge change in my life. Just huge. Beyond imagination.”
Other posts in this series
How to destroy a vasana (example 1): I am a coward
How to destroy a vasana (example 2): Julia’s grandmother
Illustration by Keith Haring.
A beautiful and moving post. Thank you.
Also, it’s wonderful that two people can be so connected that they can help each other in this way.
Thank you, thank you. I’m glad to learn your reaction to this post. I’ve been wondering how people will react to this one.
I love to read every post of you. They’re very interesting and informative. It gives me a different perspective on life because these experiences of yours are nothing like I have in mine.
As with the other posts about the vasanas and your experiences with Julia, this one was fascinating. Thank you for sharing all these with us.
Thank you, Focus. I appreciate this very much.
I concur with Nishant, such a beautiful and touching post. Am grateful you shared this with us, the bit about you giving her to God moved me to tears 🙂 Very powerful to read such stories.
Very glad to hear your reaction. It’s interesting that you pick out the “give her to God” moment because that was one of the most signficant parts of the experience for Julia too. It’s strange how different it was for me. From my point of view, at that exact moment I did nothing more than notice the vasana for a second. For me it was like — for example — you hear something buzzing and you look up and see a fly and think, “Oh, it’s a fly,” and you instantly look away. It was just like that. Except the buzzing was a vasana and before I could look away — it happened so fast — I saw the vasana go poof. From my point of view there was no drama or effort.
Thank you for sharing this and all the other personal experiences. I truly appreciate it. I have just one question: Do you think maybe the moment you “offered Julia to God” was actually the moment you turned to the Goddess for help and not the moment you noticed the vasana?
“For a moment I had no idea what she was talking about. Heal what? I asked the Goddess for help.” Julia asked you, you asked the Goddess. You literally turned her over to the Goddess. Just a thought.
You’re welcome, Bulancea. I’m glad to know you appreciated them. I think what you suggest is possible but I don’t know. Those two moments of my experience took place at almost exactly the same time — separated by no more than a second — and I only know what Julia experienced because she told me many minutes later, so I don’t know how to synchronize my perceptions with hers.
Oh, I see. Please call me Miron. It definitely seems to me, an impartial outsider reading two eyewitness accounts, that Julia experienced time much more slowly than you — or rather, that she perceived and experienced much faster, making time seem to slow down. But it makes sense if she was in “samadhi” even before being “in God’s presence,” while you were more or less in your normal perceptive state.
So an instant to you could have felt like seconds or minutes to her. I’ve experienced this while drunk, so at a much lower level of awareness: time seems to speed up in inverse proportion to how intensely you perceive and experience. So to the drunk, perceiving and experiencing very little, time seems to fly by. To someone on a stimulant, on the other hand, time seems to slow down as they cram more and more perception and experience into every second. The brain processes input at a certain rate that can certainly speed up to many times the normal rate, and I’ve also read about this recently in relation to qigong masters who claim to live with an increased processing rate. (I’m not a scientist, so I don’t really care about the science.)
At any rate, from my perspective your timelines do match up:
TO FRED:
(1) Then she sank deeper and stopped talking again. Suddenly she said, “Fred, heal me, you have to heal me.” For a moment I had no idea what she was talking about. Heal what? I asked the Goddess for help.
TO JULIA:
(1) Right after she asked me to heal her, … she saw me come out of red light. I lifted her above my head on outstretched arms and offered her to God.
TO FRED:
(2) Then I realized, “The thing that needs to be healed is Julia’s feeling that her father didn’t love her.” For a moment I was aware of the vasana. My attention was on it. … I “looked” at it …. Almost instantly it ceased to exist.
TO JULIA:
(2) Everything that she experienced after she “turned into a golden bird [and] shot toward God.”
I didn’t mean to become obsessed with this, it just seemed so obvious to me while reading it for the first time yesterday. Thanks again for sharing! These experiences are invaluable because people who have them generally tend to keep them secret. Even people who naturally experience telepathy and can see auras tend to hide the fact because it’s not “normal” and would make them stand out from the crowd, with all the attendant implications. So I think just having this blog and sharing these expriences is very brave of you. Thank you! (^_^)
Hi Miron. 🙂 What you say about our timelines matching and our experience of time happening at different speeds, makes sense and may very well be right, but I can’t confirm or disconfirm it. Your conclusion is as good as mine.
Thanks again for telling me you appreciated the descriptions of personal experience. The first vasana article (in which I confessed to being a coward) took a little bit of courage but not as much as some people might think because at the time I wrote it, I was beginning to feel that the guy who was confessing, the coward, my ego, wasn’t really me.
I hesitated to write the articles that involve siddhis (paranormal abilities) because I don’t want people to think siddhis are important or necessary for enlightenment. But ultimately, I decided to publish them because people wonder whether such things really happen and I wanted to add my experiences to the public record. I’ve had some very surprising experiences over the years that my younger self would not have believed possible, but they happened. Maybe when I start blogging again I’ll describe some more of them.