When Julia got stuck behind her head

An experiment with the location of "me" and an example of the use of a siddhi.

This article describes my girlfriend Julia’s experience a few years ago with a technique taught by a spiritual teacher and author named Aadi who previously called himself Anadi and Aziz Kristof.

Julia has read this article, made changes, and given me permission to publish it.

The story also involves the use of a siddhi.

Caveat: I find Aadi’s writings interesting but I don’t endorse him as a teacher.

Some background about Julia:

Ever since she was a child Julia has felt that she is located in her heart. This began when she was a little girl frightened by adults arguing in her house and she lay on her bed staring at a picture on the wall of Jesus surrounded by children, until she found Jesus in her heart and took refuge there. I note in passing that this is an example of something Godly resulting from something painful, something that at the time seemed bad but later turned out to bring a gift.

Love and God are with her in her heart. Her inner world is usually peaceful and love-filled and relatively free of thought. When I feel what she feels through transmission or empathy or some sense that has no name in English, I become aware of a cloudy white field in her chest. When I enter into that field, which I can do somehow, I find the infinitely soothing love a mother would give if that mother were God. It’s a realm where everything is good and nothing is bad, where everything is about love and giving to others. This is Julia’s characteristic state of consciousness, the place to which she automatically returns.

As Julia grew and aged, her life reflected this. She was a hospice nurse for twenty years, caring for dying people, and always felt that her work was a gift that God gave to her rather than a gift she gave to her patients. This is a kind of yoga but she didn’t think of it that way. She just simply chose to do that work because she loved it.

That’s the background. Here’s the story:

A couple of years ago I mentioned to Julia that Aadi had written that there are three main places in the body where the sense of me can abide and develop: head, heart and belly. (His ideas have become more complicated since then.) We thought this was interesting in light of the fact that she is in her heart and her spiritual experiences involve mainly love, and I was located in my head and my spiritual experiences involved not only love but also consciousness.

Aadi urged seekers to move their sense of me through a “portal” in the back of the skull to a place behind the head where, he said, the “me” should surrender and merge with something he called “universal I am”. If I understood him correctly (I may not have) the universal I am is what everyone else calls God or more exactly is the consciousness-aspect of God. I imagine Aadi took the term “I am” from the story in the Bible in which Moses asks God his name and God answers, in effect, “I am that which I am and will be, but you can call me ‘I am’ for short.”

Julia was intrigued by the idea of moving from her heart to a place behind her head and decided to try it. For about a week from time to time she deliberately felt herself in that place and then suddenly one night — I’ll let her describe what happened:

A trapdoor opened in the back of my skull. I fell backward. God was waiting there for me. God caught me. [She cupped her hands together as she told me this.] There was a feeling of safety and connection to God. Probably the closest I ever felt to God.

For a day or two God remained with her behind her head. She was very happy. She told me this was the most powerful spiritual experience she had ever had.

But then:

The feeling of being close to God behind my head ended up being temporary. After two days at most God was no longer there.

God left but she remained. Not only was she still there, she was stuck there. She couldn’t get back to her heart. Over the next week:

I thought I had lost my heart center. I couldn’t feel it. I felt uncomfortable being behind my head. It felt like something was missing from me. I wasn’t where I needed to be. It became an empty feeling. When I am in my heart there is a feeling of completeness, warmth, and safety. Behind my head, after God left, there was only emptiness.

Not only that:

I felt like I lost my “me”. I no longer had a “me”.

This reminds me of what happened to Suzanne Segal.

Every day Julia became more unhappy. Her voice became panicky.

After about a week she was so unhappy and frightened that I tried to fix the problem with a siddhi. The Goddess had showed me something like this once but that was in a different context and I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to try. But Julia was so unhappy I did it anyway. I put one hand on her head, the other hand on her lower body, and radiated a beam into her heart. The beam was made of whatever I’m made of. I thought that this would make her notice her heart and draw her attention to it, and then she would naturally come right back into it.

We were 2000 miles apart when we did this, talking on the phone, so the placement of my hands was done in imagination or in some astral way.

I was reluctant to try this and postponed it for a week because I was afraid I might hurt her. It’s funny. On the one hand, I thought these things are probably imaginary and can’t really work. On the other hand, on a gut level I was so sure it was real that I was afraid I might hurt her.

It worked instantly. She went back into her heart. We both knew it, we both felt it happen. She has remained there ever since.

9 thoughts to “When Julia got stuck behind her head”

  1. Dear Freddie,
    I was just wondering about that too, Great question!
    When I sit alone now, the first move normally is to the heart and then the ajina chakra .
    Both heart and the ajina feels like the center at the same time. This double center, I like very much as it used to be either or phenomenon. The younger Roshi , however, told me to place my left hand and foot on top of the right (mudra)in order to create no center…Zen people do not talk about chakras normally, but the younger Roshi did from his experience. So Zen seems to encourage no center. More need to be investigated. As I am a therapist I am wondering what to say to my woman student who are happy about the heart experience of love and gratitude….. Should I tell them to move on to Ajina or to `no center`….I do not know.
    Mami

  2. Hey Freddie

    How would you differentiate Julie’s and Suzanne’s experiences from Manonasa? Maybe they did lose their self, but simply their emotional body was not ready to do it (while Ramana’s was?).

    Thanks

    1. Hi Riccardo,

      Before I reply, I’ll ask Julia to read Suzanne’s account and try to get her opinion.

      Do you have any thoughts about whether Suzanne’s medical condition could have played a part in this? She died 15 years later of a brain tumor.

      1. Hey Freddie
        The known conditions which could resemble what Suzanne described are three
        1)depersonalization/derealization (the painful, scary and numbing feeling that Self or Reality are not real). This is predominantly a psychiatric syndrome, but it can occur with other types of syndromes such as panic attacks, schizophrenia, depression…
        2)psychosis
        3)some forms of epilepsy.
        What strikes in Suzanne’s account is that her experience was unexpected, anguishing/scary, and continuous.

        2) and 3) can result from brain tumors, especially 3). Regarding 2) though, she seemed to lack most of other psychosis symptoms. 1) and 3) instead are usually temporary, episodic conditions, they don’t last years.

        So it’s not that clear. There are many conditions of unknown origin and modality, so it’s difficult to say

        1. Oh, also the time gap between the development of these symptoms and her tumor actually seems to long to link them. There are brain tumors which grow silently for years though

          What I am curious about is if Julie’s experience was manonasa or not, in your experience.

          1. Thanks a lot for the medical information.

            By definition manonasha is permanent. Julia’s experience was temporary. She has had episodes of me-lessness at other times. Always temporary. In some traditions (including Ramana’s) people distinguish manonasha and manolaya. The first is permanent, the second temporary.

  3. I takes the Head way, not the heart way, and it works fine for it. Everyone is built differently, but are still at the same place. At least It thinks so (;

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