Examples of healing sessions
There is no such thing as a “typical” healing session. Every one is strange, unique and surprising. I’ve included a few examples of sessions that stand out to me below.
Buster the flying cat.
Buster is one of the many, many animals who have changed my life. His person, Sue, called for a regular animal communication session, not a healing session at all. But the session did quickly shift into a deeper level than most, and certainly changed my understanding of my role in this work profoundly.
Sue called to find out why Buster was peeing outside the litterbox. He had been doing so consistently for the last 2 years. She had consulted other animal communicators, and even taken a few animal communication courses herself. But the peeing (mostly on her things!) continued.
When I first met Buster telepathically, he struck me as a very sullen, guarded fellow-kind of like a rebellious, resentful teenager staring me down. Without bothering to introduce himself, he communicated that he had a urinary tract infection (a common cause of inappropriate urination in cats). But just before I turned to glibly announce that I’d solved Sue’s mystery, I paused to consider. I’d hardly met this cat. I certainly didn’t feel like I’d earned his respect or his trust. And at that time it was rare for me to get clear, accurate, unsolicited physical information from the animals. I guessed, correctly, that Buster was testing me.
Often animals who’ve been poked and prodded by too many vets or communicators see me coming and assume I’m also just going to treat them like a piece of meat. He obviously guessed I was going to ask or lecture him about his peeing preferences, and so he figured he’d cut to the chase and get it over with. And see if I fell for it.
I stopped and gathered my wits. Cantankerous as this animal was, I knew it was pointless to ask him any charged question when he didn’t trust me. So I communicated to him that I didn’t want to talk about his urinary tract right now-that I wanted to meet him and understand a bit about who he was and what made him tick. That I was here to work on his behalf, not his person’s, and only if he wanted my help.
Buster thought about this, and then, suddenly, came to life. The sullen glare disappeared, and a completely different cat appeared before my eyes. This one had the same markings as the first Buster, but he was comical and adventurous, peering down at me from the top of a high wall. Confident that I’d been granted access to the real Buster, I described this new version to his person... did this sound like her cat? Well, she wasn’t sure. Now, I was flummuxed... it almost never happens that my first empathic impressions of an animal don’t ring absolutely true with the owner. So I went back to delve deeper, and there I met a different tabby cat, again. But I was catching on now, and immediately sensed that this one, too, was a mask. One after another, Buster kept “introducing” himself to me as wildly different cats of the same color. I knew his person must think I was crazy (this is not at all typical for an animal to be so complicated to meet!), but I didn’t really care-I was determined to get to the bottom of this cat. I kept earnestly repeating my intention to meet and understand the “real” Buster or communicate with none.
Finally, after being shown 9 different “Busters,” I must have passed his test-or worn him out. There was the real deal, Buster himself, standing in front of me, looking a bit tired. Odd as this session had been, I still felt honored to have gotten in to meet this animal. He was far smarted than I, and magnificent of spirit. I asked him, “So what’s up with all the peeing?”
Immediately, Buster leapt into motion. He actually grabbed his person by the front of her shirt and jerked her upwards. Crash, we went through the ceiling. Crash, through the roof of the house. “What in the world is he doing?” I wondered... this session was just stubbornly bizarre. Up we went, way up to the clouds. “Um, what are we doing up here?” I asked him, sure that Sue must have long since written me off as a complete idiot.
Buster looked down at the little house with the hole in its roof, and communicated with great urgency “She’s got to get out of there. Now!” How was I going to tell this woman that her cat wanted her to sell her house and move elsewhere?! This was just too much. “All right, Buster,” I said. “I believe you. I really do. And I will tell her this. But she’s going to want to know why. We humans just have to have reasons for things, especially for big difficult things like this. What can I tell her about why you feel she has to leave?”
I wondered if there might be some kinds of toxic fumes from the basement or even a ghost in the house-both I have on occasion known animals to complain about, and both problems could potentially be solved without Sue actually moving to another house. In answer, he again showed me the house (way down below with the hole in the roof!). All I could see was a stagnant, dull, pus colored energy sluggishly gurgling through the house. Now what kind of an answer was that??
I related what Buster had communicated to his person. But to my surprise, the woman understood these strange images immediately. “That’s my marriage he’s talking about,” she said in surprise. Apparently, for two years she and her husband had been trying to repair their marriage. Without success. She felt dissatisfied and trapped, and 6 months before had announced she was leaving. But he didn’t want her to go and she felt guilty, and so she was still there.. She said she hated to go home and felt tired and ill when she was there.
She promised Buster she would leave, and after that session Buster did indeed stop peeing outside the litterbox. For two full months. But two months later, she still hadn’t left, and so he began again, apparently to try his best to drive her to safety!
Sue’s first question to me that day was “But why didn’t he tell any of the other communicators this?” I honestly don’t know, but I do know it’s not that I am any better than they are. I know there have been many times when I’ve NOT passed an animal’s “test.” In this case my strong empathic connection to the animals served me well and I sensed immediately that Buster was testing me to see if he could trust me. And I guess my sheer stubbornness paid off as he led me on a wild goose chase of different cats. But I would guess that the other communicators set out (as I myself often have) to “get the cat to stop peeing.” Perhaps they lectured him, or cajoled him, or bargained with him, as we so often do. If one walked into that session assuming that the cat’s peeing was “wrong” and needed to be fixed, one could have easily alienated Buster almost immediately. There he was, stubbornly doing his best to alert and save his person the only way he knew how, dismissing us animal communicators as a bunch of pedantic quacks!
While Buster’s was not a “healing session” per say, I tell this story here because in a single session he revolutionized my approach to healing. Already it had been a long time since I intentionally barged in to “fix” someone, but I was still very much working for “the person” in distress, not “the disease.” Now, thanks to Buster, I sink into a healing session to listen to the illness, not to lecture it about how much suffering it is causing! In my experience, the results of approaching healing work this way are simply amazing.
Rose and writers block.
Rose, a friend and regular client and a gifted writer, called me to find out why her cat was so pointedly staring at her. Hannah would sit on her desk and just stare at Rose, so often that she began to feel uncomfortable.
Once again, I did not set out to do a healing session, but it certainly blossomed into one. When I sank in to meet Hannah, I saw her briefly, but after making eye contact she turned and walked away, as if telling me to follow. I did. We seemed to be going down, deeper under the ground.
Before long we came to a dark sort of cavern with black, wet, stony walls. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw a pale form against the wall. It looked like a woman, but she was made of ice. Her arms were out straight perpendicular to her body, her features were vague, and she seemed to be firmly “iced” to the side of this cold, dark cave.
As I described all this to Rose, I warned her that we had certainly ventured out of “regular animal communication” territory. I told her I suspected that woman on the wall was some aspect of herself her cat was drawing her attention to, and asked her permission to continue, since the session had quickly become far deeper and more personal than either of us had intended. Curious, Rose encouraged me to proceed. I suggested she pay close attention to her own physical body as I proceeded with the journey, just to see if she felt or noticed anything happening on the earthen plane.
As I approached this Ice Woman and described her in more detail, Rose interrupted. “My knee hurts all of a sudden,” she said. I asked her to describe the pain... did it have a texture or a color or a tone? As she focused her awareness there, she described an overwhelming urge to kick. Baffled, but curious, I encouraged her to do so. She kicked and kicked, and as she did so I watched the Ice Woman melt. I asked her what it felt like she was kicking. “All the people who have hurt me,” she said, relating a list from childhood of people who had bullied or shamed her. She was kicking them away. Kicking and kicking and kicking.
The ice woman melted and the pain in the knee subsided. As we talked about the significance of what had happened, Rose suddenly laughed. “I know who that Ice Woman is!!” she said. “I’ve had writers block for weeks. Hannah has been sitting on my desk by my computer, just staring at me. And all of a sudden,” she added “I know what to write about. I know what to write! I finally know what to write!” I just shook my head in wonder. I didn’t know what I’d really contributed to that whole process (not much, if anything), but it had certainly been an honor to witness. Many months later Rose is polishing a draft of a fascinating novel, begun that very day.
Alice and her elbow.
Alice came over to see if I could help ease the pain in her elbow. It had begun to bother her in the summer as she hand-painted her house, but a few months later the pain was only getting worse. She also mentioned she was facing a difficult decision about her job, one that was causing her a lot of stress. Of course my curiosity was peaked by her job situation (I am, by nature, most intrigued by and at home navigating the emotional/spiritual realms), but since the elbow pain far predated the current job crisis, I settled myself down to work on understanding the physical pain in that joint.
As I sank “into” her arm, I found myself in what felt like an underground passageway that forked off in two directions. The tunnel to the left was bright and warm feeling, but somehow not appealing... there was an arid staleness to the air in that direction. The tunnel to the right was dark, damp, and cold, and not appealing at all. But what I noticed first and most strongly was the point where those two tunnels met-it was like the blade of an axe, as tall as me. It was razor sharp and only inches from my forhead. Since stepping into that sharp edge was out of the question, I decided to explore the tunnels a bit so I could give Alice a sense of what all this symbolized, and save her some work.
I took a hesitant, curious step down the dark, damp tunnel, to get it over with first. Wham! It was like a huge door slammed behind me, and I was suddenly stuck in a very dark place. I was furious with myself, and a little bit scared. I had known all along this was not the right passageway to choose, so why had I so stupidly stepped into this one? And I was angry at whoever made this place-after all, if it wasn’t safe to explore here, if one step was a commitment to this unpleasant tunnel, why hadn’t someone put a sign up or something? I fumed and fussed and grumbled.
And then I caught myself. I’ve learned that usually everything that happens to me in these healing journeys is information for the person I’m journeying for. Often, it’s like manoeuvring through a video game, and as I pass each test I am granted access to the next, and deeper phase of the journey. In this case, it suddenly dawned on me that this sort of angry, bitter fuming was not helping, nor was it my typical reaction to unpleasant circumstances. I asked Alice if she beat herself up about things and ranted this way about others. She grinned sheepishly, nodding.
Back in the darkness, I centered myself, and tried to shift gears. “What would help here?” I asked no one in particular. Immediately, I could feel myself accepting my situation. The darkness. The cold. The wrong turn. The mistake. Just opening my heart to each one with a big warm hearty “Yes, I am here now. Yup, I screwed up. Yes, I’m stuck now and it’s all dark and yucky and I don’t know what to do. Yup. Yup. Yup.” After a few minutes of opening to and accepting this present cold, strange reality, the edges became blurry and the scene shifted and I found myself once again at the fork in the passage ways! So already something was clear... Alice’s anger was only keeping her stuck where she did not want to be, whereas anchoring her awareness deep in the present moment and accepting her situation wholeheartedly might offer her a fresh energy and perspective and a whole new chance.
But now what to do at this bizarre fork in the path? Neither tunnel, light or dark, felt appealing. It certainly didn’t feel safe to wander around casually exploring. And the sharp axe blade hanging in front of me was down right frightening. Aha-a clue. Strong charged emotion coursed through me as I faced that sharp blade-always a sign that something interesting lies in that direction. So, blindly letting my emotions guide me, I took a bold step forward, softly asking “What are you?” to the menacing blade as I reached out to touch it. To my surprise, it was like the axe blade was made of vapor, and I stepped, stumbling, right through it. On the other side was a wonderland landscape. A meadow, blue sky, animals grazing everywhere, flowers. Strong emotions of peace and joy and wonder and power coursed through me. But what did this all represent, and what did it have to do with Alice’s darned elbow?
I share this story because what happened next was another turning pointing in my understanding of this work. As Alice and I discussed the journey, she was easily able to translate the metaphors of the fork in the tunnel to help her understand what was being asked of her in her stressful situation at work. She understood that neither choice she was considering was the “right” one, and that there was another path she was not seeing, but that to walk it she’d have to walk straight into whatever she most feared, and she understood exactly what that meant. Fair enough. But then I realized that every step of that journey was personally meaningful for me, as well, as I wavered and wondered about how to honorably charge for my healing work (to that point, none of the choices I had seen and tried felt right to me. And so it was I determined that day to face my fears of financial insecurity-my own version of the axe blade-and commit to working by donation). In fact, I had set a firm intention to decide this matter once and for all that very morning. Getting such a clear answer to my own question in a session done for someone else seemed like a gift and a fluke at the time. But I’ve found that almost every journey I’ve done since that day has been as healing for me as for the person or animal I’m trying to help, if I only pause to look for and accept the wisdom. Odd, amazing, and exhilaratingly real, the connections weaving us all together.
But what about her elbow? I had to laugh, realizing that in spite of myself I’d zeroed in on the emotionally charged issue in her life (and mine), not the physical pain. So I closed my eyes and “sank into” her elbow again, setting an earnest intention this time to understand and-if it would serve the highest good for all-to ease her physical pain. Inside her elbow and forearm I saw several bloated red and black spheres, pulsing with irritation. As I approached one to try to communicate with it, it brushed me away. “We want to talk to Alice, not you!” was the only message. Then I saw a movie of Alice painting, painting, painting. Grimly forcing herself to continue even as the pain increased. It seemed to me that her inner guidance had been trying to get her attention for a long, long time, but she’d been doggedly focused on painting that darn house in all her spare time. And so it was waiting, cross and indignant, in her aching elbow!
Feeling a bit lame, I told her I didn’t think I could help much... that her arm needed to talk with her directly! Alice was already adept at communicating with animals, so I knew she could do this if she would only try. But what homework! I suggested she go home and quiet her mind, and try to listen to pain in her elbow, and find out what it so wanted to tell her.
To my delight and surprise, that’s just what she did. She called me that evening to report that she’d listened to that elbow of hers, understood the message, and that already the pain was almost gone. The pain continued to dissipate over the next week, and has not returned.
Tobi and tonsillitis.
Now this is the strangest story ever. Having made the clear decision to open my practice to work by donation in 2007, I had to then finish the long process of rewriting, updating and reinventing my website. The most difficult part of making this new site was formally articulating my experiences and my philosophy about this intuitive healing work I offer-which had ballooned over the last few years to account for more than half of my practice, but which I hardly even mention on my old, outgrown website. Miraculous as it can be, my particular style of intuitive healing is undeniably “strange” and difficult to try to explain to another person, and I knew some people would judge me for it, or write me off as a complete flake (pretending to talk with animals was bad enough, but this-talking with old wounds and diseases...!). Besides, I was very busy working with clients and settling my children and I into our new house, and as the weeks flew by I kept not putting this aspect of the website into writing.
Then a client called about her dog Tobi, who had been suffering terribly from a sudden bout of tonsillitis. He couldn’t eat and could barely move, and nothing she’d tried seemed to be helping at all. I know Tobi well, and I leapt at the chance to help him.
When I sank in to work with him, however, it was like pushing forward against a strong headwind. I could see him, just barely, but the harder I tried to reach him the more blurry his image became. Finally I stopped to rest and regroup. “What am I doing wrong?” I asked. Immediately, I saw a movie of myself, quite large, charging in to “help” the poor suffering Tobi, who looked tiny as a kitten. Oh, I’d done it again!! And I certainly knew better-of all the animals I’d ever communicated with, Tobi tolerated being treated like a “poor little doggy” the least. So I stopped, centered, and regrouped.
This time, I approached Tobi as an equal, not to save him but simply to understand if there was any way I could be of service to him. He came into view immediately (the same size as myself, I noticed). But he looked just fine... wise and kind, greeting me with a warm light in his eyes.
“But I understand that your physical body is suffering terribly,” I said, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.
“Oh, it is,” he said casually. He lifted his beautiful head to show me a bright red, hot, charged area glowing in his throat.
“Is there anything I can do to help you?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “In fact you’re the cause of all this.”
Now, sometimes I think nothing in these healing sessions could surprise me anymore-they’re all so strange and rich, bizarre, profound and surprising, like living poetry. But I confess my jaw dropped at that. This dog lived a few hundred miles away from me, and I’d only met him in person once. How could anything I was doing cause such a severe bout of tonsillitis? I stared at him, speechless, far too baffled for words.
“Go and write, Calloway,” he ordered. Then he showed me my own 5th chakra (the throat area), it was all clogged and cluttered, hard and constricted. Suddenly I understood (at least the edge of) what he might be talking about-the 5th chakra is the center of expression, both talking and writing, and certainly of speaking one’s truth. I had personally been avoiding that very thing for weeks. Could it really be possible that my own blocked chakra could manifest as an illness in a dog so far away? I understood that at some deep level we are all connected to each other spiritually, but how could this be? Why would such a thing happen? Why wasn’t I the one with tonsillitis? In all my reading and studying, I’d certainly never heard of such an occurrence. Tobi just stared at me, impassively.
“OK,” I said. “I understand the metaphor and I agree I’ve been avoiding this writing for too long. I’ll go write. But in the mean time won’t you let me offer you some energy work? I think I can rebalance and unclog that throat of yours in a few minutes so you can have some peace.”
Now he glared at me. “The only way you can help me,” he said firmly, and sloooowly, as if he were talking to a deaf woman with very limited intelligence, “is to GO WRITE.”
Sheepishly, I retreated. I sent his person a quick email telling her that I’d worked with Tobi (but conveniently neglecting to mention what he’d told me), and doggedly sat myself down to write. I wrote and wrote, for most of two full days, and with a flourish I proudly sent the first batch of finalized text off to the web developer to load onto the new site.
Then I got word from Tobi’s person that for 24 hours after I’d worked with him, the inflammation in his tonsils had vanished. But, she said, it was back again now, and in addition he was now unable to walk (!)-he acted like bones might be broken in his leg and his tail, but the vet’s xrays showed nothing. A few more days passed, and his condition didn’t improve. Clearly, my sitting down to write hadn’t solved the problem in any lasting way. Doubtful, disoriented, and deeply disheartened, I settled in to work with him again, thinking that maybe after all that writing, maybe this time he’d let me offer him a simple healing session...?
There he was again, staring at me impassively, a tinge of impatience in his eyes. “But I did what you said, right away,” I burst out. “I wrote for two full days! You got better... why didn’t you stay well?”
There was a long, long pause as Tobi looked deep into my eyes. Again he spoke to me slowly, as if doubtful of my ability to comprehend. “Think, Calloway,” he said. “You had a chance to help me. But what did you write about?”
I took a moment to reflect, and then it hit me. Ooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhh. Dumb, dumb, dumb Calloway. I had spent the two days feverishly updating and finalizing all the animal communication text for the new site. The stuff that I was comfortable sharing. The stuff that was already on the site. The stuff that was safe to talk about. I hadn’t written one single word about the new section, about this intuitive healing work I offer, or about opening my practice to work by donation. My own 5th chakra was still firmly, cowardly, sealed.
Shaking my head in wonder, I retreated, and again sat down to write. But this time I tackled the tender stuff, my growing edge, the stuff that scared and stretched me. And over the next weeks, Tobi’s health honestly seemed to directly parallel my own writing. The days I spent writing about healing sessions, the swelling in his tonsils shrank. The days I spent focussed on other things, his tonsils swelled, as if to remind me. But he did steadily improve, and now he is up and about and acting like himself again. His person kept close tabs on the lingering swelling in his tonsils, telling me with a laugh that “if I want to find out how you’re doing all I have to do is look at Tobi!”
Neither of us can quite believe this has really happened, but neither of us can explain Tobi’s steady recovery in any other terms, either. It’s a sobering thought that my own cowardice could so affect another being. And strong incentive to attend first and with fiercest courage to my own wholeness and healing-something all of us who try to be of help to others seem to need to be often, and sternly, reminded of.
I’m wondering if the residual, lingering inflammation in his tonsils will finally disappear when I finally launch this darned website. What a strange, and mysterious world.
“Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson