Green Balls of Woo-Woo

I had an experience this week that really highlighted the importance of sharing with each other.

While at a friend’s birthday party, I was introduced to a woman who does energy work. “Kristin, this is so and so. She does energy work!”

I’m a recycling freak and a fan of sustainability, so I thought we were talking wind turbines. “Oh great! What kind of energy work do you do?”

She looked a little taken aback. It turns out she’s a spiratual healer. (Oh, THAT kind of energy work.) We had a lovely conversation about her practice in energetic healing and some changes in the field. I don’t know a lot about energy work, but I find it fascinating, and this woman was talking about it like it was any other industry, describing new R & D and the efficiencies yielded by new processes.

While we were talking, another woman came and sat on the chair that was about 6 inches from the stool I was perched on. I didn’t pay much attention, but when my conversation was over and I turned around, she was looking at me. We’d met earlier in the night, and she seemed cool so I just smiled.

“I tried to eavesdrop a couple of times, but, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what you guys were talking about. What does that woman do?”

“Well,” I said, “I’m not sure how to explain. It kind of depends on your background and my understanding.” She laughed. The other woman had told me about identifying her clients’ limiting beliefs and how she had moved from extracting the seed beliefs before transmuting them to directly “blasting” the beliefs in place. Evidently this is an improvement in the field of energy work.

I wasn’t sure that the woman I was now talking with had any idea of the answer she was about to hear – and I wasn’t sure how I wanted to answer.

“Well, I guess you’d say she’s a healer.” Now, I’ve had my fair share of exposure to energy work, and I believe in energetic healing. Still, I felt like I was telling someone else’s dirty secret. I kept looking back at the healer, trying to catch her eye to bring her into the conversation – to tell her own story.

“OH!” was the response I got as my new friend recoiled a little, eyes wide.

“Yeah” I said, feeling a little like I should defend the healer, “it’s pretty interesting stuff, but I don’t have enough knowledge to really explain.”

The woman laughed a little nervously again. “From the way she was talking, I thought she might help people with getting their passports. Sounded like she was talking about working through layers of bureaucracy.” It was true. We both laughed a little and then, I don’t really remember how, we started sharing our own experiences with things energetic in nature.

I’m in the process of selling my house, and, as the result of another random conversation with a friend, have recently contacted a woman who does energy clearings for homes. We talked a bit about that, the chakra clearing that I had done as well, and my upcoming travels.

She shared her experiences in the Peace Corps with the “bushman telegraph,” and indigenous people who, without use of any modern device, could sense when a family member would be arriving in the village.

We talked about the ability of the bushmen to “fly” over landscapes and project themselves into distant locations (and the US Government’s “remote sensing” program that taught the skill). We talked about our own experiences with flight dreams and how she wished she still had them.

As our conversation drew to a close, she expressed how interesting it is to know that there is so much more going on than what she can see, and I expressed how much I enjoy finding people who are willing to talk about their experiences. We so often stop ourselves for fear of sounding “woo-woo” or being marginalized because “you just don’t talk about those things.”

Before we said our goodbyes, she told me a story about a friend of hers who she described as “mind-expanding.”

“One day we were talking about these types of things, and she said that pepole don’t talk about all of the experiences that they have. I said ‘oh you mean like the green balls,’ and she said, ‘Yes! Exactly like the green balls.'” Green balls? I had no idea what this woman was talking about. She continued, “I remembered, as a child, having experiences where it looked like everything in the world was made of green balls. When I shared this with my friend, she told me that it’s a fairly common experience for people to have when they are beginning to meditate. I had no idea. I thought it was just me.”

Bingo. I thought it was just me. Now, I’ve never seen green balls, but I have had other interesting, puzzling experiences that I’ve hesitated to share. On the way home, I talked with another friend about the conversations I’d had at the party. Her response was, “Yeah, it’s like the woman in the kitchen. When I was growing up I didn’t like walking through the house at night, because I was sure there was always a woman in the kitchen.” Yup. When I was a kid, my sister and I didn’t like going into our super-nice, finished basement, because we were sure there was always someone down there.

Almost everyone I’ve ever talked with about these kinds of things has had a similar experience, whether it’s feeling a strange presence in their house when they were growing up, or flying to remote locations in their sleep. Most people, though, didn’t just volunteer the info unless it was around a campfire or at a sleepover as a “scary story.”

So, I’m going to start talking about it – about my experiences – because I really feel that, when we hide pieces of our human experience, even the pieces we don’t understand, we invalidate little parts of ourselves. We isolate and devalue. And I’m not so into that.