About five years ago someone told me that she had read that EMDR was a possible vehicle for psychic connections with dead loved ones. She had never done EMDR and knew nothing about else about it, but she, I knew, was extremely interested in what I call “boojie” stuff – anything having to do with the afterlife – which I myself have a passionate, personal, long-standing interest in. (I like to tell people I brought a dead guy back to life in 1991 – see my book The Rooms of Heaven.) I had never heard that EMDR could be used to induce psychic connections, although I had been doing EMDR regularly for a long time by then – to me it was strictly a vehicle for healing old wounds. I thought the person who told me about its boojie possibilities could probably stand to heal some old wounds so I was happy for her that she might do some EMDR, for whatever reason. I considered researching EMDR and psychic experiences but I never did, and then I forgot about what that woman had said for a long time.
Fast forward to last week. I was deep inside my EMDR trance, crying about my father. When I was a little girl I adored my father and he adored me. Then when I was somewhere in my twenties I got alienated from him; there was a deep divide between us that I didn’t understand except to know that it was somehow mutual – I had gotten disaffected, disconnected, ashamed of him, and he had gotten disconnected from me too. Maybe he didn’t know how to relate to me in any other way than he had when I was a kid. Maybe he could sense that I felt different about him and he needed me to love him fully, unconditionally, worshipfully, or not at all. Or something like that.
Down there in my EMDR trance last week, I could feel the old childhood love I had for my father, from my father, as a kind of energy – a deep, lovely, indescribable, somehow mystical flow of energy. And I could feel the separation that occurred between me and him when I got older; I could feel that as a kind of blocked energy, an emptiness somewhere near my heart, a big open space inside me that was arid and painful. And it all made me indescribably sad.
Interestingly, what made me sad wasn’t remembering the divide between my father and me. Remembering that brought back the same bad feelings of emptiness and disconnection that I’d had starting in my twenties and then going on for years, till about 1991, when my boyfriend died -- the boyfriend that I brought back to life through boojie means -- and I was shattered down to a microscopic level and had to piece myself back together over a long time as if with a pair of tweezers.
My father himself died in 1993 but I didn’t feel sad about that either in my EMDR trance the other day. What made me sad was remembering the love I felt coming to me from my father when I was a kid – my father’s deep beautiful mysterious love. Whenever I thought of that love in my EMDR trance -- or rather got the feeling of it, because there was no thinking involved at all -- I could feel the deep little-girl fear of losing my father that was woven into the deep little-girl love and then I could feel the real loss, the psychic separation, that was also woven into it, and that made me infinitely sad. I could feel myself connecting to an endless stream of sorrow, which was also an endless stream of energy, and because it was a stream of energy, getting connected to it felt good at the same time as it felt bad.
I was sitting there feeling all that, that love mingled with that loss and that sadness, when suddenly – just for about three seconds – I felt my father near me. His spirit, patting me on both arms. Sending me, once again, his old deep mysterious love for me, that beautiful stream of love which is energy and light and sustenance and everything else we long for always on our deepest levels, which I had from him and for him when I was a kid. I didn’t even mention it to my therapist at the time – I don’t know why I didn’t mention it, maybe I wasn’t sure it had really happened, maybe I was afraid she’d think I was nuts. But even though I didn’t even mention it, I knew afterwards, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that it had really happened. That my father had been with me again, just for a few seconds, as I sat there in my therapist’s office in this life, in this everyday world, at the beginning of September, 2011.
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