The Perfect Conduit

I’ve spent much of my life being unconventional in my approach to healing work. For years I have included sexual energy as part of the healing process. That’s unconventional enough for most people, but I have also experimented with another area that feels even edgier to me.

When I first started doing sexual healing work, I kept a clear distinction between me, the “healer”, the one who was holding the space, and the “heal-ee”, the one who was receiving the healing. But as I worked more intensively with people, it became harder to maintain those boundaries.

I have done lots of long sessions – being together all day, or several days in a row. I have even camped in the desert for a week with a client. With that amount of exposure, the artificiality of the “healer/healee” relationship begins to dissolve.

At first when this would happen I was horrified. I wasn’t supposed to let my own issues be activated! I wasn’t supposed to cry, or feel uncertain or vulnerable. But it was like trying to stop a river. If it were there, it would flow.

Surprisingly enough, I found over and over that the more authentic I was, the more the client received. I tell the story of one of those times in my book, Tales of a Sacred Prostitute. As I allowed myself to be vulnerable, I allowed my client to be strong, to not be identified as the weak one. To be a man, and to learn how to hold space for a woman.

This issue recently surfaced again. I stopped to see a client at the end of a long trying trip. I was tired and barely recovering from a massive psychic attack received earlier that week. I arrived at his house worn out; bare bones.

Meanwhile, he had built up an expectation that our time together would be ecstatic, that I would show him a glimpse of enlightenment. (No pressure!)

In our last time together, we had begun to work with how his energy could feel invasive to a woman. I had started teaching him about how to husband his energy, to use it to attract a woman rather than invade her.

As we got together again, he told me about a workshop that he had just attended. To make a point about how women and men experience the world differently, the leaders had asked how many woman had considered their personal safety in the last week – parked under a light, didn’t go down an alley, etc. All the women raised their hands. Then they asked the men. None of them raised their hands. My client was having trouble understanding this and found it hard to believe.

As the day wore on, between brief glimpses of enlightenment, issues began surfacing in me about safety. On many occasions, I felt invaded by him. I don’t think this had anything to do with him; it was the issues I was carrying before I got there.

So here’s where it gets sticky. Am I wrong for having my issues? Did I serve him by those issues arising? Since the things that I was feeling are very common feelings in many women, perhaps I was acting as a conduit for that particular energy – a woman feeling unsafe and invaded. Perhaps I was giving him the experience that he needed in order to learn to be with a woman in an intimate relationship, to learn how to be in order to build trust.

I often expect myself to be the perfect channel, a portal to enlightenment. There are times, moments usually, when I can be that. But then there I am, a messy human being like any other, doing the best that I can.

When I begin a session, I always ask that I be used by Spirit for service to the highest good. I try to surrender as much as possible, and let my personal self get out of the way. But what if Spirit is using my personal self, my personal issues, as part of the teaching or healing for that person? Can I surrender enough to let whatever happens just be there in the space?

What if the other person doesn’t like it? What if he had an expectation of something that didn’t get met? It’s easy to doubt myself at that time. But the words to a song keep coming through:

“You can’t always get what you want . . . But if you try sometime, you just might find,
You get what you need.”