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Category Archives: Still extremely dubious

I had psychic surgery to remove my alien implant

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Oh no.

I always come to see Mark when I visit this most mystical outreach of Australia’s coastline. I’m a skeptic, sure, but Mark’s my healer. He’s my wild card; the aberration of science that I’ve described as being the real deal in the same way that racists will have their one black mate who’s “all right”. It makes no sense, but we’ll happily let it through to the keeper.

Mark was the knife-edge on which my skepticism swayed. I’ve told so many fellow naysayers: “but there’s this one guy…” I’ve accredited him with dispensing of my circular thoughts, a broken heart and my smoking habit. Or at least, I’ve thought of it as a dual effort between us – one with immediate results I couldn’t have achieved on my own. Accordingly, I’ve lisped away to people: I could feel energy pulsing down my body and streaming out of my feet.

I think. Couldn’t I? I remember telling Mark I could.

Mark is placid as a panda bear; as warm as a roaring hearth. As benevolent and wise as Yoda. He’s the sort of person you can make prolonged and meaningful eye contact with without wanting to stab out the jelly in your vitreous with pencils. Last time I saw him he diagnosed an energy block in my abdomen.

“That’s funny,” I piped up. “I’ve always had a huge phobia about being touched around there. I’ve had nightmares since I was a kid about being rigged up and prodded in my hips by disembodied fingers.”

Mark suddenly saw arrows. “I’m being shown arrows,” he said. “You were shot in a past life by a jealous lover.” He gave a warm chuckle as I pictured my punctured ovaries. One healing later, I left: a big ball of loved-up expanded consciousness, floating off down the street to the sea.

Now, past lives are about as high on my ‘Maybe Believe This’ list as DNA ThetaHealing ™, but in the name of consistency, I decided to return to this subject with Mark on my next visit. I.e., would he stick to the arrows story?

“Last time I came here you said we should investigate an energy block,” I said.

Mark gazed at my energy for a bit. “I often baulk at saying things like this, because most people don’t react well,” he said, at which point my hips tightened a few notches. “But it’s an implant.”

“An implant?”

“Yes. I’m seeing reptilian ETs – Zeta Reticulans. They used to rule the Earth and would quite frequently study humans by using implants, but these days we thankfully attract more benevolent beings of a higher frequency. The Zetas put an implant in you at birth to study your reproductive system. I can probably get it out.”

I rolled with this. Mark’s not alone in thinking reptilian aliens are all around us; it’s a theory David Icke made popular, and I love hearing David Icke’s theories. Love it.

“I’m not going to use the spirit guides in this operation, I’m going to use the friendly ETs,” Mark said, as I removed my shoes.

I climbed aboard the table for 40 minutes. I usually love this bit, but I wasn’t feeling it as much this time, due to the inconvenient truth of Mark talking about aliens. I was mourning the Mark gone by; the one who told me not to intellectualise spirituality, the one who said he had no interest in studying things like chakras and what have you.

I tried though. It could be true, was my mantra. You don’t know for sure; you only know your version of reality. And besides, it’s worth the $90 for a good blog post.

I saw my individual cells, golden, spinning, shimmering and spitting like Coke bubbles. I felt myself opened up flat as a pancake on the table – although Mark later told me the operation was multidimensional.

“I’ve never seen one as big as this before,” he said when he was done, talking down at me as I lay on the table with my arms behind my head. “It was like the Tardis. There was a whole universe inside.”

“Really?” I said, unable to not be impressed.

“But then there’s a whole universe inside every cell,” Mark pointed out.

“A universe in my pelvic bowl,” I marvel, and we chortle.

“The Zeta aliens actually came in at the beginning,” he said. “It got a bit nasty, but they were asked to leave. Could you feel it being removed from your brain? There were strands leading all the way up your spine, meshed into every cell, and up into your brain. It was a very tricky procedure – I only facilitated it.”

Mark didn’t seem too rattled after facilitating major surgery on the biggest alien implant he’d ever seen. He explained that I’d attracted bad sexual experiences to myself because of the implant. “Your critical mind will explain this away over the next few days,” he continued, “but you know it was special. There was a lot of love in the room. Don’t forget this experience you’ve had.”

“So,” I offered hopefully, as I swung my legs off the table. “Do you see this as a visualisation technique to hypnotise me into freeing myself from some emotional blockage?”

There came a pause.

“Or are you describing things in real terms?”

“In real terms,” he said. His eyes shone softly, as though he were just giving me a lovely recipe for parsnip soup.

Bugger.

As I walked out, something in me pouted. I love the thought of two shimmering entities walking down the high street with me; why can’t I just go with it? I greatly enjoyed, as a child, believing the spirit of God was channeled through me and that I could bless people just by doing an internal yawn; even if it constantly irritated the family. Where’s the harm?

But Mark had pushed me past my limit of making allowances and moving the goal posts. I hate it when men do that. And so, with reluctance, I write up my findings.

– But Mark will see this and he’s a lovely guy.

– He WON’T see this – he’s not psychic!

In conclusion, in conclusion… I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m quite good at lying on a table and turning it on. Getting the love flowing. Could it be I already found the greatest love of all, inside of me? Possibly. I’ll report back.

Getting my ears candled

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I fall asleep immediately, so I’m not sure what happens. According to this article, though, “the negative pressure needed to pull wax from the canal would have to be so powerful that it would rupture the eardrum in the process”.

 

EMDR: Fingering trauma into submission

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Felt a bit like this.

Francine Shapiro is a psychologist who formulated Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing in the early ’90s when she discovered that rapid eye movements quelled her own anxiety.

EMDR employs double-pronged stimulation of the brain. It occupies the individual with eye movement and tactile stimulation – like being tapped on the knee – while they recall a traumatic event, and then encourages visualisation of safe places. The client can venture off into the recesses of their mind to explore the trauma, then duck back into the safety of their therapist-constructed hidey-hole whenever the going gets tough.

You know: legs blown off by landmines / secluded beach with Nanny and Binky; legs blown off by landmines / secluded beach with Nanny and Binky. Tap tap tap. Eventually the trauma is defused like a bomb.

It’s garnered something of a new age reputation, on account of it being a quick fix and, as with NLP and EFT, it’s not necessarily carried out by anybody with any recognisable qualifications. However, it also utilises cognitive and psychodynamic psychology – hopefully.

I give it a whirl.

1) The questionnaire

The therapist, out in Melbourne’s suburbs, asks me a series of questions as paranoid and sinister as any ’70s conspiracy thriller.

Some people find they are not sure if they have done something or if they just dreamed doing it. How often does this happen to you?

Some people are on a bus or train and realise they can’t remember a section of their journey. How often does this happen to you?

2) Thinking of a safe place

With the therapist’s urging, I think of a beach I’d enjoyed as a youngster.

“How are you feeling?” she asks.

“Like I’ve imagined a safe place and now you’re going to ruin it.” But creepier.

She bids me describe the beach. “That’s an English beach,” she says, aghast at my depiction of the majestic shingles and grey waters of the east coast of Suffolk. “Why don’t you choose the white beaches of Australia, so the little girl inside you can feel the warmth of the sun on her back?”

I think she’s picturing the little girl inside me growing up in a Dickensian workhouse, malnutritioned and failing to thrive without sunlight, but I humour her and switch to the southern coast of New South Wales.

3) Finger tracking and whale music.

My therapist jerks her finger from right to left in sets of 12 strokes, asking me to track its path. The idea is that the eye movements unlock one’s “information processing system” by flitting between the hemispheres of your brain. At the end of each set I’m asked how I feel.

“Increasingly nauseous,” I admit, although it’s the therapist’s unflinching, slightly pop-eyed stare that’s bringing on the quease. Appeased, she works through another set.

“Stay with the clenching feeling,” she says, “and push my fingers with your eyes.”

She stops. “What score would you give me out of 10?”

I look at her, confused. She wants me to rate her performance now? Me, a rank amateur!

“For what?”

“For the sickness. With 10 being as bad as anyone could ever feel.”

“About a three, I suppose.”

“Okay, stay with it – we’re going again.”

4) Exploring an incident

Just when I think I’m going to run bellowing from the room if I have to sit through any more bug-eyed finger-jerking, a voice in my head pipes up: “She wants you to look over there.

“What’s happening now?”

“Nothing,” I lie. I’m feeling rising panic.

I notice that she is not trailing her hand smoothly from right to left; she’s flicking her finger to my left on each set, like an instruction… and I ‘m getting a feeling of dread each time.

My eyes linger longer on the left with each sweep and some images begin to flood my brain.

“Find the spot and look at it,” she yelps, grabbing a pointer and wielding it forth. “Just stay focused on it and then see what comes out next.”

Miraculously, I recount a childhood event I’d previously not been able to remember; not realising till the next day that I’ve cast the main character in the exact same outfit they wear in a photograph I have of them. Is this how past life regression therapy works, when people recount tales of medieval derring do? Can it be put down to wanting to perform well for the therapist’s approval; like being eager to please a parent?

5) The counselling bit

“When people don’t have coping skills to deal with a situation, the brain puts it aside in a box,” the therapist explains, “but it will keep bobbing up. Nature will eventually help you deal with it… but nature’s way takes too long.”

We indulge some stomach-churning talking to my younger self while the therapist leans cavalierly into my comfort zone and taps my knees like a demented aunt.

EMDR, she says, works by sensory overload: the following of the finger while listening to whale music and focusing on two entirely different scenarios and feelings. “By bonding them, the good one disarms the bad. Now you have a tool.”

“Cheque or savings?” she says, breaking my trance.

Here’s an interesting interview with Shapiro.

Health professionals-ish.

Admittedly, I am not a fount of esoteric knowledge

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Some anonymous type left the comment “Another attempt to explain something you know nothing about” on a website that this blog is syndicated on.

To which I retort: “Exactly! You have hit the nail on the head there, sir/madam.”

The very joy of this mission is derived from making forays into the unknown* and jumping to my own conclusions, based on my own experience – the journo as human guinea pig.

(*Unknown to me, that is. Others may claim to know exactly how DNA healing, EFT tapping and the placebo effect work, even as they laugh in the face of inconclusive scientific evidence.)

Maybe I should slap upon the blog a loud disclaimer: The findings herein are wholly based upon opinion. But I reckon if we’re dealing with new age activity – an entirely ungoverned industry – that goes without saying.

SOME OTHER TAKES ON ThetaHealing™

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Having not even heard of Vianna Stibel’s ThetaHealing™ till two days ago, I now discover it’s as entertainingly reviled as Scientology.

Rational Wiki (a familiar looking online encyclopedia dedicated to “analyzing and refuting pseudoscience”) says: “It was developed by Vianna Stibal, a naturopath who claims to have healed herself of cancer instantly in 1995. Not that IT CURES CANCER!!! or anything, except her followers think it does.”

Here’s a blog from Vianna’s ex-daughter-in-law, called ThetaHealing Revealed: The Fraud – The Cult – The Truth: To Protect Those Who Innocently Investigate ThetaHealing, which seems to have been created just for me.

Stump up the $550 and I’ll take the Basic DNA ThetaHealing course in January. That way we can speed up the process of finding out whether I will remain your sturdy-ish skeptic, or will insist on being addressed thenceforth as ‘Bindi’.

Does speaking kindly to water just before it freezes create beautiful patterns in its molecules?

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It was David Icke who put me on to Masaru Emoto, which should be your indicator of whether to read on or not. For the past 12 years, the Japanese entrepreneur has been insisting that human consciousness can affect the molecular structure of water. Positive thoughts, songs, prayers or nice words taped to a water canister, he says, create beautiful patterns in the water crystals that can be examined with microscopic photography when frozen. Mean words create crazy, irregular shapes.

Nice crystals had been played Beethoven. Vicious blobs had received heavy metal.

One Emoto experiment involved 2000 volunteers in Tokyo vibing positive intent at bottles of water thousands of miles away in a room in California. The water in the vibed bottles, Emoto says, had increased aesthetic appeal to bottles of unvibed water in a neighbouring room. Boy, I wish I could have taken part in that experiment. Just as intrigued as me is psychic slayer James Randi, who has offered Emoto his customary million bucks to prove his theory under more controlled circumstances.

But this projecting of intent is a common theme in New Age circles. I can think of examples in which I’d agree it works. Ever had a shit massage? One where the technique is all there, but the care is lacking? Compare that to a massage by a spiritually minded practitioner, who focuses healing through their hands. And if you’ve ever made love, as I have, you will be familiar with the effect that has on every cell in your body. If you’re doing it properly.

If you subscribe to Emoto’s theories, positive intent affects all the molecules around us. This is good to know, as regular readers will remember I have been challenged to tune into the electrical frequencies of three people in different moods, as chosen by my skepto cohort Esther. This is one instance where my skepticism has taken a slide (I’m predicting further slides, just to pre-warn you). Being a sensitive – some may say over-sensitive – type, I’m confident I’ll be able to read their moods by the vibes in the room. Esther reckons not. Dr Emoto would be on my side, as would the Mayans, who thought everything in the universe was made up of energy vibrating at different frequencies. Still, why should we listen to ancient civilisations?

Oh, incidentally, if you’d like to drink some sacred geometry, you can make your own poor man’s Divine Energy Activation Water, like these healers in Texas. And THEN, you can send a sample to Emoto, who’ll test it for lovely patterns for just 55,000 yen.

Further reading: http://is-masaru-emoto-for-real.com/

Do it yourself.

The Secret: unfairly excludes infidels and the faithless

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Get them while they're young.

“Everything happens for a reason.” OOF.

“It is what it is.” OOH-YAY.

I’m as vague as the next old dear, but even I need a bit more direction than “throw it out to the universe” as a roadmap to run my life.

Still, according to the Oprah-endorsed The Secret by Australian Rhonda Byrne, everyone from Plato to Shakespeare to Beethoven to your next-door celebrity Scientologist is in on a magical formula to get everything you want, so I’d better jump onboard quick-smart.

The Secret is essentially the law of attraction: visualise brilliant things happening to you and those brilliant things will be helpless to resist speeding towards you, like “iron filings to a magnet”.

A quick email around the office instantly conjures up three copies of The Secret, although everyone groaningly insists their copy was pressed upon them by some chump. Sure. I take one down to the beach for a peruse – not for an extra spiritual experience, but so nobody catches me reading it.

Opening the book at random, P59 explains how to visualise yourself thin. Even though you may have stuffed yourself cross-eyed and giggling, “food cannot cause you to put on weight, unless you THINK it can.”

You can also think yourself well and think yourself a million bucks. Don’t be anti-something, be pro- its positive opposite. And don’t resist! I’m confused, though… how does ‘visualising’ what you want differ from ‘fantasising’, which I’m already doing every waking minute? All that’s brought me is a tendency to not hear a word you’re saying.

Look, maybe there’s something in this. A ‘positivity can’t hurt, and people around you seem to prefer it’ sort of something. When I was a child, home life was a cacophony of tuts: Dad’d get started with one of his epic to-be-followed-by-rumbling-storm-clouds-of-oaths tuts that would make your heart skip a beat with dread, then Mum would fall in with the empathetic, oh-dear-that’s-torn-it tuts, and eventually we were all at it. On trips away, tension would do a Mexican wave around the car at the bloody unfairness of it all, whatever that was. Heeding someone else’s sensitivity to tuts and forecastings of doom by being outwardly chipper was not considered.

So anyway, let’s see what we have here.

Funny – I’ve always been told I’m NOT the centre of the universe, yet here on p46, within a jolly metaphor about Aladdin’s lamp, it clearly says: “You are the Master of the Universe, and the Genie (that’s the law of attraction, or the Universe) is there to serve you.” I’m advised to “place an order” to the Universe by writing it out on a piece of paper in the present tense. (Fried chicken wings?)

Step two is to believe that it’s already mine. I guess I already do this when I go shopping. I look at a dress and imagine myself parading down the street wearing it, looking fine, with my hair bouncing around.

Of course, The Secret does have itself a get-out clause. You’re to believe with “complete and utter faith”. So I guess if you don’t get the dress you wanted, your faith was lacking. And if you live in a third-world country and are STILL starving to death, well, I guess you should have put it out to the Universe harder.

I come from here, Rhonda. Do you think the Universe can be arsed?

Psychics Vs. Mentalists

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I’m on a quest to crack open my monkey brain and slip in the spoon of spirituality (a hypnotherapist told me the unconscious mind responds well to metaphors… how’s yours doing?), but one area guaranteed to get me wriggling like a fish on a hook is clairvoyancy.

Here’s why.

“Many of the chronic health conditions and diseases that we experience in adulthood are rooted in childhood or the womb. I use many different techniques to remove these traumas and problems quickly and easily.”

“A Soul Inspired reading is an opportunity to connect with your Soul/Higher self, to gain, feel and see your life from a higher perspective through the energy of love and without the distractions of your personality.”

“Anything from minor complaints to life-threatening injuries can be treated or even cured through the use of psychic powers. Whether these powers come from God, the healer, or the Universe as a whole is a matter of debate, but that they work is certain to those who believe in them.”

“Psychic healing can help you obtain relief from physical or mental pain. The gifted psychic can see your aura and determine the source of pain. They use subtle energy to remove your pain.”

“Transcendence Healing is an individual process assessing powerful Universal energies in order to facilitate your healing at a soul level.”

Deep down I would rather believe than not believe, though. How awesome to think that someone could completely understand and anticipate you without all that awkward business of getting to know you. So I’m fully prepared to alter my perception at the slightest shred of evidence and raising of hairs. I’ve already been proved wrong with energy healing, as I’m convinced the chap in Byron Bay on Day One quelled my vagus nerve by the time I’d wobbled out his door. So maybe, as with teachers, hairdressers and cats, you’ve just got to meet the right psychic.

The problem is, I’ve failed to be rendered wide-eyed by the triumvirate of revelations psychics always wheel out to women in their thirties:

1)    You’re having doubts about a man

2)    You’re thinking about buying a house

3)    You’re unhappy in your job and thinking about going for another

You may also be worrying about a friend, be musing on vague plans to travel or move to the sea, and be thinking about starting a family… although no one’s leveled that last one at me.

That’s because of cold reading; the art (they’d call it science) of making high probability guesses about someone’s life by their appearance and reactions.

Psychics beadily eye my slovenly dress code and inky arms and deduce I’m a raging pisshead. “You need to start taking it easy on your body,” they’ll say with concern, shuffling cards and prescribing early nights. One of the perks of being a toothsome teetotaller is smugness, so imagine how sensational I feel when a psychic wheels out that old chestnut. For this reason I reckon I’m a fantastic litmus test for psychics – you should take me along before you agree to hand over your money.

Here’s an interview I did with a mentalist – a man who happily admits to leading a person’s train of thought with imperceptible cues (and a good grasp of neuro-linguistic programming), reading the nuances of their face and body in turn, to see if he’s on the right track. The accomplished accompanying patter allows him to slither and weasel his way out of any wrong turn, barely detected.

No such luck today here in Glebe. I can’t believe this $30-for-20-mins psychic is talking solely about me, yet I’m still bored.

We get onto the subject of some japester persistently vandalising my property, and she proposes I call on “his royal hotness” the Archangel Michael. I’m to visualise a deep blue cloak draped around my possessions, which will render them invisible. Sorted.

The Archangel Michael.

“Take a big lump of rose quartz,” she says, doing the very same. “And hold it in your right hand.”

Awesome. Are we going to make a fist around it and learn how to throw a loaded right hook?

“See all the lines in it? They directly link up to your brain stems.” She gauges my reaction for a beat. “You can tell this crystal your intention and it will project it out to the universe.”

I feel like I’m on the phone to a telecaller, or a boring band I’m interviewing. “Okay, thanks then. Okay thanks. Thanks. Yep, yep, no, that’s all,” I say, lowering the metaphysical telephone receiver. Keep talking and I’m going to have to blow a whistle down it in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…

Nonintuitively, she bids me ask another question.

Psychic ‘n’ Parma Night in the outer suburbs

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Pinched from my last venture, the new-adventure-every-day-for-a-year account, Hey Man, Now You’re Really Living

“So how long have you known you’re a white witch?” the psychic asks me over her shoulder as we hurry through the pub for my 10-minute sesh in a back room. As opening lines go I reckon it’s up there with “If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?” So good, she uses it on my mate later.

One archangel, two spirit guides and a medieval past-life later, I’m moving on to the tarot reader – it’s $30 for a counter meal and two readings at this pub out in the ‘burbs. This reader bears an unnerving resemblance to Jacki Weaver in Animal Kingdom as she pins me with a stare and says: “You think you’ve reached rock bottom already, but you haven’t.”

Predicting a spell in rehab and a short-lived career selling drugs for bikers, she doesn’t pull her punches. What’s more, she seems to be almost imperceptibly vibrating her head as she cranes closer, giving off a weird strobe effect.

“You’ve had two abortions … no … miscarriages … no … you can’t have children because of all the drugs …  no … you don’t WANT children!” she finishes triumphantly.

“You think men are only good for one thing; you tend to flip either way [for the record, I’m quite particular about only flipping one way] and you’re fed up of being told to just get over it.” She fixes me an extra beady one. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

Jeez, someone’s been watching too much Underbelly, I’d wager. Jacki did nail my upbringing with further detail, but then, I can immediately sniff out someone with a back-story like mine, too – you don’t have to be a psychic, or a grifter.