We interact in unseen ways. Interactions that seem to happen only in one’s imagination might, in fact, be shared, and the effects can be powerful.
For two decades, I’ve noticed that my energy level drops every time I enter my mother’s presence, from 80 or 90 percent to something like 2 percent. I cannot even keep my eyelids up. I slump and slur, completely drained as though someone were siphoning energy from the small of my back. Now, living in the same city again, I’ve been forced to face it.
We recently went to an art museum with my oldest son. The moment we rendezvoused, my energy plummeted. I shuffled through the museum so devoid of life, I felt physically ill and wanted nothing more than to curl up in a corner and enter a coma. My mom seems to pull on my puppet strings. She wanted to control more than just where we went and how long we stayed. She wanted me to respond verbally and emotionally in precisely the desired ways. Even my thoughts and feelings are not in my jurisdiction. If my eyes do not light up in Christmas wonder at the perfection of her orchestrated moment of family bliss, or if I frown or dislike something, her tension is powerful enough to incinerate granite. If I express an intention to follow an entirely different plan, she falls apart.
I survived three hours in the museum, grumbling to myself, struggling to stay awake. When we left the museum, something happened that opened my eyes.
My mother was walking ahead of me, about six feet away. She had her back turned towards me. My son was walking alongside me. That last thing we’d been talking about was children’s art and where to have lunch. Randomly, I remembered that my mother is always obsessing over my jean size, which is usually smaller than hers. She recently dropped another size, a culmination of perpetual dieting that often entails long, harsh fasts every few months and cosmetic surgery. I hate that she makes such a note of my appearance when we’re together. I wish she would just drop it.
I imagined my mother asking about my jean size, and in my mind, I let out my anger: “I do not give a $#@&! about what size jeans I wear, for the love of God. Who cares about jean sizes!”
Out of the blue, my mother flipped around, pointed at me, leveled her eyes and said, “What size jeans do you wear?”
I was speechless. I just stared at her with my mouth agape. I don’t know why these things still astound me, but they do. I’ve known for many years that my mom, like me, has strong psychic perception. That hasn’t necessarily alleviated her suffering. In fact, I think it is often the cause of her suffering, in part because she doesn’t know she’s doing it. Becoming more aware of my psychic interactions with others has removed a lot of pain from my life. Of course, that opened up other cans of worms, but life is tremendously easier.
After a moment, I said, “I was just imagining you asking me, ‘What size jeans do you wear?’ and in my mind, I was saying, ‘I don’t give a $#@&! about jean sizes!’”
My mom turned around and walked away. “Ugh, I probably should have kept that last part to myself,” I thought, but in such moments, wide open honesty seems so much more important than diplomacy. My mother has the exact opposite philosophy, not explicitly but in practice. In exploring our unconscious interconnectedness, allowing the depths of our inner life–the good, the bad, and the ugly–to spill out into the public space may be a step towards healing. Not only might it heal the sense of separation, but it might heal the dull, sleepy ignorance that stems from assuming that our inner experience is only coming from inside.
We drove in separate cars to a restaurant for lunch. Along the way, it dawned on me that my mother and I were engaging in subconscious psychic battles, and that was probably why my energy dropped so dramatically. Physical lethargy is the primary effect of perceiving that one has no personal agency. I published a journal article on that very topic three years ago.
I also realized that I was going along with it. I sort of knew that already, but now I felt it. I felt where it was happening in my body and in my awareness. “No more!” I thought.
When I arrived at the restaurant, I had created a wall of light around my body. The wall was not a wall of separation. I always thought of psychic boundaries as some sort of quarantine, which didn’t feel right to me. This wall, in contrast, was designed to avert the pulling of puppet strings and thwart the manipulation of thoughts and feelings. For the first time, I got how to do that, because I could feel the space in which the manipulation was happening. All I had to do was stop going along with it.
“My thoughts and feelings are my own!” I said to myself.
In the restaurant, my energy returned in full force. I was animated, imbued with life. In the space of fifteen minutes, my mother asked me four different times, “What are you thinking?”
“So what are you thinking about?”
“What’s been on your mind lately?”
“What do you think about things?”
“So I was just wondering what you’ve been thinking.”
It was comical. I was only thinking one thing, and I kept it to myself: “My wall of light is working!”
