I’ve long toyed with the theory that there was a link between the death of my mother and the beginning of my most bizarre health challenges but also the awakening of a whole new layer of perception that feels tantamount to “an awakening”. Around that time, age 28, everything started to change for me in my sensory field. Simultaneously, weird symptoms seemed to cascade from my nervous system and the scales fell off my eyes…although that last part needed to go through a little more catharsis before it could fully shake itself down (and circumstances made sure I had that, within half a decade). I began to perceive things beyond a certain heavy blackout curtain that was so dense and impenetrable to me, beforehand, that I hadn’t even noticed it hanging there between realities. Before that, I was a “concrete” girl living fully in the here and now, or so I told myself, whilst dealing with all the usual hang-ups around “past” and “future” that seem to preoccupy the majority. Like most people, I simply didn’t want to see, or deal with, anything else and my ability to stay present long enough to notice fine details was minimal.

Then, synchronicity started to speak to me, not least an ability to discover four-leaved clovers everywhere, even in handfuls on the most auspicious occasions, though I had never managed to find a single one, for all my years of eagerly looking out for them, beforehand; they were my mother’s “very special thing”. I came to regard this breakthrough as an invention born of necessity: I had no other means to speak to this woman with whom I had daily physical or (just so many hours of) phone contact every single day of my life for almost three decades beforehand, and so I found my way through to her by another means and sheer determination. Lo and behold, it just happened, like a crack forming and me joining her “out there”, wherever she “was”, at some level of my sensory processing. Yet it came with its pitfalls; I now felt more, was aware of far more than I could easily cope with, struggled even more to be “human”.

Scientific speculation is catching up with this theory and its now thought that death and trauma can be initiating events when it comes to developing high-sensitivity in the body.

The shared nature of feelings — and the spiritual communion they engender — is on display, I suggest, in the many anomalous reports concerning people and pets. It’s possible, even likely, that a life-threatening emergency and the prospect of death so marshals the complete attention of an animal that the energy involved in its travail upends, at least occasionally, the normal convergence of space/time so that anomalous perceptions result. Whatever the dynamics involved, they typically communicate something of value between creatures that have an emotional tie, whether human to human, pet to human, or elephant to elephant. (Michael Jawer – “Unimagined Sensitivities, Part 12“)

One other scientist Jawer makes reference to is Dr Michael Fox who speaks of the concept of the empathosphere,  “a universal realm of feeling that can transcend both space and time.” This, he points out, is similar to the concept of Telesomatic refered to by psychiatrist Berthold Swartz (popularized by author Larry Dossey) which refers to spontaneously feeling the pain of a loved one at a distance.  Then Bernard Beitman of the University of Virginia refers to what he terms the psychesphere as follows: “Our thoughts and emotions contribute to the psychesphere and our thoughts and emotions are influenced by it.”  (All of these examples are cited and further explained in Jawers article Living Closer to the Bone). The thing these all have in common is that they are shared experiential zone beyond our “little” human zone; so when we engage with this willingly (for instance, in an attempt to stay in touch with a loved one who no longer exists in physicality), we become broader than ourselves or, you could say, stretched outwards and, in a sense, transcendent of the human experience. I strongly suspect that, once stretched, we remain thus stretched and that this alters our experience range, going forwards.

In other words, as someone I loved and was tremendously close to garnered all their attention towards the transition event that death is, perhaps I did too…and slipped through that crack in realities just a little, caught on the tail wind of my emotional connection with her. I certainly recall some interesting experiences that night though I wasn’t there on time to see my mother before she died; I was stuck in traffic with my sibling, dashing the 160 miles to her bedside while my sister reassured her I would get there soon. My profound sense of loss and bereavement was draped on top of all my desperate disappointment over all the future times and the longed-for closeness we had shared, now taken away from me. We had only become such closely connected “best friends” in those very recent few years, since my father’s death; she having been preoccupied with his neediness and illness plus three other siblings while I still lived at home. I felt cheated of all the years ahead; and, I suspect, I hung onto her with white-knuckle determination, and her to me as she transitioned.

When we soften the boundaries between form and non-form, time and no-time at all, we get ourselves into all sorts of new territory, which can be fun and, equally, challenging. Being able to perceive “wider” than our physical bodies presents all sorts of issues for those who are already super-sensitive and this, most certainly, happened to me over the course of the next twenty two years to where I am now…which is, almost painfully aware of things that should be outside my daily concerns. Yet there are gifts; and there is always the potential, once you soften such “hard” lines of reality, to know that you can morph reality just as soon as you resolutely set the intention to make a change (no waiting, no process, no build-up or work to do). Perhaps this is why I never lose faith in my ability to heal myself, which is one of the profound gifts that awakening…through death…bestowed upon me all those years ago. Its something some of us only learn at the end of our own mortal life, so to touch upon it early was a treasure that dramatically altered the trajectory of my life; you could say, a parting gift from my mother, like giving me new life all over again.

Just a short philosophical post for a Saturday morning.