First off, I occasionally try out alternative healing techniques (Network Chiropractic, Kinesiology, Acupuncture, people who "read" you, and such). My experience is that 95% of them are ineffective or outright fraudulent. Rarely do I come across someone that demonstrates to me something that actually IS a real alternative. In fact, I can think of maybe four or five people out of a hundred who I believe actually demonstrated something real.

When someone claims to have an alternative healing technique, I hate it when they start pumping me for information. I want to come in, sight unseen, no medical history, and have them start telling me what they can tell about me. Show me you have something. Tell me something that I know that you couldn't know without it being something direct.

With that said, I can say that of the dozens of people who've trying kinesiology on me (also known as muscle-testing) I've pretty much decided that they all were either frauds or imcompetent at it, believing they were getting accurate information from the process when they weren't. All but one. I know one woman who can cut right to the root causes of things in ways that simply astonish me. She is the real deal.

I was born with a glob of varicose veins on my left leg. It looked like a bulging glob of entwined worms. My cousin, a medical doctor, told me that I would probably have to have them removed someday because it could develop a dangerous embolism or something. I eventually had that surgery and everything's fine.

Before I did, however, (and this was about 18 years ago), I asked this woman to see if she could tell me what the root cause of this glob was. I had another woman friend in college who had the exact same glob on her left leg in the exact same spot. That was just too weird a coincidence.

Using her own brand of kinesiology that had proven itself weirdly accurate in a number of verifiable ways, she told me that there was some kind of karmic tie between me and this woman, manifesting in my leg. (I won't share the exact details. Let's just say it was fascinating.) I asked her to help me track down the time and location. We came up with the latter half of 17th century England. I immediately thought, "I was an earl." I told her this and she confirmed it, as much as such a thing can be confirmed through kinesiology.

That was as far as that session went.

Let me digress a bit. For almost 30 years of my life up to that point, I had been dogged by certain nightmares. They almost always came in the form of someone or something pursuing me trying to kill me. It could be an unseen murderer, a snake, eels in the water, almost anything you could name. A month couldn't go by without my having a dream where someone I couldn't identify or some animal-thing was trying to strangle, stab, bite, drown, or poison me.

As it turned out, that thing pursuing me in my nightmares was this past life. Once I came to terms with it, the nightmares stopped.

Okay, onward.

Once I had the thread of a lifetime as an earl in England in the latter half of the 17th century (1650-1699), I wondered how to pinpoint it further. I still had not developed the skill of contemplating directly and opening these kinds of doors, although now I have a limited ability. It's just so scary sometimes, I don't pursue it as much anymore unless something seems to require it.

So I thought maybe I could track it down using the Will and Ariel Durant set of history books, The Story of Civilization in 11 volumes. I figured that even though there were untold numbers of earls in England, I just might be able to recognize myself in one of them. I had a time span of about 50 years. I figured that would be narrow enough that it wouldn't take long.

So I picked up volume VIII, "The Age of Louis XIV" (the French bias in this series is astonishing) and I turned to the index. Entries were like this:

Argyll, Achibald Campbell, 9th earl of (1629-85) 189-90.
I began systematically locating and reading about each earl. There were lots of them and I was not getting anything out of the exercise.
Another digression. Another thing that had dogged me all my life was a cutting satirical wit. I seemed to have been born with the ability to readily have a witty comeback, a quick insult, a cutting sense of humor. I was completely unconscious of the harm I could do with it until I was in college. I thought I was just being funny. Others were hurt by it.

It was so ingrained in me, this sarcastic, cutting edge, that once I became aware that I would lose friends and turn off acquaintances with it, I still couldn't stop. It was too automatic a part of my mind, too much in my spontaneous nature. No matter how hard I consciously tried, it would continually slip out and embarrass me.

One form it would take is mimicry. I had an uncanny ability to mimic anyone around me. I could easily adopt a role and play it out. I had some natural acting ability (I played several roles in an 8th grade production of Li'l Abner), but it usually took the form of making fun of someone.

I was an honor's student with a quick wit. In 7th and 8th grade someone tagged me with the nickname The Brain. Luckily my family moved and it didn't follow me into high school.

I was also promiscuous. I once knew someone who had a horoscope book called Sex Life of the Signs. I was never one to believe in astrology; however, I asked them to look up Capricorn and read it aloud. The first line: "Anytime, anywhere, any position."

That pretty much summed me up.

I also loved drinking beer a little too much. I could easily put away a six-pack and want more. I have since quit drinking entirely. I was born with a weak liver.

Okay, onward. I'm finally to the R's in the index, wearily reading the name of one earl after another, flipping to the pages telling about that earl, and wearily rejecting each one, when I come upon this entry:

Rochester, John Wilmot, 2d Earl of (1647-80), 270-71

I swear to god the moment I looked at that name a cloak of anxiety settled on me and I thought, Oh no, that's it.
I had never heard the name before. I hadn't a clue who this person could possibly be. As flipped to page 270, I already felt like I didn't want to read it. But I did. And my anxiety was confirmed. Here's the passage that comes right after a paragraph describing George Villers, second Duke of Buckingham who was dismissed from office, abandoned himself to degeneration, and died in poverty and disgrace:

His rival in figure, wit, revelry, and decay was John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester. John received the master's degree at Oxford at the incredible age of fourteen (1661), was admitted to the court at seventeen and became gentleman of the bedchamber to the King. At nineteen, needing money, he made love to a rich heiress; finding her dilatory, he kidnaped her, suffered imprisonment, won the lady's sympathy, then her hand, then her fortune. Charles repeatedly banished him from the court, and repeatedly let him return, relishing his wit. Like Buckingham, Rochester was an expert mimic. He delighted to disguise himself as a porter, a beggar, a merchant, a German physician, and so successfully that he deceived his closest friends. As a physician he pretnded to effect difficult cures through his knowledge of astrology; he attracted hundreds of patients and cured several; soon the ladies of the court came to him for treatment, and even those who had know him well failed to recognize him. In nearly all these disguises he pursued women, quite disregarding their rank, and they pursued him. He amused himself by writing satirical obscenities, ruined his health with liquor and lechery, and boasted of having been drunk uninterruptedly through five years. He died in poverty and penitence at thirty-three.

A little later on the same page is a reference to a little play by Rochester entitled Sodomy.

Not the kind of past life one looks for or wishes to share with others.

Okay. I shut the book. I got it now. John Wilmot. Fine. I don't have to think about that any more. On with my life.

I tried. Bit for the next couple of months I couldn't get away from it. Knowledge of that life dogged me like a shit on the bottom of my shoe. It smelled, I smelled, and nothing I could do could get him out of my mind.

I lay awake some nights feeling like someone was punching me. I felt like the karma of that lifetime was really hitting me. It permeated my cells and there was no escaping it. It was a horrible two months.

I decided to get more information on the guy. Using a university library, I found that writer Graham Greene had written a bio on the man called Lord Rochester's Monkey. He found something sympathetic in the man and his poetry genuinely talented. That made me feel a little better, but it was still a dark and ugly past life. You can read some of this bad boy's poetry here...if you can stomach it. I'm particularly fond of The Dying Lover to his Prick.

In an earlier post, I shared a spiritual exercise using the word HU. This word shows up in Rumi's poetry, in ancient Egypt, in the Celtic religion, in Sanskrit, and even in tracing the history of the word GOD in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Sometimes I gather with friends and we sing HU together for 20 minutes or so.

I was having a particularly bad day with this Rochester lifetime. I felt like my muscles were cramping up, permeated by the anger and debauchery of that man. I didn't know what to do to get past it. I felt like the Elephant Man. I am not an animal! I am a human being!

I remember that I didn't want what I was going through polluting the HU we were going to sing together, so I tried to set it aside. We gather in a small circle of about 7 or 8 people and began singing HU.

About 2 minutes in I knew that there was no way I could avoid thinking about Rochester. So in complete frustration, I mocked up his face in my mind's eye and said to myself, "I don't care what it takes, I'm going to face this directly and get through it."

And I HUed directly into my own face in that lifetime.

Almost immediately I began smell something burning. I thought maybe the heat in the building had clicked on, you know, with that initial gassy burning smell. I opened my eyes, but there was no heat running. Nothing was burning in the room, and everyone else was contentedly HUing away.

So I closed my eyes again, and I realized what I was smelling was a kind of sandlewood incense.

I hate incense. I never could understand those people who could sit in a room with burning incense and not gag on it. I had quit smoking cigarettes by this time and the last thing I wanted to do was breath in anything smokey.

But this was different. I inhaled the vapors and they were not smokey, but nourishing and healing. The vapors were incredibly thick, as if someone were holding a bowl directly under my nostrels and I was breathing in these thick, thick, vapors of sandlewood incense. And as I breathed in, the vapors washed through my body and in minutes cleansed out every bit of the gunk and darkness and anxiety and pollution that had saturated the cells in my body. It was a quick, cleansing healing of that lifetime.

The HU ended, everybody opened their eyes, and I sat there completely free of what had dogged me for the last two months. I asked if anyone smelled anything, and nobody had. I kept it to myself.

I was grateful that it all was washed out of me.

Occasionally I go back and read about that guy. It's not always easy, but it explains a lot about me.

I no longer have those nightmares. And I finally had that sarcastic wit washed out of me. At least the automatic part. I can exercise it consciously now. I try to do that less and less as time goes on.

I'm also no longer promiscuous, which is good since I've been married now for 10 years.