11 - Astral Projection

One of the ways to use Reiki is to ‘send’ it to someone if they can’t physically get to you. When I first started to do this, a strange thing sometimes happened.

My friend at the Minor Injury Unit wasn’t feeling too well and asked if I could send her some Reiki one evening. At the specified time, I went up to my bedroom, lit a candle and tuned in to the energy. As I focussed on my friend, I started to see in my mind a bedroom. The wallpaper was pale with little pink flowers on it. I saw a white wardrobe and then my friend lying in bed with her eyes closed. This had not happened to me before and I wondered what was going on. The next day I rang my friend to see how she was, and she said she was feeling much better. Out of curiosity, I asked her if she had pale wallpaper with little pink flowers on it in her bedroom. She spluttered and asked me how I knew. I told her and her response was, “Crikey, does that mean I shall have to be decent when you send it?”

Some time later another friend asked if I could send healing to her father-in-law. He had come back from a foreign holiday and was now very ill in hospital. Of course I said I would, and that night I started to send Reiki to this man. I had met him a few times at my friend’s house so I could picture him in my head. As I did this, I found myself suddenly sitting next to his bed in the hospital. The lights were dim as it was late at night. I put my hand on top of his, which was resting on the covers, and we started to communicate telepathically. I then watched as a light shone from the bottom of his bed - I thought it was a nurse shining a torch on him to see if he was all right, but when I looked there was nobody there. The light became thin and concentrated, like a laser beam, and scanned him from the feet upwards to above his head, and then back down to his feet again. I then heard in my head that it was time to go. It felt important to notice what pyjamas he was wearing, and then I was back in my bedroom again. I rushed downstairs to tell my husband what had happened and to tell him that this man had been wearing blue and white striped pyjamas. My poor husband didn’t know what to make of this!

When my friend came round for coffee the next day I told her that I had seen her father-in-law and had ended up sitting next to his bed on the ward. She laughed but I didn’t think she believed me, so I told her about the blue and white striped pyjamas. She frowned and said that he only had two pairs of pyjamas, one olive green and the other a pale blue with dark blue piping (she and her husband had bought them for him to have in hospital as he didn’t usually wear anything in bed). I was still sure they were blue and white striped ones that I had seen so we left it at that. The following day she knocked on my door and told me that she had just been up to visit her father-in-law and he was wearing his green pyjamas. She had asked him if he wanted any washing done and he said there was some in his locker. To her amazement, when she opened the locker there were the blue and white striped pyjamas that someone else had brought in for him and which he had worn the night I had sent Reiki. It was fantastic to have confirmation that I had actually seen him.

On another occasion I was asked by my best friend if I could do anything to help her dad. He was in hospital with kidney problems. That night, once again, I was sitting in my bedroom and focussing on him and before I knew it I was standing at the entrance to the hospital. In my head I asked where he was and I was instantly facing the Renal Unit building, so I focussed on an image of him and suddenly I was standing at the foot of his bed. Again it was late at night and only a soft glow of light showed in his room. He was connected to lots of machines and tubes and I could hear the bleeping of the monitor.

As I stood at the end of his bed sending him Reiki, he suddenly ‘sent’ me an image of a young man with black hair and a leather jacket, standing next to a motorbike. This told me that he wanted his loved ones to remember him as this healthy man and not the sick man he had become. I promised him I would tell them and then suddenly I was back in my room again. The next day I asked my friend if her dad had black hair and a motorbike when he was younger. She went very quiet and asked me how I knew this. I told her what I’d seen and that he wanted to be remembered as he once was and not as he was now. My friend couldn’t believe this had happened and was expecting a `phone call to say her dad had died. A week or so later I was talking to a mutual friend who asked me if I had heard the news about our friend’s dad. I was dreading to hear that he had passed away, but in fact he had been discharged from hospital because he had made a remarkable recovery. I was so relieved. Sadly, he passed away two years later but I’m sure he had sorted out all his unfinished business with his loved ones by then.

My mum is one of six children but she and her big sister are the only ones alive. When her youngest brother died, my aunt asked me if I would come to the funeral as she felt she might need some Reiki to help her through the day. I went with my parents and after the service we all went back to my cousin’s house for food. My aunt found me an hour later and said it was all right to use my cousin’s bedroom to give her some Reiki, so up we went. She sat on the dressing table stool and closed her eyes, while I stood behind her and connected to the energy. After about ten minutes I opened my eyes to see how she was. To my surprise, just in front of us, a pair of ‘winkle picker’ boots materialised on the floor. My aunt still had her eyes closed, which meant she had drifted off to somewhere nice, so I continued to watch the floor. Once the boots had become clear, a pair of light coloured jeans appeared and then my uncle became totally visible, not looking the age he was when he died but more like in his thirties. He had both his thumbs tucked into his belt and he was smiling at me.

In my head, I asked him if there was a message for my aunt and he replied, “Tell her you saw me looking like this and that I want her to remember me like this and not how I was in the end,” and then he disappeared. By then the Reiki had stopped flowing and my aunt started to come back from wherever she was. She opened her eyes and smiled and said how much better she was now feeling. I told her what I had seen and as I described what my uncle was wearing she gasped, telling me that there was a photograph at her home in which he is wearing exactly the same clothes, taken when he was in his thirties. She felt so much better after hearing his message and I was amazed that once again I had got confirmation of what I had seen.

Not long after I had my Reiki training, I noticed that the National Federation of Spiritual Healers was holding its annual conference somewhere in the north. It was the last day to apply for tickets to attend and I was sure I’d left it too late to get a place. Although I wasn’t a Spiritualist healer myself, I was interested in finding out what the difference was in our methods. A few days later, much to my surprise, my ticket arrived through the post and then I was on a coach heading north, gazing out of the window at the green rolling hills passing by. The more north the coach travelled, the more the big white fluffy clouds in the blue sky seemed to get closer to the ground. I thought this was strange but continued to gaze out at the scenery. Suddenly a ‘door’ appeared in the cloud closest to the coach and a rainbow ‘river’ began to pour out and flow down like a waterfall. As I continued watching, fascinated, the river of colour then flowed along parallel to the coach. I couldn’t believe my eyes and wanted to ask the lady sitting in the seat behind me if she could see this too, but I didn’t want to be seen as the mad woman on the coach! The rainbow river continued to flow down the side of the cloud for another few miles and then began to fade until it was gone. I took this as a good omen for the weekend conference.

Although I wasn’t a Spiritualist, I was made to feel welcome by the organisers. One of the workshops was on Aura Soma, which is about colour, oils and essences. Beautiful crystal bottles have different colours - sometimes two in the same bottle - and they are prevented from mixing by a slight film of clear oil. A trained Aura Soma practitioner can give a reading by looking at the colours in the bottles that you have chosen.

One of the ladies who attended the workshop was partially sighted so I helped her to a seat next to mine. I admit to wondering how she would benefit as she wouldn’t be able to see very much. The lady running the workshop had put all her bottles on the windowsill of the room and the sun made them sparkle - it was a beautiful sight. She explained that people were drawn to the colours that were lacking in their aura; they would not be aware that this was the reason they chose a particular bottle, but would be drawn intuitively to what they needed. She then told us of a few cases where the colour in the bottle had been taken out just by somebody holding the bottle, someone who desperately needed the colour. I doubted this - how could the colour become clear while still in the bottle?

She asked us to go over to the windowsill and choose the bottle we were most drawn to, hold it in our hands and take it back to our seat. I helped the partially sighted lady over to the bottles and she just put her hand out and felt them until she found one that she liked. It was a deep sky blue. She clutched it in her hand while we made our way back to our seats where, to my astonishment, as she put the bottle down on the table I saw that it had gone clear. There was no sign of the colour that had been in there. It was as if the spirit world was saying to me (yet again), “You WILL believe this.” The lady who had chosen it was feeling so much better that she didn’t want to hand it back, so she ended up buying the bottle.

The bottle I had chosen meant that I was ‘a messenger, feet on the earth and head in Heaven, a gatherer and giver of information’. We were then asked to put the bottles back and choose one more, and when back in our seats we were to hold the bottle in our palms and see what we could pick up. After helping the lady with me to find hers, I chose mine and sat back down, holding it in my hands as directed. The strangest sensations started in my hands and I felt the bottle get colder and colder until it was too painful for me to hold anymore. While this was going on I was trying to get images from the bottle but nothing came, just complete pitch blackness.

The lady running the workshop then went around each of us asking what we had seen and felt while holding our bottle. I was beginning to worry as my experience had been totally different to others’ and I was convinced I had done something wrong. When she got to me, she crouched down next to me and asked what I had experienced. I shook my head and apologised that I had not done it properly because I had only seen pitch blackness and the bottle had got so cold that I’d had to put it down. She rocked back on her heels and looked at me in a strange way, then said that I had, in fact, been in the presence of God. The blackness was the vastness of the universe; she also explained that when the spirit is close the temperature drops, and that was why the bottle had got painfully cold - I was in the presence of God! She seemed quite shocked, but no more than I was.

While at this conference I made friends with another lady and on the last afternoon we bought raffle tickets for a draw that was being held, the prizes having been donated by members. The draw was held in the big lecture room with tiered seats. As my friend and I walked past the table with the prizes on it, I noticed a book that I had wanted to read. My friend was about to walk up to the top tier of seats but I called her back to sit in the third row instead. She asked why, and I said that I didn’t want to have to walk too far when I went up to collect the book! The third ticket drawn was mine, and the look of surprise on my friend’s face made me laugh as I walked the short distance to collect my prize.