Return to Innocence

Excerpt from The Wagamama Bride, a memoir in progress…

 

I was at Akahigedo getting treatment from a Chinese psychic who used an unusual technique to align her brain waves with mine and a room full of other people. Moving my feet like windshield wipers I visualized sun and moon alternately. After a while I don’t know what happened exactly but it seems I merged with the light I was visualizing.  To say it was earth-shattering is an understatement. It was sky-shattering as well. A hole had been pierced to heaven and I was standing bathed in light in what felt like a tunnel. Or maybe it was a ring around me that rendered me invisible. I merged into the intensity of a light I had never known to exist before. The light took me and merged past, present and future into an instant knowing that the soul’s journey didn’t begin at birth and certainly wouldn’t end with death. I felt the light connecting me next with the vastness of all energetic beings, and all things that animate life.

This feeling of connection was so intense that I began to cry tears of joy. I never imagined before that connection to all beings feels so exquisitely peaceful and blissful. Time stopped while I was bathed in this light. I don’t know how long I was there. Seconds? Minutes? It felt like an eternity. It was as if the love of my life had paid me a visit, departed, then left me with an inner knowing that what I had experienced wasn’t an invention of the mind, or a wishful fabrication, because no amoun of willing or wanting could bring about a re-experiencing of it. I had absolutely no idea how to repeat the most magical moment of my life experience.

For weeks I walked around Tokyo as if my ribs had separated and my heart was so full of love, it was practically dangling out of me. My usual reserve vanished. When people I didn’t know were kind to me, I stopped them to connect and chat and say kind words that would usually stay in my neo-cortex. Now I actually spoke the words from the heart out loud.

When people who normally irritated me did their usual thing, I felt no pangs of tension anymore. This was highly uncharacteristic of me,for until the light visited me, I saw in people mostly problems needing to be fixed. By seeing myself as whole, I came likewise to appreciate their wholeness.

Returning to myself, it no longer mattered whether I was in New York or Tokyo, how I labeled myself. I was complete.

Pastel by Liane Wakabayashi
Pastel by Liane Wakabayashi

 

Author: admin

I'm a Jerusalem-based artist and writer of a memoir in progress about rediscovering my Jewish roots in Japan.