Attunement

The door to the waiting room sprang open, and out came a burst of sunshine in the form of dear old Lee and Jo. Arms outstretched, they welcomed me into their warm embrace and then, linking arms, led me inside.

"Been waiting long?" Lee asked.

"No, just a bit. Perfect timing," I replied.

"Wonderful," Jo said. "It's so good to have you with us again. Now, just take a seat there between ours and we'll get started."

So I'd arrived once more in this warm place, this magical room that had the touch of a true artist. All the wonders of nature had been captured in this one indoor space. One of the walls reminded me of a dense forest, another the inside of a wave, and a third wall was like vast sunburnt spaces. A pile of granite boulders in the corner provided a perfect ledge in front of the window on the other side wall. It looked out to an ever-changing landscape of purple mountains and wildflower-filled plains. In parts, the floor was made of honey-coloured wood, but elsewhere there was thick, springy grass and a carpet of fallen autumn leaves. The light in here was warm and mellow, like sundown. On one side of the room was a round pool of brighter light that seemed to stream in from above.

I was drawn to the middle of the room and into a shimmering pod that enveloped my presence like a womb. Jo and Lee had seated themselves in the plush armchairs on either side of me. The chairs then somehow moved silently into position so that we were in a triangle facing each other and just touching.

They hadn't changed a bit.

Lee was of an indeterminate age. Her silky long hair seemed to float around her serene and gentle face. Her softly feminine clothes reminded me of a long-ago favourite artwork. But what I remembered most of all was her stillness and strength.

Jo was ageless as well. Like Lee, he was barefoot. He wore quirky clothes in deep jewel-like colours. I could almost feel the rich texture of his jacket. He had a warm and kindly face and an even gaze with a twinkle of humour. But his calm steadiness struck me most of all.

As he spoke, I remembered the comforting depth of his voice: "So, ready for the big adventure, eh?" His wise deep-brown eyes held such a mischievous twinkle that I instantly remembered why I loved these two so much.

Lee was just as pleased about the whole thing. When she smiled, her clear blue eyes sparkled like diamonds. She wore a look of contented expectancy. Just as I thought it, she said, "Well, let's get started. Let's get you a body."

The hypnotic caress of her words echoed softly in the room as the small hollows at the edges of their seats joined to provide perfect little nests for their hands to rest together. They closed their eyes, and together we sank easily into a state of total relaxation. I loved this attunement part.

The air began to pulse. Soon the softest sound began. It was a single middle note on a bell. It circled on and on, louder and softer, until the air was gently vibrating. Then a deeper tone sounded, anchoring us steady and true. Over the top of these came the crash of the deepest, mightiest gong from an ancient monastery in the mountains. I basked in the glory of this sound as it sent a shudder through the air. Next came the surprise of the most delicate waterfall of tinkling bells again, again, and again. A single higher note sent us soaring then, ringing clear and pure like a soprano bellbird in a forest.

Waves of long-ago smells began to wash over me.

Rain on parched earth ... Mm.

Fine red wine maturing in oak casks.

The rotting damp of a wet rainforest.

A brand-new baby wearing that scent of soft innocence.

Roses, glorious roses! Names floated back with each fragrance.

I could smell Tiffany ... and was that Royal Dane? Mm ... And that would have to be Papa Meilland. Glory on a stem.

A breeze blew away the scent of the roses and then brought in another smell. Hang on. I think I remember ... What is that? I know that one ... Then I had it. It was wet dog fur rolled in fresh cow manure!

They were being funny now. I suddenly came back and heard us all laughing.

"Gets 'em every time!" blurted Jo, slapping his hand on his leg. He was wiping tears from his eyes and making an effort to compose himself.

A half-hearted attempt at seriousness crossed Lee's face, followed by a small explosion of childlike giggles.

Jo wasn't helping. He had a way of looking at her sideways, with a lopsided grin like a naughty schoolboy. Despite a concerted attempt at a sensible expression on his face, little snorts and half-stifled guffaws kept bubbling up from his stomach like champagne bubbles.

Lee forced herself to look away from him and, after a few more gentle snickers, said, "All right, we'll get going now."

Finally they settled down.

Jo looked at me admiringly. "You're positively glowing! And as you know, smell is the link. So we always know that a soul is really ready for the transition when the sense of smell is reawakened during the attunement."

The chairs glided away from each other to be beside me again. We were now in a shallow half circle facing a central screen that had risen from the floor. Two ergonomic keyboards had risen in front of Lee and Jo, and Lee had her hands comfortably wrapped around her sphere, which reminded me of an ornate Victorian-era globe of the world.

"So what'll it be?" she asked. "Do you want to do death?" The screen turned blue. "Or guilt?" A quick touch of another key and the screen turned green. "Or maybe illness — physical or mental?" She did something else, and the screen was now pink.

I knew she was asking me for the main life theme I'd decided on, but I couldn't keep up with the screen changes.

"Don't mind her," Jo said. "We just got some new software. She's like a kid on her birthday with this. Just take your time."

I settled back quietly to refocus while Lee gleefully switched the screen through all her favourite colours.

Main Theme

I announced my choice. "I'd like to do sex."

Click, click. There were a couple of ticks and zap! She had the screen up.

"Ready," she said.

"OK," Jo continued eagerly. "Good choice. The sexual energy being the vital life force — straight to the point. I like it. Now we'll zero in. What aspect of sex in particular would you like to work on?"

I was stumped. "I'm not really sure. I just have this feeling, you know? I was hoping you could help me clarify it."

"That's just what we're here for," he said, reassuring me with his rich, resonant voice. He started speaking more slowly. "Let's look at some of the options. You could do sexual repression, sexual domination, sexual addiction ..."

He waited calmly for me to respond, lifting the palms of his hands and looking deeply into me with his endless gaze. Soon he said a single word: "Passion."

He had captured it. There was a sigh of recognition from me, and a burst of gentle love from them both as I received this deep truth.

"Yes ... I'll be passionate ... full-hearted ... open ... intense." They waited, smiling, as I tuned in. "I'll be passionate in every sense of the word, living life to the fullest. I'll have a huge capacity for love." I rested in the beauty of this, until the energy in the room suddenly dropped.

"Go on," Lee said.

"But along the way, I'll be stifled ..." They both nodded slowly.

"During a phase in my adult life, I'll be in a situation where my glorious, passionate sexual energy is suffocated, sucked dry, almost destroyed."

I was remembering, anticipating, and living it all at once. "The threat of the loss of that vital life force will be the most

unbearable thing to me. That is the ultimate compromise I will not be prepared to make," I said.

Jo and Lee were sitting back in their chairs, totally relaxed as I unfolded my story.

"That's what will finally force me to leave that destructive situation. It will be impossible for me to tolerate the thought of shutting down my passionate energy, of living half-heartedly, as a shell. That will be what leads me back ..."

I heard them exhale deeply, and I felt the softest whisper of wind. Through the window, a rainbow arched over the mountains, and instantly we were basking in the shower of colours that filled the room.

Fortress

As the soft, warm light gradually returned, there was a gentle tapping sound, and I noticed that Jo was keying in the information we'd just discovered.

"Ready to go on?" Lee asked.

"Yes, please," I replied.

She started to explain the next step. "Well, as you may remember, your task in any lifetime is to collect your broken or unhealed parts, reassemble them, and bring yourself back to wholeness. To give you a broad scope for this reintegration, there are four main areas we key in. We have the main life theme you've already chosen — well done — along with subplots, plus universal themes, all within historical context, the pervading milieu of the time. Then of course there's place, as in country. That also has an effect. Then I guess that's five, isn't it?" She looked questioningly at Jo.

"Whatever," he said with a wave of his hand.

She went on in her calming tone: "There are various ways to find a placement that has the potential to integrate the themes you are bringing in with you. For example, if you'd chosen, say, guilt as your main life theme, we could place you in a specific family that has developed a pattern for a number of generations of committing some horrible misdemeanour, or even crime, and then either repressing the guilt, covering it up with anger, or even carrying it as a guilty secret. If this dynamic isn't automatically in place for you in that family, another option is to find experiences to allow you to feel the guilt in your own particular way. You'll attract these experiences like iron filings to a magnet."

I could hear her voice, but the soothing hum of her words had sent me into a gently tingling trance. I must have agreed, so she continued.

"Then again, we could come at guilt from a more general angle and have you born in a particular era and country so you'd get to experience the collective guilt of a whole nation. So the possibilities are endless!" She positively glowed with the wonder of this elegant system.

"In your case, in this lifetime you'll be hoping to make some progress on clearing that load of sadness and pain that you're carrying over from your past lives."

"I am?"

"Yes, you are," she said warmly.

"Why am I still carrying this?" I asked.

"Oh, it's pretty much a universal theme. In your case it could be some residue that was not fully felt. Then again, it could be due to the opposing principle, where you caused this feeling in another person and failed to clear it by accepting responsibility and making amends."

Now Lee leaned in closer, her eyes shining. Her voice was animated, and had taken on a playful, wondrous tone. She looked like a passionate teacher pulling me in to some magical story about her favourite subject. "In any case, you will be given the opportunity in this lifetime to experience both sides of the same coin again. It needs to be cleared one way or another. It's all about physics. Positive and negative, good and bad, both poles of the magnet; you get to experience it all!"

Jo was leaning forward, attending to her every word like a fascinated school student.

Lee smiled at him and began elaborating, fleshing out the details of her exciting story: "So, if we take the specific approach we could place you in a particular family, or for the collective approach we would send you to a relevant era, country and painful event. The sadness might even become an illness within your body. Any number of different combinations, you see? All you really need to do is keep answering our questions; we'll find the exact placement for you. As you know, you can't make a wrong choice. Every choice is the right one." She beamed with satisfaction and sat back in her chair contentedly.

Jo took over from her. "Of course, none of this is set in concrete. Do you recall the second principle?"

"Yes, I'm pretty clear on that," I replied. "Isn't it that we can only evolve by engaging with the realities of the physical world, initially our parents and families?"

"Exactly," Jo said. "And what is the nature of that physical world and those parents?"

I didn't respond straight away. Instead, I waited patiently in my current state, which was like a void — a neutral space full of endless possibilities. From this place of expansive freedom, it was hard to place myself back down into that world. It was as if I didn't have access to it. It was like diving down to retrieve something from the bottom of the ocean, and then swimming back up to the surface with it.

"If you can't remember, see if you can imagine," Jo prompted.

"The physical world is not perfect but contains all of the positives and negatives of existence," I said. This simple statement had come from nowhere.

He nodded for me to go on. I rested quietly in the stillness until an image came to me, and the words came spilling out.

"After gestating in the perfect world of the womb we suddenly find ourselves completely open and porous to a real but imperfect world, dependent on imperfect parents for our very survival. We absorb both the positive and negative energy like a sponge. But this soon becomes untenable because, as children, our brains are not yet able to process the intricacies of the adult world, or the emotions that arise from experiencing either a mild or extreme version of this flawed world. We are easily swamped by these feelings, which we don't understand and cannot name."

"Yes, yes, you mentioned the brain," Lee said excitedly. "Do you remember how your brain works as a child?"

I waited for the memory to come back to me. "As a child I am innocent and naïve. I interpret things in a childlike way. I think of situations as either black or white. I don't have the maturity of the adult mind to put my world into context. From my observations, I sometimes apply limited or faulty thinking to develop and then harbour mistaken beliefs. Because I am naturally egocentric, I not only feel that the world revolves around me, but also that I am somehow responsible for everything. This leads to a mistaken belief in my power to control and fix my world and everyone in it."

"Ah, the omnipotence of childhood!" Jo laughed. He continued with the story. "Some children find themselves in an extreme situation where a loss of love and protection is a very real threat. But because they are dependent on their parents, they don't have the choice to move to a safer environment or to create boundaries around what they will accept, as an adult might. Some children are in a more benign situation but still sense and fear that they will be overwhelmed by emotions that are too big to feel."

I was trying to recall these scenarios.

Lee and Jo were nodding at each other. Lee clapped her hands like a little girl. "And what do children do about it?" she asked me, with a gleam in her eyes. She waited while I searched for the answer.

I imagined myself as a child again. Then I remembered, and spoke as if in a dream: "I have to look after my pure heart, which is my essence. It's me as I am now. Using my mind, I shut parts of myself away for my own protection ... the sadness, the pain, all the feelings that swamp me ... lock them away in a safe little box ... create a cosy place to hide away and go to sleep ... make that safe place into a fortress with tall walls ... barricade it with personality traits and ways of behaving that protect me. These traits become comfortable, and set in stone ... there's a big heavy door with an old-fashioned key."

"Such beautiful pictures," Lee said, smiling happily. "Can you recall how the story unfolds?" Again she waited for me to imagine the resolution.

I seemed to step into the next life phase, and speak more firmly from there: "In our adult lives, if we are ever ready to realize that parts of ourselves have been asleep and locked away, we may actually reach the true adult stage. We will see that our safe little worlds are inflexible and limiting, and don't even work for us any more. We may sense that there is something more to be had. We can then choose whether to keep our old behaviours going or surrender to the true flow of life."

They both looked at me approvingly.

"Couldn't have put it better myself," Jo said. "Returning to your current state of gentle expansive freedom is a lot like being born, but in reverse! This surrender you mentioned can happen in a number of ways — and to a greater or lesser degree. In any case, you will need that key that you mentioned."

He waited for me to take that in. I could see the key clearly. It was about the size of a hand, made of rough iron, with an elaborate filigree pattern on the end, and a ring through that to hold it on a hook. I couldn't quite grasp its meaning, though. "What's the key for?" I asked.