Cabin Fever Pt. 2

Deborah instructed me to lie down on the cushioned table and remove my shirt. As I did so, she started mixing some sort of massage oils in a bronze bowl. She began rubbing the mixture on my chest and started to massage the aforementioned pressure points. I assume. I’m not too familiar with “pressure points”. I know that they are the various spots on your body where it hurts when you apply pressure and are very useful in immobilizing an opponent in any sort of hand-to-hand combat.

She began kneading the muscles around my stomach and groin. I briefly worried about getting a boner and whether that would negate my sincerity in this regression session. I imagined Christine yelling at me: “You always think about sex! Sex! Sex! Sex! Can’t you get your chakras massaged without getting a hard-on?! Men!” I also wondered what my groin area had to do with my past lives.

“Ouch!” I cried.

“Does that hurt?” Deborah asked.

“A little.” She was pressing down above my stomach and it felt like she had just stabbed me.

“Hmmm,” she sighed.

“What?” I said. My mind raced. I wondered what was wrong with me. She was not a doctor, but knew more about chakras and pressure points than me, so maybe she found something troubling with my aura?

“It burns, yes?” she asked.

“Slightly,” I said.

“Hmmm.”

She began rubbing the area around my stomach more forcefully now. Every time she pressed under my right ribcage I winced.

“Yep,” she said.

“What is it?” I was genuinely interested. Perhaps we had found the key to my acid reflux. And perhaps she could exorcise whatever was causing it.

“It’s your liver,” she said.

Great. My liver was rotting away. I knew those years of beer bongs and Flaming Dr. Peppers would catch up with me!

“Your liver is where you store your anger,” Deborah continued, as she applied more oil to the region below my ribcage.

What fucking anger?!

Had Christine talked to her about the gypsy’s prognosis and her own ideas about the origin of my dyspepsia? This anger bullshit was getting out of hand!

“Really?” I said.

“This is good,” Deborah said. “We should be able to take care of this through the regression. Now lie back, relax and close your eyes.”

With my eyes closed, the tinny finger-cymbal music that had been playing in the background the whole time became more prevalent. The smoke from the incense filled my nostrils. I felt myself fade into the table.

I wanted a joint. I knew Deborah was carrying. I’d smoked a jay with her when I first checked out the cabin and she discovered my “beautiful soul”. I found the address from an ad in the classifieds while looking for a place to rent. Christine was at her arts and crafts school and I was using her car to find us an apartment. When I pulled up to the cabin, Deborah was outside pulling some weeds from the base of the cabin’s porch. We greeted each other, talked for a few minutes about ourselves and then she showed me about the cabin. After a cursory tour of the place we stood on the porch trying to figure out if this was the right arrangement for both parties. Deborah pulled a small joint from her flannel shirt’s breast pocket and looked at me inquisitively to see if I would care to partake.

I did. And we spent a good half hour getting high and talking about life. I was glad to have found this place and couldn’t think of a cooler landlord to have for six months. The drive back to the motel I was staying in was a little hairy, trying to maneuver the car along the twisting mountain roads while my head was spinning from the weed, but it all worked out. I made no mention of the pot to Christine when I told her about the cabin, lest she think my decision to plop down $800 for the first and last month’s rent before she’d even seen the little cottage was influenced by that.

“I want you to let your mind drift back,” Deborah said, as she rubbed the muscles of my neck.

My brain was having trouble relaxing now that it had been told to. It was like trying to force yourself to dream or fall asleep, you become conscious of all the work your brain must do in order to shut down for the night. And it doesn’t want to let you in on its secrets.

“Try to picture yourself,” she said.

That helped. Of course, I wasn’t completely honest in my imagining of myself. My inner me was a helluva lot better looking than the actual me, a vague cross between Johnny Depp and Kevin Spacey. My inner me stood against a black background and waved at me. My actual hand involuntarily waved back.

“Now go back in time with yourself. Can you see events from your life?”

“Yes,” I said.

And I could. There was my inner me, SpaceyDepp, at my friend’s wedding a few months ago. He looked dashing in his tuxedo and I wondered why he didn’t get laid that night. I could see my inner me cracking wise about something at a party in college, trying too hard to be the center of attention but only making it to the outer edges of attention. And there’s my inner me getting out of the car he just wrapped around a telephone pole, shaking beads of windshield glass from his long hair. This was kinda fun.

“Go further back, as your inner child gets younger...”

I watched as my inner me got his books dumped down the stairwell in junior high school, as he got hit in the head by a fly ball in little league, as my neighbor’s mother yelled at the “third grade me” for letting her son read a short play I’d written that contained the words “shit” and “fuck” in the dialogue. They were all none-too-pleasant but my inner me handled it all rather well.

I could feel my fists and toes clench into fists the further back I went. Was this a real reaction or had it been planted? Whatever the case, I couldn’t control it and I began to curl my body up as well, lying on my left side as I did.

“Can you see your inner child?”

“I guess,” I said.

There was some fetal organism before me in the black ness. It squirted some sort of pus or fluid. It quickly burst with light and became a little child, a mini-me, I suppose.

“Yes,” I said. “I see it now.”

The small infant looked at me and waited for something. He smiled.

“What’s up?” I said out loud.

“I want you to talk to it and tell it whatever you want to tell it. Whatever you feel it should know,” Deborah said, assuming I’d been talking to her.

Looking at this wide-eyed infant version of myself standing there in a sea of black before me I wondered what I should say to him. What information could I impart to make his life easier so he didn’t develop latent anger issues and acid reflux? What had I never been told that knocked me off my life’s path? I began to well with tears and breathed in heavily.

“It’s o.k. to cry,” said Deborah in a comforting voice. “Let it all out. Speak to your child.”

I was a blubbering mess now that I’d been given the o.k. to break down. The tears poured down my face. I would’ve tried to brush them away had my hands not been balled up into fetal fists. My inner child smiled at me benevolently. He was so pure and untainted by the tragedies of life. I wanted to keep him safe from all the misery the world would throw his way. He was a strong little guy, I could see that, but I feared (or rather knew) that life’s occasional sucker punches just might knock him adrift in the world. I couldn’t let that happen.

“I just want you to know,” I sobbed. “That no matter what happens...don’t let...I mean, everyone is gonna be real supportive...encouragement...always there...”

I was having trouble making sense and I tried to gather myself.

“You will have lots of people who encourage you in life...they’ll tell you that you can do anything...and you can, if you try...it’s just...no one will ever tell you that...well, that life is shit.

“So many, sooo many things will happen that are just horrible...terrible...people will abandon you throughout your life, steal from you, lead you astray, break your heart, beat you senseless physically...it’s just a really shitty world...

“And you should know this...cuz your friends and family will be so supportive and helpful...but they’ll hide the shittiness of life from you...and you should know that it all sucks...so it doesn’t, like, throw you off...”

Deborah slapped her hands together and I opened my tear-filled eyes. My inner child disappeared from my mind.

“O.K. that’s not working,” she said. “Maybe we should try something else.”

I thought I was doing a good job. He needed to know! If I’m angry about anything it’s that I wasn’t properly prepared to live in a world that continually pulls the rug out from under you like a villain in a Mack Sennett comedy. Oh well.

Deborah blew out the candle on one of the conga drums and told me that we’d try this again at a later date.

“Maybe we can try contacting an older dead relative, who can help you with what you’re going through,” she said.

“Sure.”

I laid on the table waiting for my hands and feet to uncurl and return to normal. I didn’t think I would be returning for another session. I’d just have to stick to ingesting handfuls of Tums before I went to bed each night. I’m glad I got to meet my inner child though. He seemed like a nice enough guy. I hoped what I said didn’t mess him up or anything and he was able to take it with a grain of salt. I didn’t want him to be completely scared of the world and never come out again. Maybe I’ll check in on him in a few years to see how he’s doing. Let him know that even though life might be shit, it’s a helluva good fertilizer and some pretty nice flowers and mushrooms grow on shit.