January/February 2001 - Case Study in Psychic Counseling

 

A REAL LOVE STORY

John Doe I'll call him.  Certainly to protect his anonymity, but also to imply that he is a type beyond just himself.  I have counseled 3 or 4 men who are very similar.  Curiously this type has always been male for reasons which escape me.

John came as a typical client with general malaise about his life in general and love life in particular.  Nothing traumatic but nothing really working either.  He had recently ended yet another lackluster relationship with a woman.  Somehow he knew he 'should' have a relationship but he never experienced real depth in them.  And no, he wasn't gay.  He'd asked that of himself and was very clear that he was not attracted to men.  His career was OK, but just.  This man and his life all seemed gray and dull.  I seriously feared I would drift off to sleep even reading him!

Quite the opposite happened when I entered my mental 'workshop.'  How unsettling it must be to have a psychic reader break down in sobs in front of you!  How embarrassing for the psychic.  I could never fully explain what happened when I went into that imaginary space.  I imagined seeing John in the room and that's in a sense the last concrete thing I saw.  The rest is more of a feeling.  I had the sense of being drawn into something overwhelmingly powerful and I felt an almost painful aching inside me.  I can't decide if it was more a crushing feeling of something weighing on me, or some force inside pushing to get out.  But I watched as John, in my workshop, just sat there in a glowing light with tears running down his face and a smile that felt like the Mona Lisa.  I had the oddest sense that I had touched a force that I could only call love.  This simple, gray man seemed to have it or connect to it in a very powerful way.  And I felt so sorry for him.  It seemed clear that he was not of this world and he would never find an easy path trying to be of it.

Suddenly I saw one of my favorite books, Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics, and then it became clear to me who this man could be.  He was a monk.  He was one of these people who needs to connect to a spiritual world very different from our ordinary world.  He needs to set himself apart for that role.

How in hell to tell him that?!  All I could do was describe the feelings I had experienced and tell him what I knew about the role of monk.  And when I did, he too cried!  He felt the same thing and he felt great relief to be able to talk about it.  It explained why his worldly relationships and careers always paled in comparison to this inner call to connect to God.  He had an intense need to be private and alone in his experience of love.

I could easily have discounted that position, but I didn't because I had heard the same thing from a famous monk, Thomas Merton.  My question was always what difference could it make if some monk or nun spent their days in prayer to God?  They should be out 'doing' something to show their love.  But Merton makes a wonderful case for the hermetic life.  On some very real level, he claims that one man or woman giving their life to Love raises us all above the common place.  Somehow that love is emitted into the world for us all.  Don't ask me to explain it, but I certainly felt it one day in my office and I can tap into that feeling at anytime, knowing John is out there living his very quiet life of reflection, prayer, and love.  And I know he is because he tells me he is now that the burden is off him to have a 'real' and 'normal' life of workaday world and relationships.

You don't need to go do what John is doing, but you can benefit from it just knowing that he is out there Being Love.  Or perhaps you can find some time in your life when you can just BE and connect with that same stuff.

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