Like many people, I began to have psychic experiences at a time of
great challenge and transformation in my life - during a kind of mid-
life crisis brought on by an "up-front and close" experience of death
and suffering that made me realise that life was limited and could
include some pretty horrendous suffering.

I began meditation classes with a local Buddhist group to help me
stay calm and together as the world/life I had known underwent
progressive disintegration. Coincidentally it was experiences like
mine ("in your face" death and suffering) that, two and a half
thousand years ago had moved the Buddha to leave his home and
marriage and go out in search of the answers to those tricky
questions about life that we mostly avoid by keeping busy and
distracted. He too progressively uncovered the transformative tools
of meditation and spiritual practice.

The meditation and Buddhism classes were great and helped me to hold
together and move forwards through some very tricky waters of major
life events externally and major developments internally. All was
going fine until the psychic experiences started to appear...

Predictive Dreams
-----------------
I had always believed in a mechanistic and progressively evolving
universe, despite a Christian upbringing, but the appearance of
predictive dreams was to change all that. They turned my science-
based reality upside down for all time! The first dream was a half-
explained wisdom story that days later appeared in full via the mouth
of a good friend. It could have been a bizarre coincidence of course,
but within a week or two an image of a "Green Tara" appeared in a
dream along with a classic Buddhist Tara meditation sequence. Both
were outside of my experience but within days appeared in my external
reality.

I was confused. No-one amongst my relatives and friends had
experienced anything like this. In a way it felt seductively a bit
special and privileged to have these experiences occurring, but at
the same time it was disorientating - the reality I had spent 40
years constructing was beginning to wobble!

More predictive dreams appeared in the following months but they had
much longer time courses, for example one showed an unusual
architectural change to the building I worked in, which to my
amazement actually happened some 2 years later.

Automatic Writing
-----------------
I was both frightened and yet excited by the predictive dreams. The
idea that the future might already be laid out and determined I did
not find very comforting - it seemed to mean that I was in less
control of my future than I had imagined. Plus, I had the scary
thought that if I am not in control of my future, then who is???!!!
On the other hand, there was a certain wonder and excitement around
the predictive dreams - I felt that a magical additional dimension to
life was being confided to me for some unknown, but apparently
powerful, reason or purpose.

When I started to experience "Automatic Writing" (aka channelled
communication) my confusion and concern began to head south towards
alarm and terror. In the period of a week I found that my hand moved
mysteriously over paper writing out with little or no pause, around
50 poems. It would have been OK if I was given to poetry, but I
wasn't - even at school I found writing poems a big struggle and I
had not written any since. When I tried to share this experience with
others they just stared at me in disbelief or quickly changed the
subject to something more material-worldly.

My psychic experiences were beginning to make me feel increasingly
strange and isolated. I tried to cope by putting more time and effort
into my meditation practice. This proved to be my undoing! During six
months or so of learning meditation I had gone down the expected path
of becoming calmer and increasingly skilled at meditating and
reaching that wonderful place of inner stillness and restoration.

Now, however, meditation became increasingly an experience of "opening up
Pandora's box". As I sank into my inner space, instead of stillness I found a
growing amount of disturbing images and mental and emotional chaos. This was not
what I had been promised by the advocates of meditative stress-relief!

A year - and a hospital admission! - later I met an experienced Zen Buddhist who
told me that the "Pandora's Box" meditations were not at all unusual, and he
gave me some wonderfully simple yet powerful tips on how to survive and
transform them.

"Possession" Syndrome
---------------------
Unfortunately, my unfolding, amazing, psychic experiences were one side of a
two-edged coin which I now know was the progressive "lifting of the lid of"
(opening up a bigger connection to) my unconscious mind (and its connection to
what Carl Jung called "The Collective Unconscious".

Years later I was to explore and compare my experiences during this
period with the documented classic experiences of the great shamans
and prophets, including Abraham, Moses, Siddhartha Gautama Buddha,
Yeshua (Jesus), Zoroaster and Muhammad, to name but a few. They,
like me, "went into the wilderness and meditated/prayed" during times
of great challenge and stress and experienced a strange mixture of
psychic and spiritual experiences alongside what are commonly
regarded as typical symptoms of mental illness.

Rather like the Gospel story of Jesus coming into conversation/conflict with the
Devil, I eventually had the terrifying
experience of "psychic attack" - i.e. that a malign spiritual entity has somehow
penetrated my psyche and was set upon making my life hell.

To Hell and Back
----------------
I had no training or support system to help me cope with these
increasingly bizarre and unworldly experiences, so I progressively
spiralled down into a hospital admission - an acute psychiatric ward.
It was a further 2 years before I could extricate myself from the
world of medication and psychological/emotional "wobbliness". In the
years that followed I eventually began to meet and mix with lots of
other people who had a range of similar experiences to mine but
managed to stay out of "the pit of" mental illness and away from
psychiatrists.

For some years I felt quite annoyed that my experiences had led me
down through a downward spiral into medication and psychiatric
stigma, while others I met had the same experiences but also the
knowledge and support that enabled them to navigate and harness the
psychic terrain without coming adrift or being overwhelmed!

In time, however I began to reap the benefits of having being "right
down to the bottom" of psychic trauma and psychic overwhelm. Once I
had found my way back to "level ground" and learned the key lessons
of my journey, It meant that I was in a good position to help others
who might be in danger of falling down the same slippery slope. Many
of us simply have no idea of just how precariously "near the edge" we
might be sailing in our deeper experiences of meditation, healing or
spiritual practice.

Having been on the receiving end of seriously bad psychic experiences
16 years ago, I have had a keen interest in the decade and a half
since then in studying and building a repertoire of ancient and
modern technologies for "staying safe" and "clearing" psychic
and "negative-energy" experiences in order to do energy-field
healing, channelling, working with spiritual guides etc.

Psychic Protection & Energy-Field (Aura/Chakra) Clearing Workshop
-----------------------------------------------------------------
This 16-year journey has now culminated in the presentation of a
workshop on the skills and art of "Psychic Protection" in
collaboration with Veronica Hufford. Veronica is an experienced
healer and "subtle energies" worker, based in Cambridgeshire UK. She
began her healthcare career by training as a nurse in 1964, then from
1998 onwards branched out into a range of complementary therapies and
undertook trained in spiritual healing, including shamanic healing.
Veronica is trained and experienced in crystal healing, Reiki
healing, seichem, magnified and spiritual healing, Pleiadian
lightwork Hopi ear candling. She is also a professional dowser.
For those in the Cambridgeshire area who might be interested the
workshop is on the afternoon of Sunday December 17th. Details at:
http://www.sunflower-health.com/workshops.htm

Apart from our own extensive experiences and training, important
background resources to this workshop have been last year's "Seeing
Angels and Hearing Voices" conference in Cambridge (a unique
collaborative venture of mental health professionals and
spirituality/complementary healing professionals), the Cambridge
University conferences on (evidence-based) Spiritual Healing plus
these classic books:

"Psychic Protection" by William Bloom:
http://www.Amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684835193/sunflowerheal-21
and
"Dancing with the Devil as You Channel the Light: Survival for
Healers and Therapists":
http://www.Amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1902733037/sunflowerheal-21

If you are within travelling distance of Cambridgeshire and would like to share
(or prepare for) psychic or energy-field-contamination experiences, do come and
join our workshop:
http://www.sunflower-health.com/workshops.htm

Stay Safe out there!

Mike