Light as a Feather

By Amy Liz Harrison author of Eternally Expecting: A Mom of Eight Gets Sober and Gives Birth to a New Life...Her Own.

 Friday nights in junior high school consisted of facial masks, prank phone calls, pajamas, junk food, giggling and sleeping bags. We did each others’ hair, tried the latest makeup, and talked about boys way into the early hours of the morning. Inevitably at some point, somebody would suggest that we played a game called “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board.”

 

One person would lie on her back, and the others would gather around her, equal numbers on both sides of her body. We’d sit on our knees and slide our hands under the back of the person laying on the ground. We would close our eyes and chant in unison, “light as a feather, still as a board!” This phrase was repeated over and over until the person on the ground would feel like we lifting her off the ground, at which point we’d slowly slip our hands away, leaving the girl feeling suspended in mid air for a split second.

 

I tried it a few times, but remained underwhelmed. I fundamentally didn’t believe in the concept.  Growing up in the church, it was very clear that messing with anything from the occult was pretty much your one-way ticket to hell. Ouija boards, magic, any of that stuff was completely off-limits. God might strike me down by a lightening bolt if I messed with one of those folded paper fortune tellers with the unfolding corners, ficticiously revealing how many kids you would have, what car you would drive, and what sort of house you would live in.

 

Fast forward to later in life, when I arrived at the doors of my rehab, broken and desperate for a solution. I was at the last house on the block. The church solutions had failed me, my own self reliance had failed me, and there weren’t enough books or websites in the world that could help me to get out of the pit of despair that I was in… depression coupled with alcoholism. When I met my therapist, a French shaman, I was quick to tell him that I wasn’t going to do any weird “shaman things“.

 

I had heard rumors from some of my other rehab friends that he was a wizard of sorts, and he had sorcery skills that could help his patients get relief from whatever baggage we were carrying. When I immediately and adamantly told him I was not interested in casting any spells, or even entertaining the idea of looking outside the box of traditional therapy methods, he simply looked at me and gently said, “we’ll see about that.“

 

Days on the calendar were ticked off and I worked with my therapist to wrestle with the scars of my past. We unpacked a junk drawer full of issues, and eventually I reached a point I could not get past. My therapist said, “I can help you but you’ll have to let go of some fixed ideas and really believe in the possibility of healing around this.”

 

I was desperate. I decided I had nothing to lose, and so I was willing to try his suggestions, whatever they may be. My therapist laid out the plan and explained it. On my way out of the office, he handed me a list of supplies and said “Now remember, you have to be optimistic that this can help you.”

 

As I went home and gathered the supplies from the list, I noticed a sadness was washing over me, and I realized I was ready. I went into my room and shut the door. I lit a candle and I went through the steps as my therapist had laid them out, my entire body sobbing and shaking. When the ritual was completed, I noticed as I walked back inside how much lighter I felt. It wasn’t like some crazy revelation come over me but it was definitely noticeable. The next few days I noticed I felt lighter and lighter.

I was going to get out of it what I put into it. Including having the willingness to try something I thought couldn’t help me. 

 

And you know what? When I was willing to admit that maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t entirely right about something, maybe I wasn’t going to get struck down by lightning after all if I tried some thing out of the ordinary, sure enough, I found out that it was worked for me and gave me great freedom.

 

Just like that, once again I was levitating just like at the slumber parties from junior high. The difference was, I was now levitating above the incident that took me down and tried to chain me to its’ death grip. Now soaring far above it and being willing to get some new tools, I realize that i’ve never experienced such freedom. I surrendered to win.

 

And God didn’t even strike me down with a lightening bolt,