Enter Label: A skeptics guide to Awakening the Third Eye (pt 1)

what in the f*&# just happened?

Dear Companions,

Two days after the Titanic’s demise, and 111 years later, I woke up wanting to go. I just started an aggressive detox regimen consisting of charcoal, NAC, cholestyramine, and glutathione, all of which challenged my unstable Hedonic Set Point. In addition, I just received a dastardly set of 50 injections to my head. So on that Monday morning, I longed for a place dedicated to healing. I expected to find comfort, or at the very least, solace in a peaceful environment. I thought I would encounter something akin to a guided meditation. I knew there was a chance that my symptoms might worsen, as can be the case with embodied work, but what actually happened was completely unexpected and off the radar, reminding of this quote from a surviving passenger on that fated ship:

I had just climbed into my berth when a stewardess came in…. “Do you know where we are?” she said pleasantly. “We are in what is called The Devil’s Hole.” “What does that mean?” I asked. “That it is a dangerous part of the ocean,” she answered.

I am not one to exaggerate spiritual experiences. I do not deign to use the word chakra in a sentence (my chakra is stuck?). I am aware that my analytical mind can interfere with enlightenment. But indeed, on my first go at it, I accessed something other worldly, without imbibing or ingesting anything hallucinogenic. Something undeniable, and terrifying, and exhausting. And it started within 2-3 minutes of laying down on the mat.

The method that I tried is called IST, which I later learned stood for Inner Space Technique. The founder of the method was a doctor named Samuel Sagan. I purchased his book, Awakening the Third Eye, only after the session, in a plea for answers. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

I am hoping to share what happened, as it happened—without context. Below is a rough sketch of the experience. In a follow-up I will share the explanations for my experience which the book thankfully provided.

With the major speed at which AI is growing, all that may matter in the future, all that may separate us from our intelligent overlords, will be the limbic system, the pineal gland, and the Third Eye. So, I guess now is as good time as any to begin its exploration in the Healingvrse.

I met Matteus in the space of my functional doctor’s office. He wore a neutral-colored garb with bow-legged pants and an Australian accent. I felt uneasy; he was not making square eye contact with me and seemed in a rush to get started, or perhaps I was dilly-dallying. I told him that I knew nothing of this method but he did not provide any explanation before starting the session.

“Alright, let’s get started. Lay down,” he said. I lay down, and he covered me with a white sheet. “Close your eyes and let’s begin.” I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths. I kept fiddling with the poor choice of fishnet socks I was wearing. It was also uncomfortably hot in the room. I tried to ignore both, but I began to feel clammy, anxious, and wet. “Can we turn on some air in here? I’m not sure…I just feel so hot. Do you feel hot? Also, I’m wearing these strange socks, don’t look...” I took my socks off, laid them down beside me, and covered myself back up with the sheet. Was Matteus annoyed or was I projecting insecurity? He turned on the AC. These were two very smart decisions, as being hot or uncomfortable beyond what was intrinsic to the experience would have been a kind of mental death sentence.

bye bye to unprepared me

“Ok, let’s begin,” he said. “I want you to close your eyes and feel the back of the mat, feel the entirety of the mat. Sink into it, sink down into the mat.” He repeated this several times. At first, I felt the normal discomfort of closing one’s eyes and trying to meditate in front of someone. But quickly this morphed. A solid 360 darkness engulfed me, a dark black formed over my pupils like dark mysterious velvet caterpillars from my youth.

Matteus continued, “Now, I want you to take up space in the room, fill up the whole room. If it helps, imagine someone else, someone who fills up the room as soon as they walk in. Can you think of someone like that? Someone who walks into a room and immediately can fill it up with their presence?” My mind darted around to a few people, and then settled on one person—my daughter, L.

As I looked at her in my mind’s eye, I realized how small she was, yet she was the only thing in the room that anyone could see, and more than that, how her aura, which is so innocent and confident, has a quality that we all lose over time, which is to say that she presents herself as the only person in the room with such self-assuredness, her pudgy stomach hanging outward, never pressing in, and her eyes full of delight. It was a pleasant thought, and as I dwelled on it, I began to feel a sense of expansion. However, just as quickly, a dark feeling hit me— the memory and realization that I, too, was once a baby with that same aura, but at some point, I lost that aura, and with that, I began to simultaneously shrink. The tension of expansion and contraction made me feel nauseous and powerless. What emerged was a vast darkness. I felt extremely small before it, like a seedling. My voice was buried underneath it all, and with my voice, there was buried me.

All of a sudden I was rocketed upward. I said to Matteus,“Um…something weird is happening. Like…ok…this sounds weird..but I’m suddenly feeling like I’m high up, like on a mountain, or like I’m in a plane or a balloon…30,000 feet in the air…” I could hear Matteus saying everything was Ok, but he felt so distant to me. His voice was a mile away. He was asking me to describe the sensation further. “Well, I don’t understand what is happening, but I’m up in the air, on the mountain, but I don’t see any mountain it just feels like I’m high up, and you…you are far away. Who are you?” This was all I could muster. Had I implied that I thought he had put some kind of spell on me? I didn’t really feel that way, but I was just worried. I remembered friends warning me that energy healers can, in a way, enter you, but even those fears seemed small to the very busy, enormity unfolding before me.

“Ok relax. What colors, if any, do you see?” asked Matteus. “I don’t really see colors. It feels like I’m up in the air, so I have a sensation of being surrounded by white sky but in actuality all I see darkness, all I feel is a terrifying darkness.” I was sweating hard now, my heart beating very fast. My eyes were darting back and forth under their lids. I started to grab at my eyes and the sides of my face, I wanted to open them. “I want to open my eyes, what happens if I open my eyes?” Matteus hesitated but said it was alright to do so, but I knew if I did that, I would lose the momentum, or lose contact with whatever this was, or even worse, I feared that opening my eyes would not resolve the chaos.

So I was lying there, grabbing at my eyes with my hands, grabbing at my face, knowing that I was probably still in that little room, but I couldn’t bet my life on it now, it’s possible I was somewhere else. I did not open my eyes although it was excruciating to keep them closed. I felt nauseous, anxious, oxygen-less and my eyes were pressing so hard to be opened. My head was brewing a hot soup. My eyes were scattering inside their sockets like pinballs. I certainly wasn’t sleeping, or resting, it felt like I was experiencing Radical Eye Movement, except I was utterly awake. Later I checked my Oura watch to see if it had recorded anything of the sort, but Oura knew nothing.

Suddenly, I dropped down. I was no longer throttling through the air, but sinking down into the ground. I’m not sure if Matteus was even guiding me at this point. I was not following any instruction. “Ok we just flipped. I’m no longer up in the air. And now…now…I’m seeing rings above me, rings swirling out of me. It’s like I’m somehow a camp fire, and there are smoke rings swirling out of me. I feel like I’m the devil, or this is death, I’m something insignificant and dead before whatever this is.” I was aware that it was 3pm, 3pm on a Monday, and not an hour ago I was walking over eating some kind of trail mix, I did not know how to reconcile this. Indeed my prefrontal cortex, the area in charge of cognition, was vying for the spotlight, but getting turned down by the more mysterious parts of my brain.

Matteus prompted me, “Why do you think you might be feeling death.” I said, “There has been a death in my family recently. My grandmother died.” “When? asked Matteus. “Recently, as early as a month ago.” Suddenly I exclaimed, “Mother. Father!” That was the entirety of the thought, that I was willing to vocalize, at least. I was still this small seed in front of this vast world of darkness with orange smoke rings wafting over my eyes, in the center of my eyes.

I don’t remember the transition exactly, but at some point the heart palpitations got a bit weaker, and the waves of nausea less violent. My eyes relaxed. I started to laugh, breaking the trance. “This is ridiculous, completely ridiculous!” I began to feel less sick, like I was returning to my body, like I was filling up my skin, and returning to my normal size. I said, “I shouldn’t be mad at my M in this hard time, but I am, I am mad at everyone for how they have shown up for how sick I’ve been.” What are you mad at, be more precise,” said Matteus. “I’m mad, I don’t know, I’m mad! It’s nobody’s fault but I’m still so mad!"

Matteus wanted me to work with that, he wanted me to identify moments of anger, to recount the last time I had lost my temper, and to go back to that time. I remembered before I got sick where I nearly ruined my husbands laptop in a fury. “What were you mad at?” Matteus asked. “I can’t remember!” “Ok how about you pick something more recent.” I replied, “Well the problem is that more recently, I have felt this anger but I cannot let it out because when I do, I feel even sicker because of my headaches. My sickness makes me mad, but being mad causes more sickness!”

Matteus added, “Anger is like a bowel movement. You don't investigate it. You don’t stop your bowel to see if it's the right shape and size. You don’t say that if it’s not the right size, you won’t release it, right? Emotions are the same. Anger is the same. You have to release it, even if it is wrong.” At some point here, Matteus grabbed a pillow and placed it in the center of my body. I wrapped my arms around it and he instructed me to squeeze the pillow as hard as I could.

I didn’t want to do that at first, but as I kept talking, the urge took fruit in my arms, and I squeezed the pillow tightly, multiple times. “Now add your voice to it, make a sound as you squeeze it,” “ said Matteus. “Grr,” I said quietly at first. “GRRRR!” I said now louder and louder in unison with Matteus. After 3 or 4 time, a wave of sadness took over me. The sadness I have felt so many times, the sadness of being alone, that sadness that no one can save us, that we are all alone to face our demons, the sadness of self pity. The anger and sadness alternated, and at times, tears came out of my firmly shut eyes, and then I would hug the pillow tight, GRRR! with the tears sliding down my cheeks.

I felt ashamed. Matteus told me that while it feels I may be allowing myself to feel anger from time to time, it seems that I beat myself up for it afterward, a learned behavior, a survival mechanism. At some point, a non sequiter, I mentioned how exercising used to be a release for me but I haven’t been able to do that in two years. He comforted me with the idea that exercise doesn’t actually heal anger, it does not move energy, it simply makes one tired. It’s a trick. And it was true. You can exercise but the anger lays in wait at the next situation.

“You need to move your energy, you need to use your voice. It’s not about being loud, it’s not about screaming, it’s connecting to the flow.” Matteus proceeded to make low guttural sounds, each time, deeper, longer, accessing a pathway that sounded like a shofar blowing for an ancestral war. He said that working with my voice would help release unstuck channels. I tried to do it, and of course it did not sound like him, but in hearing the difference between my attempts and his, I could understand what he was driving at.

“Well we are running out of time,” he said. I said, “But I still feel so weird, I still feel anger in my bones.”“Well, that’s because we have not yet even begun the work to unstick your channels. Unfortunately, our session is almost up.” “What!? Was he telling me that none of the healing had actually occurred yet. I felt exhausted and ready for it to be over, but I was concerned about that fact that we had kicked a sleeping dog without getting it to lie back down. “Can I…I mean should I open my eyes now?” Before Matteus could respond, I opened my eyes, and was back, back in the florescent world, with my head vibrating, relieved that what surrounded me, that is to say, reality, felt 95% normal.

As I was putting my fishnet socks back on Matteus said, “My recommendation for you is to work with your voice. You want to connect how you feel to your voice, when you are walking, on the street, at home, doesn’t matter. It’s important for you to express your feelings in your relationship with loved ones, but at the end of the day, you can’t always express your anger that way, as you will be judged and you will judge yourself for that. The stakes are too high. But on your own, you can learn to move the energy, by practicing with your voice.” I stayed on the mat a while longer, coming back into my body, mulling over Matteus’s words. I wanted to know more about the beginning of the session.

“But, how did you do that? How did you do that to where I was on a mountain, or feeling the universe suddenly inside of me…is that normal?” Matteus attempted to demonstrate what happened. He rolled his eyes back into his skull many times, blinking rapidly and accompanied that with the motion of rolling backwards with his hand. From this, I presume I was to understand that he made my eyes move in a particular way that I could access this place. “But I wouldn’t worry about what you saw, don’t focus on that. Some people see things, some people see nothing, it doesn’t matter, it’s not the important part.”

As I got up and ready to leave, I asked him how much it cost. “I told you I really had no preparation for this before coming!” “$195” he said. We sat by the door as I scanned his Venmo and I sent him the transfer with a pizza emoji. This emoji was a signal, making clear to the powers that be: I am still me.

“Last question” I said. “What’s the goal here, like, if I continue?” He replied, “The goal is that you become effective at this practice such that you get insulated from the things that bother you, that make you angry. By learning these methods of letting the anger flow through you, it will ultimately become harder to press your buttons, to get you angry, and you will be more peaceful.” To this I replied, “That’s the dream!” and shook his hand and headed out.

It was only on my walk home when I remembered to check how much time went by. Deducting for the 15 minutes at the end, the session was almost two complete hours. I wondered how much the first part, the hallucination was? Was it the biggest chunk of the session, or something shorter? I could not trust my senses. How was it that the very same mind which perceived the street so ordinarily now, on my walk home, was capable of seeing what it saw in the session.

I already knew that I was angry. Dealing with a sickness that delays professional progress and robs precious time from my thirties, the early years of my daughter's life, and the possibility of having another child is deeply unfair. The pandemic has caused so much chaos and has made me feel powerless over my own body and the decisions made around me. It's all so unjust. Of course, I'm mad.

I stopped going to therapy months leaning into functional neurology, functional medicine, conventional medicine, even Twitter Spaces to learn everything about the world of AI and get away from myself. However, the first part of my energy experience was completely unexpected and inexplicable. I didn't know that this sort of thing lay dormant in my mind. Of course, I've experienced similar sensations if prodded by external substances, but how could it be there in the middle of the afternoon on a Monday, amid my headaches, how could I access my exogenous DMT centers? Although the work itself was challenging, it was also effortless, like swimming for hours when I was younger, racing 500 yards in a few minutes.

Was it possible that my headaches opened me up to a new portal, which a healthy version of me could never go through?

On the walk home, I felt ecstatic, euphoric, light. I stopped in a bookstore that smelled like cat litter. Never have cats in a bookstore by the way. I also wondered if I would ever try that again. As soon as I got home I ordered “Awakening the Third Eye” by Samuel Sagan and it arrived a day later, quick enough so that when I found explanations for my experience in the book I was able to match it directly to the visuals I could recall from my hallucinatory experience. There were sentences in print that spoke to my experience so precisely, I could have written them myself. My fate was sealed. This was not some coincidence. Or a fever dream.

As mentioned in the next post I will share what I learned about energy work and this IST method, the explanations for what happened to me, and how I understand now, what I felt is just the tip of the iceberg.

With much love from the Healingvrse,

Rebecca