Soul Surgery

This experience, which I wrote about in one of my journals years ago, has left a profound and permanent positive change in my life. 


by Adam Bosler 


Jessica sits across the circle from me. Twenty-five of us initiates have gathered for the second time this year. We have been invited by the teacher to perform a kind of ritualized healing dance, a practice we were taught six months ago in this same sacred circle.

Before starting, we have called in the presence of the compassionate spirits we are learning to work with. The instructor has asked us to try to control and contain the power that wells up inside of us when we work with the helping spirits in this way.

Jessica sits across the circle from me. The room is darkened, and people all around are starting to feel the power rising, as we continue calling compassionate spirits into the room, using the methods we have been taught. There are subtle shifts in people’s physical bodies. Something ancient and intense is starting to enter the room.

Jessica sits across the circle from me. I see her shaking, quivering. She looks as if she is being taken over by a force she cannot control. She signals by shaking her rattle, and the teacher and the assistant-singers quickly make their way over to her.

They are helping her up from her seated position on the floor. She can barely stand. She begins sobbing, wailing, overflowing with a sorrow that wells up from deep inside. Everyone in the room is transfixed. We are witnessing something intensely powerful and profound.

The teacher and the helpers are practically dragging Jessica, pulling her to move forward. The circle is watching a broken woman, almost unable to function. She is having trouble staying within the protocol for this practice. She is on the edge of losing control, of complete breakdown. She inches her way forward on her quest to make it all the way around the circle.

My eyes are flowing with tears. No one sees this, because everyone is watching this helpless woman, who appears to be tormented with immense, unexplainable grief. Her entire being is filled with sorrow. She falls to the ground, crawling, wailing like a person who has just learned of their soulmate’s unexpected death.

The teacher and the helpers struggle to get her to make her way around the circle. She is still forty feet away from me when I feel it, in my heart, and I know exactly what is happening:

Jessica is heading straight to where I am sitting. 


*******


I am no longer in the circle learning the healing dance ritual. I am at a graveyard. My disembodied soul sits atop my own grave. Jessica has been transformed into Sarah, my wife. My soulmate, the love of my life.

Because of my drinking, I have died an early death.

​This is not the first time in her life Sarah has been struck down with unendurable grief, but it is the worst she has ever felt it. In spirit form, I am able to share in her misery. The separation of beings in the physical world no longer protects me from feeling her unimaginable suffering, this shredding of her soul Sarah feels because of me — because I wouldn’t stop my self-destructive behaviors.

I have caused this ruin, this sorrow, this immense pain.

Jessica is in front of me. She falls to her knees, wailing, weeping. She reaches out to caress my face, but I am two inches too far away. She cannot reach me, and I can do nothing to comfort her.

I sit nodding my head up and down. Yes, I tell the spirit that now inhabits Jessica's body. Yes, I know exactly what you are trying to show me. Yes, this is all my fault. I can see it all so clearly now. There are things I need to change in my life, patterns of behavior I have allowed to develop that are leading me and my loved ones down this path of unremitting sorrow and grief.

Sarah is screaming, fighting. She has crumbled to the floor in front of me. She attempts to rise, making a fist, and pounds her fury into my chest. Why, God? Why did you take him from me?

She cannot, will not, accept what has happened. I am dead, and she is alone, and now I must witness her grieving over my sudden and unexpected end.

I do not rest in peace. I sit in silence atop my own grave, awaiting the moment Sarah’s bereaved soul, newly widowed, arrives to pour her sorrows onto me, for all eternity. 


*******

​
The teacher and the assistants eventually lift Jessica again to her feet, and she is nearly dragged away, to complete her walk around the circle.

I am left with a hollow hole in my heart, where a cancer has been removed. I feel a scar that will stay with me for the rest of my life, a deep and ever-present reminder of the sadness I had been creating with certain behaviors and patterns in my life.

​