The chipmunks are driving me crazy. They won’t let me sleep and when I sit down to write, there’s so much chatter I can’t think straight. Each and every one of the furry little beasts is jumping up and down in a fit of frenzy trying to get my attention. These aren’t real chipmunks, mind you, and they’re not spirit guides either. They are, instead, physical manifestations of my overactive mind. Let me explain.

For several weeks, I’ve been going to The Aesclepion Healing Center in San Rafael for a ‘healing hands’ class. Before getting to the chipmunks, though, let me point out that Aesclepius, the Greek god of medicine and healing, was the son of Apollo. And it was Apollo that the Oracles at Delphi channeled in their trances. Yet another Greek connection!

In the first healing hands class, we were introduced to the basic principals of meditation. I’ve been avoiding meditation all my life. It’s not that I hadn’t tried, but every time I  sat down and attempted to relax and empty my mind, my body rebelled and I’d be up and moving within five minutes. So I was interested to see if I was ready to quiet my mind and find a way to access a higher state of consciousness.

We learned to set grounding cords to anchor us to the earth, to make our thoughts vanish by putting them in a rose and blowing it up, and to bring in the energy of the sun by imagining golden light coming in through our crown chakras. So far so good. If given a task of imagining something, I could keep my thoughts at bay. Maybe I could do this after all.

Before each class, the students at the Center gather to give and to receive healings and energy checks. After three classes, I had my energy checked by a perky blonde who looks like Julia Duffy in the ’80’s series ‘Newhart’. First she saw the color green around me. Every time I have a reading, I’m surrounded by green and I have yet to find out what this means. Then she said that she saw cow pies on top of my head (I don’t know what this means either), and a bunch of chipmunks scurrying around inside my head. According to ‘Julia’, the chipmunks are uninvited spirit guides, and they’re not happy because I’m not paying as much attention to them as I did in the past.

And she saw my father who’s been dead for over 20 years. He, too, was trying to get my attention, waving his arms saying, “I can help. Let me help.” At the time I understood this to mean that he wanted to help me with my healing hands class. Later I realized that his intention was to inform me that I could call upon him to help heal from the trauma of our past lives together.

So, I have a lot of work to do. I need to get the chipmunks under control, and I have to find a way to forgive my father. I would guess that those past lifetimes with him are the very reason I’ve been avoiding meditation in the first place.