My first four months in Thailand were spent at a spa called Tao Garden. While I was there, they had a Dark Room but before it began, I started to know Margit (not her real name). She was a tall, slim Austrian woman who spent several months each year at Tao Garden giving healings. She speaks softly, pausing to search for the right English word, and her eyes smile gently. Her healings relieve people of their physical pain.
Days in the Dark Room
These Dark Rooms are an annual event and there were 40 participants at this year’s. Briefly, you stay alone in a room with a bathroom, no lights, and all windows covered. Meals are brought to you in the dark so they’re mostly finger foods that you feel around to identify. A bell wakes you each morning and you feel around to find your clothes. Another bell rings after breakfast time and people leave their rooms in the dark for a class conducted in darkness. It’s a talk about spiritual matters by Master Chia, the Buddhist leader of Tao Garden. Then it’s back to your room until the lunch bell and more finger food. Afternoons are free and you use whatever spiritual tools you have to process the thoughts and emotions that emerge. Some people get very anxious, even a bit panicked and must learn to let go of pain.
For more on the Dark Room, please see the May 29 blog, An Unusual Psychic in Thailand. That blog is about another psychic woman I met at Tao Garden who lived only on air. Beyond occasional snacks with her grandchildren, she had not eaten anything for 20 years.
There is nothing any of us can do with pain except let it go. Letting go is central to spiritual growth but it’s not always easy. One might assume that letting go of pain would be easy but we probably all know it isn’t, even though we’re presumably motivated to do so. We all have foreign energy in our personal space: other people’s energy that interferes with our own energy flow and reduces our control over our own lives. All physical disease begins as energy.
Margit’s Experience of Light
During this Dark Room, Margit was a participant although her purpose in being here was to give people healings after they came out of the Dark Room. She has done a lot of energy work, which made the Dark Room easier for her. She also had a near-death experience some years ago on a steep Swiss ski slope. A near-death experience causes you to look at yourself and your life so that you often make changes in how you live. That happened to Margit so during the week of Dark Room, she felt calm and in command of herself.
On the last (7th) day, she told me, she woke in the darkness seeing a bright white light across the room. At first she thought the window must have become unsealed but it was just as it should be. The white light was energy and it expanded as she watched, filling up half the room. Then a bright blue light appeared at the window and expanded upwards across the ceiling. Margit lay on her bed and watched this light show with enjoyment. Eventually the lights faded and her day continued as the previous ones had.
A Conversation With Margit
I was having lunch in the dining room when she walked in from the Dark Room. She walked slowly and looked dazed and overwhelmed. There was no crowd; it was just the daylight that overwhelmed her, the colorful surroundings and human beings, which she hadn’t seen for a week,
She sat at my table and after a bit of talk about her time in the Dark Room. I asked,
“How did you get started on doing healings, Margit?”
“It was after I had that near death experience. I fell and rolled down and my leg got twisted. It was a while before they rescued me and my clothing got wet and I passed out. I saw beautiful colors of light and floated up and there was singing. I couldn’t describe it. It wasn’t like hymns or pop music. Very beautiful. A choir singing. A voice said, “You’re a healer. Go back and heal people.”
“Had you done energy training before this happened?”
“Yes, I took classes in qi gong and meditation here at Tao Garden. For a few years.”
“Did you go back into the body while it was still on the ski slope?”
“No. I didn’t want to go back. I stayed with the beautiful colors and the singing and I don’t know exactly how they rescued me. They told me later they took me down the slope and into an ambulance. My leg was broken but it’s fine now.”
“So then did you start doing healings?”
“Yes. I felt I had to. I was glad after I started.”
“I’ve been told that your healings cure people of their physical pain. How do you do that?”
“I don’t know! It just happens.” She laughed softly. “People tell me, ‘Thanks! The pain is gone now.'”
Margit gave many healings after the Dark Room and she offered to give me one too. I was too slow in taking her up on that and she left just two days later. I’ve regretted that ever since. She was a gentle and perceptive person and I’m sure she could have helped me with my layers of anger against my mother and grief over all the things I missed as I grew up. I should say “helped me further” because I’ve had a great many amazing psychic healings since 1978 when I finally found a school that would teach me how to meditate. Watch for an upcoming blog on how I found that school. 🙂