And Now, the Cement and the Butterfly!

She is lying there on the table and there is soft music playing and suddenly there it is again, the cement, squarely in her abdomen!

When she had the medical psychic reading 20 years ago during her cancer treatment (August 6th, 2003, a date chiseled forever into her memory!) she turned completely into cement. The psychic had told her that she would feel very very heavy, and she did, Leah felt heavy, like cement, and then, when the feeling lifted, the psychic said that Leah was to call her back.

Leah was in California that warm summer morning and the medical psychic was back in Vermont and they had only spoken once and had never met each other and the psychic didn't even know Leah's last name or any other information about her at all.

And that's when all hell broke loose.

That's when the miracles occurred.

OK, but today she wasn't expecting the cement again. Why should she?

Every other time she has had Reiki, with a different practitioner, a young woman she saw for years, it was relaxing but that's as far as it went.

Today when the Reiki woman laid her hands there -- where was it exactly? on her abdomen? on her chest? Just as soon as the session began, Leah wandered into a never never land, she felt the woman's hands channeling the chi, she could feel the energy pass into her own hands and then it went swooshing directly there: it became cement in her abdomen but not just that. Some kind of giant butterfly was also sitting there too, a beautiful yellow and what else, red or pink, or was it orange and black?

And somehow her hands were holding the butterfly, yes, she could feel her hands trying to guide the butterfly? But where?

When she tries to think back on it, when she tries too hard to pin the images down, the whole scene evaporates like steam vanishing off a teakettle.

But what she knew in that moment was the tension: the cement was there but then the energy was also the butterfly -- pretty and light and wanting to take flight.

And without thinking, that's when she felt Filomena, her great great grandmother, the one who had to give her illegitimate baby away in southern Italy back in 1870. The scenes Leah wrote last fall about Fi --in delivery and then the horrifying days after -- ah those were so difficult for Leah to write.

And now she knows why, she feels it squarely there, in her own abdomen, and that's when she thinks: yes Filomena had to let go of the infant almost immediately but every mother also has to let go. Every mother "loses" her baby, day by day by day the child grows up and eventually takes flight.

Leah's own daughter, who delivered a gorgeous little boy last November, recently told Leah that at the same time she is ecstatic and relishing every minute with the little cherub, she also feels that the days are slipping by way too fast, how could he possibly be six months old already?

Let that baby go, let that yearning take flight like the butterfly.

Let it go, that's what the energy wants to be, a freedom from cement.

She remembers the Reiki woman's hands on her head, over her eyes, and then the woman told Leah that she was snoring! Ha!

After it was all over, Leah talked briefly to the Reiki woman about her anxiety.

In Italian, "nervosa," nervous

I am nervous.

Sono nervosa

Sometimes I am a nervous woman

A volte sono una donna nervosa

And that is why, Leah decides, she will return as soon as possible for more Reiki.