New Teacher

 I should preface my story with another story told to me a few days before the craziness I will recount in this blog post... 
 I took a trip with my friend Christoff to the residence(or at least the garage) of Ben Albers in Burnsville. There was a small gathering of people that night, and Christoff thought I would fit in well. One of the folks there was Ben Wilkins. Wilkins told me the story of a friend of his that felt like there was some kind of shadowy thing following him around. The theory was that this shadowy thing caused him bad luck and was a general source of negativity and sickness in his life. One day, one of his friends actually saw the shadowy creature(it looked like a gnome if I remember right) and told it to go away. The forceful intent worked, and the shadowy thing went away, and didn't come back.
 This story was told to me 3 days or so before this event...

 About 2 weeks had passed since my Reiki attunement with Collin Mackay. During these 2 weeks, I marveled like a child at everything, feeling energy fields with my hands and channeling love at every object I near me. I lived and breathed the love and respect of Reiki. I had really only worked with plants, rocks, and sticks at that point, since I was still a bit apprehensive about screwing up a person's energy with Reiki. Normally, I would observe, while Collin would administer Reiki to another person. On this day, Collin had gone to New York for a 3 day meditation retreat. Collin was gone and couldn't be contacted at all since he shut off his phone for the duration of his retreat.
 My friend Mike wanted to find out more about Reiki with a treatment, and with Collin gone, I had no choice but to do it myself.
 99% of my life back then happened at A Cup A Joe, and this was no exception.  It was about 10pm, and the cafe had just closed for the evening, and Mike and I went down to the basement where I had been doing the bulk of my meditations and healing of inanimate objects.
 I began a scan and treatment just as Collin had showed me, using my palms to feel the layers of energy, sensing the subtle differences, and smoothing out the rough spots. After a few minutes of this, I sat down and asked Mike how he felt. He said that he didn't really feel any different. He seemed to ponder something for a moment, then he told me about a "thickness" that he felt on his back. He said that it had been there for years, and that he felt it was an invisible parasitic thing. Mike is a very spiritual person, and he had been a long time yoga and meditation practitioner. He said that every time he got to a certain point in his own energy work, the "thickness" would block him from achieving his desired outcome. He said it felt like an invisible creature had settled on his back and just stayed there.
 I remembered the story Wilkins told me about the shadow creature, and became inspired.
 I got up and stood behind Mike, tracing the Cho Ku Rei(Reiki power symbol) with my palms. I pointed my palms at the center of his back, and pictured in my mind a shadowy creature getting fried by Reiki light.
 This is when shit went crazy.
 My hands literally started glowing blue. Sensing hidden energy fields and even seeing a demon wolf didn't prepare me for this. As I stood there, picturing a shadow gnome being destroyed by light, my hands started glowing! There is an amazingly awesome/awful 80's movie called "The Last Dragon." In this movie Bruce Leroy and Shonuff(the shogun of Harlem) had the power of the glow. That's exactly what happened to my hands. Somehow I was still holding the image of the shadow gnome in my mind while, internally, I was totally freaking out.
 When my hands started glowing, Mike immediately sat bolt upright.
 "Woah! Now that feels weird..."
 I continued to keep the image of the shadow being fried by the light for a long moment. Eventually I felt like it was done. I dropped my hands, which were no longer glowing, and circled back to sit on the couch. In retrospect, I can't believe I didn't soil myself. I asked Mike how he felt. He said something was different, and he asked me to scan his back again to see if the thickness was still there.
 I started a scan around 10 feet from his body, and about halfway to him, my hand ran into a blob. I couldn't see it, but I could feel it. It felt like a 3 foot ball of static electricity, and it was moving!
 I made a few choice exclamations as I tried to figure out what to do.
 I had been using Reiki for 2 weeks, and had no idea what to do about a phantom blob of who knows what flying around in my dear basement/bedroom.
 After a few minutes, the blob went from feeling like static, to a repulsion, like 2 magnets of same polarity pushing away from each other. I still couldn't see it with my eyes, but I could feel it with my palms.
 I had no theories on what to do, and Collin was unreachable, so I called Christoff, who had more experience with paranormal strangeness than I.
 Christoff told me to "seal" the basement door with green energy to keep it trapped in the basement, and to hold on as he called Ben Albers.
 It was about midnight when the spiritual X-Men arrived.
 This group, who later became very dear to me, included Ben, his then wife Michelle, Christoff(the Asian Sensation), a crazy witch couple named Bill and Erin, and an evil hippie looking guy named Isaiah. Each of them had a wealth of paranormal experience as well as their own unique psychic talents and abilities.
 I smile now when I think of how crazy I must have seemed when they got there. Thoroughly freaked out, I filled them in on the flying blob and glowing hands, and whether my "energy seal"  had worked or not, the blob couldn't seem to get out of the basement.
 Bill had prepared a mixture of oils and herbs, which I still refer to as goop, in a glass jar to trap the blob. Into this goop, Ben placed a coffin nail. Apparently, you could actually order coffin nails from Ebay...who knew? This seemed crazy to me, but at the time, I was not about to argue.
 The group came down to the basement, and formed a large circle.
 I located the blob with my palms, and by shooting it with Reiki, and the group slowly tightening the circle, we corralled the spirit to the middle, where Ben sat with the jar.
 I don't know if the nail worked as a magnet, or if Ben used intention to pull the blob into the jar, but it worked. He set the jar on a table and asked me to check it out. I scanned the jar, and sure enough, the weird repelling energy was there. The blob was considerably bigger than the jar, but it couldn't seem to move away. It was trapped by a jar of goop and a coffin nail.
 Bill released the blob thing outside later that night. Ben showed me how to get rid of the residual energy in the basement by using salt. This was when I decided I could learn something from him...
 The crisis was averted, and the next day, A Cup A Joe was open without marauding shadow creatures, or parasitic flying blobs.
 Shortly after this, Ben became a trusted friend and teacher of the shadowy side of energy and intent.

 We still don't really know what the blob was. It could have been a spirit, human or otherwise. I have since seen shadow creatures, and I don't think it was one of those, mainly because it was invisible. Whatever it was, it was definitely parasitic and big, and apparently extremely vulnerable to Reiki and coffin nails.

 I still study with Ben, and he still blows my mind with his wealth of occult knowledge.