Because we were so spread out geographically, most of us were implementing this challenging work alone. Recognizing that we needed support, we established a Basic Grid email discussion group and shared our stories, some of which we're bringing to you in this issue. We offered each other suggestions and comments, praise and support. We set up supervisory relationships with those who are experienced in grid work and received helpful suggestions from them whenever we asked.

And we grew!

This issue of the Energy Community Report is dedicated to the Basic Grid. The next grid class is scheduled for September and the application process is announced below. If you are thinking about applying, we'd like to tell you about some of our experiences in both giving and receiving grid sessions. Donna talks about her most difficult case; others of us tell of situations that are less dramatic but equally as fascinating.

We want to offer support and encouragement to those who follow. If you take the next Basic Grid class, you will be welcomed into our grid email discussion group. Some of the grid grads have offered to be mentors to the next class. We are all at different levels in our implementation of the grid, but we are happy to share with you what we know.

In one sense, however, the Basic Grid isn't easy to teach because you can never predict just how a session is going to unfold. In the early days I had no map at all. Yes, there was a map of where to hold and connect, as it is the same as the cloaccal patterns, but these "maps" did not fit the territory of what was happening to me and my clients.

I was sometimes thrown far beyond my experience and knowledge and even intuition. I have been frightened at times, felt over my head, and had no one to turn to. In each case, I figured it out, though it could be a bumpy ride and sometimes required many sessions and involved a learning process built upon mistakes. But you will be surprised if you keep a faith that the path to a solution is available, how often you will find that path.

Unless your intuition is well-informed and is strongly telling you it is safe to proceed, you are wise to get the other energies balanced and holding their balance (to the extent at least that the damaged grid system will allow) before you do a grid session. You are wise to never promise a new client in advance that you will be doing grid work. You are wise to learn something about the person's history through their energies particularly through work with their chakras before you decide to do a grid session.

Grid work is simply not cut and dried. You never know what the outcome will be. Every single human being displays different patterns in grid work. And on rare occasions, I was shaken by the process and felt stumped during the session, wondering "What do I do now?" Here is one of those. It was one of the toughest cases I faced back in those early days.

A woman in her early thirties was sent to me by her therapist as he seemed unable to get beyond the surface in the therapy, which was also what was wrong with her life. It was very bland; she was very bland. She did not think of herself as being tormented in any way, except to wonder, "Is this all life is? It is just so blank." I still did not understand at that time the deep implications of grid work. And so I thought the best option was to give her a grid session to knock down the walls and then hand her back to her therapist. I didn't really do anything to prepare her psyche or her body before I jumped into the grid work.

It seemed to take a very long time for the first grid to connect (several were out). I remember a jerky energy, but nothing too dramatic, until it began to connect. Instead of bringing her relief or more wholeness, it was like a monster surged up. A fierce rage and an unbelievable amount of physical strength welled up out of her. She was not in present time. I was no longer Donna. She was seeing someone who was not me. She literally picked me up and threw me against the wall. Then she rushed me and began to choke me. I felt that some force other than myself guided me at that moment, and I simply surrendered to her. I began to hum a lullaby. She looked startled. Her eyes grew giant, childlike, and she crumbled and sobbed. The rage disappeared and in a little while she was again the person who had been on the table earlier.

Fool that I was, I said "Let's continue." I thought we were so close to having the grid connected and that once it did, everything would be okay. This time, however, I was very alert to each little nuance of energy and watched her as I would see her face grimace and her energy change as the grid began to come closer and closer to a connection. I saw colors and energies change all around her. And the moment the grid was beginning to connect, the rage came back. I sensed this was again a different person. It wasn't her.

I quickly backed off from finishing the grid connection because it felt like danger. I balanced out her energies in other ways, stayed in contact with her each day, and then tried it again on another grid to see what would happen. As the grid began to connect, she again became another person. While this one didn't physically attack me, she was very controlled, not wild like the first one, but still hostile, insulting, and very abusive in her talk toward me. This person's voice had a totally different sound than my client's or the person who had been so violent. This was a different energy all together.

The story came out over time. While she had no recall of this before we started working together (in fact, she had virtually no memory of her childhood), she had been a multiple personality as a little girl. Trauma and shock were constants in her young life. Splitting into dissociated psychological states was the way she had coped with the desperate, painful, abusive situation she lived in. The alter I met in our first grid session had been fierce, but while in a child's body, manageable in a world of abusive adults. As her body grew stronger, it became increasingly dangerous for this alter to appear. And from the wisdom of her body or maybe her soul, this is when the grid splintered. When the grid splintered, all of the personalities disappeared. They had been her foundation for survival, a viable solution to her desperate situation, but when the grid came apart, they weren't there anymore. It was the opposite of what you might think. In dissociative identity disorder (the current term for multiple personalities), the disorder comes about to cope with a life-threatening situation, as had happened for her. But in "Part 2" of the development of her mental problems, the alters were disbanded (at the deepest energetic foundation) to cope with a different life-threatening situation, which was that she might do something terrible to someone as she matured and got stronger.

Had the grid not collapsed, she felt in retrospect that she might have killed someone. Instead she became like a robot. She had no reactions to life. She developed chronic fatigue syndrome. It was like she was drifting further and further away from her emotions, her responses, her relationships. She said she felt like an empty shell. It particularly frightened her that she had no reaction to her children, no reaction when they were hurt, no reaction when they were being bad. Not even when they were joyful and loving did she have a response. Though I truly wanted to help her, I felt I was in over my head.

I also had never heard of multiple personalities disappearing in this way. It made the work very tricky. To restore the grid was to restore her multiple personality disorder. But now she needed to have the energies at her foundation become strong. How could the grid be reconnected without the destructive personalities? I prayed on it and got two pieces of guidance. First, I realized I needed consultation and help, and I found someone else to work with her, using deep therapy and hypnosis while I moved the energy. Second, I gave up doing grid work on her for the time being because her other energy systems needed to get strong and harmonious and able to handle whatever it was that was going to happen if all these grids connected. I had to prepare her. Meanwhile, she was having a terrible time between sessions. I questioned myself and many other things because it seemed her life was falling apart. But in time, after the slow and careful orchestration of energy work and hypnosis, I was ready to attempt grid work again. And this time it was very different. We'd built a basis for bringing the forces of her various childhood personalities into one well-integrated adult. In the grid process, the wailing and pain that surfaced in the session were robust. Some memories that could not be found even in hypnosis surfaced. But now her body could sustain the information, the reality, the truth of her childhood.

She had had, it turned out, seven different personalities when she was small that helped her to cope with different people and different circumstances. Now the healthy impulse of each could come back and integrate into her. She found, in fact, that she was capable of very healthy reactions to life. She could feel excitement and enthusiasm. She could feel anger and fear without becoming overwhelmed. The chronic fatigue syndrome lifted. Her relationships renewed. She eventually told me that she felt the grid work had saved her life.

I'm not telling you this to scare you out of grid work and into learning something easy like computer repair or nuclear physics. You cannot do any kind of deep work with a multiply traumatized person or someone with other profound psychological problems without a risk of winding up in difficult territory. But you can approach grid work in a way that lowers that risk very substantially and prepares the way for the next steps if the person does destabilize. The following three precautions listed will do much to protect you and your client and insure a good process:

1. Don't promise grid sessions before you know someone's energy really well.
2. Get to know the person's energies, particularly the chakras and the history they reveal before offering a grid session.
3. Get the other energies balanced and holding before scheduling a grid session. Often the grid will not connect if the chakras are not stable.

A fourth precaution has to do with what in medicine is called "informed consent" where, among other things, you lay out the risks of a procedure in advance. Since we are talking about a very small percentage of the people you might work with, I don't mean to give everyone a hypnotic suggestion that grid work will make them go into a meltdown. But if after the above three precautions, you feel ready to move forward but have some lingering concerns, I would explain that grid work, while it will not cause new problems, can temporarily stir up old trauma and destabilize old coping styles, and I would get a verbal agreement from them that if this happens, that they understand that you and they have entered a longer process and that they see the process through with you and/or with whoever you might refer them to. If they are in psychotherapy, the therapist should also be consulted in advance. The degree to which you spell out these warnings involves intuition as much as any concrete guidelines I can offer.

The second session that I did had a similar correlation in that the trauma that came up for this man was almost exactly a story that I could have told about myself. It was then that I realised just how interconnected we all are and how when we do this work for others, we get to heal aspects of ourselves at the same time. During that same session I had an interesting experience of how this grid energy moves. Half way through the session I suddenly felt as if my one lung was not taking in oxygen properly, as if I had been winded on just one side of my body and I only then discovered that when he was 18, this man had had a collapsed lung. It was a very strange experience because it didn't feel dangerous or horrible, almost as if I was experiencing the energy of it rather than the actual physical experience of a collapsed lung (Happily!)

As she held the grid points, she said she saw a man dressed in furs with a hood that covered his face. He was with a younger boy, a teenage boy. They had killed a bear and rigged a two pole thing that eased the burden of carrying the bear back to the village.

As the two of them came into the village, the man noticed that no smoke was coming from any of the dwellings. This was so unusual, so out of the scope of his reality that he just couldn't understand it. He went up to his own dwelling and opened the door. After his eyes adjusted to the light, he could see his young wife and unborn child mutilated on the floor, blood everywhere. This was so incomprehensible, so out of the realm of this man's ability to reason, that he literally froze to death standing in shock in his doorway. I don't know what happened to the youth that was with the man.

Debra suggested I create a ritual to bring healing to this scene. So I imagined the youth finding another person, a man, who went about cleansing the land of all the horror by tearing down all the dwellings and creating an enormous bonfire so that he could burn the bodies and all their possessions. This effort took quite a while, maybe several days. All the time the man chanted his grief and rage that such an atrocity had happened.

By the end of the burning, he had called in the four directions, called in the father sun and the mother earth, called the ancestors to greet and carry their loved ones back home to the ONE. He had planted blue corn as an offering to renew this land. He had made prayer flags and wrapped tobacco in prayer offering bags, and tied them to the trees. By the time the last embers of the fire were dying down, the man was exhausted. Still he continued, releasing the four directions, the father sun and mother earth, the ancestors and their loved ones. He collapsed in a heap just as the sun was rising to greet a new day. The land had been restored back to balance. The man rested and knew his work was done.

The grid snapped just as he was leaving his body. He realized that he had, perhaps, wasted this life with extreme sacrifice and experienced no joy. The bitterness I felt was overwhelming. When the session was over and the grid was fused, my patient began to experience such sadness. She was overcome with sorrow at the misguided sacrifice this piece of her had experienced and wanted to let this part of her know that she was grateful for the lesson, but the suffering could now end. She felt stuck and incomplete with this energy. Sandy suggested that we do a Buddhist Sur ceremony for hungry ghosts. I was not familiar with what a Sur practice was, but it has something to do with satisfying the craving or unfinished emotions for ghosts. What we did was purchase candles, fruit, and incense with the intention of having a ceremony that thanked this life for the sacrifice and to help this piece of her integrate and experience, through this current life, some of the sweetness and abundance he missed. My patient purchased nine candles.

As she was paying for the candles the shop owner asked her why nine? She just liked all the colors and had not noticed that she had gathered nine. Meanwhile, I was in charge of the fruit. Knowing that we were going to eat the fruit it was my intention to just get a couple of nice pieces of something. That day at market, the fruit was incredibly luscious and colorful. I could not decide on just two, so I picked, without noticing the number, nine gorgeous pieces.

When we met, we had between us nine sticks of our best incense. My patient was grinning from ear to ear. She said she had had a casual conversation with the candle shop owner and had gotten an interesting lecture on the number nine and how it signifies the energy of completion. We really flipped when we realized that we had chosen the ninth day of the month to do this ceremony. That night she went to see the movie Lord of the Rings. To her delight, it was a pack of nine that were chosen to save the world in the movie. I am certain that our version of the Sur practice was far from recognizable, but we seemed to stumble through to what was needed to complete this grid. Perhaps, for future reference a ceremony including the completion energy of nine may help facilitate a tough integration process.

Shortly after the grid session, I found myself feeling a connection to my inner child, the young me whom I had called "a big blob" in hypnotherapy. A compassion arose that was new to me and I basked in the new connection to this neglected part of myself. But the story had only begun to unfold. In the past few months, my growing sense of compassion has gently reached out to encompass my mother, without any additional work on my part. I now feel enormous compassion for her and with it comes a newfound understanding of who she is in both strengths and limitations. The change in my behavior and attitude is enormous. The timing is fortuitous--she is 92 and beginning to fail. But she has an enormous new resource now--her oldest daughter whose hardened heart has softened in its newfound compassion.

The grid session was really cool. We started by going out to the state park and doing a fire ceremony together in the Incan medicine tradition we both practice. We hiked in the woods down to a fire pit far from crowds. Among other things, my sister offered to the fire any attachment she had to living with her basic grid out, because even damaged energy states serve us and we wanted to be very clear that she was prepared to make this change. Right before the fire we energy tested to be certain that her energy field was prepared to make this change at this time. That was really wonderful.

We set our intentions clearly with the fire and then went back to my house to do the work. We did some basic balancing to make sure her field was ready. We tested and found 2 basic grid points out.

As is my practice, we called in the directions before we worked and I extended my 8th chakra energies over us both to create a healing space for us to work. I had a candle lit beside the table.

She's very energy aware, so she was able to track the energies quite well during the session. She experienced a lot of images. I had a lot of pain in various places. At one point the energies got stuck. We both could feel the energies jamming up in the same area of our bodies, which seemed to be the epicenter of the damage.

I became aware at that point that she might not feel safe letting her energies really run freely across my grid. We talked about that. When she checked in with herself she found that was how she was feeling. So she did a little internal work to reorder that belief and the energy started to flow again.

After that it moved swiftly. We came upon a powerful image that had the feeling of a past life or ancestral story. Very painful. As we explored it the grid healed.

Once the grid hooked up (which took about 35 minutes), we did further rebalancing and she rested a bit.

Energy testing indicated that the integration process would take 10 days. She wanted to test specifically whether taking flower essences would speed the process. The answer we got was no. It was like the universe was already aware that she WOULD take the flower essences! Anyway we got a chuckle out of it trying to do an end run around the situation to SPEED the integration process!

I've learned from earlier sessions that it is imperative that people do some follow up energy work. When I was initially practicing grid work after our grid class in Mt. Shasta, I told my volunteers that they needed to come in and see me again, but because they were volunteering instead of paying me for my effort and time several of them felt awkward about imposing on my time further. They didn't come in for a "checkup" and one of them wound up having a rough time of it. We would have been able to alleviate a lot of the energy congestion with a simple rebalancing.

5-Day Hands-On Energy Medicine Intensive (August 16 - 21): Many of you have taken this class numerous times because it is always such a fabulous experience. Next one is August 16 - 21 at the wonderful and aptly named Eden Roc Resort on Miami's South Beach. Following that will be February 15 - 22, 2003 on Isla Mujeres (a pristine island near Cancun).

So I put Donna's info along with the info from Dr. John La Tourrette about finding your own points, and I did sedating and strengthening on both kidney and bladder, and then tried doing the wave on K1 on myself. It really helped.

I have tinnitus, a prevalent but little understood condition, however, Brian Hines writes in God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder: "As a student of spiritual science, I find it interesting--and even a bit amusing--that so many people are trying to get rid of sounds in their head which bear such a close resemblance to sounds welcomed by students of contemplative meditations."

"There is little doubt that some tinnitus 'sufferers' are experiencing a spiritual phenomenon well known to mystics."

Personally, tinnitus 'reminds' me to pay attention to my inner landscape, now.

Comfrey is an amazing plant. It is demulcent, astringent, nutritive, tonic, and has a soothing healing effect on every organ it contacts. It often used as a poultice and is great for stagnant blood conditions. It's easy to grow and propagate.

When I was in Hawaii I went to a meeting of Lau L'apa lau Kahunas, which basically means elders who specialized in using herbs for healing.

These elders talked of many native plants- native to Hawaii, but I couldn't help but smile when a number of the healers mentioned comfrey as being one of the main plants they use.

Although not native to Hawaii, these elders noticed how versatile and useful comfrey can be. One had a great story about his taking a mainland U.S. physician on a hike. The doctor slipped and fell quite a distance. It was clear that his ankle was sprained and perhaps dislocated. The Hawaiian healer just wrapped the wound with comfrey leaves- and the man was able to walk. After a few days of changing the wrap, he was completely healed.

There are many other cases I know with sprains and external problems solved by comfrey compresses.