Eamon the Shaman and Angel Wings

In 2014, I went away to train as a Sexological Bodyworker.

It was six months of solid practical work with volunteers and then seven days of intensive, hands-on training all students together. Around thirty of us in a room, learning through touch, practising on each other, working with bodies of every shape and kind. It was intense physically, emotionally and energetically, but it was also beautiful. There is something quite extraordinary about spending that much time in the company of other human bodies without the usual armour around them.

One of the people on the training was Eamon.

Eamon was from Northern Ireland, tall and bald, with a long silvery white and grey goatee that he sometimes wore plaited. He had a thick Irish accent and one of those voices that seemed to belong to the whole room rather than simply the person speaking.

Somehow, we connected.

I can’t really remember the moment it happened. There wasn’t some great conversation where we suddenly realised we were going to become friends. We just did.

Alongside training as a Sexological Bodyworker, Eamon had spent years exploring shamanic practices, plant medicine and various spiritual traditions around the world. He was also a trained hypnotist.

So naturally, at some point, we started talking about past-life regression.

Obviously I was interested.

I’ve always been spiritually curious. I’ve had experiences throughout my life that I would describe as profound, and I’ve always had a fairly comfortable relationship with the idea that there might be rather more going on than we can see.

I talk to my guardian angels.

Mostly, admittedly, I ask them for parking spaces.

They are remarkably good at it.

I’d also always had a strange sensitivity around my neck and had occasionally wondered whether there might be some enormous past-life explanation for it. Perhaps I’d been hanged. Beheaded. Strangled by an eighteenth-century highwayman.

Who knew?

Past-life regression seemed like an excellent opportunity to find out.

At the time I was living and running my sexuality practice in an enormous old Victorian mill that had once been a shoe mill. My living room was huge, almost silo-like, with a high curved brick ceilings that made sound travel around the room.

Eamon came to stay with me for several days and we decided we’d run a past-life regression workshop there.

I made the poster, put it on Facebook and shared it around some of the more open-minded groups I belonged to at the time — people interested in bodywork, yoga, retreats, spirituality and all the other slightly unusual things I seemed to find myself involved in.

And people signed up.

The night before, Eamon and I prepared the room.

We cleansed the space with sage and a rattle. The next morning I pushed all my furniture against the edges of the room so that the entire centre was open. People arrived carrying mats, cushions and blankets and slowly filled the floor.

We’d arranged a Jacob’s join for lunch, so everybody brought a dish to share.

By the time we began, my house was full of people, food, cups of tea, cushions and anticipation.

And I became the host.

Completely.

I wanted everybody comfortable.

Did they have somewhere to lie down?

Was anybody cold?

Did anyone need another cushion?

Was there enough tea?

Could everybody hear?

Was everybody happy?

Meanwhile, Eamon began guiding us into the regression.

His Irish accent travelled around that strange curved room as he led us down a path, across fields, towards a tree. We moved inside it, down a spiral staircase, deeper and deeper into whatever place we were supposed to reach.

Everyone drifted away.

Eventually Eamon brought us back.

And the stories started.

One person had been walking through a meadow.

Someone had been a child living in a forest, possibly somewhere in Germany.

Another had been a warrior.

Someone had been involved in some kind of crime.

There were Victorian lives, battles, poverty, forests, houses and whole identities apparently waiting inside people’s heads.

Then it came around to me.

“Where did you go, Fran?”

Nowhere.

Absolutely nowhere.

I’d gone deep. I’d relaxed. It had been lovely.

But there was nothing there.

Blank.

So we tried again.

This time my friend Paula decided we should hold hands because she was convinced we were made from the same cloth.

Perhaps we’d known each other before.

Maybe, holding hands, we’d both suddenly arrive in seventeenth-century France together or discover we’d been sisters in ancient Egypt.

So we lay there holding hands while Eamon took us back down the path, inside the tree and down into that dreamlike place again.

Paula disappeared completely into it.

And I…

had another very nice lie down.

Nothing.

When we came back, once again everyone began sharing these elaborate experiences.

And once again I had absolutely bugger all.

By then I was beginning to feel slightly envious.

I’d organised a past-life regression workshop in my own house and apparently everybody in Lancashire had a fascinating previous existence except me.

We stopped for lunch.

People stretched their legs, went outside for air or cigarettes, made cups of tea and loaded plates with all the food everybody had brought.

And somewhere in the middle of all this, Eamon pulled me aside.

“You’re doing a great job of hosting,” he told me.

Everyone was happy.

Everyone had what they needed.

And I was missing the whole thing.

He told me to look around.

Nobody needed me.

Then he essentially told me to stop playing the perfect host and actually take part in the workshop I’d organised.

He was right.

I’d spent the entire day keeping one part of myself outside the experience, checking that everybody else was all right.

So when we gathered again for the final regression, I decided I was going in.

No holding Paula’s hand.

No checking whether anybody needed a blanket.

No listening for kettles or doors or people moving around.

I lay down.

Eamon began speaking.

Back along the path.

Across the field.

Into the tree.

Down and down and down.

And then something changed.

I don’t remember exactly what Eamon said. There was a sentence somewhere in his meditation that seemed to catch hold of me.

And my mind just went.

Whoosh.

Suddenly I wasn’t in my living room anymore.

I was somewhere vast.

I could see Earth below me.

On one side was darkness. Night.

On the other, day was beginning.

I seemed to be watching the point where night became morning.

The whole universe felt enormous around me, but I wasn’t frightened by it.

I belonged there.

And then two enormous white feathered wings unfolded from my back.

I was male.

I don’t know how I knew that.

I just did.

And I was strong.

Not physically strong in the way we usually mean it. There was simply a profound solidity to me.

Grounded.

Confident.

Certain.

I had the sense that I was watching over something. A guardian perhaps. A gatekeeper. A custodian of this immense peaceful place.

And I remember the peace more than anything.

There was no anxiety.

No responsibility.

No checking whether everybody else was comfortable.

No wondering what anybody thought of me.

I was simply there.

Watching the universe.

Watching darkness turn into light.

And I didn’t want to leave.

Eventually Eamon’s voice began pulling us back towards the room.

Back up the staircase.

Back through the tree.

Back into my body.

I opened my eyes.

And almost immediately all that certainty disappeared.

Because my first thought was:

Oh my God.

My second was:

I can’t tell anybody that.

Everybody else had been Victorian children and warriors and people living in forests.

And apparently I’d been some magnificent male angel standing above the Earth with enormous white wings.

It sounded ridiculous.

Even to me.

I remember thinking people were going to assume I had an extraordinarily high opinion of myself.

Oh yes, lovely past life, Dave. You were a farmer.

Me? Guardian of the universe.

I seriously considered keeping quiet.

There was also the name Saint Anthony going around in my head, although I have absolutely no idea where that came from. Perhaps it was simply the first saint my brain could produce once I started trying to make sense of what I’d seen.

I hadn’t asked the man with the wings his name.

I hadn’t thought to.

While I was there, there hadn’t been any questions.

There had only been certainty.

Eventually I told everyone.

And nobody laughed.

Nobody accused me of being a narcissist.

Nobody seemed remotely bothered that my subconscious — or my soul, depending on what you believe — had apparently gone slightly more celestial than everybody else’s.

They simply listened.

I don’t know what happened in that room.

I didn’t then and I don’t now.

I’ve had enough spiritual experiences in my life that I don’t feel any great need to dismiss it. Equally, I can’t tell you that I genuinely discovered one of my previous incarnations.

Perhaps hypnosis allowed my imagination to create something extraordinarily vivid.

Perhaps my mind gave me an image of exactly what I needed at that moment.

Strength.

Stillness.

Certainty.

Perhaps it was simply a beautiful dream.

Or perhaps somewhere, in some existence I can’t remember, I really did stand looking down at Earth while enormous white wings opened behind me.

I genuinely don’t know.

What I do know is how I felt.

For those few minutes, wherever I had gone, there was absolutely no doubt in me.

I was strong.

I was grounded.

I was completely at peace.

And then I opened my eyes.

And became Fran again.

And almost immediately wondered what everybody else would think.