Chapter 12: The Dolphin Swimmer

In 1994, I gave a workshop in Bellevue, Washington. Tom was a psychologist who had come to my workshop and then signed up for a session with me afterwards. He brought his wife along. She was going to wait out by the motel swimming pool while I worked on her husband. Tom's wife was a heavyset woman, obviously well-off, and obviously very skeptical of what her husband had told her about me. Her husband by comparison was as excited about his session as a puppy about to go for a walk. He couldn't wait to experience some of the things that he'd seen my clients experience in my workshop.

Ninety minutes later, which is when I normally end my sessions, Tom was still on the table, and still raring to go. I had taken care of all of his soul fragments, energies, and entities, but when it came to the past lives that he needed to look at to make sense of his life today, Tom had suddenly gone holographic on me. He was racing through thirty simultaneous past lives like someone on a paid shopping spree at Bloomingdale's. I listened in awe. Meanwhile, his wife paced back and forth metronomically in her fur coat out by the pool like a polar bear at the zoo. Sensing her mounting irritation, I poked my head out of the motel room door. Her husband lay babbling ecstatically about Egypt on my massage table behind me.

"He's just looking at some past lives," I explained apologetically. She raised her eyebrows in a clear expression of disapproval as she brushed past me to see for herself what state her husband was in.

"I want to be sick now," her husband chimed in from the table, in the middle of one of his past life recollections.

I hurried back over to the table. "No you don't," I said firmly. This worked almost every time. I didn't like having clients throw up around me. If I liked that sort of thing I would have become a nurse.

"No," said the husband. "You don't understand. I really want to be sick." His emphasis on the word want was meant to convey that this was a necessary part of his spiritual experience. Maybe he was remembering a peyote initiation.

His wife looked at me expectantly. I sighed. "Okay," I told him. "If you absolutely have to be sick, go use the bathroom, okay?"

"Okay!" he chirped happily. He leapt up and ran into the bathroom, practically bouncing off of the walls as he went. His wife by way of contrast, stood staring at me like I was a museum curiosity. The bathroom door slammed. A moment later we heard the unmistakable sound of the toilet lid being flipped up, followed by the equally unmistakable sound of one ecstatic psychologist yelling "BUUU-ICK!" into a porcelain bullhorn. There was nothing that I could say to his wife at this point. She rolled her eyes skyward and sighed as her husband serenaded us. Finally the toilet flushed and it was quiet again.

By then I'd succeeded in engaging the psychologist's wife in an awkward conversation. Things were looking up, or so I thought. Her husband had other ideas. He started to serenade us again. This time it sounded like someone trying to sing underwater. "Bloobloobloo-blooblooo-aaah!" he yelled. I smiled weakly at the psychologist's wife and excused myself.

When I opened the bathroom door, the psychologist was still on his knees in front of the toilet. He had loosened his tie and draped it over one shoulder. His head was in the bowl and he was blowing bubbles. Weird! I thought to myself.

"What are you doing?" I asked him. He didn't hear me right away.

"Bloob-bloob-bloog-aaah!" he repeated.

"What are you doing?" I asked him again.

He paused to suck air between bubbles. "I'm bloob-bloob-bloob swimming with the dolphins!" he bubbled excitedly. That was all I needed to hear. I backed out of the bathroom and carefully shut the door. His wife waited for me with arms folded.

"He's, uh, swimming with the dolphins," I told her. She looked at me like I was the one with my head in the toilet. I shrugged. "Maybe you should wait outside for a few minutes," She considered this. The sound of her husband blowing bubbles in the toilet filled the space between us like muzak for the criminally insane.

"Maybe I'd better," she said.

When Tom finally emerged from the bathroom, he had a glow about him and a serenity that I hadn't seen before. He looked at me with either tears or toilet water in his eyes. "Nothing like this has ever happened to me before," he told me sincerely. We stood looking at each other for a long time, like two brothers. "Thank you," he said finally.

Months later, I got a letter from Tom that detailed how his experience had changed his life. No one had been able to work with him before. After our visit, he saw himself and his work in a completely different way. He had decided to renew his study of psychology, only instead of going back to the university, he was going to study with the native americans who lived in the Seattle area. I felt very blessed for meeting him. I'd always known that there was a sacred power imminent in all things, that God was everywhere, but the truth of this was never quite so clear as it was on the day when I saw someone find enlightenment in a toilet.