self-inflicted trauma that has negated the natural condition wherein your mind and body work in unison."
"What 'trauma'?" I asked.
He didn't answer the question. Instead he began massaging my temples.
"Breathe deeply. And do it slowly, very slowly."
As I did, I felt a kind of dizziness gradually coming over me, the hypnotic drone seeming to take over my consciousness. Instead of growing slower, my breathing was actually becoming more rapid, as though I'd started to hyperventilate. But I no longer had any control over it. My autonomic nervous system had been handed over to him, as dizziness and a sense of disorientation settled over me. The room around me began to swirl, and I felt my conscious mind, my will, slipping out of my grasp. It was the very thing I'd vowed not to let happen.
The same thing had occurred once before, after I broke my collarbone in the Pacific surf that slammed a Mexican beach south of Puerto Villarta. When a kindly Mexican doctor was later binding on a harness to immobilize my shoulder, the pain was such that I momentarily passed out while sitting on a stool in his office. I didn't fall over or collapse; it just seemed as though my mind, fleeing the incredible pain, drifted away in a haze of sensation.
Now the pastel blue walls of the room slowly faded to white, and then I was somewhere else, a universe away, surrounded by blank nothingness. I tried to focus on the bronze Shiva directly across, but the ring of fire around him had become actual flames. The only reality left was the powerful touch of Alex Goddard's hands and a drone that could have been the music of the spheres.
[Chapter Eight]
Sometime thereafter, in a reverie, I felt myself in a magical forest whose lush vines reminded me of Kerala in India. It was a verdant, hazy paradise, another Eden. A child was with me, a child of my own, and I felt jubilation. I watched the child as she grew and became a resplendent orchid.