Okay, I’m finally ready to write the follow up to the Inner Demon’s post.

 

One of the reasons I enjoy working in a hospital so much: it’s incredibly grounding.  Grounding, maybe not always in a pleasant, zen way, but in a jarring, gritty, this-shit-is-real-life kind of way.

 

The positivity movement is a much-needed balance to the hyper-negative news culture we have in North America, and even though I’m as sunny a Mary Sunshine as you’ll ever meet, I’ve always railed against the idea that you can eliminate all pain and discomfort from life through positive attitude, by disallowing negativity to impact your life.

 

Let me start this piece by stating I firmly believe in the balance of light and dark in life.  I believe that joy, love and happiness are as much a part of life as their counter-parts: sorrow, grief and stress.

 

Yes, we can greatly affect our *experience* of negativity through our faith and attitudes, but we can’t surgically excise negativity from life.  I think negativity is something to be embraced, managed, challenges to rise to or difficulties to survive.

 

I feel it would be a personal moral failing for me to forget there is suffering in the world.

 

So I work at a hospital.  I donate to charity.  Every time I do a reading, I say a prayer hoping to make a positive difference to those who ask for my help.

 

The thing about working at a hospital (animal or human): you have your finger on the pulse of the best and worst in humanity.  Although I am not directly involved in patient care, I am *around*, and when there is acute suffering, of course I feel it too.

 

I feel the emotions the most, especially if I’ve experienced a similar distress in my own life.  This would be true for anyone empathetic, anyone who is strong enough still *feel* things in a setting like healthcare, rescue work (human or animal), social work, law enforcement or any other job where shit gets real.

 

A common practice is to disconnect from what’s happening.  During the health care crisis in Ontario in the late 90s, when I did my nursing training after 7 years of volunteer work as a candy-striper, I watched nurses whom I respected and admired burn out and quit.  The surviving health care workers were empathetically checked out.  They had to be.

 

This is why I am in awe of the mighty few who remain in nursing, who hold the hand of a patient in distress and cry tears of empathy – and show up for work the next day. 

 

After just one year of training, I was burnt out too.  Despite my excellent grades and the counseling from the teachers and nursing supervisors, I felt I couldn’t continue.   I did a search of the blog and it looks like I haven’t yet told you guys about the day I quit nursing.  Someone please remind me to tell that story down the line.

 

So why suffering?  And what the fuck are Demons anyway?

 

I received a really sweet email from a reader who suggested that rather than using the word “demon” that I use “entity” instead.  Let me explain the differences I perceive, based on my personal experience.

 

So far, my understanding of the Garden of Shadows has become a loose classification of the individual types of beings I’ve encountered.  Critters, Entities and Demons.

 

If you’d asked me last month, I would only have talked about Critters and Entities, the low-vibration life forms that recycle the energy imprint of negativity into neutrality.

 

Okay, wait, let me back up a bit more.

 

Picture a house.  Now, picture a married couple in that house.  The husband and wife fight, a lot.  Then one of their kids is killed in an accident.  The marriage collapses under the pressure, the couple moves out and the house goes on the real-estate market, but sits empty.

 

Nothing has been done to clear this house, energetically, so the thing sits on the market.  People walk into this house, but it just doesn’t feel right.  There’s something about it.  They don’t like it.

 

What the potential buyers perceive is the energetic imprint left by the emotion of the former occupants.

 

That energetic imprint has altered the energy eco-system in the house.

 

Our eco-system goes far beyond the physical environment we experience with our bodies.  The energy we put out into our environment is like adding an essential oil to a big bath tub, and it changes what energetic organisms thrive in this environment.

 

In a place where the atmosphere has been altered through pain, the critters who thrive off of that will be pulled in.  This is perfect.  Under normal circumstances they just transmute the energy to neutral through feeding on it, and they move on.  When I perceive critters, I usually see them as insect-like, doing their composting duties.

 

But if there is a location rich enough in pain that they want to stick around, you can end up with an infestation.

 

Let’s say this house is purchased by another happy couple.  The day they move in, they have a fight.  The stress inexplicably continues as they wait for things to even out.  One bad thing after another seems to happen, and finally one of them is injured.  The injured partner generates more stress and sadness for the critters to feed upon.  The critters multiply, and their increasing numbers enhances the subtle negative energy of the whole house.  It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.  The critters become parasite-ish.  Insects in small numbers are normal and healthy, but an imbalance of insects is a plague.  Think locusts, cockroaches, tapeworms.  Very unhealthy indeed.

 

The humans start to get depressed, which is expressed in irritation towards each other.  Within two years, this happy marriage is on the rocks.

 

When I was growing up, I lived across the street from a place we called “the divorce house.”  Every two years, this place would go on the market.  A happy family would move in, break apart and sell the house.

 

You’d think the real estate agents would be the biggest clients of psychics and priests offering house-clearing services… but then, if the house stayed off the market, the realtor would have less opportunity for commission.  (I have not extinguished my inner cynic!)

 

Once a place is swarming with critters, it starts to invite entities.  Entities can also hitch-hike in on resident humans.  Just like lice, scabies or the flu, humans can transmit sad parasites back and forth to each other.  Entities have more of a discerning consciousness than critters.  I perceive them as monkey-like, making conscious choices about what to do and where to be and who they latch on to.

 

Entities are more proactive about their environment, and they actively incite the sort of energy they feed off of.  They like to garden.

 

Entities love to hang out with depressed and ill people, especially if there’s a chronic illness that’s associated with a lot of shame or emotional trauma.

 

An entity hitch-hiked into our house, once.  We discovered it after our guest left, and it decided to hang out in the “sad room” of our Ucluelet house.  This room, we later found out, was where the property owner’s son accidentally / intentionally ended his own life.  I was kind of pissed the property manager hadn’t alerted us to this event, which had traumatized not just the family, but the whole town, and all of that sorrow had rained upon our living space for over a decade.

 

This little creature was hanging out in the top corner of the house, and I noticed him only as a movement in the corner of my eye.  I slipped into medium mode and THEN I was able to “see” him.
I do not deal with these sorts of things myself.  We called in the angels to take care of it, and they did.  Immediately.  We were then advised by the “cleaning crew” to cut open an apple and leave it on a plate, cut side up, overnight to absorb the remaining energy and then dispose of it the next day.

 

I don’t like to waste food, but this is a really neat trick.  It worked well.  In general, I burn candles, use salt, rocks, holy water, bells, cleaning, smudging, prayer – but never before a cut apple.  The ways to energetically clean your house are endless.

 

I have since believed that this creature, this monkey-like entity must be what they’re talking about when people say “demon”.

 

Now, I’m going to tell you *how* this new information came to me:

 

I had just finished my third and final reading of the day.  I was positively *high* on energy.  The usual two-inch thick stream of warm energy I usually feel down my spine during readings had expanded into this four-foot column of warm happy light that enveloped my entire body.  My very being was pulsating with energy and love.

 

This doesn’t happen every time I do readings, and this was the most powerful experience of the universal god force that I’ve had to date.  I was just so high on love.  I felt like I’d never come down, no matter what sadness I witnessed, no matter what happened, it was all love, baby, love envelopes us all.

 

And then, my mind flashed on a particularly difficult person in our life.  I’ve been perplexed by this challenge of a human for quite a while.  And then it hit me – and it all made sense.  And it was all still part of the perfect love story of existence.

 

This person was an incarnated demon.

 

My knowledge and certainty of this was instantaneous and complete – like Neo getting the kung-fu download in the Matrix.  It was also completely harmless, non-alarming knowledge.  I was filled with understanding, compassion and – get this – renewed RESPECT for this person.

 

Because – this is so wild – sometimes demons incarnate to shift their pattern – they are going from dark to light!

 

Isn’t that amazing?  They’re transmuting themselves.  This is one of the purposes of demon incarnation.

 

THAT’S NOT EVEN THE CRAZY PART YET! 

 

Some of them are FANTASTICALLY GOOD PEOPLE!

 

SERIOUSLY!!!  I was too zen / full of universal love to have my mind blown by this at the time, but it was blown about six hours later when I came back down to earth.

 

I was awash with images of religious leaders, teachers and doctors, social workers and nurses, police officers, fire fighters – people devoting their lives to and sacrificing themselves for other people in need of help.

 

The thing is, no transition is easy.  This “dark” nature expresses itself in a variety of ways, and sometimes these demon people are easily corrupted in positions of power.  Not just the big, obvious positions of power, but the subtle, day-to-day positions of power.

 

You know how many incarnated demons end up as priests and ministers?  A LOT.  They’re working *really hard* and they’re taking their cue from a long and powerful tradition.

 

An example from my ancient history – when I was working as a temp in Toronto, I had a boss who bullied me.  She would find a way to call me fat and stupid every single day of the week… but she had the power to fire me at a moment’s notice, so I couldn’t defend myself until after I was hired on permanently.  It took a year and a half of daily office torture before she was finally fired.

 

This concept suddenly shed light on why some people just can’t resist being assholes, power-mongers or just plain crazy-makers.

 

They may not even know it themselves, but they feed off of negative energy.  They almost can’t help tweaking a situation negatively to get that energetic feedback.  For someone working really, really hard at being a good person, a moment of relapse in making a hurtful comment may come as a great relief to them, like letting off steam.

 

The flip side is the utterly shocking impact this can have on those around the incarnated demon.  How could this amazing, wonderful person say / do such a  thing?  It’s very confusing.  It’s almost irreconcilable.  Often, it seems easier to just forget what happened or what was said, because it seems impossible to incorporate this information into who you thought this person to be.

 

Here’s another thing:  There are demon SOUL FAMILIES!

 

Sometimes, they incarnate in groups, over and over into the same family line.  And woe to the angelic kid who chooses to be born into a demon family – this happens.  This explanation flashed with three separate headlines I’ve read in the past ten years with tragic stories of kids who died at the hands of neglectful and abusive guardians.

 

Child abuse is such a common tragedy that it doesn’t make the papers unless it’s truly horrific.  These are the sorts of things I feel a personal responsibility to witness, to never forget or deny that the innocent suffer in this world.

 

For the first time, I really started to understand *why*.  I could never before reconcile my ideas of a soul incarnation in human form, choosing terrible behavior.

 

In this blissful, expansive consciousness state, I understood (more completely than I do now, trying to explain it in words) that demons incarnated in human bodies are expressing their nature.  They are a part of the ecosystem.

 

It is not an eternal war between good and evil, harmony and dissonance.  It is a dance.

I understood, too, that we really do make a choice.  There is the potential for harmony and dissonance within all of us, because we are all related when you come right down to it.  Even angels and demons are cousins, incarnated or ethereal.

 

So what do we do with this knowledge?

 

I think we use this idea to change our approach.  Ever see that episode of Friends with the incompetent naturopath treating Ross’ weird mole or “kundus”?

 

“You must LOVE the Kundus!  Let me hear you say it!”  “Uh, I love the Kundus…”

 

We change our approach to incarnated demons expressing themselves in a harmful manner.

 

Our whole corrections system is based upon revenge.  When someone hurts us, as human beings we want to strike back.

 

Now, I don’t know what a “loving” judicial system would look like exactly, but I’m sure it would involve less minimum sentences and much more reparative community service.

 

This humble post isn’t intended to be an answer to the entire world’s problems, it’s just a useful idea.  It came to me in a blinding moment of love and happiness, and I will hold it in my heart as truth for the rest of my life.

 

I’ll let you know how it settles.

 

Your questions are welcome!  I may expand this into a podcast episode.