The Sprit of the Water Rat
When you give acupuncture to a person over a number of years you inevitably get to know each other pretty well and you can build up quite a strong relationship. I had a good example of this recently where I was treating a dear old lady as she was going through chemotherapy. The treatment was initially successful however after a year or so, unfortunately the cancer came back with a vengeance. She didn’t want to go through the chemotherapy again as the side effects were so brutal and she came to terms with the fact that she was going to die. I continued to treat her with acupuncture to help with the symptoms caused by the cancer and also helping with the process of letting go of this lifetime.
She was not afraid of dying and we often talked about what would happen in the after-life. She had a strong Christian beliefs but was also interested in discussing Buddhist and Taoist ideas of reincarnation. During one session, when she was nearing the end we came up with an idea that if it was at all possible then she would send me some sort of message from the after-life. As the Universe usually talks to me through animal symbolism we decided that the conveyor of this message would be her spirit-animal, which we determined to be a water-rat. This seemed like a good choice as quite frankly, she looked like one and they are also extraordinarily rare and therefore probably wouldn’t crop up coincidentally. The fact that the water rat is also part of the Chinese zodiac system added an extra gravitas to the choice.
Just before Christmas I called in to do my usual home-visit and my client was no longer there. I subsequently found out that she had been taken in to care as she could no longer care for herself. I had a couple of weeks off coming up so I decided to go and find her in her care home in the New Year, to see how she was getting on. Unfortunately it didn’t quite work out like that. One day, during the holidays, I opened up my Instagram account on my phone, and there right at the top was a reel of a water-rat swimming under water along a narrow gully. For those who don’t know, a ‘reel’ is a small video lasting just a few seconds and this one was put on loop so it seemed as though the water-rat was continually swimming along its passage way. I watched it transfixed for a while as my body broke out in goose-pimples and I knew then that my client had passed on and that this was the message to let me know.
Of course, this may well have been a massive coincidence and I understand the notion of confirmation bias, but I personally don’t believe this to be the case. My Instagram account is usually filled up with a heady mixture of Chinese medicine, Jamaican reggae and UFO sightings and I haven’t seen a water-rat on there before or since. It also happened to show up at the very same time that I later learnt that she had indeed died. The actual video of the rat was also very telling – it was continually swimming, over and over, on and on, as if it was on some kind of never-ending journey.
On the other hand I also don’t believe that when you die you have the ability to somehow hack the social media accounts of the living. So what is really going on here? Well, reality has to be seen as a two-way process. It is not something that just happens to you but something that you are also a part of in its co-creation. This has been proven without doubt by experiments with quantum mechanics – we are complicit and involved in the unfolding of reality. The Universe likes to speak to us, to remind us that we are all part of its magnificent whole. It does so through signs and symbols and when we attribute meaning to such symbols, such as the after-life and the water-rat, then the Universe cannot help but to affirm its very own extraordinary, inter-connected existence.