Psychic Attack

The topic of psychic attack is extremely complex and I am not an expert in any sense, but I have experience with being assaulted by negative energies with a distinct signature that felt not to be my own self, nor with my wellbeing at heart.

It’s hard to discern to what extent such invasive, aggressive shadow energies are one’s own repressed & split off selves, or something more on the collective level, but if you take a more phenomenological perspective, merely describing what is experienced, it can certainly feel like an attack, a siege, an assault.

I had a dramatic experience of negative energy that felt like a distinct energetic entity in my life in 2001, when I lived for 6 months in Berlin to complete a series of paintings, while on pause from my studies at Berkeley.

The experience was extremely traumatizing, and left a black mark on my life that it took decades to work through.

This song speaks to what I experienced.

Lyrics:

I feel you velvet darkness, tugging on my sleeve

Yes, I know you've come for me, you haunt me in my sleep

You always drag me down, you mire me in my sickness

take away my happiness, and all that I hold precious

The struggle starts, I rip you with my teeth

You grab me by my soft throat, I wait for my release

You pull my life apart, thread by thread

You are a leaden tide, you pull me to the dead

You are not my friend

no matter what the good book said

you took away my paintings in Berlin

and you left me for dead

You said that you were nearer to me

than my warm red veins,

but tell me, where were you, huh,

when I couldn't shake the pain off?

When the spell breaks I come

to my shattered senses.

Count myself as outright lucky,

you broke down my defenses.

You are not my friend

no matter what the good book said

you took away my paintings in Berlin

and you left me for dead

How can I love you when you're so ferocious?

Well I do love the tenderness

that ensues from your pursuit of me.

There is another version of the same song that I recorded with the Interludes, my San Francisco band.

I don’t tend to share this version, though it has some beauty brought by the bandmates I had back then (Jamie Fordyce, Ken Lee and Sami Jo Buffington), because of the line no matter what the Quran said, for fear of this being misinterpreted. In reality the line refers to my own personal experiences of studying the Quran, which I did do for a period of time.

My Invitation to You:

Do you sometimes get ambushed by strong, intense negative emotion or other “bad vibes” that hit you from out of nowhere?

If so, consider getting to know what it is, precisely, that you are experiencing, through art.

Feel free to take your own side, and tell the story from the point of view of you as protagonist or innocent.

May my example be helpful.

Thank you for reading, beloved

—

Thumbnail image respectfully borrowed from The Wonderful Things You Will Be, by Emily Winfield Martin.