of gender sensitivity training, pranic healing and meryl streep

Few sleeps ago I attended a gender sensitivity training and discovered two non sequitors: (a) that 25 years ago Meryl Streep was beautiful in a fragile kind of way; and (b) that pranic healing is way too much for an adult with ADHA disorder like me.

All government agencies are mandated to be GAD-compliant, which means, all their workers must attend a gender sensitivity training. Since ours was the last batch, my boss literally had to drag me to the venue which was in another province.

I had my lids tightly shut as Speaker Aleli mouthed jargons like Economic Marginalization, Political Subordination, Multiple Burden, Gender Stereotyping, Violence Against Women, Personhood Development etc. I only sat up when the speaker said she’d be willing to do pranic healing for those who were interested. But first, she said, they had to view and review Kramer Vs. Kramer, a film pregnant (see? am no sexist!) with gender issues.

I first watched Kramer Vs. Kramer in 1981 (?) when I was a college freshie in Cebu. That far back, the movie was a blur, except for an image of a child, the subject of a custody case, falling from a climbing bar. I had no recollection that it was about a wife who, weary and disgusted with the inequities of family life, cut loose to find adventure and independence.

Now sitting before an LCD screen in a room that had suddenly turned dark, I wondered how could Meryl dominate the film when she was in it only about a third of the time. Dominate, as in, she made her every appearance haunting. (And to think this was before the French Lieutenant’s Woman, the film that forever endeared her to me.) Of course the Pinocchio-nosed Dustin Hoffman was all over the film but still it was Meryl that made a larger impression on me: the tentativeness she showed on the witness stand; the doleful glances she cast at Dustin at the restaurant where he threw wine glasses; the final scene inside the elevator where she asked Dustin, after 18 months of separation, how she looked—all these were testaments to the sheer magnitude of her talent and the utter perfection of her craft.

Watching Kramer Vs. Kramer for the second time left me transfixed. Beautiful in its poignancy, it’s an articulate thesis of letting go not being bitter but sweet.

Now, on to pranic healing. It was 8:30 PM and I was alone with Aleli in her room. She told me that pranic healing is a simple yet powerful and effective no-touch energy healing. It is based on the fundamental principle that the body is a "self-repairing" living entity that possesses the innate ability to heal itself and that the healing process is accelerated by increasing the life force or vital energy on the affected part of the physical body.

For prelims, she let me stand before her as she took out a pendulum (actually her necklace that had a huge pendant). It was supposed to tell me if my chakras or energies were depleted or not by swinging sideways, clockwise or counterclockwise. At once I regretted having told her earlier that I had thyroid cancer because just as she had made a connection between my throat and my sex chakras, the pendulum made the connection too. Hmmmmm. The pendulum went on to tell me that some of my chakras were fine (crown, third eye, solar plexus, navel, basic) while others were depleted (throat, heart and sex!). Throughout all these, I refused to think that her hand had a hand in the pendulum’s motion and that she was a juggler doing a mean trick with her yoyo.

Then she propped me on a monoblock. A pink basin that contained water and salt was set on the floor, by my feet. “This is where I toss aside bad energies, which the salt will purify,” she said. I took off my slippers as told and spread my feet, placed my hands--palms up--on my knees and closed my eyes.

A sense of déjà vu washed over me. Suddenly I was a child having trouble keeping his eyes closed because his mom forced him to sleep in the afternoons of long ago. For two hours the child’s eyes would remain shut, his mind flitting from one thought to another while faking a snore every now and then.

It wasn’t easy for me sitting still. I wanted to slit open my eyes but what if Aleli was making faces at me? Or worse, peering at my nose or my ears? I began to feel uncomfortable and so I prayed for the monoblock to collapse under my weight so that we could have a good laugh and break the sickening inertia, for fellow participants drinking outside to shout for fire, for Aleli to turn mute or for me to fart to the tune of Chupeta. But the gods intervened and nothing of that sort happened.

Ooooommmmm, ooooommmmm, ooooommmmmm, Aleli went, making it all the more hard for me to concentrate because by this time I was already either mentally blogging the experience or revising my stories in time for the deadline of La Salle Bacolod’s summer writing workshop.

When finally it was over after almost two hours, Aleli smiled at me. “You’re now clean of bad energies and cured of your cancer,” she said, matter of factly.

“Thank you.” I felt so tired doing nothing.

“How did you feel the whole time?”

"I felt so light,” I said, but it was not entirely true. Or false.

She wanted to shake my hand but I was already holding the basin on my way out; so she patted me on the back instead.

As the door closed, I felt so relieved. And that was when I laughed, guiltily.