magic

By the end of 2016, something had profoundly changed within me.
The trials I had experienced over the previous year and a half had, by then, pushed my cynically judgmental self—directed at everything and everyone—into the background.

In its place, a deeper and more accepting side of me began to emerge, one I found myself increasingly conversing with during my afternoon drawing-therapy retreats.

It is difficult to put into words, but after so many years of “performing,” the honesty I cultivated toward myself seemed to fill me with a sense of safety.
All that anxiety and fear of death gradually brought me closer to a higher version of myself, one that—relative to my level at the time—was able to point out certain compensatory patterns.

The carefully constructed roles I had built and maintained for so many years began to crack through these inner struggles, and by the end of 2016 they had collapsed enough for me to be capable of connecting to a new quality of being.

One manifestation of this was art therapy, which I experienced at the time as learning the fundamentals of figure and space during my afternoon retreats.

The relationship between form and shadow. Charcoal studies from the studio.

This was something entirely new to me.

Creation filled me with a new kind of satisfaction, while the many hours spent alone allowed me to connect more deeply with myself.

I could no longer play my roles, as the subconscious guilt tied to them was also part of the mosaic underlying my anxiety.

Of course, this realization was only a small fragment of the tip of the iceberg, and I knew that to uncover the root cause I would have to dig much deeper.
I just didn’t yet know how.

What I did sense instinctively, however, was that the past year and a half—with all its difficulties—had been a benevolent “learning package,” one that urged me to learn even more about myself.

By then, i had become willing as well.

Getting acquainted with the fundamentals of figure drawing.

By November 2016, only a small step separated me from a higher rung.
Gyula helped me with that.

Gyula was… how should I put it—he had always struck me as a peculiar, anything-but-average person.
Before meeting him, I had somehow imagined healers and therapists as different, perhaps more restrained.

He, however, had no problem telling you to fuck off if he didn’t sense intention or honesty in you.
He didn’t deflect, nor did he say what he thought I wanted to hear, and that was precisely what made me feel a kind of clarity in him that was still very new to me at the time.

Calmness and love radiated from him.

It was my mother—who had already known him for a few years by then—who first mentioned him and advised me to visit.
“Maybe it would do you good to widen your perspective a little.”

Had she mentioned him before 2016, I probably wouldn’t have even heard it.
By then, however, I was sitting on pins and needles, waiting to meet someone who might actually understand what I was going through.

Gyula had previously lived in the United States and had moved back home a few years earlier, carrying extensive experience as a healer and therapist.

On the last Friday of November, I set out to see him, to a hidden corner of the suburbs.
Even on the way there, I felt a strange, stirred-up sensation in my stomach, which lasted right up until the moment he opened the door.

I found myself in a pleasant, clean, and orderly apartment, facing Gyula, whom I judged to be somewhere between fifty-five and sixty.

I remember that after a quick handshake, he smiled and remarked right away:
“I can sense that you smoke.”

There was no accusation in his words, yet I immediately began explaining myself and making excuses—just as I did back then in situations like this.

Gyula, in the manner of an intuitive therapist, had already inferred a rough direction from my very first words as to where it might be worth heading during the session.
Still, he asked me to tell my story.

And I did.
Everything.

About the panic disorder, the struggle of the past year and a half, about how I had been unable to ease my anxiety in any way other than with medication.
And about how, no matter how many times I tried to quit smoking, I never succeeded.

Gyula knew how to ask questions very well.
Through them, he shed light on many things that might not even have occurred to me.

For example, the connection between my morning stomach cramps and the self-reproach caused by smoking, which had already been part of my mornings for months by then.
We talked a lot about this.

Before that, I had perhaps not even thought through what might change once the meeting was over.
I had no specific topic in mind to work on; instead, curiosity was what drove me.

Gyula, however, did not want to satisfy that.
Instead, he asked constructive questions and listened, while picking up on certain things—subconscious beliefs, among others—from my choice of words.

This, too, was part of the map.

“So. Would you like to see what I do?” he asked after our session, which had already lasted at least an hour and a half.

“Of course,” I said, while in truth I already felt as if the conversation alone had been like a kick from a horse.

After that, lying stretched out on a massage table, by then almost half-asleep, I listened as Gyula walked around me in circles, fanning the air above different points of my body.

From the silly and often ridiculed, overblown “spiritual” archetypes, plenty had rubbed off on my own beliefs as well, so a bit of resistance arose in me.

“If my friends could see this…” I thought to myself.

Yet, setting my prejudices aside, I began to feel a level of safety unlike anything I had ever experienced before.

There was no touch, yet I felt dull, pressure-like sensations appearing at completely unpredictable points in my body.

A sense of calm settled over me as I waited curiously for further symptoms.
These, however, appeared only very rarely, and even then in barely perceptible ways.

I was perhaps a little disappointed by this, as I had been expecting some great catharsis—yet there were no white lights, no shifting of dimensions.

After he finished, he asked me to begin getting up very carefully and slowly.

I did so, but despite this, a sudden wave of intense nausea came over me, to the point where, in my imagination, I was already scrubbing my vomit out of the carpet.

Fortunately, this surprising symptom subsided before I even reached the bathroom.
After a few deep breaths, I washed up, then looked into the mirror and saw myself staring back with such sparkling eyes and dilated pupils that I almost frightened myself.

Confused, I returned to Gyula and sat down in a nearby leather armchair so we could go over one or two things as takeaway. After he asked how I was feeling, I noticed that everything felt so unusually clear that I could almost hear the hum of energy vibrating around me.

I was just about to begin my next sentence when suddenly everything became so… funny and unserious that I started laughing.

I don’t know why.
It simply burst to the surface and began to grow uncontrollable.

The laughter slowly turned into hysterical laughing, until I was almost rolling on the floor, struggling through my tears.

After a while, even Gyula couldn’t hold it anymore and started laughing too.
We had a hard time stopping, but eventually I managed to blurt out:

“What was that? I feel as if I’ve been enchanted…”

“This isn’t magic,” he said, his expression turning serious.
“Your body simply received a stronger impulse. I work with quantum touch. It’s one technique out of thousands. It’s accessible to everyone.”

“But how is it that I didn’t feel anything during the treatment? I thought I would have strong physical symptoms.”

“Well, because you’re tense like concrete. Especially your legs.
It would have been a miracle if you’d felt anything. This is something that wouldn’t hurt to work on further…”

Suddenly my knee surgery came to mind, along with the six years of jumping down staircases and sliding along railings before it.

And, of course, skipping warm-ups and stretching.

A moment of a longer slide, from 2014.

We talked a little more about the principles of the treatment, then, after a handshake, I set off on my way.

Confused, sedated—yet calm.

It wasn’t just the treatment…
Already during the conversation, even from the very first minute, it felt as if I had arrived somewhere.

My ego wanted answers, but I was too tired to provide them.

What happened?
How could I have felt it so strongly?
After all, he hadn’t even touched me during the treatment.

Everything Gyula had said.
About how this wasn’t magic, but something accessible to everyone.

Was all of this true?

Excerpt from Quantum Touch by Richard Gordon.