Feeding your demons – an ancient Tibetan Buddhist practice

Feeding your demons sounds like something out of a horror movie but turns out it’s an ancient technique from Tibetan Buddhism.
You know how sometimes life just feels as if you’re wading through treacle?  No matter how hard you try, you come up against barriers. You just feel stuck.  When that happened to me I turned to Dainei Tracy who specialises in getting people out of negative patterns.

She uses a whole battery of tools for healing but she feels that, in my case, I need to feed my demons.  ‘Don’t panic,’ she smiles. ‘A demon is simply any part of us that hasn’t come into wholeness. It’s something we’ve internalised – it could be shame, fear, addiction, depression, anxiety, sickness. It might not even be ours originally – it could be an ancestral pattern.’

Put like that, it’s less alarming, so I readily agree to give it a try.  Dainei asks if I can sense where the ‘stuckness’ sits in my body. My hands stretch across my abdomen. ‘It feels like a huge ball of muck in my belly.’

I sit on a cushion with another placed opposite me.  We’re going to use a technique that uses the ‘two chair’ technique made popular with gestalt therapy.  Dainei encourages me to intensify the feeling of stuckness. ‘What size is it? What shape? What colour? Texture?’ I sink into my body and feel the stuckness.  It’s disgusting – a huge blob, red like blood, sticky and pulsing. ‘Let it come out of your body onto the empty cushion. Can you visualise it as a being with arms and legs?’ she asks. I shudder. It becomes a demonic baby, with claws and sharp teeth, writhing on the floor, hissing and snapping. There’s a set formula for talking to demons it appears and I follow Dainei’s guidance.  ‘What do you want from me?’ I ask. ‘What do you need from me? How will you feel if you get what you want?’

I shift onto the demon’s cushion and, the moment I sit in the demon’s place I curl into a ball, squirming. Dainei repeats the questions and I reply as the demon. ‘I want life. I need love. If I get it I will feel light and free.’

She guides me into dissolving my body into ‘nectar’ for the demon. I visualise a pool of golden liquid and the demonic baby laps eagerly. As it drinks in the nectar, it starts to change, transforming into a well-nourished happy baby with firm fat limbs. It gurgles and laughs. I ask for an ally to reveal itself and the baby vanishes; in its place, a beautiful black panther appears. My ally promises to help and protect me and my whole body tingles with energy as it dissolves into me.

I sit quietly for a while and then tell Dainei how my ‘demon’ felt like an old family pattern of abuse and shame that I’d internalised. She suggests that I continue to work with my ‘demon’, to uncover its secrets and explore its lessons. ‘Every demon has something to tell us,’ she says. ‘And the process can be deeply transformative. It releases all that trapped energy and makes it available to you. In fact, the larger and more horrific your demon, the more energy you will be able to access.’

Dainei works from Okehampton in Devon, or remotely via Skype. See her website for more details.

Photo by Callie Gibson on Unsplash

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