Aftershocks of Awareness (A Vermont author recounts her Life Vessel experience)
by Julie Aitcheson
When you live in a town the size of Montpelier, Vermont, you don’t expect something called Life Vessel Technology (Energy Genesis) to show up a mere block from the legislative hall. And yet that’s where I found Lucid Path Wellness, the East Coast’s only Life Vessel center. Or rather, that’s where I found it after I attended a Wellness Expo and overheard a friend saying- “Yeah, it’s the box you get into and there’s lights and then you’re all fixed. Like, for good!” Full to bursting with kimchi samples, cheese cubes, and little wooden spoonfuls of chutney, I assumed I’d heard her wrong.
“Wait, it’s a box?” I asked.
“No,” she giggled, high on her own smorgasbord of Expo samples. “It’s, like, a vessel.”
She handed me a brochure she’d picked up and tottered off for another Dixie cup of free coffee. The brochure was professional, attractive, and prominently featured the statement “Your body knows what to do.”
I was at that moment in deep doubt about my ability to know anything about anything. Unemployed and soon to be homeless, I’d been eking by on a truck driver’s wages in order to support my writing. My enthusiasm for long hauls and interstate breakdowns gave out around the same time my back did, which unfortunately did not coincide with a six-figure book deal. So there I was, facing a step that I had no idea how to take, and here was a brochure telling me that some part of me actually did know, and might be willing to clue me in if I could just calm down enough to listen.
Using sound, light, vibration, and frequency, the Life Vessel resets the autonomic nervous system, which induces a state of deep relaxation that enables the body’s self-healing mechanisms to kick in. The results can range from a sense of well-being to the noticeable improvement of acute and chronic health complaints. In the way that a quiet room with the perfect temperature and a quality mattress creates the circumstances for a restful night’s sleep, the Life Vessel creates the circumstances in which optimal healing occurs.
Intrigued, I went to Lucid Path’s website to find out more. There, I read glowing testimonials about the positive impacts of Life Vessel Technology. Further reading revealed a statement by biochemist Randall Thomasen, whose research discovered “the release of cellular debris and pH alterations that have taken place after one session.” Detoxification is a big part of what the Life Vessel purports to do, from the cells on out. This explains the mandatory protocol of drinking a gallon of water a day during and after treatment, in order to flush all of that “cellular debris.” The results of nine years worth of clinical research and ringing endorsements are widespread on the internet, as are the inevitable detractors who claim that the any benefit is little more than a placebo effect. This is a common critique of energy medicine in general, which doesn’t look like much during a session, and whose results are often hard to quantify. What a Life Vessel session looks like is a thorough intake with a technician, followed by an hour spent lying down in an enclosed unit rigged up with lights, speakers, and a comfortable mattress. What it felt like, at least for me, was far more complex.
Spurred by the chance to shrug off some of the baggage (cellular and otherwise) that kept me spinning my wheels and address the many structural wrongs trucking had done to my body, I contacted Wendy Halley at Lucid Path Wellness to book an appointment. The standard protocol involves four appointments over a period of three days and drinking lots of water, with a prohibition on strong physical exertion during and immediately following treatment. At a ninety-five dollars per session, I figured I could afford to get at least 25% of my cells detoxed, and hope those gallons of water did the rest.
A licensed therapist and shaman, as well as Lucid Path’s Life Vessel technician and owner, Wendy Halley is a practitioner of what she calls “Radical Wellness.” This term refers to a holistic approach rooted in both ancient and contemporary traditions. It is also, I realized, after five minutes on the phone with her, thoroughly infused with Wendy’s lack of “woo woo” window dressing or artifice. A straight shooter and born skeptic, Halley had her own transformative experience with the Life Vessel in 2013. After watching an interview with inventor Barry McNew and having what she describes as a “strangely strong” reaction, she booked a flight and a round of sessions in Colorado and headed west. For a woman who routinely journeys to other worlds on behalf of her clients, conducts a thriving practice as a psychotherapist, and does it all with the calm pragmatism of a Yellow Cab dispatcher, “strangely strong” is a noteworthy descriptor.
Within a year of watching McNew’s interview, Wendy had established Lucid Path Wellness in order to bring the profound healing benefits she’d experienced in Colorado to the northeast. To date, Lucid Path Wellness is the only Life Vessel Center on the East Coast, though the brightly lit atmosphere feels more like a congenial café than a cutting edge healing center. This, on the day I rushed in on a frigid November wind, was just my speed, since the prospect of climbing into a wooden box to have my cells purged had me a little on edge.
Wendy greeted me with a welcoming smile and, after settling me into the plush couch in her waiting area, reviewed the extensive intake form. She walked me through the session and aftercare guidelines, and invited me to contact her at any point if I had further questions. I followed her back to a low-lit room dominated by the vessel, a large wooden unit roughly the length of a Subaru Impreza. After positioning me on the mattress so that I was in proper alignment with the lights overhead, Wendy closed up the vessel and cued up the music and lights.
I am susceptible enough to claustrophobia that turtlenecks are off limits and an over-long hug makes me twitch, but I had no problem inside the Life Vessel. It was just small enough that I felt held, and just roomy enough to avoid any sense of confinement. In short order, my limbs grew heavy and my eyes drifted shut, thoughts racing in the non-linear, accelerated way I associate with the opening moments of a Reiki or cranial session. This time, though, the thoughts quickly faded and transformed into imagery. As a student of yoga, meditation, and shamanic healing, I have experienced visions of non-ordinary reality where colors, sounds, and textures morph and evolve, bearing a cargo of emotions and insight. The visions I experienced in the Life Vessel were easily as intense and vivid, if not more so. My body felt like a pinball machine as old injury pathways lit up in rapid succession. This was not what I expected.
I was prepared to feel relaxed. I was prepared to battle some “monkey mind” of the “what the hell am I doing?” variety, and I was prepared to walk away with a “been there, done that, don’t need to do it again” sense of closure. What I was not prepared for were the extreme rushes of emotion, the profundity of realization, and the aftershocks of awareness. Accounts of other Life Vessel sessions reveal that no two are the same, even when experienced by the same person on the same day. Some people have zero visions but huge physical releases. Some are simply relaxed- a feeling that stays with them into the future. Others walk away perplexed, unsure of how to characterize or quantify their experience. My reaction was to immediately sign up for another round, and then another. And another. Not because of the psychedelic nature of my sessions, but because of what came after. Or, to be more accurate, because of what didn’t come back.
Throughout my life I have been the hostess of a low-grade anxiety that can latch onto something as innocuous as a blown-out light bulb and transform it into an omen of a doomed life. Always waiting for the other shoe to drop is exhausting work, but it must have been one of those bits of cellular detritus that got purged in the Life Vessel. With every session, I walk away with more clarity, more peace, and more certainty that sometimes, no, most of the time, a light bulb is just a light bulb- something that it turns out my body knew all along.
Julie Aitcheson is an author and screenwriter living in Montpelier, Vermont. She has had articles published in Echo Quarterly, Talking Leaves Magazine, Isabella, and All Things Girl. Most recently, she received a full fellowship to the 2013 Stowe StoryLabs and won second place in the 2014 San Miguel Writers' Conference writing competition for nonfiction.