In March of this year, I was at a weekend retreat and while talking to an acquaintance of mine in the dining area, a friend of his hobbles over to us, to address my friend. The man that hobbled over was crouched down very low on two crutches with a leg that was in a cast that he did not place on the ground when he walked. Decidedly he was in pain and not a happy camper.
As the man came closer, my acquaintance asked if I knew him, and when I responded that I didn’t, he proceeded to introduce us. After a short conversation, my acquaintance excused himself and walked away, leaving me with the man in crutches, who seemed like he wanted to converse with me. Little did I know, from what I later gathered, he wanted to argue with me.
I am not sure what he knew of me, ”LIFEChanges With Filippo” and all, if anything, but I got the feeling that he assumed I was going to go all Pollyanna on him and tell him “oh, I’m sure everything is going to be alright.” And so, he proceeded to tell me his story and how bleak his situation was with his leg. His story was very dark and full of anger and rage. It was very elaborate and gruesome. His story included scenarios that ranged from certain amputation to possible death, with little to nothing in-between.
Maybe my intuition was kicking in, but I sensed more wrong with this man’s attitude than I did his leg. Having taking and taught many energy healing courses, not knowingly, I must have been scanning his body, and without consciously paying attention to the reading, I kept getting that the guy was full of shit. I saw this man’s leg healed, for all intents and purposes, and I saw him walking around, as long as someone didn’t insist on an amputation.
So, I offered nothing Pollyannaesque, in my opinion, in response to his story. However, I did try and correct some of what he was stating scientifically as fact, that I have learned are not facts at all. I figured if he could believe in new possibilities, he might be able to seek help in those areas and save his leg.
My possibilities were met with even more anger and now included hostility towards me for giving him “hope,” in his words, where there “was no hope,” as he saw it. And technically, he is right. If he didn’t see it, he probably wouldn’t come to experience it, especially since he was so on the other side of it.
I actually shared this story as a monologue to one of our LIFEChanges With Filippo show episodes, and in the retelling of it, I shared that I had learned something. I shared that what I learned was that, maybe, just maybe, this person’s life had just changed so dramatically for the worse, due to what sounded like a horrible car accident. He had the right to be in shock, fear, angst and anger and it was, hopefully, temporarily, keeping him so close-minded that he couldn’t see outside of the situation as he saw it.
And so, in that moment, I wished him the best and then moved on.
Since this was a weekend workshop, I ran into this same person the next day. I avoided him twice because I didn’t need to be his punching bag anymore. But he waved me over at one point to where he was sitting. I was gracious and simply said “Good morning.” He surprised me by telling me that all night he had thought about what I had told him the evening before, and that I might be right. I smiled at him and told him that I wished him the best and quietly walked away.
And that’s where the story ended when I shared it on the show.
Now fast-forward four months. I was at a party and I noticed a man walk briskly by me a couple times that looked awfully familiar to me, but I just couldn’t place him. He didn’t seem the most pleasant of fellows but I didn’t pay too much attention to him. At one point, I noticed him almost racing from one room to another, and I asked myself “Don’t I know him from somewhere?”
Later at the party, as this man walks into the room where I was sitting someone called out to him and asked him how he was doing. He answered, “well, my leg was hurting this morning. You know we are still not out of the woods yet. “ And that is when I put two and two together. Because he was crouched down when I met him, I never saw him standing upright. And not only did he not have crutches, he was walking, literally, without any sign of his having had any problem at all.
Since he was walking toward me, heading to who knows where, this time stone facedly, he looked at me square in the face and I at him. He then turned into the direction of where he was going and walked beside me without any sort of outwardly acknowledgement.
There are so many directions I can go with this story, and it is so rich with information I didn’t share in the monologue nor have shared here. But I have a feeling that this story is not over and that I will be writing about it and speaking about it again. But for now, maybe I will leave it at that, with the stay tuned, incase there are any more developments.