The high cost of protection

I discovered something interesting about kismet or good karma or whatever you want to call it. It comes at a pretty hefty price.

A friend of mine has recently started a massage course, and is keen to start up her own treatment studio. In the mean time, she wanted to create business cards, with a quote on them to summarise the vibe of what she was offering.

Since I "know about the Internet" she asked me to search for her for something meaningful about touch or hands or healing that would look pretty on a business card.

I did a couple of Google searches, and came up with an array of options for her. There were two that we liked quite a lot:

* "The pressure of the hands causes the springs of life to flow."
- Tokujiro Namikoshi

* "Hands are the heart`s landscape."
- Pope John Paul II

That was the easy part.

Then, a couple of weeks later, she came to me again. This time, she said, it had been suggested to her that she find some kind of mantra for protection against taking on the negative energy of her patients.

I guess in much the same way as publishing houses have extensive staff and overheads to take care of, so do esoteric thinkers.

Georgina Guedes, Editor, ITWeb Brainstorm

Her massage teacher had made this suggestion to the entire class, and had said that regardless of what their religious or cultural beliefs were, it was a good idea to have some ritualised way of getting themselves into the mindset of not taking on other people`s issues.

My friend had been quite into Buddhism at one point in her life, so that was my first point of departure. I searched for "mantras" and "prayers of protection".

I thought this was going to be easy.

Although there were lots of sites, when I clicked on any link, I was frequently connected to subscriber-only pages. These pages were brightly coloured, covered in astral symbols and photographs of whatever bearded grand cricket had thought up this particular sequence of words. However, should I want to actually view the words, I had to pay either a site subscription fee, or a one-off payment for that particular mantra.

In some sneaky instances, the mantra was given in the original Hindu, and for a translation, so that you can actually understand what it is you`re uttering in the name of protection, you had to cough up hard currency.

What ever happened to doing something for the greater good of the collective conscious? My friend has to go into her massage therapy unprotected because these visionaries require a financial outlay before they`ll share the love.

It`s a business model utilised by publishing sites the world over, but I hadn`t expected it from spiritualists. I guess in much the same way as publishing houses have extensive staff and overheads to take care of, so do esoteric thinkers. Why shouldn`t they benefit financially from their own wisdom?

I guess it`s just difficult to let go of the notion that enlightenment should come from wizened, barefoot men in white togas high on mountaintops with no care for material things.

Perhaps they pay a lot to get their beards trimmed.