If you have ever received an attunement, an activation, or an initiation of any kind, you were
probably warned about the period afterwards. A few difficult days. Old material surfacing.
Possibly some physical discomfort. This is normal, you were told, and it is a sign that the work
is taking. The field calls it a healing crisis.
I want to suggest something less comfortable. That period is not a spiritual necessity. It is
what happens when you flood a system that has not been cleared or repaired first, and it is the
predictable consequence of a particular order of operations.
WHAT AN INITIATION IS DOING
Strip the language away and any initiation is doing two things at once. It is raising the amount
of energy moving through a person, and it is expanding the capacity of the nervous system that
has to carry it. Both have to happen, and they have to happen in a workable relationship to each
other.
Increase the energy without increasing the capacity and you have a straightforward engineering
problem. The system cannot conduct what is being pushed through it. Energy accumulates where it
cannot pass, and is absent on the other side of the obstruction, and the nervous system reads
that differential as something being wrong. It reports this in the only language it has, which
is sensation and emotion. Difficult days. Old material. Physical discomfort.
Read that way, the crisis is not evidence that the work is taking. It is evidence about the
sequence.
THE ORDER MOST TRADITIONS USE
The dominant pattern across a lot of energy traditions is to open the channel first and then
manage the fallout. There are reasons for this that are not sinister. The energy is the
dramatic part and the part people came for. It produces an experience they can feel, which is
what makes them confident they received something. Clearing is slow, unglamorous, and produces
very little that anybody would describe afterwards as profound.
There is also a structural convenience to it, and this is where I would ask people to be more
sceptical than they usually are. When difficulty afterwards is defined in advance as a sign of
success, no outcome can count as a mistake. The person who feels wonderful received the
transmission. The person who feels wretched is clearing. Both results confirm the method.
Anything that cannot fail to be confirmed is not being tested.
THE ORDER I USE INSTEAD
Clear first. Repair the nervous system. Expand it. Then increase the energy.
Clearing means removing the specific interpretations that keep generating charge, so there is
less material sitting in the system waiting to be dislodged. Repair means attending to the
places where the capacity to conduct has been damaged, usually by something the person did not
choose. Expansion means increasing what the system can carry before any additional energy is
introduced at all.
Only then does the flooding stage happen, and when the first three have been done properly, the
fourth is frequently the least eventful part of the whole process. People sometimes find this
disappointing. They expected the significant part to feel significant. What they got instead was
something that went in without incident, because the preparation was the significant part and it
happened weeks earlier.
WHAT THIS CHANGES FOR A PRACTITIONER
You stop attributing to the client what belongs to the method
When somebody has a hard time after receiving something from you, the available explanations
are usually about them. They had a lot to clear. They were not as ready as they presented. Their
system is sensitive. Every one of those may be true, and every one of them puts the cause safely
outside your own design. Sequence is the explanation that implicates you, which is precisely why
it is worth checking first.
You gain a question that sorts the field quickly
Ask anybody offering an attunement what happens before the energy is raised. Not what happens
afterwards, which everybody has an answer for. Before. If the answer is a period of preparation
with a describable purpose, you are dealing with somebody who has thought about the mechanism.
If the answer is that the energy finds its own level, or that the recipient’s higher self will
regulate the process, you have learned that there is no preparation stage and that the
difficulty afterwards is the preparation, applied retrospectively, to the person rather than by
them.
You can decline without insulting anybody
This is not an accusation of bad faith against a whole field. Most people teaching these
traditions received them in the same order and are passing on what they were given. But
inheriting a sequence is not the same as having examined it, and you are allowed to want the
examined version without implying that anybody lied to you.
THE PART WORTH SITTING WITH
Somewhere in this field there is a phrase for almost every difficulty a method produces, and
each of those phrases performs the same quiet service. It converts a result into a
confirmation.
A healing crisis, a purge, a clearing, a dark night. Some of these describe something real. All
of them are also extremely convenient, and the convenience is worth noticing.
The question is not whether the difficult period happened. It is whether anybody can tell you,
in advance and in mechanical terms, why it was necessary.
