Magick cred & Energy

My magickal cred:
Don't think I ever mentioned my magickal "credentials." For about sixteen years or so, I have been part of a traditional Wiccan coven and have been a High Priestess for thirteen. I have my own personal beliefs that differ from Wiccan philosophy, but I have been doing "Low Magick" for a long time now. I am a licensed massage therapist, and part of what interested me in the more practical aspects of magick was experiences I had in the massage field. In bodywork, you tend to meet a lot of different people who have a wide variety of skills, so you tend to (yay) get a ton of freebies. Well, they're usually more like exchanges, but still....

My first real experience with sensing energy came from a Reiki Master who, at the time, hadn't had his final attunement/training. I was getting a massage while still in school. My back was really boogaring me. As I was receiving the massage, a huge band of my back went completely numb. I don't mean that I could feel anything. I knew it was numb from the sensation surrounding it. I half-turned on the table and said, "Are you giving me Reiki?" He just nodded with half-closed eyes. Well, damn. Then, a few months later, I received a Polarity treatment, which I thought was a bunch of hooey but a friend invited me for a freebie at her school's "clinic" so why not? At one point during the treatment, I felt what can only be described as lightning in my chest. Zap, zap, zap. I asked the student what she was doing, and she showed me this motion with her hand a bit like all the fingers of her hand had been bunched together (kind of like the start of a closed-mouth dog in shadow puppets) and touched my chest. She was doing something energetically, which I didn't understand.

At this point, I had been away from the coven for a couple years, more because I wanted to study other things on my own. But this was when I knew there was something more to magick that my High Priestess hadn't taught me. I was going to find out.