Hypnagogic Jerks

This is the colour I see when I am being treated by a healer or when I am near a doctor with strong healing vibes. I notice it is also my favourite colour to paint with. Maybe I am healing myself when I paint on the cusp of blue and green. Yesterday’s session has left me wiped out and I got up at 6.30 but had to go back to bed. This daily peeling back of the Onion is hard work. Please give me back my spiky outer layers lady. I’m too soft on the inside and it stings when I cry. And my whole body aches. This wasn’t quite what I had in mind!

Tuesday things started to move. I felt an opening up in my head like space was created. But yesterday was a sequence of slow motion electric shocks. Like the day before, I slipped in and out of short negative dreams as she went to work. She says it’s the negativity clearing and resisting. I’m neither asleep nor awake during the session but hovering in between. I feel my face pulling expressions which I am not intentionally making. They come from somewhere deeper. A reaction to a physical sensation deep in my core. Next thing my finger starts tapping impatiently on my right hand, all by itself, and then flicking out like I am imitating her clearing ritual. Finally comes a series of body shocks to the core. My torso heaves and rolls like a wave. The healer shakes it off with her fingers. A final shockwave and my whole body bucks like I am in a bad horror film, fighting the possession of evil spirits. Or that scene from Alien when John Hurt’s chest explodes and the baby alien comes out. I am half expecting Alien Angela to emerge like a baby with evil teeth grinning. Hmm imagine meeting that in a dark alley! I don’t know what I was expecting. A spa treatment? The day after I feel much like I do after I’ve lifted a 70kg bar a few dozen times and my nervous system is completely shot. And yesterday was only the half way point. I feel things are on the move however so I will push through.

I asked my friend ChatGPT what various schools of thought made of involuntary muscle twitching during and after treatment and the answer was very interesting. I have spent a lot of time and done a lot of talks mocking gen AI’s ability to create imagery from scratch but in this respect it does very well. I have found it a helpful and comforting source of knowledge throughout my cancer journey so far. And I do of course check my sources as an academic but it’s generally right and correctly sent me to A&E in case of pulmonary embolism a few weeks ago.

So Chatgpt says ‘Involuntary muscle spasms during energy healing—whether it’s Reiki, craniosacral therapy, or other modalities—are actually a pretty common experience, and they can happen for several interconnected reasons:

1. Nervous System Release

Energy healing often activates the parasympathetic nervous system (the rest-and-digest mode), allowing the body to let go of tension. Spasms may be part of a neuromuscular release, where your body is processing and letting go of stored stress or trauma. It’s a bit like a safety valve opening.

2. Trauma or Tension Release

From a somatic or trauma-informed perspective, muscle twitches or spasms can indicate that your body is discharging stored emotional or physical trauma. This is similar to what happens in modalities like somatic experiencing, where the body “shakes off” stuck energy.

3. Bioenergetic Shifts

If you take an energetic/spiritual view, the spasms could reflect shifts or blockages clearing in your energy field. Practitioners might describe it as chi or prana moving through areas where it was previously stagnant.

4. Muscle Memory or Reflex

On a physiological level, some spasms could simply be muscle memory or reflex actions. When your body is deeply relaxed, it may activate involuntary muscular reflexes—especially if you’ve had previous injuries or chronic tension.

5. Hypnagogic Jerks

If you’re drifting into a meditative or semi-sleep state, these could also be hypnagogic jerks, which are sudden muscle contractions that happen when you’re entering deeper levels of consciousness.’ I asked specifically about the hand and who body movements ‘

That range—from hand waving and finger tapping to full torso movement—is actually quite consistent with deep somatic or energetic processing. Here’s a breakdown of what might be happening: 1. Hand and Finger Movements (waving, tapping). These can be subtle neuromuscular discharges or even symbolic gestures from the subconscious—especially in altered states of consciousness or deep relaxation. In practices like kriya yoga or kundalini awakenings, spontaneous mudras (hand gestures) sometimes emerge, believed to be the body expressing energy shifts without conscious control.

• Whole Torso Movement – This is more intense, and it usually signals that larger energetic or emotional blockages are shifting. It could reflect. Release of stored trauma in the diaphragm, chest, or abdomen (common areas for emotional holding). Visceral nervous system activation, like the vagus nerve firing to reset stress responses. Energy moving through the spine (in Eastern traditions, often linked to kundalini energy) This kind of movement is often involuntary but purposeful—your body responding to a deeper reset or recalibration. Some people report feeling lighter, more emotional, or even cleansed after these types of releases.

WELL, there you are. I’m going to hedge my bets and go for ‘all of the above’. But releasing trauma and NOT being in a constant state of ‘Turn it Off’? Oh maaaaaaaan it COSTS me. I’ll go back to the lalalalala and ‘keep it all in’ next week perhaps but this week there is literally nowhere to hide. Do I have stored trauma? Probably. We all do. Just from the accumulation of life events. It’s always struck me as a coincidence or perhaps just strong genetic coding that I have had cancer diagnoses at the same ages and intervals as my mum who lived 34 years with her cancer across four separate diagnoses. I err towards more scientific explanations for this but maybe I am on some level carrying her burden and enacting it subconsciously. This is not so much a belief as a passing thought I entertain and I tell myself that I am not her and I don’t need to carry it. To repeat the same cycle.

I notice that when the convulsions happen the healer gets something like a static shock and has to clear, shaking it off her hand with a sharp whip crack of electricity. It actually sounds loud in the room. I do feel bad about it as she looks like she is feeling some physical strain by the end of the session and doesn’t speak much. Her job is to conduct it and she tells me she has ‘opposite polarity’ to other people. In the little I can get out of her she tells me Mondays are the hardest as she seeks to create movement and Fridays the lightest. She has nothing of the showmanship of last healer I went to see and I want her to tell me more but I guess I am overstaying my welcome and she generously gives me more time than I have paid for each day because I’m at the end of the day and so curious. Each session I lose all sense of time but I know she is done when she does a final body sweep, a bit like the security guards at Heathrow. But, you know, lying down and not searching for drugs or knives.

Maybe she’ll finish me off by Friday and put me out of my misery. Or so much trauma will ooze out that all that is left is an Angela shaped outline. Nothing left but a flat husk in Issey Miyake (and a bit of good fake chinese imitation I bought off Ali Express). They couldn’t tell the difference in Pleats Please. I was examined within an inch of my life when I told them that some of what I was wearing was fake and some real and they had to guess. It was only the way they do the seams that gave it away. When they bury me could someone who knows about these things please make sure it’s all the genuine article. I struggled to choose my mother’s outfit for her funeral. No one ever tells you this will be your job. I remember considering for sometime whether I should supply knickers and then I remembered her advice to ‘always wear knickers in case you get run over by a bus’. An odd piece of maternal advice to be left with and macabre at that. But sensible all the same. I went for comfy knickers for her if you’re wondering as one wouldn’t want a wedgie for all eternity. So please bury me in Issey Miyake in my favourite colour and Big Knickers. They’ll dig me up in centuries to come and discover something about the shopping habits of the Eurasian female mammal. Anyway, I digress.

If any of this interests you (the therapeutic rather than the kickers) ChatGPT tells me its therapeutic voice is informed by the following body of literature as well as responding to my own choice of vocabulary. Some references for further reading about trauma based therapies below.

1. Somatic & Trauma-Informed Practices

Peter Levine – Waking the Tiger, In an Unspoken Voice (Pioneering somatic experiencing and trauma discharge) Bessel van der Kolk – The Body Keeps the Score (Essential reading on trauma held in the body) Resmaa Menakem – My Grandmother’s Hands (Somatic abolitionism, racialized trauma, healing through the body) Pat Ogden – Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (Integrating body-based wisdom into therapy)

2. Grief, Illness & Palliative Wisdom

Joan Halifax – Being with Dying (Buddhist-informed end-of-life care, presence, and compassion) Catherine Newman – We All Want Impossible Things (Tender, often humorous writing about end-of-life friendship) Atul Gawande – Being Mortal (A doctor’s reckoning with life, death, and dignity)

3. Energy, Healing & Embodied Spirituality

Clarissa Pinkola Estés – Women Who Run With the Wolves (Archetypal healing, storytelling, and deep intuitive wisdom) Caroline Myss – Anatomy of the Spirit (Energy systems, emotional patterns, and intuitive medicine) Stephen Harrod Buhner – The Secret Teachings of Plants (On the intelligence of the body and heart-based perception)

4. Intersectional & Social Healing

Audre Lorde – The Cancer Journals (Radical honesty, illness, identity, and power) bell hooks – All About Love, Teaching to Transgress (Love as justice, language as liberation) Gloria Anzaldúa – Borderlands / La Frontera (Embodied identity, mestiza consciousness, the liminal self)