Green eyes

Grandmother Luda and grandfather Slava had three daughters - Sveta, Nina and Angelina, my mother.

But once my grandmother said that they actually had four children - the firstborn, Ivan, died in infancy.

- And after him only girls were born. God didn't give me any more sons," she sighed sadly.

When the whole family moved from the village to "Airfild", the three sisters planted a birch tree in front of the house, as if these trees personified the three of them.

The saplings grew and became three large, beautiful trees.

And then someone cut down one of the birch trees.

It was my mother's birch tree, and she was very upset because she thought it was a bad omen, as if she herself had been cut down by an axe.

Neither my mother nor Aunt Sveta, as far as I know, had supernatural powers. The gift of being a witch and a healer was only passed on to the middle daughter, Nina.

When she was a child, in the cellar of their old wooden house, she repeatedly noticed a certain being that looked like a little girl with a green eye in her forehead.

No one but Nina had ever seen this Cyclops girl.

My aunt was a little afraid to go down to the cellar alone to get potatoes, but the "green-eyed girl" was kind to her, did not hurt her, and never tried to get out of the cellar.

I think my grandmother suspected her middle daughter's unusual gift, so she insisted that Nina go to medical school to become a nurse.

Lump

I was once confirmed by Aunt Nina's healing powers myself.

When I was a child, I went sledding down a hill and crashed into a tree. As it turned out, it was not just a mild concussion. The severe impact dislocated my vertebrae. Years later, the injury developed into an intervertebral hernia that sometimes showed itself. Walking for a long time made my back hurt, but I didn't realize what was wrong with me.

My husband noticed the hernia when he gave me a massage and reassured me:

- I'm going to fix it. I just need to give you a good shake.

And he shook me. Sparks came out of my eyes and a huge lump began to swell on my back.

After this "shaking" I had two options: go to the hospital for surgery or find a good bone therapist. So I fell into the hands of my aunt Nina.

- Oh, my God, - she said thoughtfully, after evaluating the work of her "colleague". - The hard case.

To be honest, until that moment I had no idea that my aunt could treat with her hands. To me, she was just an ordinary nurse, and I didn't really rely on her massage. As is often the case, we are more likely to believe people from outside than those who are close to us. Especially when it comes to our family. We think we know them like the back of our hand, so we don't expect miracles from them.

But I agreed to accept my aunt's help.

Every evening my aunt would lay me on the couch and perform various manipulations on my aching back - crushing, pressing, rubbing with warming ointment, gently tapping her knuckles along my vertebrae, but the unfortunate lump would not even think of shrinking.

"I'm just wasting my time," I thought wistfully. - What if it gets worse?"

A week later, out of habit, I felt my back - the lump was gone! My spine was completely healthy! But Aunt Nina continued the massage for three more days to consolidate the results. At the end of the session, she suggested:

- Let me see something else.

Nimbly, she wrapped her hands around my head and slowly, like a massage, began to feel with the pads of her fingers, revealing all the "weak" places in my body - what to watch out for and what to pay attention to in the future.

Mysterious strangers

Aunt Nina learned the basics of massage at the Glazov Medical School.

There she learned one simple truth: do not entrust your body to a non-medical person. A masseur who does not know basic anatomy can do more harm than good.

In her childhood, her father and mother often took little Nina to the forest to gather medicinal herbs. But the girl hardly listened to her parents, herbs did not interest her.

In high school, Nina spent her summer vacation with a construction team in Moldova.

There a strange man approached her on the street and said:

- Sweet girl, did you know that if you dip a marigold in boiling water and put it to your eyes, you can get rid of nearsightedness? Did you know that if your appendix is inflamed, you should drink a decoction of wormwood? I think that since you are going into the business of treating people, my advice will be useful to you.

My aunt thought the man was crazy and blurted out defiantly:

- I'm not treating anyone! What makes you think that? I don't need it!

And just in case, she prepared to run away from him.

- Yes, you do! - said the stranger to her.

Soon Nina got married, gave birth to a daughter and moved with her family to Kazakhstan, to the town of Shevchenko. Her son Sasha was born there. In those years, babies were sent to kindergartens early, and in order to be close to her son, my aunt got a job as a nurse in a kindergarten.

In 1987, when she was 34 years old, on her way to work she met an old man with a distinctive Kazakh beard, wearing a felt hat like a Kyrgyz and a robe.

The old man stopped and pointed a questioning finger at Aunt Nina:

- Do you treat people?

"Oh, no," Aunt Nina rolled her eyes. - Another madman, unfortunately for me!"

The old man grinned, "You treat - you treat," and slipped her a piece of paper with his address:

- Come tomorrow, I'll be waiting for you.

The next day, Aunt Nina went to the old man's house, though she didn't know why.

Eighteen middle-aged men and women gathered in an ordinary two-room apartment in a city high-rise.

Janibek

The old man introduced himself as Janibek and said he was 81 years old. He had spent seventy of those years in a Tibetan monastery studying Eastern practices. Now he was ready to teach.

By decision of the monastery's council of elders, Janibek was sent to Kazakhstan to find disciples and pass on his knowledge. Not for free.

At that time, education cost a lot of money, in dollars, not rubles.

- For nine months, the mentor taught us to develop our sensitivity and to turn off our inner dialogue, Aunt Nina said. - He often took us to the desert on the shores of the Caspian Sea, where we had to sit on rocks and meditate for a long time.

Concentrating, Janibek could, on a windless day, create a great ripple in the sea or calm a small wave in the wind by a mere effort of will. He could sit cross-legged for hours without moving, while we began to fidget and get distracted after five minutes of meditation.

"Sometimes," Auntie recalled, "the classes were held in his apartment. On those days we would ask the master to play a guessing game with us. Janibek would go into the next room and we would act out different characters.

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And every time he guessed correctly, even though there was a concrete wall between us. The game was our favorite pastime because, unlike meditation, it required no effort.

- I understand now that our behavior caused Master a lot of trouble. Many of us thought that studying was nothing, a waste of time and money.

It was not without reason that Janibek compared his disciples to five-year-old children.

"At three," he explained, "a child is curious, at seven he is teachable. And five is the age of total carelessness."

The aunt was sure that none of them had learned anything by the end of their training, but Janibek didn't see it that way. He did not deny that he had taught his students only the basics, but in his opinion, nine months of practical training was more than enough to give a massage.

At the end, Master gave each disciple a magic item (Aunt Nina got a small quartz crystal) and said that whoever wanted to continue studying would find him and join the group.

The fate of the magic crystal

Aunt Nina wanted to find Janibek, but there was no time for that in the chain of daily affairs and worries. So aunt Nina had given up her studies, thinking that maybe the other students would be more conscientious. But out of eighteen people, not one had found the Master! Not a single "padawan" wanted to follow in the footsteps of his guru.

At the end of the noughties I asked my aunt if she knew where Janibek was now, if he was alive.

Yes, she replied, she had heard from her friends that Master was living in India. Although he is well over a hundred years old, he is still active and alert - even restoring Buddhist shrines in Afghanistan with a group of like-minded people.

The fate of the magic crystal that the master gave to his student Nina is curious.

For a long time the crystal was kept in my aunt's apartment, on a glass stand in the living room, until one day her one-and-a-half-year-old grandson Sasha swallowed it.

The family was terrified and took the boy to an X-ray.

The x-ray showed that there was a foreign object in the child's body, but there was no need for surgery - in a day or two the crystal would come out on its own.

But no matter how much the family monitored the boy, no matter how much they examined the chamber pot, the crystal mysteriously disappeared.

At least they didn't find it in the potty, but the repeated X-rays in Sasha's stomach didn't find the crystal either.

Closing the circle

Among my mother's sisters, the eldest, Sveta, was considered the strictest and most principled. She was almost like my great-grandmother Matrena, so she would bend anyone to her will.

As for Nina, as she grew older, she also began to resemble her mother and grandmother more and more.

My mother recalled that when her sister Nina was young, she dreamed of leaving her father's house as soon as possible to find her own way, to engage in spiritual practices.

As far as I know, she did not even want to have children because of this and fervently discouraged my mother from motherhood.

Many of her dreams came true, but as the years went by, the path she had chosen did not seem as appealing to her as it had once been. The ties of kinship proved to be stronger than she had thought. In addition, a mass exodus of Russians from Kazakhstan began in the mid-1990s. The Kazakhs behaved aggressively toward the Russians, shouting, "Get out, this is our land!"

My aunt gave up everything, divorced her husband, took the children and returned to her homeland. She had nowhere else to go but to Grandma Luda's house. But soon after the relatives arrived, my grandmother had a stroke.

The older my aunt got, the more she seemed to be drawn back to her roots, to the matriarchal way of life. This was especially noticeable after my grandmother's death and the birth of Aunt Nina's grandson, the one who swallowed the magic crystal.

No, my aunt is still fond of esotericism and Eastern practices. She knows how to give massages, read cards and understand herbs, but now the family is the first place for her, where she, as a mother, is the head, the unquestionable authority. The circle is complete.

Massage is a delicate matter

Like any masseuse, Aunt Nina had her own secrets.

For example, she insists that only the massage performed along the lymph vessels can be considered correct.

- In our body there is a large and a small circle of blood circulation - she explains. - You should always start from the head - and go down to the buttocks. Then the hands and arms are massaged, and then the legs - from the bottom to the top. A complete massage takes at least an hour.

- Folk wisdom is right - all diseases from nerves - like to repeat my aunt. - People complain about shoulder pain, back pain, stiff neck, so they go to the clinic for a massage, but it doesn't help. They do not know that up to the age of thirty-three it is possible to do a partial massage, for example, if the elbow is sick - you massage only it, but for older people it is recommended to massage the whole body.

- At this age the disease is like an electric impulse, - she continues. - You treat the elbow, but the pain goes to the lower back. It lurks there for a while, travels through the body, finds a weak spot and hides there. Then it can return to the same place where it started.

Aunt Nina taught me to start the massage with light warming strokes. You shouldn't knead the muscles with the diligence of a dough kneader. The intensity should be increased gradually, from session to session, so that the patient does not wriggle in pain and experiences in the body a pleasant lightness, relaxation, which gradually turns into vitality.

And let the Oriental medicine has a different point of view, take the same Thais - they literally turn the muscles inside out, twist them like wet underwear, but, according to Aunt Nina, Thai massage is suitable only for those who were born, grew up or live in a hot climate. For northerners, these techniques are inappropriate and even harmful.

Why is it necessary to follow a ten-day course of massage therapy if it is possible to adjust joints and vertebrae from the first session? (By the way, many chiropractors do it). It's necessary because if you don't fix the result, a careless movement is enough and a new dislocation or displacement is guaranteed. That is why it is so important not to miss the first week of massage, especially the sixth, seventh and eighth sessions, when the body is most active in fighting the disease.

Aunt Nina never massages more than two or three people a day because it takes too much strength and energy. After each visitor, she washes her hands thoroughly and sometimes even takes a shower to wash off the energy of others so as not to transfer it to the next patient.

Aunt Nina's patients are mostly people with a sedentary lifestyle - bosses, drivers, programmers, people suffering from osteochondrosis or sciatica.

By the way, my aunt could not only relieve pain with her hands, but also "straighten" the head after a concussion and treat herbal infusions. But she didn't massage everyone. She told me:

- One day a woman came to me for a massage. She looked ordinary, but in her presence I literally had a splitting headache and my hands began to go numb. I couldn't massage her at all.

My aunt tried to refuse such energetically toxic people under any pretext so as not to get sick herself.

A dot on the map

Over the years, Aunt Nina had learned to feel where and what a person was in pain.

She would run her hand along the body, and if she felt a cold, it meant something was wrong with the internal organ in that place.

My aunt didn't really understand how she did it, but she always guessed cancer patients. She said that even on the hottest afternoons she felt cold around them. The icy chill that comes from a person is a sure sign that he or she is about to go to the next world.

As for examining the head to detect problems in the body, my aunt never saw mysticism in it.

She used to explain that our head is like a geographical map. Just as we can look at it to find a lake, river, or forest, she could detect diseases, including hereditary ones, by feeling the surface of the head with her fingers, which act like antennas to pick up nerve impulses coming from the internal organs to the brain.

She could also "see" diseases by looking into your eyes. In medicine, there is even a concept called iridodiagnostics, where black dots on the iris signal certain ailments and diseases.

Then Aunt Nina touched an invisible point in the center of the chest. - This is the place where negative energy accumulates. - If you've had a fight with someone, if you're nervous, or if you have a grudge or resentment against someone, it's all here now.

It's easy to find that point. In anxious and nervous people it is very painful.

To release negativity, massage it clockwise. I've tried it, it helps.

Swing

It was strange, my grandmother blessed Aunt Nina on the path of healing, but she did not approve of my efforts in this direction - she thought I had a different destiny in life.

I was offended - why could Grandma Luda heal people and I could not? Why am I worse?

And yet, by spending a lot of time in my grandmother's house, I apparently managed to read some things subconsciously, to memorize them on an intuitive level.

I remember in my grandmother's yard there was a huge swing that looked like a scale with two bowls on it. Only instead of bowls, there were two rings on each side that you had to grasp tightly with your hands.

The swing was usually used by two people. One person would grab the rings and jump up so the other person could grab the rings. Then both would hang in the air for a moment.

But since the weight of each person was different, one would always be lighter, and the heavier partner would have to keep pushing off the ground, otherwise the "skinny" one would be doomed to dangle helplessly from the top. A very dangerous attraction!

One day, as the swings were rising sharply, I was shaken violently, my fingers came loose by themselves, and I fell. It all happened in a split second. I didn't even notice that my lip hit my knee. I didn't feel any pain, but when I got up my mouth was bleeding. My first thought was that I had knocked out my teeth!

When my friends saw the blood, they all ran away. Only an unknown girl stayed in the yard, she took my hand and led me to the water supply.

My mouth was salty. I walked like a blind man, head tilted back, stumbling with every step. I felt my teeth with my tongue, they were intact, but the blood just kept coming out.

The funny thing is that I was most afraid of getting blood on my shirt. If I did, my mom would kill me. I didn't want my family to know about my fall because I didn't want to upset them, and I was sure they would give me a hard time. No, it's better to keep quiet!

After washing my face, I asked the girl to examine me, find a wound in my mouth and put plantain on it. But the girl couldn't find any visible damage. The bleeding didn't stop. So maybe the internal organs were damaged.

I had to find out what it was. I didn't want to worry my grandmother - she would see me, make a fuss, and then tell my parents.

Luckily, my grandmother was asleep when I got home.

Without turning on the light, I slipped into the kitchen and immediately opened the refrigerator. I took out a jar of honey and locked myself in the bathroom. There, in front of the mirror, I finally managed to see what was wrong. I'd hit the inside of my lower lip with my tooth when I fell and almost bit through it.

I rinsed my mouth with cold water, scooped honey from a jar with my finger, and smeared it on the wound as if to glue the piece of bite back in place. And the bleeding stopped instantly! I put more honey under my lip and went to bed.

During the night, the honey dissolved, absorbed where it needed to go, and everything healed perfectly, almost without a trace.

To be continued