We spoke last week about how treating patients like muppets never satisfied me. Today I would like to talk about my encounter with synaesthesia. Two patients forced me to pay proper attention to the way I feel things, a few years before I actually started to meditate.

The stories take place way before I started to hold space for the patients, but they are major events on my path. And somehow, everytime I talked about that, it helped many people to realise that it happens to them as well.

First patient: back pain

The first patient consulted me for a sharp pain between his shoulder blades, slightly to the left of the spine. I remembered that he described how the pain was triggered by breathing in and moving his arm backwards.

I remember treating him, everything was fine really, nothing special to declare. Only when he left, something strange happened to me. Something that is now frequent, but at this time it seemed so random to me that I didn’t pay attention to it.

After walking him back to the door, I went back to my desk. Slowly but surely, I started to feel a pain in my body. So far, nothing abnormal. But, the thing is that pain was located precisely on same spot as my patient, and triggered by the same actions.

I remember thinking that it was really random, but I didn’t pay attention to it as it disappeared after a few hours.

And a second encounter with synaesthesia

The second patient was treated maybe one year later. During that year that separates those two patients, I spent a big amount of time testing the models and beliefs taught by my teachers and seeing them failing ineluctably. But we will talk about that in another article.

So once again, I am in a treatment room with a patient, in Marseille in the South of France. For this case, the timing was different as I didn’t wait for the end of the treatment to realize something. As my hands were under my patient’s skull, I remember feeling a sharp pain in my right elbow, which I found, once again, quite random as I never had pain in that area.

A couple of seconds later, I saw my patient grabbing his right elbow with his left hand and rubbing it as if he was trying to get rid of a pain. Of course, I asked him what was happening to him. And that is when he told me something that changed my life.

Something changed at that precise moment. I thought to myself, “Oh Oh!” as I knew I was onto something new.
At this time, I knew very little about empathy or mirror-touch synaesthesia. I also didn’t know that meditation would help me to deepen that experience and to find stillness. If you are an empath, you might be interested in my 1-on-1 classes.

About Jules Rampal

Meditation teacher and osteopath

I am an online meditation teacher and an osteopath currently working in Gordes, France. My courses are for people who want to learn meditation with guided sessions, and for therapists who want to delve into the way they feel and the knowledge they can gather for their clients.
Book an osteopathic session here
Learn more about me here