Art of Acupressure: In One Aura, Out Another

The fact is, it feels good.

How it works, or more important, why it works are questions you needn’t be concerned with. You can ask, of course. What the heck, it’s your body.

If you have the time and the inclination, you can ask, “What’s going on here?” You may discover that your body is a lot more complex--wondrous, even--than that picture in “Gray’s Anatomy,” the one that looks like a road map with legs.

Psychic Centers You may be perfectly happy schlepping about in the stripped-down model--ears, nose, mouth; lungs, liver, lights; all that good stuff that helps you make it through the night. Atma Kaur Khalsa, if asked, will try to persuade you that your body comes fully equipped, at no extra charge, with psychic centers, auras, chakras, prana, even a “third eye.”

Whichever way you want to go, though, pragmatic or psychic, the result is the same: After Atma has tinkered with the plugs and valves for 15 minutes, it feels good.

Atma Kaur Khalsa makes office visits in a one-woman crusade against stress. What she does is jin shin do (“the compassionate way”), more commonly known as acupressure. (In less exalted moments, Atma has been known to call it “the lazy man’s yoga.”) Whatever it is, it works--at least for a while.

For $15, a modicum of acceptance and a telephone call (876-2551), Atma will appear at your place of employ. (“Appear” somehow seems an apposite verb for the quiet entry of this wraith, a 26-year-old Sikh from Torrance.) She will appear with a little folding chair, a phonograph and what she believes to be a “healing power” in her fingers. Ideally, the healee will find a vacant office, or at least a quiet corner where Atma may play Indian music while she works.

A Peaceful Soul Given a shortage of sanctuaries, she will grapple with your stress at your desk, smack-dab in the vortex of the pandemonium that probably spawned the stress in the first place. A surpassingly peaceful soul, Atma seems oblivious to the tumult of the marketplace; indeed, the implied message of her ministrations is “Pick up thy bedlam and walk.”

For the thin-skinned subject, however, a certain self-consciousness may unbalance the equation of acupressure-in-the-office. The pageant of a slip of a girl, garbed head to toe in white, running her fingers up one’s spine is liable to elicit a certain amount of raillery from one’s co-workers--especially, perhaps, in a newspaper office. Still, whatever turns you on. . . .

Whether in public or in private, the treatment consists mainly in the pressing and subsequent release of points along and adjacent to the spine, the shoulders, the neck, the head, the arms. Depending on the spots--and on one’s degree of tension--the pressure feels alternately celestial or mildly painful. Tender traps of stress you didn’t know you had are coming alive, and if a certain soreness ensues after the first treatment, it seems to be a healthy soreness--akin to the afterglow of three sets of tennis following a six-month layoff.

Occasionally, there is a real jolt, as when Atma leans sharp elbows into the areas below the shoulder blades, but gradually, inexorably, there is an overall dissipation of tension, strain, what Atma calls the toxic fallout of life in the fast lane.

Occasional Instructions During the treatment, there are occasional instructions--more suggestions than commands. In a soft soprano voice (a startling contrast to the finger force of a village smithy), Atma will ask her subject to concentrate on a spot in the middle of the forehead (the “third eye”); to breathe deeply and circularly up the back and down the front; in the end, to visualize a white light, or “aura,” expanding from the body.

Again, one does not necessarily have to believe in what one is doing. One may simply kick back and savor the sensation (though for $15, it seems a waste of a perfectly good aura). It is perhaps enough that Atma believes, for both of you.

She believes, among many other things, that she is exchanging auras with her subject. She explains, with ingenuous authority, that she is working on your seven chakras, or energy centers. (Energy is chi , or prana to the Sikhs.) If you ask further, she will point out the chakra points Delicious Dichotomy But Atma, an altogether delicious dichotomy of California beach kid-cum-spiritualist, also will inquire after the practical results of her treatment as prosaically as a podiatrist who’s just removed a wart from your sole.

On the one hand, she will say straight out that she can see the color of your chakras (“The third eye is purple”). On the other, she will observe with undisguised delight that “you weren’t resisting, or at least you were cooperating pretty well for someone who was essentially resisting.”

“Your energy changed a lot from the beginning,” she will add. “I could feel it. You’re a lot easier to talk to now, not so jittery. You’re mellowed out.”

What kind of a Sikh, you wonder, would describe the object of his therapy as “mellowed out”? Only a Southland Sikh, of course, one who has welcomed the rigors and disciplines of her calling and at the same time infused it with the innate joie de vivre of sand and surf.

Atma Kaur Khalsa prefers, at this point, to keep her Christian name to herself. Her Sikh name, “chosen for me by my spiritual teacher,” means “soul” (Atma) and “princess of the pure ones” (Kaur Khalsa), and she likes it.

Four years ago, Atma, a Roman Catholic from Torrance who was “I guess what you’d call a ‘normal’ person, into boogie-boarding and jogging,” took time out to enroll in a kundalini yoga class at Orange Coast College.

“I didn’t even know what yoga was,” she says. “I walked into this class and there was this man sitting there in a turban, wearing all white. I thought he was a doctor. I didn’t know what a Sikh was either.”

Obviously it was a class that was to transform her life. “It was a very purifying experience,” she says now, “ a very alive experience. It was so real . It made me feel vital, relaxed, happy--I mean naturally happy. A higher consciousness, if you will.”

In Sikhness there is health, she discovered, and she pursued her grail with the zeal that only a convert can muster. She pursues it to this day.

It is a day that starts at 4 a.m. with a 2 1/2 hours of a ritual called sadhana: reading of scriptures; meditation; chanting the naad. There is also kundalini-- “a very powerful breath and postural yoga that takes you beyond what you perceive as your limits”--and occasional forays into the martial arts of kung fu and wing chung , the latter “developing a line of energy. Afterward, I feel much lighter and stronger. At first, you really sweat. It’s excruciating until you really get it.”

If for no other reason, the sadhana is necessary as a source of revitalization, since in the course of Atma’s treatments there is that “exchange of energies, of my aura and yours.”

This, of course, is a swap meet not without its caveats--less for the emptor than the emptee. “I start feeling like the other person, because our auras are combined,” Atma confesses.

Is she not, then, in daily danger of contracting dry rot from an aura with a terminal case of the nameless dreads?

“Oh sure,” she says, “but I can get rid of it through my sadhana. He can’t.”

Moreover, Atma appears to be a soul of transcendent calm, a calm born, perhaps, of a discipline not merely accepted but embraced. She and her fellow Sikhs, for example, are strict vegetarians, eschewing “eggs, meat, fish, poultry, anything that can crawl, walk, swim or fly--or wanted to but couldn’t because somebody bopped its head off.”

They do not cut their hair, which they consider a source of energy and which may or may not explain why women are more rambunctious than men. Contrarily, they cover it with a turban “because it absorbs negative energy. The turban is wrapped pretty tightly, you’ll notice; it presses down on the ‘arc line,’ the points of commitment, and we remove it only for sleeping.

These and other dogmas combine to rid the life of stress--or most of it, at any rate.

“Oh, I’m subjected to the same pressures as anyone else,” Atma says, “but I suppose I deal with it more effectively.”

If she is stress-free, one wonders, why does she talk so fast? “Well, I have a little stress,” she says. “Also, of course, I have five planets in Virgo, and Mercury, as you know, rules Virgo. . . .”

Of course. Still, however one chooses to perceive the style and substance of this blue-eyed Sikh with the gentle hands of steel, the fact remains that her treatments seem to work. And how they work remains, for most, an enigma.

“I’m not trying to convert anybody,” Atma says. “That’s not our style. Relieving their stress is quite enough.

“But at the same time, I am having a deep effect on their consciousness.

“I’m not really sending a message, but if I were, it would be this:

“We’re all here to help each other. And if we’re not, we should be.”

That feels good too.