Alysia, no don't stop telling your stories. You give us gems of insight.
About your mother's veins--maybe she wasn't ready for healing? There is something to be learned from each experience. We can look at her experience and learn from it--like you said, it is not selfish to receive healing because there is plenty to go around. But she must have needed to learn how to ask/accept healing which she wasn't able to do at the time.
There is a lot I want to respond to on this thread...have to figure out how to sort what I want to say here.
Ok, between Mairlyn's answers and Spooky's and Alysia's, I think what I'm realizing is that it is OK and very necessary to allow ourselves to use and to trust a framework of experience that has been previously set by another's imagination, for example when Mairlyn said she got the same vision of Bruce's experience. Perhaps, Mairlyn, you received it that way as a starting point, and maybe if you had trusted it and ran with it more could have unfolded for you? (I don't want to make you feel like you failed, not trying to do that by any means. I'm just trying to learn from this). Ok, so that fits with "priming the pump" and with "playing along". I too love both these concepts and I find they apply everywhere.
I have had visits by spirits in the dream state and I find that they have to "play along" with what I'm dreaming so that they fit in with my experience. And then when and if I recognize them for what they are, my experience and perception changes and I gain more than I thought possible. The dream, I realize, becomes more than just a dream.
We also learn how to play along during retrievals, so that we are helping the individual see and accept us and their situation. It makes me think we are blind to what is truely around us unless/until we experience something that opens our eyes and makes us aware, but we have to be the ones willing to see.
My husband always tells me I'm a control freak, and it's true but not in a bad way. I don't control others but I like to be in control of myself and what happens to me. I hate surprises and I hate not knowing what to expect, even on a normal every-day basis. I think that is why even as a young child I became so very good at using my imagination. I always had to make up in my mind all the possibilities of what might happen or what could happen in any given situation. In that way, I could be prepared for how to react or how to feel, what to say, etc. I still do this even now as an adult, it is habit I guess. I was very psychic as a child, always knowing what would happen next and always feeling guilty when something bad happened, like I created it myself. I wonder if psychic ability is what caused me to become this obscessive day dreamer. I think that I used my imagination to plan things so I could be in control, at least in my fantasies. I've always been a fantasizer and daydreamer, always making up situations and stories in my mind. I'm sure I'm not the only one who does this, it's just that I do this a lot. I always wonder what kinds of unconscious intentions am I setting? Could I be creating things that get experienced by others? How does this affect those Consciousness Workers out there? Do I drive them bananas?
Some of you may remember several months ago on a PE thread I mentioned I had tried very hard to do a visit to the crystal by using my imagination and priming the pump so to speak. I made up in my mind what TMI looked like, made up what it was like to look at the crystal, and made up in my mind that Bruce would join me and guide me along. Suddenly I see him in my mind, he shows up beside me, holds my hand and says "thanks for inviting me, it's nice to be here". In my mind, in my imagination, I turned to look up at him (as he's so much taller than me) and I was shocked because I know at that point that I was not in control of making this up anymore. I see him in my mind. Then Bruce playfully says, "Ok, you jump first!" And at that point I think to myself that I didn't plan on having him say that (in my imagination, as I thought I should still be in control of this), and then I thought that I don't even know what he said means. It is because I didn't trust this new situation and play along with it that it ended abruptly right then and there, and I came back to physical reality. I wish I had trusted and went with it and I could have had fun and learned something. But my "control freak" nature, as my husband puts it, made me cancel out this whole process I had so easily set up.
It makes me realize that it is very easy to use our imaginations. We have the ability to do this, to make so many things possible.