Conference Bios

THE SPOON BENDING GUIDE


STEP ONE - PREPARE

You'll want to collect a lot of unwanted cutlery - otherwise, once it starts working, you'll end up without a single functional fork in your house. Which is a little bit annoying once the euphoria of bending them wears off. The best ones are those chunky big old-fashioned ones, usually silver-plated brass. It will work with stainless steel ones just as well, but the core metal in a lot of stainless cutlery is really cruddy, and they snap much easier that old-fashioned ones. Whatever the mysterious process is, it certainly stresses the metal, and a snapped fork is very disappointing.

Get a variety of sizes, from teaspoon right up to big heavy dinner-forks. You might want to start with a little spoon, but once it's happening, you'll want to do something bigger to prove to yourself it's not just mind-over-matter. As you can see from some of the ones I've shown here, you can bend some very heavy cutlery into beautiful graceful curls - that's the kind of thing that makes you convinced that you're not just using brute force without realising.

Charity Shops,  Secondhand Shops, Jumble Sales or whatever you call them in your country, are the best place to buy the right sort of forks & spoons. Buy as many as you can.

STEP TWO - THE GROUP

The session that I went to where I first learned to bend metal was sort of a formal "New Age" spoon bending session. I'm not a New-Ager by any means, but I guess I wanted to see if it was really possible. I didn't expect it to work for me (and indeed, it didn't at that session). There were about 20 adults - mostly New-Agers, of course.

I've read on another site that a group situation works best, especially if there are kids. The communal group atmosphere of excitement apparently helps. A party. I can certainly confirm that I've had more success showing other people how to do it in group situations than one-to-one, so I think there's something to the idea that the group helps somehow. Maybe it's also because some people are naturally so much better at it, and once one person does it in a group and everyone witnesses it, it's pretty hard to stay skeptical. You KNOW it works - you just have to try to make it work yourself.

Also I think that the group situation (especially with children around) help with the "distraction" required to make the cutlery bend.

Once everyone has arrived, had a drink & food or whatever and settled down, you can begin. Put all of the cutlery in the middle and get everyone to choose a piece that feels good when they pick it up. Everyone sits in a circle with their cutlery, and then the lights are dimmed and any music is turned off, (this appears to work best to start with).

STEP THREE - THE VISUALISATION

The visualisation stage is a lot like meditation, or a visualisation exercise.

Dim the lights, turn off any music and get everyone to sit quietly with their eyes closed for the talk-through (this is just a sample, you should improvise rather than reading it like a script):

'Hold the fork or spoon between your thumb and forefinger. Relax, and clear your mind. Breathe slowly and deeply. Listen to your own breathing, and feel the rise and fall of your chest. Imagine you are at a place where you feel most relaxed - on a beach, in a forest, lying beside a log fire - whatever place your mind will take you where you feel totally at ease. The stresses of the world are far, far away. You do not feel sleepy, but you are totally relaxed... totally carefree... safe... comfortable... calm... happy.

Now, imagine a golden ball of energy a few feet above your head. It's spinning and fizzing. You can feel warmth and energy emanating from it. A beam comes out of this ball of energy and into your forehead. It feels warm and tingly. You are drawing energy from the ball in a stream. No matter how much energy you pull from the ball, you can still draw more. It is a ball of limitless energy. You can feel the warmth of the energy spreading from the point on your forehead. It feels beautiful, like warm champagne flowing over your skin, bubbling and tingling. The energy flows over your shoulder and down your arm.

Remember that no matter how much you draw from the ball, there is limitless energy there still. You feel strong and invigorated, but relaxed. The energy flows down your arm, over your elbow and wrist and into your hand. You can feel it's warmth on your skin, flowing into your head.... over your shoulder... down your arm.... past your elbow.... into your hand. You can feel the heat of the energy collecting in your hand, in your thumb and forefinger. You can feel it welling up there, with nowhere to go, like a dead-end.

On the count of three, open your eyes and shout "Bend" three times at your fork or spoon to release the energy into it.'

Turn up the lights as soon as the channelling talk-through is over, and you're all ready for the next stage.

STEP FOUR - THE BENDING

Once everyone has shouted "Bend, bend bend" at their cutlery, you need to explain to them that for the fork or spoon to actually bend requires 'focused inattention'. Chatting to people nearby, listening to music, having a drink or whatever may help. The channelling stage requires focus and concentration, but now you need the opposite - distraction.

You keep holding the fork or spoon (by the neck area is usually easiest for beginners), and every now and then, you give it a gentle 'try' - using both hands to see if it will bend. When it works, this will NOT require any degree of force, it should go quite soft. It's tempting to use a fair bit of physical effort, especially if it goes a BIT soft, and you're impatient like me. It's better to keep putting energy into it until it goes really soft, though - especially if you want to do lovely twirly ones like some of these. Using force will basically just get the handle bend, which you'll never really be sure if you just did by force or if you really got the weird energy thing to work...

The harder you try, though, the more difficult it is. You need to be distracted, not really thinking about it. Hold the cutlery at the point you want it to bend and just 'try' it now and then with both hands. If it's working, it will go soft for a few seconds. This can happen within minutes, or take hours. Sometimes the whole thing goes soft and you can twirl the prongs of a fork around each other, or even roll up the bowl of a spoon (I've only been able to do that a few times). More commonly, it just softens at the point where you were touching it.

Since I get so many emails asking this: YES you use your hands to bend it, but if it's working it will go soft enough to bend with very little effort. So PLEASE don't ask me "do you bend them just using your mind?" as I'll probably get pretty annoyed at being asked the same stupid question yet again.

It didn't actually work for me at the New-Age session I went to. In fact, only two of us out of twenty couldn't do it at the session, and the other failure was a Reiki Master (she thought maybe she was too used to focusing energy in a particular healing way - fair enough, I wouldn't want my insides contorting like these forks). As you can imagine, I'd just seen eighteen other people bend forks before my eyes, so any doubts I had about it being possible were gone - I figured it was just a personal failing of my own *sigh*. Sitting in the car on the way home, though, I wondered if the particular fork I'd tried just didn't like me. In the dark, I picked up a little silver teaspoon*. It immediately turned soft in my hand, and I spiralled the handle tightly. I was soooo happy!

So, the moral of the story is that if it doesn't work the first time you try, don't be disheartened. Keep trying.

The above article on Spoon Bending was sent to me via email. I tried it and it works.


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