Sunday, March 20, 2011

The Way We Were

Caprice celebrated her sixteenth birthday on March 5/1989, but it was anything but sweet.  She had attended a basketball game at school and afterwards felt sad seeing all her friends having fun and going out together and she couldn’t join in, always dependent on others to go anywhere or do anything.  Instead she had to just come home alone and miss out on all the fun.  She felt her life was always the same; nothing changing even though she was trying so hard to believe that one day she would have a normal life like her sister Lisa.  Both my daughters are beautiful to look at and this made it even more difficult for Caprice.  She and Lisa may have looked alike but she couldn’t see herself having a boyfriend and eventually getting married and having children because she was in a wheelchair and who wants someone like that?  It hurt me so to see her suffering like that and inside I silently screamed, ‘it’s just not fair’!  Why does she have to miss out on all the fun of being young and carefree when everyone else she associates with is  ‘normal’?  At school Caprice was Miss Popularity and she was accepted by both boys and girls, but at the end of the school day while all the other kids had things to do and places to go, she had to wait to be picked up to be taken home.  Ah!  Acceptance - the need to be like everyone else.  The human condition that is the trap that holds us back from dreaming the impossible dream and facing the world as an individual instead of one of the pack.  On the inside Caprice was just like her friends, but on the outside - she was different.  She couldn’t hide her flaws.

“When the inside is like the outside and the outside is like the inside.”  (Gospel of Thomas)

I remember her sadness when she first went into her wheelchair (she was seven years old) and suddenly she came face to face with the fact she was ‘different’ and not like everyone else.  She came home frustrated and in tears then too, because she couldn’t join in any of the extra-curricular activities and she had to sit on the sidelines and watch all the other kids having fun.   I remember trying to make her feel better by telling her; “everyone has a handicap Caprice, yours just happens to show.”

Until Caprice, I had never known anyone in a wheelchair.  Why my daughter?  Why not me?  Why not Roy?  Why not my sons David and Jim, why not Lisa?  Why not anyone in either our family trees?  It just seemed to have come out of nowhere.  There had to be a reason and her tears just made me all the more determined to find answers. 

I gave her the old pep talk about how it won’t always be this way for her; lots of other girls don’t go on dates or have any more fun than she does, nor do they have the other perks she does etc., etc., etc., but inside my heart was breaking. I just had to find a way to make her pain go away!  I wrote in my journal:  “Please God, if you’re listening, help us to be strong.  Do not let anything deter us.  Surely by now you know we will honor our promise to continue helping others?  We will not let you down.”

“When the pain of remaining the same exceeds the pain of change, you will change.” (Modern Mantra)

In Dickie Motherwell’s psychic reading in September 1987, she said Caprice would be married in the future.  One of Shera’s readings said she would have friends all over the world and lots of them and this is true today.  All the psychic readings pointed to Caprice being healed, maybe even walking again!  Both Roy and I had also seen her walking in a dream, so had Carleen (her sister in law), friends, and even strangers.  As a matter of fact, in May of 1989, Lisa, Caprice and I were in Vancouver for a fun weekend away and we wandered into a crystal shop to look around.  We no sooner walked through the door when the owner of the store said to Caprice, ‘I knew you were coming, I dreamt about you last night’.  Now - Lisa was having a hard time with all this weird stuff Caprice and I were into and when she heard this her face went white and all she wanted to do was get outta there.  He too told Caprice she would walk again! Caprice and I go back to his store (Amethyst Creations, 2746 4th Avenue W) whenever we are in Vancouver and the last time in 1999 he asked Caprice why she was still in her chair and he added, ‘you can get out of it you know’).  Imagine that!  

Is it any wonder we began to think that maybe, just maybe, dreams do come true?   The thought that she might one day be able to walk again kept Caprice and I motivated, so why not go there?  Who was I to say that miracles cannot happen?  I had learned from the people who came to me for healings that hope is what really heals a person and hope comes from the inside.  It was their faith in the thought I was a healer that helped them, not anything I did…except maybe give them a reason to hope.  So, as impossible as our expectations were, hope reigned supreme.  Why?  What made us even think such a thing could happen? Well, ‘what if’ there was a way?  We had already seen huge changes in her physical condition since beginning the healings, changes that were not supposed to be possible (I mean, how does one revive dead nerves?) so why not believe that anything was possible?

“Hope is the opposite of despair.”  Deepak Chopra

I was caught between a rock and a hard place.  Which way do I go?  Who do I listen to?  I was torn between the pull of two opposites and neither were working; one minute here and one minute there.  From where I sat I had no choice.  Caprice was all I cared about and to watch her body slowly deteriorate in front of my eyes was not an option.   I was willing to head into no-man’s-land and risk losing in order to gain and that is exactly what happened.  It is a good thing I couldn’t see into the future.  If I had known then what I know now…where would I have found the strength to persevere?  Maybe our expectations were too high and maybe we fell short of accomplishing them, but then - we’re not dead yet!  If I hadn’t plunged in headfirst would she be alive and well today?  The prognosis given for her disease hung like a stone around our necks and I just couldn’t accept there wasn’t another way.     

“The body is a learning device for the mind.” Alice Bailey

“Anyone can do what I do if they are willing to pay the price.” Edgar Cayce

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

What Goes ‘Round Comes ‘Round

We arrived home from Hawaii to three feet of snow and freezing cold temperatures and it felt wonderful! While we had the best holiday it didn’t feel like Christmas to me while basking in the sunshine, so from that moment, I decided to stay home at that time of year.  The great thing about getting away was that I didn’t have to think about doing healings or reading or meditating or journaling or the stores.  I hadn’t realized how hectic my life had become until I left it all behind.  We received good news from Lisa when we returned. She was pregnant with our first grandchild!

She and her husband Russ had been trying for so long, but there was an extra, added bonus to the timing of it all. I love it when the Plan comes together!  Lisa had been managing our stores for us since Caprice’s surgery in 1986 and without her help I do not know how I would have survived.  She did an excellent job and was receiving a very healthy salary for doing so.  The new owners of our stores had taken over in September and had immediately removed her from any managerial duties pretty much delegating her to a salesclerk only.  As they did not need to pay a salesclerk such a high salary they did everything in their power to force her quit.  She came to me frustrated and in tears.  Lisa loved her job and was a talented, highly motivated merchandiser.  It was humiliating for her to have to go to work every day and be treated as if she did not exist.  I told her no matter what they said and did, try and make the best of it and just get through each day as best she could and take their money.  Make them fire you and then they will have to pay you severance pay.  So for months she did just that, and then…she discovered she was pregnant, but she didn’t say anything at work.  Finally, they got the picture that the only way to get rid of her was to fire her and they did just that.  Lisa received a large severance check and was also eligible for maternity leave.  Now that’s karma!  She would have resigned on her own in a few more months.  Who had the last laugh now? 

"Karma:  the totality of a person’s actions in any one of the successive states of his existence, thought of as determining his fate in the next.” (Webster’s New World Dictionary)

“For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” (Otherwise known as the Law of Cause and Effect)

“For every physical reaction there is a metaphysical reason.” 
       
                   
It really is a true statement when it is said that word of mouth is the best advertising!  I had no sooner arrived back home and the phone started ringing from people asking for healings. How on earth were they finding me?  I certainly wasn’t advertising.  Unlike Rod, who gathered clients wherever he was and whomever he happened to be standing next to, my lips were sealed.  Again, unlike Rod, whose clients were mostly cancer patients, I was drawing people with all manner of ailments that were not imminently life threatening, but still extremely painful and for which medical science did not have a satisfactory solution, but no cancer patients…except for one.

Before our trip to Hawaii, on one of Rod’s weekend visits to our home in September, a young man named Darrell brought his mother Retta, suffering from an advanced cancer, to see Rod. While Rod and I were doing a healing on her, I looked over at Darrell sitting off to the side and he appeared to be in a lot of pain.  I left Rod and Retta and walked over to him and asked what was the matter.  He said he had back problems and he was always in pain.  I asked if he would like me to try to help and he agreed.  After only a few minutes the pain was gone and with an incredulous look on his face he said to me, “how did you do that?”  He was hooked!  Darrell took a more hands on route to using the healing energy.  To this end, he took course after course after course.  He and I were both driven to learn more, to try and figure out what this strange force was that had suddenly taken over our lives.  We spent many hours discussing all manner of spiritual topics and today he is still a close friend of Caprice and I.  He even shares Caprice’s birth date, March 5th.  Eventually he opened a health clinic in the basement of his home which offered many body healing therapies such as colonic irrigation, touch-for-health, massage, etc., along with herbal remedies for every ailment all of which helped me tremendously and taught me much about my own body and how to care for it holistically.  One more thing I have to mention; Darrel may have learned about the ‘mechanics’ of the body but he had that ‘something’ else in his fingers – something that no course can give – magic! 

As I reflect back to these past memories I am thinking now how so many ‘coincidental’ meetings, that came and went unnoticed by me at the time, were so very relevant to what was to come next.  Two people has come into my life, first Rod and then Darrell, both deeply committed to healing others, but with very different methods and then…there was me, caught in the middle of two opposites.  Neither Rod’s way nor Darrell’s fit me.  Both of them were comfortable with their roles, but not me.  I constantly fought against the tide of giving all my control to some invisible being ‘out there’.  Whenever Rod and I worked together I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was missing something.   Rod noticed the difference between us as well.  After one of our healing sessions he made the comment - “the energy is the same, but you work differently than I do in that you talk to people and get them to express their feelings verbally.”  I remember saying to him that God had given me this mouth for a reason.  Ding!  Ding!

“The true voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” (The 21 Lessons of Merlin)

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Seeing is Believing

It was December 1988 and the money was in the bank from the sale of our two stores.  I had decided a vacation was in order to celebrate our newfound freedom and so I had booked a two-week vacation to spend Christmas in Hawaii for Roy, Caprice, David and I.  The first week was spent on Oahu and what a fun time we all had boating, swimming in the ocean, snorkeling with the fishes at Hanauma Bay, a luau, lots of shopping and just generally relaxing in the sun.  The second week we left Oahu and headed for Maui, but a strange thing happened to me when I stepped off the plane as soon as I my feet hit the ground.  I went from feeling happy, happy to suddenly becoming very cranky and irritable.  As we walked around that evening doing some window shopping nothing I looked at appealed to me in the least and I could not have cared less about being there. What on earth was wrong with me I wondered?  I ‘came back’ the next day but I didn’t really ever get to feeling relaxed while we were there.  One other strange thing happened on the 4th day.  Roy and David had left early to go fishing.  When I woke up Caprice was already awake with severe pain in her stomach and had to throw up.  I did a healing on her and she went back to bed for several hours.  She slept soundly until lunchtime and woke up feeling fine and said she was hungry.  We went down for lunch and she ate a hamburger of all things, with no ill effects I might add.  David and Caprice were sleeping in the same room and when David came back from fishing he told us that on the night before, he woke up and Caprice’s body was surrounded by a glowing green light…‘very big and very bright’ (no wonder she had to throw up the next morning!).

Now, as I sit here in the year 2010 reading my journal entry about our Hawaii trip and being reminded of that glowing green light, another memory surfaces, one I hadn’t recorded in my journal at the time.  It was January 1987...I know, I know! - this is getting confusing, but if you think you’re confused imagine being me!  Here I am trying to recapture the events from my past in the order they happened, one year, at a time and now I’m backtracking while I’m backtracking.  I was staying at Shera’s while taking the Reiki course.  The first day had ended and I had just gone to bed.  There I was, sitting in the dark and I happened to look at my hands and they were glowing with this same green light.  Now I’m thinking – why didn’t I think this was important enough to record in my journal?  I looked.  Nada.  Not a word!  Seems to me something this odd would be worthy of a mention?

Then, as fast as this memory surfaces, in comes another and back I go yet again to September 1987 and Dickie Motherwell’s psychic reading (mentioned in my blog post ‘Wisdom In A Mystery’).  For some reason the Maui memory made me think of something she had said in that reading that I should check out.  It wasn’t much, just a few words; ‘do you like Hawaii? – Maui?”  Now why did she ask that?  I had never been to Hawaii? 

Like links in a chain these flashbacks started a raft of memories of all the times I was given a ‘heads up’ before an event happened (and I have twenty-four years of them in my memory bank!).  As I began to write my next post after ‘I’ll See You In My Dreams’ my brain blew up, or at least that is what it felt like.  Suddenly what appeared to be insignificant, unrelated incidents that meant nothing at the time now came together in one gigantic explosion in my brain and they just never stopped.  All day and all night, day after day after day, back and forth for the past four months the memories came in and went out from the past to the present and back to the past. Talk about time travel!!  It’s exhausting!  When I sit down to write I have no set plan as to what will appear on the page, I just sit and wait for the words to come to me – no chitter-chatter getting in the way.  I had so much going on in my head there was no way I could write anything and besides, my head hurt along with some other uncomfortable, painful body symptoms.             

 “They say the moral of a story comes at the end, but sometimes it comes at the top and sometimes in the middle and you just don’t get it until the end.”


The above quote came to me three weeks ago as Caprice and I watched the first episode of a new television series called ‘Harry’s Law’.  Imagine that! What is the moral, or maybe the word reason would fit better, of our story?  Well, is it not interesting that David, Caprice and I all experienced something unusual while we were in Hawaii albeit each of us in a different way?  My emotional body shifted temporarily when I got off the plane; Caprice’s physical body was temporarily affected; and David had a spiritual moment, but Roy appears to have ‘missed’ it all (but did he?).  And is it not interesting that all this time later my notes, or lack of notes, should cause my body and mind to be so thrown?  How can something that happened twenty-two years ago now create such inner turmoil in my body and my mind?  I knew from practical, hands-on experience how this force, called by many names, changes the workings of the body.  So?  Do I doubt that what the three of us experienced was this same energy?  Not now - but in 1988 I hadn’t even touched the surface of how powerful this energy is and how It is always with us whether we know it or not.  It does not matter whether a person believes or does not believe; the memories sit inside waiting for the right ‘moment’ to make their presence known.  Like it or not, the power resides within each and every person on this planet.  It’s up to the individual to set the time and place.   

When Caprice and I moved into this house in 2003 the backyard was totally overgrown with weeds.  The following spring a friend asked me what I planned to do with the garden and I honestly did not know where to start.  The following Saturday he showed up unannounced with a dozen people to help me begin to pull out the weeds.  Lo and behold, underneath all those weeds was a work of art completely hidden from view.  What a joyous day that was!  Our yard was alive with so much fun, so much laughter and excitement as one rock wall was uncovered and then another and another.  Plants that had been buried for more than fifteen years were still alive underneath all the weeds!  To all of you who were here that day, I thank you.  This garden is as much yours as it is mine.  Now this is what I call a happy memory! 

Someone had put a lot of time, energy and thought into designing and building this garden.  I do not know who you are or where you are, but I thank you as well.  Since that day for the past seven years I have nurtured and tended this garden back to its original glory and today…there are no more weeds!

The body is no different than a garden.  Painful memories lie stored in the subconscious like weeds in a garden and can choke the life force right out of the body if they are not ‘pulled’ out.  It requires hard labor to restore a body from sickness to health, but with help from friends and a willingness to ‘get the job done’ it can be accomplished.  With this thought I have to ask - ‘Who is the designer and creator of the human body?’   

“Luck is a four letter word spelled W-O-R-K and lots of it.”
(brother Ken)

Guess I can call myself lucky!



                            That was then......

                            ...and this is now!

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

The Long Days Journey Into Night

THE AWAKENING -“A time comes in your life when you finally get it…when, in the midst of all your fears and insanity, you stop dead in your tracks and somewhere the voice inside your head cries out…ENOUGH! Enough fighting and crying and blaming and struggling to hold on. Then, like a child quieting down after a tantrum, you blink back your tears and begin to look at the world through new eyes. This is your awakening.” (author not known)


What a relief to finally be sitting at my computer again! I was beginning to wonder if I would ever write again. What hit us since writing my last post is a mystery that will have to wait until later, much later to relate. I am presently writing about the beginning of our story and this is the end. I have a lot of ground to cover until any of it would make sense to anyone but Caprice and I.


“The years teach much that the days never knew.” (movie, Shadows Under The Sun)


Time heals all wounds they say. Well! This wound cut deep; so deep we didn’t know it was there. Life has a way of throwing us curves we don’t see coming. Since writing my last post on Sept. 27th my computer has sat closed on my desk. I kept looking at it wishing something would prompt me to get writing but the days went by and turned into weeks and then into months. I had been looking forward to starting on the next one, which was to be dated December 1988 and, as was my custom, had read my journal entries for that time and Bang! - Everything came to a screaming halt. Something had triggered a bomb that went off in my brain and shut me down and because Caprice and I are writing and reliving this together, whatever it was hit her too. Why?


It turns out to be connected to something I was about to write that released a whole mess of garbage long buried. Subconsciously I did not want to remember my pain and so I had buried it deep within the cells of my body where it couldn’t hurt me. I buried it so well I didn’t even know it was there, and there it sat until I began to bring it to the surface by writing this blog. Secrets have a way of being found out, even ones you do not know are there. Given time (which I now have) and the opportunity (gained from all the knowledge I now have) the mind responds triggering a body reaction which in turn triggers a mind reaction and round and round it goes creating a steadily increasing chaos in the body and the mind until suddenly, in a moment, it all comes together into total coherence, order and tranquility……… and then………there is no explaining the elation this brings.


I can see clearly now
The rain is gone
I can see all the obstacles in my way


Seems to me I’ve heard this song before?


In December of 1988 I had become so focused on seeking and learning that I wasn’t paying attention to what was in front of my face. Drugs create chemical changes in the brain and dull the intellect. So does soul work! So many strange, new things were happening so fast and furious I was carried away. It was all very exciting and all I could think of was healing Caprice and to this end hope reigned supreme. I was determined to follow my nose and let the chips fall where they may. I took no interest in dealing with business matters and finances and besides, Roy was going to make us millions. Was it a mistake? All depends on how I see it. If I could, would I change anything knowing what I know now? Why gamble with success? It doesn’t really matter because it’s all in the past now and besides, even if I had been told the truth I wouldn’t have believed it anyway.


“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” (Albert Einstein) Amen to this. Thanks Al!


“From the point of greatest imbalance, comes the point of greatest stability. Perfectly balanced forces result in a net movement of zero – and there can be no growth without movement. Movement should result in the direction of the weakness, where it is most needed. Perfect balance results in perfect stagnation.” (21 Lessons Of Merlin-July1990)

Sunday, November 28, 2010

To Denise

To Denise, my friend for 13 years, 2 months and 15 days. We were unalike as night and day and yet we forged a bond that could only be called soul. I will not forget what the gift of your friendship has given to me. Love, Elizabeth

Monday, September 27, 2010

I’ll See You In My Dreams


When I began this ‘trip of a lifetime’ I lived a normal life (and I use the term loosely). I didn’t know there was another ‘me’ inside this body that was about to make itself known. I was pretty set in my ways. I had my beliefs and had no intention of changing. It just happened with no warning as I sat and waited for Caprice to come out of surgery. My friend Elisha took me to her friend’s house to get me out of the hospital. While there, her friend put on some soothing music (she thought) for me to listen to. It was a Zamfir tape that I loved, but the moment I heard the familiar melody all my resolve to be strong for Caprice went out the window. In a flash I broke down sobbing uncontrollably. Elisha asked me if I wanted to go back to the hospital, but I couldn’t speak, all I could do was nod yes. It’s amazing what music can do to a body! I know there was a message from my soul in the haunting melody of this song and this is the reason why it touched my heart, first with joy and then with the sadness that is so necessary to move the stubborn personality out of place. For years I could not listen to this tape without tears flowing, but today I am happy to say I can once again feel happy when I hear it because I know my soul and I are singing the same song. Everyone has a special signal that will come when a person is ready. Listen for it!



I can only stay focused on writing for so long and then I need to come back ‘down’ to earth for a while and get busy doing something physical. This is the reason for the gaps in time between posts. If I do not do this it would be so easy for me to get lost in my reverie and forget about the fact that I am a physical human being living in a material world that demands I pay attention to it every once in a while or all manner of things can go ‘wrong’.


Something happened last week that brought this ‘lesson’ home big time. I was visiting a friend and I was admiring her garden. She pointed to a plant and told me it was sage used for smudging (practiced by First Nations people to clear away negative energy) and she gave me some to take home. When I got home, Caprice and I remembered back to a time when our friend Bruce, who walked, talked and breathed spiritualism, was visiting us. He decided to light up some sage and ‘smudge’ our house and yard and he practically asphyxiated us the smoke was so thick! As this memory came to our minds I wondered out loud when he would drop in again unannounced, as was his way. Hours later we received the sad news that Bruce had passed away by his own hands. Our hearts sank and we felt so sad at hearing this news because we knew we would not be seeing him again. I met Bruce when he and my son David were in high school together. He was a young man who struggled all his life caught between the physical world and the spiritual. I remember him telling me he was abducted by aliens when he was five years old! Bruce had a difficult time keeping his feet on the ground. He was an Aquarian after all. He was also in a double jeopardy situation. In addition to a childhood experience of the third kind, he also suffered from bipolar disease, which made things that much more difficult for him to function in a logical, rational way. He tried so hard to stay in touch with this world, but he was never really ‘here’ with or without his meds. When he was on them life had no meaning, he felt flat lined; when he went off them he would fly for awhile and he came alive, excited, self-confident, and his creative juices began to flow. He had one passion - to get a screenplay he had written produced into a movie and to this end, over and over again, he would get so close, but without his meds he couldn’t maintain the mental processes necessary and he would lose control and wind up in the hospital defeated again. What a roller coaster ride he had. He visited us last January, just popped in unannounced as he so often did, and it was clear to us from his behavior that the manic state of mind was in full swing. Sure enough, he called me at the end of June deeply troubled and in a terrible state, the worst I have ever witnessed in all the years I have known him. He needed to go into the hospital as he has had to do so often, but he was so agitated that when I suggested this it wasn’t what he wanted to hear from me. He chose another way, but while he was here he taught me much about the dangers of flying too high in the spiritual realm and by doing so forgetting to pay attention to the practical business of living in the physical.


Goodbye for now Bruce. You are ‘home’ now. We will miss your presence here in our lives, but I have no doubt I’ll see you in my dreams.


Monday, September 20, 2010

Lost and Found

It seems forever since I last posted. Where was I anyway? Oh yes, the speech I gave at the M.D. dinner. While I may not have been writing my mind is still going – and going – and going. Now I have to try and put it all down and this is going to take a minute, or two, or three. So many triggers going off in my mind taking me back, back to where I was, I am reeling from it all. Boy! How do I put it all together so it makes any sense? Well, it doesn’t, at least not in any logical, rational sense. Good thing I have learned over the years that there comes a time to let the intellect go and just allow the mind to roam wherever.

In 2009 our beautiful dog Lucy became sick. She needed constant care and Caprice and I needed something to take our minds off ‘losing’ her so we rented the DVD’s of the television series ‘Lost’. We began to watch and we were hooked. Lucy left us a week later and all we did all day long to try and ease our pain of not having her with us was sit and watch this show. Last year (2009), was the final season and the DVD was just released this month. Of course, we had to buy it! Right after my last post was written we decided to watch the special edition disc. They were reminiscing over the past six years of writing, producing and filming the series and what it feels like to them now that all that has come to an end. One of the producers being interviewed said something that caught my attention:


“As T.S. Elliot said, we have arrived at the place where we started and are experiencing it for the first time.”
“It is liberating to share what we have kept to ourselves for so long”.


Bells went off in my head when I heard this as you can imagine. I mean, is this not exactly what I am feeling as I go back and ‘experience’ the events of Caprice’s and my journey? Liberated! Now that it is all over we can enjoy the ‘trip’ without experiencing any of the physical and emotional ups and downs. We met so many people; had so many beautiful and not-so-beautiful experiences that have now all united into one BIG learning experience.


I am remembering being single again after my marriage ended and men were coming on to me left, right and center. One of them was a handsome, charming, married stockbroker who was sure he could get me to agree to becoming his mistress (on the side of course). He told me that anything he desired, if he put his mind to it, he got – and he wanted me. Talk about misinterpreting the power of positive thinking! I found it amusing he could be so full of himself, but he did give me a gift, a book called ‘The Magic Of Believing’. He said I would understand why he felt so confident if I read it. I did just that. One line ‘spoke’ to me and it went something like this: “In times of deep turmoil, think ahead to the worst possible outcome and find a solution to that problem and then? - There will be no problem”. It has held me in good stead ever since, especially through my years of seeking to understand myself from a spiritual perspective. By the way, it did not work for him in this instance. Guess he missed that part! To try and use your personal power of mind to rule another for personal gain goes against the law of cause and effect that says; ‘what you sow, you reap’ and it will boomerang back to you and someday, sometime, someone will eventually ‘pay it back’.

Okay, back to the present/past (Nov. 5, 1988). On November 7th, two days after I gave my speech for M.D. I wrote in my journal: Roy and I are leaving for Arizona today. That’s it! That’s all I wrote. Imagine that. One line and nothing else after that, and yet, this trip was one of those ‘aha’ times for me. Roy attended a Professional Golf Association tournament every year and this year it was held in Phoenix, Arizona. I loved it because when he was out golfing all day I got to snoop around and do whatever I wanted and it was always held in a classy resort, which wasn’t too hard to take. We had already gone to Bermuda and the Bahamas. After the tournament we drove to Sedona, Arizona, a New Age Mecca. I felt like a kid in a candy store! The entire place was alive with psychics, crystals, bookstores, health stores and healers as well as guided tours to visit the ‘vortexes’, specific places where the ‘energy’ is higher than normal. Of course we went on one of these! Anything and everything connected to spirit was there. It was magical for me to be surrounded by people who accepted the realm of spirit as perfectly normal. From there we drove to the Grand Canyon, and that too was awe-inspiring, but it was freezing there and as I was in shorts, we didn’t stay to long. It was all a bit overwhelming for me – and yet? Not a word about it did I write once I got home? Maybe it was a little too much methinks.

Rod had taught me about absentee healing where the energy could be ‘sent’ to a person at a distance, so now I not only had people coming to my house almost daily for healings, I was getting calls from other cities so I became very busy. I was totally immersed in the healing work to the point I became disinterested in day-to-day activities that were not related to the spiritual. With the sale of our stores I no longer had to go to work, my relationships with friends went by the wayside, not because of any disagreements, it just happened. Besides, Caprice was still in constant pain and although we accepted there were changes occurring in her body, adjustments being made, it was difficult for us to be patient. Twice, both times when she was in bed, both times extremely painful, she received a powerful jolt that felt like a knife jabbing right through her. The more healings I did, the more I was pushed to keep searching for answers. There had to be one! Answers came and I would think I knew, but the questions just kept surfacing. I would get a sense of what a person needed to hear and pass it on and I began to see a pattern emerging. Always, it was the same message. CHANGE! Although I continued to believe in what was happening, I was having difficulty with the ‘not knowing’ and having to have this blind faith. It was one thing for me to believe, but what about the people I am trying to help? If everyone I work on has to go through what Caprice was going through and if it takes this much effort, how many will have the stamina to stay with it and not give up? Does it have to be this difficult? Something didn’t add up. I felt caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Shanon’s tape said something about this?


‘This is one who will find greatly she will feel as though her soul has been dismantled in that there will be the feeling she has been sliced and cut down the middle and that she knows herself not and that there is confusion and that there is an isolation, but more than that, there is the desire by her to alienate from that which she was part of and which she no longer desires to be part of.’


Well, that pretty much says it like it was.
Then I began reading the book, ‘A Course In Miracles’ and in chapter one I read; “Miracles are natural; when they do not occur something has gone wrong.” Oh boy! I quickly realized this book was going to take more than the three weeks the library allows so I went out and bought it for myself. I didn’t understand a word of it then, but I kept reading, all 1,231 pages of it, even if it did take me several years to get through it! This was definitely not light reading by any stretch of the mind, but it was the catalyst that turned me away from so much focus on physically doing healings to healing at a different level (as Shanon’s first reading from Havar had mentioned in my post titled ‘What Can I Say?’).


“The body is a learning device for the mind.” Ding! Ding! I was certainly finding out this was the truth – and another - “Only the mind is capable of error. The body can act wrongly only when it is responding to misthought.” (A Course In Miracles) Oh boy! Why isn’t there a book that explains in ten easy steps how to find a miracle and put it in a language I can understand?