Sunday, November 28, 2010
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?
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?
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
God Made Me Do It!
I had been asked to give a speech for the Muscular Dystrophy Association to their clients at a dinner in Calgary on November 5th. I was having difficulty putting it together as I had never given a speech in my life and I was asking myself why I agreed to do it. What will I talk about? Finally, after many frustrating attempts I woke up in the middle of the night feeling very ‘wired’, my body shaking so hard I could hardly write but I knew I had to get what was going through my head down on paper. I had my speech. Would you believe the original draft of this speech fell out of the back of one of my first journals weeks ago?! Now that I am reading it again for the first time since I wrote it so long ago, I am surprised that I actually pulled off a pretty darn good speech, even if I do say so myself. I spoke of how the negatives of this disease are all we parents hear about, but there are also many positives and I went on to describe why I believed this. I spoke of how we built our house for Caprice even when we really could not afford it, but she needed to have independence so we did it anyway. We just worked harder and how doing this for her also gave us something beautiful. She gave us inspiration and kept our priorities straight; how she taught us to appreciate a healthy body and the freedom this gives us to come and go as we please; how to never give up and not to just think about ourselves; and most of all – she taught us the power of love and how everything we did revolved around this love, not just Roy and myself, but also our three other children, who were always there for Caprice…and then – I actually spoke about the mind, body, spirit connection and learning to trust our intuition, and more than that, I talked about healers and I cannot believe I did that. Me! Elizabeth, who liked to keep silent about this spirit stuff because people who are not into it just look at you like you have lost your mind! Apparently I was the one who had lost her mind – to go public like that! What on earth possessed me? I am reminded of a television show from the fifties called the Flip Wilson Show. He was a funny man and one of his favorite expressions was ‘God made me do it’. I rest my case.
Caprice was still experiencing a lot of pain, everywhere it seemed. Shooting pains in her upper back, then her right hip, then her left - she seemed to constantly ache even though she was receiving healings from both Rod and I? Something didn’t compute. I just could not understand, if God was working through Rod and he had such phenomenal success with removing cancer, why was Caprice still in so much pain? Something did not ‘feel’ right. I was missing something. Surely God did not play favorites, so what was the reason? Jesus would pop into my mind and I kept thinking about the miracles He performed. Did He have a different God than Rod? I can see now that if I had not had my vision of Him, as shocking as it was to me, none of the questions I then had regarding what it means to be a healer would have entered my mind. I was absolutely positive - I think - that until I could do what Jesus did, as ridiculous as this thought sounds, I was no healer. Thank God I had that vision! Every time I began to think I knew something the memory of that vision gave me a reality check that kept me from getting ahead of myself and thinking I was something I was not. I was not Jesus and until I could get my head around what I was? I would just have to watch, wait, listen and learn.
An older woman named Ethel arrived for a healing (she was 68!) Guess I better reevaluate whom I call old huh? Ethel was suffering from painful arthritis in her hips, but her biggest concern was a dry-eye condition that was giving her even more pain than the arthritis. She called me the next day and said; ‘I don’t know what you did girl, but I had the first good nights sleep in years and my eyes are not sore. I can even read the newspaper for the first time in fifteen years’. I told her I did not know what I had done either, but if she was happy, so was I. However, this was short-lived and she came back several times and each time she came she poured out her heart to me about things in her life that were causing her great stress. She was a great teacher for me and from her and others that followed I learned that my gift was in helping others release emotional pain, not so much the physical. I began to see that Rod and I were different in our method of healing. He dealt with the physical. I seemed to be more successful with the deeper wounds. I stopped thinking I was doing something ‘wrong’ when someone wasn’t instantly healed.
“Healers are not the source of healing, but aid the one seeking healing in attuning to the spirit within. Healing is awakening the desire to be one with the whole.”
“Healing is the rediscovery of who we are and who we have always been.”
“Nature controls healing from deep within for every cell participates in the body’s inner intelligence responding to the person’s thoughts, emotions, desires, beliefs and self image. Nature did not put up a wall between mind and body. We do this ourselves. The wall exists because we have conditioned ourselves to believe in them. We are prisoners of our own conditioning. Healing is needed to release us from the spells of disease and illness, ignorance and suffering we have put on ourselves.”
(The above quotes were written in my journal, but I am not sure from which book. I was reading so many of them.)
The good news was, thanks to the steady stream of strangers walking through my front door, I was beginning to trust in the fact that all the pain Caprice was in, even after constant healing sessions, was somehow connected to her ultimate healing. The same was true for all the people who came to me for aid in their healing. I would speak of using the pain that appears in the body as a message system to find within self the real cause of the pain and a strange thing would happen. Somehow whatever I said opened the release valve that keeps the emotions locked up tight inside and they would pour out their troubles to me. Over and over again, as I gave healings to people their pain appeared to increase not lesson, but still I did not doubt even though I had no proof in the form of release from pain I was helping them in any way. It baffles me to this day why they kept coming back. Caprice was no exception. She too was experiencing many tearful, emotional reactions to the healing energy and old fears she had never acknowledged to herself were surfacing, but poor Caprice was stuck with me. She couldn’t walk away, in more ways than one. Oh my! We do carry around a lot of baggage in these bodies of ours and when the body becomes overloaded? We get sick!
Meanwhile, we were still receiving continual updates from Shera via her psychic readings and everything regarding Roy’s business plans was moving along in a positive direction. He was still going to make us tons of money! That was a relief, but when Shera called to tell me her sister Shanon wanted to see Caprice and I because she had a ‘message’ from her guide to aid in her healing – now that was a relief! So off to Calgary we went. I did not know what to expect as the last time I experienced a channeller of information it did not sit well with me. Shanon, however, did not speak in a voice that sounded phony at all. She sat quietly and in her own voice proceeded to give me specific instructions on where I should concentrate the healing energy on Caprice’s body. Of course, as soon as we got home we did as we were ‘told’, not because we had to, but because it felt right to us to do so. Odd as it may seem, not once in all these years have Caprice and I felt we were in harms way. We both always felt safe and protected even when things did not appear to be going so well.
In my last post I mentioned finding some loose journal entries. Well, interesting enough there was also another one dated November 1997 (the exact same time of year I am now writing about in 1988). Imagine that! I had come across an exact description of my vision of Christ written by St. Theresa! Exactly ten years since I had my vision in 1987! Ten years I waited for confirmation that I hadn’t lost my mind. Just goes to show how much patience is required to gain this knowledge.
The vision she says:
“passes as quickly as a flash of lightening, yet this most glorious picture makes an impression on the imagination that I believe can never be effaced until the soul at last sees Christ to enjoy Him forever. Although I call it a picture you must not imagine that it looks like a painting; Christ appears as a living Person, who sometimes speaks and reveals deep mysteries. “If I were to spend many years in devising how to picture to myself anything so beautiful”, she says of the imaginary vision of Christ, “I should never be able nor even know how to do it, for it is beyond the scope of any possible imagination here below; the whiteness, brightness, giving excessive delight to the eyes, which enables us to see a beauty so divine. It is a light so different from any light here below, that the very brightness of the sun we see, in comparison with the brightness and light before our eyes, seems to be something so obscure that no one would ever wish to open his eyes again…in short, it is such that no man, however gifted he may be, can ever in the whole course of his life arrive at any imagination of what it is. God puts it before us so instantaneously, that we could not open our eyes in time to see it, if it were necessary for us to open them at all. But whether our eyes be open or shut, it makes no difference whatever, for when our Lord wills, we must see it whether we will or not.”
Amen to this!
Caprice was still experiencing a lot of pain, everywhere it seemed. Shooting pains in her upper back, then her right hip, then her left - she seemed to constantly ache even though she was receiving healings from both Rod and I? Something didn’t compute. I just could not understand, if God was working through Rod and he had such phenomenal success with removing cancer, why was Caprice still in so much pain? Something did not ‘feel’ right. I was missing something. Surely God did not play favorites, so what was the reason? Jesus would pop into my mind and I kept thinking about the miracles He performed. Did He have a different God than Rod? I can see now that if I had not had my vision of Him, as shocking as it was to me, none of the questions I then had regarding what it means to be a healer would have entered my mind. I was absolutely positive - I think - that until I could do what Jesus did, as ridiculous as this thought sounds, I was no healer. Thank God I had that vision! Every time I began to think I knew something the memory of that vision gave me a reality check that kept me from getting ahead of myself and thinking I was something I was not. I was not Jesus and until I could get my head around what I was? I would just have to watch, wait, listen and learn.
An older woman named Ethel arrived for a healing (she was 68!) Guess I better reevaluate whom I call old huh? Ethel was suffering from painful arthritis in her hips, but her biggest concern was a dry-eye condition that was giving her even more pain than the arthritis. She called me the next day and said; ‘I don’t know what you did girl, but I had the first good nights sleep in years and my eyes are not sore. I can even read the newspaper for the first time in fifteen years’. I told her I did not know what I had done either, but if she was happy, so was I. However, this was short-lived and she came back several times and each time she came she poured out her heart to me about things in her life that were causing her great stress. She was a great teacher for me and from her and others that followed I learned that my gift was in helping others release emotional pain, not so much the physical. I began to see that Rod and I were different in our method of healing. He dealt with the physical. I seemed to be more successful with the deeper wounds. I stopped thinking I was doing something ‘wrong’ when someone wasn’t instantly healed.
“Healers are not the source of healing, but aid the one seeking healing in attuning to the spirit within. Healing is awakening the desire to be one with the whole.”
“Healing is the rediscovery of who we are and who we have always been.”
“Nature controls healing from deep within for every cell participates in the body’s inner intelligence responding to the person’s thoughts, emotions, desires, beliefs and self image. Nature did not put up a wall between mind and body. We do this ourselves. The wall exists because we have conditioned ourselves to believe in them. We are prisoners of our own conditioning. Healing is needed to release us from the spells of disease and illness, ignorance and suffering we have put on ourselves.”
(The above quotes were written in my journal, but I am not sure from which book. I was reading so many of them.)
The good news was, thanks to the steady stream of strangers walking through my front door, I was beginning to trust in the fact that all the pain Caprice was in, even after constant healing sessions, was somehow connected to her ultimate healing. The same was true for all the people who came to me for aid in their healing. I would speak of using the pain that appears in the body as a message system to find within self the real cause of the pain and a strange thing would happen. Somehow whatever I said opened the release valve that keeps the emotions locked up tight inside and they would pour out their troubles to me. Over and over again, as I gave healings to people their pain appeared to increase not lesson, but still I did not doubt even though I had no proof in the form of release from pain I was helping them in any way. It baffles me to this day why they kept coming back. Caprice was no exception. She too was experiencing many tearful, emotional reactions to the healing energy and old fears she had never acknowledged to herself were surfacing, but poor Caprice was stuck with me. She couldn’t walk away, in more ways than one. Oh my! We do carry around a lot of baggage in these bodies of ours and when the body becomes overloaded? We get sick!
Meanwhile, we were still receiving continual updates from Shera via her psychic readings and everything regarding Roy’s business plans was moving along in a positive direction. He was still going to make us tons of money! That was a relief, but when Shera called to tell me her sister Shanon wanted to see Caprice and I because she had a ‘message’ from her guide to aid in her healing – now that was a relief! So off to Calgary we went. I did not know what to expect as the last time I experienced a channeller of information it did not sit well with me. Shanon, however, did not speak in a voice that sounded phony at all. She sat quietly and in her own voice proceeded to give me specific instructions on where I should concentrate the healing energy on Caprice’s body. Of course, as soon as we got home we did as we were ‘told’, not because we had to, but because it felt right to us to do so. Odd as it may seem, not once in all these years have Caprice and I felt we were in harms way. We both always felt safe and protected even when things did not appear to be going so well.
In my last post I mentioned finding some loose journal entries. Well, interesting enough there was also another one dated November 1997 (the exact same time of year I am now writing about in 1988). Imagine that! I had come across an exact description of my vision of Christ written by St. Theresa! Exactly ten years since I had my vision in 1987! Ten years I waited for confirmation that I hadn’t lost my mind. Just goes to show how much patience is required to gain this knowledge.
The vision she says:
“passes as quickly as a flash of lightening, yet this most glorious picture makes an impression on the imagination that I believe can never be effaced until the soul at last sees Christ to enjoy Him forever. Although I call it a picture you must not imagine that it looks like a painting; Christ appears as a living Person, who sometimes speaks and reveals deep mysteries. “If I were to spend many years in devising how to picture to myself anything so beautiful”, she says of the imaginary vision of Christ, “I should never be able nor even know how to do it, for it is beyond the scope of any possible imagination here below; the whiteness, brightness, giving excessive delight to the eyes, which enables us to see a beauty so divine. It is a light so different from any light here below, that the very brightness of the sun we see, in comparison with the brightness and light before our eyes, seems to be something so obscure that no one would ever wish to open his eyes again…in short, it is such that no man, however gifted he may be, can ever in the whole course of his life arrive at any imagination of what it is. God puts it before us so instantaneously, that we could not open our eyes in time to see it, if it were necessary for us to open them at all. But whether our eyes be open or shut, it makes no difference whatever, for when our Lord wills, we must see it whether we will or not.”
Amen to this!
Sunday, September 5, 2010
The Pot Begins To Boil!
I love it when a Plan comes together!
Something happened a few nights ago (Sept. 2, 2010) that is taking me back to the year 1992. In the evening of the day I wrote ‘Life Is But A Dream’ Caprice and I went to a pre-wedding celebration put on by our friend Sue. We didn’t get a chance to visit with her as she was in the kitchen all night. As we were leaving she came out to say goodbye and she told us that in the midst of all this joy and happiness she had received a call from her brother in Ontario telling her that the cancer the doctors had previously said was in remission was back and all through his body. It took her by complete surprise as she had been at his side through his entire chemotherapy treatments even though he lives in another province. Strangely, during the day before we attended this gathering, while looking through a pile of papers for one thing I found another – surprise, surprise! It was a journal entry I had put into the computer, printed out and here it has sat unnoticed until now. Coincidence? I do not think so.
The date was Oct. 22,1992. My brother Ken had called me from his home in Winnipeg. Caprice was very close to her uncle Ken and the feeling was mutual. He knew we were using spiritual means to help her and he had seen the changes in her whenever he visited us, but he never asked or wanted to know what Caprice and I were actually doing. So I was surprised when he asked me to ‘put in a good word for him with the Man upstairs’. This did not sound good. I could tell by his voice he was worried. He had the results of a cat scan that showed he had multiple masses in the liver, which they had now diagnosed as lymphoma. As soon as I hung up the phone Caprice and I did a healing meditation for him and we both cried all the way through it. When it was over I looked through my tears at her and said, “he’s leaving us”. She felt it too, but although our hearts were heavy, the peace and lack of fear for him was what was so strange. The next morning I felt the weight of the world on my shoulders and I started to cry and cry and cry. The thought had come to me that when the soul says “I’m out of here” there’s no point in arguing. My brother was leaving and going ‘home’ and the only way to get there is to leave the body behind. Knowing this is one thing, accepting it is another, and suddenly I was overwhelmed with the thought of not having him here with me in the physical and I felt so sad.
Something was percolating in my brain as I read this, but it wasn’t until after reading the above that I found another journal excerpt - on another piece of paper - written on Oct. 20, 1992, two days before this one! It was a letter to Ken. I remember now he had previously called to let me know he was having some tests done, but the prognosis was not dire. I can almost feel the wheels in my brain turning as the answer to why the memory of Rod Campbell created such a brain fog in me. I had to stop and think, think, think, because I knew meeting him was a vital link in the chain of learning that was coming to me. It is connected to his strong faith in his belief that God and God alone was responsible for all the healing work and all he (Rod) had to do was show up. Ding! Ding!
I now share with you this letter to my brother. Remember, this was written in 1992, four years after meeting Rod. By the time this letter was written we had been through four years of huge changes that affected every aspect of our lives - the physical, the mental, the emotional and the spiritual and it wasn’t ending anytime soon. Told you the spiritual path has many twists and turns!
“Dear Ken,
“There are no accidents everything happens for a reason.” How many times a day do I remind myself of this since I first began my search for answers to why there is so much suffering and pain in our lives. So when you told me of your cancer, again I asked myself, why? A person such as yourself, who has always been so loving, kind, compassionate and caring to all who come in contact with him - why? When you have just retired from working so hard all your life and have reached a place where you can enjoy what life has to offer and let go of the mundane, material, work-a-day world – why?
We have all been programmed from birth to look at disease as something to get rid of as quickly as possible by any means and so we have given complete power to medical science to ‘fix’ us, believing that only they have the power to do so. As soon as we have the slightest discomfort in the body we rush to the drugstore to get rid of it and without hesitation pop some pills and it all goes away. Or so we think. But does it? Any sign of discomfort in the body is a signal from within that we are not being true to our self. From the time we are born we are taught to put others before ourselves and call it love. Our parents, teachers, friends and the environment we live in, all contribute to our belief in what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. We are not taught to think for ourselves and make our own choices and so we go through life with a set of beliefs that are not necessarily our own. When we meet others with a different set of beliefs we react in many different ways. We can be tolerant and understanding or just plain angry or indifferent and all the while we think our way of believing is the ‘right’ way.
All the great religions follow this same understanding. They each interpret the bible in their own way according to the beliefs programmed into their particular religion for centuries and if someone dares to question those beliefs? They are made to feel they are being blasphemous and will be punished. I have questioned all my life how there can only be one God and so many different interpretations of Him. Which religion speaks the Truth? What I have discovered in my search is – all of them, and none of them. Each has taken pieces of Truth and then put so much ritual and dogma around their perception of that truth so as to keep their people subdued and faithful to a God who will punish them if they do not follow the rules. One thing they all have in common is the belief that God is outside of them, totally out of reach of the individual and the only way to Him is through the church.
“Seek and ye shall find, ask and it shall be given”. What does this mean? It means we have been given a marvelous warning system in our bodies to let us know when we are out of step with what we came here to learn and to do in this life. Christ came to earth in the form of man almost 2000 years ago to set an example of how each and every one of us has the divine potential within to rise above the physical, material world. It would appear few have got His message. Over the centuries what he came to teach has been turned inside out and upside down until today there are many who are so fed up that the mere mention of God or Jesus makes us turn and run the other way. I was one of these when Caprice became so sick. Love,”
“We do not have to continue to believe what is not true unless we choose to do so.”(A Course In Miracles)
Needless to say, I did not send this letter. It was written so I could try and gain some understanding of this oft- times cruel world we live in.
Did I mention that the name of Ken’s wife was Sue?
Something happened a few nights ago (Sept. 2, 2010) that is taking me back to the year 1992. In the evening of the day I wrote ‘Life Is But A Dream’ Caprice and I went to a pre-wedding celebration put on by our friend Sue. We didn’t get a chance to visit with her as she was in the kitchen all night. As we were leaving she came out to say goodbye and she told us that in the midst of all this joy and happiness she had received a call from her brother in Ontario telling her that the cancer the doctors had previously said was in remission was back and all through his body. It took her by complete surprise as she had been at his side through his entire chemotherapy treatments even though he lives in another province. Strangely, during the day before we attended this gathering, while looking through a pile of papers for one thing I found another – surprise, surprise! It was a journal entry I had put into the computer, printed out and here it has sat unnoticed until now. Coincidence? I do not think so.
The date was Oct. 22,1992. My brother Ken had called me from his home in Winnipeg. Caprice was very close to her uncle Ken and the feeling was mutual. He knew we were using spiritual means to help her and he had seen the changes in her whenever he visited us, but he never asked or wanted to know what Caprice and I were actually doing. So I was surprised when he asked me to ‘put in a good word for him with the Man upstairs’. This did not sound good. I could tell by his voice he was worried. He had the results of a cat scan that showed he had multiple masses in the liver, which they had now diagnosed as lymphoma. As soon as I hung up the phone Caprice and I did a healing meditation for him and we both cried all the way through it. When it was over I looked through my tears at her and said, “he’s leaving us”. She felt it too, but although our hearts were heavy, the peace and lack of fear for him was what was so strange. The next morning I felt the weight of the world on my shoulders and I started to cry and cry and cry. The thought had come to me that when the soul says “I’m out of here” there’s no point in arguing. My brother was leaving and going ‘home’ and the only way to get there is to leave the body behind. Knowing this is one thing, accepting it is another, and suddenly I was overwhelmed with the thought of not having him here with me in the physical and I felt so sad.
Something was percolating in my brain as I read this, but it wasn’t until after reading the above that I found another journal excerpt - on another piece of paper - written on Oct. 20, 1992, two days before this one! It was a letter to Ken. I remember now he had previously called to let me know he was having some tests done, but the prognosis was not dire. I can almost feel the wheels in my brain turning as the answer to why the memory of Rod Campbell created such a brain fog in me. I had to stop and think, think, think, because I knew meeting him was a vital link in the chain of learning that was coming to me. It is connected to his strong faith in his belief that God and God alone was responsible for all the healing work and all he (Rod) had to do was show up. Ding! Ding!
I now share with you this letter to my brother. Remember, this was written in 1992, four years after meeting Rod. By the time this letter was written we had been through four years of huge changes that affected every aspect of our lives - the physical, the mental, the emotional and the spiritual and it wasn’t ending anytime soon. Told you the spiritual path has many twists and turns!
“Dear Ken,
“There are no accidents everything happens for a reason.” How many times a day do I remind myself of this since I first began my search for answers to why there is so much suffering and pain in our lives. So when you told me of your cancer, again I asked myself, why? A person such as yourself, who has always been so loving, kind, compassionate and caring to all who come in contact with him - why? When you have just retired from working so hard all your life and have reached a place where you can enjoy what life has to offer and let go of the mundane, material, work-a-day world – why?
We have all been programmed from birth to look at disease as something to get rid of as quickly as possible by any means and so we have given complete power to medical science to ‘fix’ us, believing that only they have the power to do so. As soon as we have the slightest discomfort in the body we rush to the drugstore to get rid of it and without hesitation pop some pills and it all goes away. Or so we think. But does it? Any sign of discomfort in the body is a signal from within that we are not being true to our self. From the time we are born we are taught to put others before ourselves and call it love. Our parents, teachers, friends and the environment we live in, all contribute to our belief in what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. We are not taught to think for ourselves and make our own choices and so we go through life with a set of beliefs that are not necessarily our own. When we meet others with a different set of beliefs we react in many different ways. We can be tolerant and understanding or just plain angry or indifferent and all the while we think our way of believing is the ‘right’ way.
All the great religions follow this same understanding. They each interpret the bible in their own way according to the beliefs programmed into their particular religion for centuries and if someone dares to question those beliefs? They are made to feel they are being blasphemous and will be punished. I have questioned all my life how there can only be one God and so many different interpretations of Him. Which religion speaks the Truth? What I have discovered in my search is – all of them, and none of them. Each has taken pieces of Truth and then put so much ritual and dogma around their perception of that truth so as to keep their people subdued and faithful to a God who will punish them if they do not follow the rules. One thing they all have in common is the belief that God is outside of them, totally out of reach of the individual and the only way to Him is through the church.
“Seek and ye shall find, ask and it shall be given”. What does this mean? It means we have been given a marvelous warning system in our bodies to let us know when we are out of step with what we came here to learn and to do in this life. Christ came to earth in the form of man almost 2000 years ago to set an example of how each and every one of us has the divine potential within to rise above the physical, material world. It would appear few have got His message. Over the centuries what he came to teach has been turned inside out and upside down until today there are many who are so fed up that the mere mention of God or Jesus makes us turn and run the other way. I was one of these when Caprice became so sick. Love,”
“We do not have to continue to believe what is not true unless we choose to do so.”(A Course In Miracles)
Needless to say, I did not send this letter. It was written so I could try and gain some understanding of this oft- times cruel world we live in.
Did I mention that the name of Ken’s wife was Sue?
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Life Is But A Dream
Well! I had another post ready to go two days ago, but when it was finished something did not feel right to me and when I get this feeling – I listen. So, back to the drawing board I go. ‘What am I missing?’ I ask myself. The next morning I was jolted awake by the sound of little feet pit-pattering across the kitchen floor, four of them to be exact. Our dog needed to go out NOW! It was 4 A.M, but once I am awake I’m up so I made myself a coffee and sat as I so often do gazing out at my beautiful garden, just barely visible in the shadows, feeling the peace the dark before the dawn brings with it. I love this time of day! It’s dead quiet, not a sound can be heard, except silence, and so I wait - for the answer to my question to filter into my empty mind - and in it comes!
“It’s always darkest before the dawn.”
That’s it! My brain has been on overload since I began trying to put the puzzle of the past twenty-four years together. As I read my journals for the years 1986 onward everything is blurring together into one twenty-four-year ‘day’. Imagine waking up in the morning trying to remember every detail of a dream from the night before! This is what this trip into ‘yesterday’ feels like for both Caprice and I, like we are remembering an impossible dream – but it did all happen. We have a record of it all. Now we can see how everything happened with a synchronicity that cannot be chance. If we have learned anything it is that everything did happen for a reason, but it was not for the reason we thought, and although it seemed to be happening in a neat, linear pattern, such was not the case. Hey! think the fog in my brain is lifting! Soon I will be able to sing the song………
I can see clearly now, the rain is gone.
I can see all the obstacles in my way……
“If we allow our emotions to be tied to the events in our lives, we have given the power of our happiness to the changing tides of circumstances.”(Many Mansions by Gina Cerminara)
“There are no idle thoughts; all thoughts produce form in some way.”(A Course In Miracles)
“A new spiritual awareness cannot be born within a mind that is firmly attached to old ways of thinking and perceiving.”(Prophecies And Predictions- Moira Timms)
Before Caprice’s surgery each day was pretty much like any other day. Get up in the morning, eat breakfast, take Caprice to school, go to work, come home, eat supper, spend the evening doing whatever and go back to bed and start all over again. Her surgery, suddenly without warning, threw us into total chaos. There was nothing routine about it. When I began searching for a miracle, our lives once again fell into a routine, but with a difference. We returned to the ‘normal’ routine but added to that, every evening at exactly 8 P.M. she would get into bed and I would do a healing on her - every night at 10 P.M. I would sit in meditation after which I would read and then go to bed. We took advantage of every new piece of information that might possibly help her. Caprice had a thick, red, rope-like scar from the incisions made from the last two surgeries that was very uncomfortable to sit on every day. I found a book called ‘Drugless Remedies’ by Edgar Cayce and in this book I read that cold-pressed peanut oil rubbed on a scar would dissolve it. So off to the health food store I go! We added this to the routine every day. She was still experiencing severe pain in her hips and this book also gave us something else to try – castor oil packs, so we added this to our routine every day. Add to this, I still had a steady stream of people coming for healings and all of this had to be fit into our normal every-day, tick-tock, tick-tock schedules. Did I mention that her scar, after repeated applications, all but disappeared?
As well as all of the above, Rod Campbell had now become a regular visitor to our home. He said he had been sent to us to heal Caprice and to this end, he too was giving her healings whenever he came. Go for it Rod! Caprice and I welcomed anything or any person who could help us. He was absolutely positive he could do this and his enthusiasm gave us hope (which reminds me of a comment my brother Ken used to say; ‘I’m absolutely positive – I think!)
Despair had pushed us take a look at where we were and we did not accept we had to stay there. We made a conscious decision, maybe not too willingly in the beginning, but the point I make is, we changed our minds and in doing this we changed our lives. BUT! Here’s the twist. We had to be willing to believe in miracles!
“Miracles are natural; it is when they do not happen something is wrong.”(A Course In Miracles – I began reading this in November of 1988)
“Both miracles and fear come from thought. If you were not free to choose one, you would not be free to choose the other.” (A Course in Miracles)
There was a plan in motion that we had no idea existed. But Who was the planner?? Today we are beginning to connect the dots. Caprice and I now see that where we are today in mind, body and spirit is directly related to the day we began to consciously, with dedication and determination, move away from the status quo that says ‘it can’t be done’.
“It’s always darkest before the dawn.”
That’s it! My brain has been on overload since I began trying to put the puzzle of the past twenty-four years together. As I read my journals for the years 1986 onward everything is blurring together into one twenty-four-year ‘day’. Imagine waking up in the morning trying to remember every detail of a dream from the night before! This is what this trip into ‘yesterday’ feels like for both Caprice and I, like we are remembering an impossible dream – but it did all happen. We have a record of it all. Now we can see how everything happened with a synchronicity that cannot be chance. If we have learned anything it is that everything did happen for a reason, but it was not for the reason we thought, and although it seemed to be happening in a neat, linear pattern, such was not the case. Hey! think the fog in my brain is lifting! Soon I will be able to sing the song………
I can see clearly now, the rain is gone.
I can see all the obstacles in my way……
“If we allow our emotions to be tied to the events in our lives, we have given the power of our happiness to the changing tides of circumstances.”(Many Mansions by Gina Cerminara)
“There are no idle thoughts; all thoughts produce form in some way.”(A Course In Miracles)
“A new spiritual awareness cannot be born within a mind that is firmly attached to old ways of thinking and perceiving.”(Prophecies And Predictions- Moira Timms)
Before Caprice’s surgery each day was pretty much like any other day. Get up in the morning, eat breakfast, take Caprice to school, go to work, come home, eat supper, spend the evening doing whatever and go back to bed and start all over again. Her surgery, suddenly without warning, threw us into total chaos. There was nothing routine about it. When I began searching for a miracle, our lives once again fell into a routine, but with a difference. We returned to the ‘normal’ routine but added to that, every evening at exactly 8 P.M. she would get into bed and I would do a healing on her - every night at 10 P.M. I would sit in meditation after which I would read and then go to bed. We took advantage of every new piece of information that might possibly help her. Caprice had a thick, red, rope-like scar from the incisions made from the last two surgeries that was very uncomfortable to sit on every day. I found a book called ‘Drugless Remedies’ by Edgar Cayce and in this book I read that cold-pressed peanut oil rubbed on a scar would dissolve it. So off to the health food store I go! We added this to the routine every day. She was still experiencing severe pain in her hips and this book also gave us something else to try – castor oil packs, so we added this to our routine every day. Add to this, I still had a steady stream of people coming for healings and all of this had to be fit into our normal every-day, tick-tock, tick-tock schedules. Did I mention that her scar, after repeated applications, all but disappeared?
As well as all of the above, Rod Campbell had now become a regular visitor to our home. He said he had been sent to us to heal Caprice and to this end, he too was giving her healings whenever he came. Go for it Rod! Caprice and I welcomed anything or any person who could help us. He was absolutely positive he could do this and his enthusiasm gave us hope (which reminds me of a comment my brother Ken used to say; ‘I’m absolutely positive – I think!)
Despair had pushed us take a look at where we were and we did not accept we had to stay there. We made a conscious decision, maybe not too willingly in the beginning, but the point I make is, we changed our minds and in doing this we changed our lives. BUT! Here’s the twist. We had to be willing to believe in miracles!
“Miracles are natural; it is when they do not happen something is wrong.”(A Course In Miracles – I began reading this in November of 1988)
“Both miracles and fear come from thought. If you were not free to choose one, you would not be free to choose the other.” (A Course in Miracles)
There was a plan in motion that we had no idea existed. But Who was the planner?? Today we are beginning to connect the dots. Caprice and I now see that where we are today in mind, body and spirit is directly related to the day we began to consciously, with dedication and determination, move away from the status quo that says ‘it can’t be done’.
Friday, August 27, 2010
The Source Of Courage Is Conviction
September 11th, 1988 was the day of my fiftieth birthday. Roy took me out to dinner and when we arrived back home the house was filled with friends all dressed in 1950’s costumes. Our house was filled with music and laughter and dancing. What a party it was! Wouldn’t you think I would have this recorded in my journal? You guessed it. Not a word about it. It appears to me now that events that were happening in my daily life, no matter how over-the-top they were, if they were not directly connected to my spiritual learning, they just disappeared from my brain. I find it interesting how one-track my brain was at the time, but then, this is exactly the reason that today I have the understanding of why this had to be. Training the mind to follow a different path, whether it be for a physical reason or a spiritual one, takes its toll on the physical body, both mentally and emotionally. To try and make a drastic change in lifestyle and be successful means something has to go.
I know I have let the cat out of the bag now and everyone knows how old I am, but what you do not know is that the next day I came to the conclusion that reaching the age of fifty was quite old enough and so I decided to celebrate un-birthdays every year instead. I would take a year off my age every year instead of adding one and I have done just that. Seriously, I have! That means that today I am younger than all of my children! How about that? As this memory flitted through my brain it came to me to figure out how old I am today using this formula. Twenty-eight years old! I may not look twenty-eight today, but I feel twenty-eight. However, neither do I look seventy-two either.
What year did I turn twenty-eight? 1966. Ding! Ding! The year my beloved ‘daddy’ died. Remember the psychic Dickie Motherwell’s reading (Wisdom In A Mystery post) and her comment that I went through a ‘shift in consciousness at the age of thirty-one’ and she thought I was a Walk-In? The memory of what was happening in my life at that time (when I divorced my first husband) did cross my mind when Dickie made this comment, but I was more interested in the Walk-In comment and it quickly was forgotten. It would seem I have come full circle and I am back to the moment when my soul first stepped in and took over my life.
In the channeled reading quoted in my post ‘What Can I Say’ Shanon had mentioned that my dad, who had passed on, was very much around me in 1988, but I am thinking he’s been with me a lot longer than that!
I touched briefly on the ending of my first marriage in my post ‘Change Your Mind Change Your Life’, but there is much more to this story. I spent the last week of my dad’s life with him in Winnipeg, Manitoba. As soon as I arrived back home my brother Ken called to say he had died the night I left, so back I went for his funeral. It was the month of March 1966. The first hint I had that I had changed was on Mother’s day that year. I wanted to learn how to play golf and my husband Dave agreed to buy me clubs for Mother’s day. It was an insignificant, little thing, but it hit me like a bolt of lightening. We went shopping for golf clubs for me and we came home with a set for him! Ding! Ding! The first wave had hit. I felt hurt and unappreciated by his actions, but as usual said or did nothing about it. I was a wimp in this marriage, completely controlled by this man since day one. I now wonder, where did I disappear to and how did I allow this to happen to me? He had given me permission to join Beta Sigma Phi, a woman’s sorority and there was a weekend conference coming up in June that meant a stay overnight in a hotel. He did not like this idea, but for the first time in our marriage I did not do as I was told. Ding! Ding! I attended and after the dinner on the Saturday night the husbands were to join us. Afterwards, one of my ‘sisters’ came up to me and said; ‘are you aware you are a different person when your husband is around?’ That one comment from another person was the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’ and the deed was set in motion. From that day forward I began to take back my life.
Dave and I moved away from Winnipeg when he was transferred to Edmonton, Alta. He had been having an affair with a woman in his office and when the transfer came along I decided to stay in Winnipeg with the children. I was pretty sure the woman was going to move there too. However, after he left he missed the children so much he asked me to come with him. Did I make a mistake moving away from all my family and friends? It might appear so, but then, Caprice would most likely never have been born, so that pretty much answers that question. However, with no support system, alone and far away from home, I was in a very vulnerable position and he took advantage of this. I was miserably unhappy. The only reason I kept some semblance of sanity was the children. He refused to allow me to get a job even though we could have used the extra money. He was the man of the house and he had to be the sole provider. All that changed when I ‘woke’ up. I took a part-time job! My natural hair color was black - I dyed it red! I began to take an interest in how I looked and slowly my self-confidence grew and as all this was happening I went from looking like a frump to – what else can I say - I looked ‘hot’. I was a new person! There was no comparison to the woman I had been.
I will never forget the look of sadness on my dad’s face the night I came home with an engagement ring on my finger. I was eighteen years old. He knew what I did not. That I was, in part at least, marrying to get away from the constant bickering going on between him and my mother. He was correct of course, but I didn’t know that then. In the 1950’s young woman did not go out and live the single life. They got married and had babies. Well, daddy! You saved me eventually. I just wish we could have talked about these things before you died. No matter. The day came when I knew I wanted out of the marriage and I went to a lawyer. Dave was served the divorce papers at his office while we were still living together, albeit in separate bedrooms by this time, and he had no idea this was coming. I still cannot believe I did that! Where did this newly found defiance in me come from? I do remember asking Dave if he would go to a marriage counselor with me because we needed help before any of this happened. His answer? ‘There’s nothing wrong with me; you’re the one with the problem.’ That pretty much sums up why he was so surprised at my actions. Meanwhile, I was having the time of my life. Elizabeth was back and I made a promise to myself that I would never let another man rule me like that again!
“Life and reality are only what we perceive them to be. Life doesn’t happen to us. We make it happen. Reality isn’t separate from us. We are creating our own reality every moment of every day. Whether we like it or not, we are a participant in our own life, we are a co-creator. We cannot separate ourselves from our life.”- Dancing In The Light, Shirley Maclaine
I know I have let the cat out of the bag now and everyone knows how old I am, but what you do not know is that the next day I came to the conclusion that reaching the age of fifty was quite old enough and so I decided to celebrate un-birthdays every year instead. I would take a year off my age every year instead of adding one and I have done just that. Seriously, I have! That means that today I am younger than all of my children! How about that? As this memory flitted through my brain it came to me to figure out how old I am today using this formula. Twenty-eight years old! I may not look twenty-eight today, but I feel twenty-eight. However, neither do I look seventy-two either.
What year did I turn twenty-eight? 1966. Ding! Ding! The year my beloved ‘daddy’ died. Remember the psychic Dickie Motherwell’s reading (Wisdom In A Mystery post) and her comment that I went through a ‘shift in consciousness at the age of thirty-one’ and she thought I was a Walk-In? The memory of what was happening in my life at that time (when I divorced my first husband) did cross my mind when Dickie made this comment, but I was more interested in the Walk-In comment and it quickly was forgotten. It would seem I have come full circle and I am back to the moment when my soul first stepped in and took over my life.
In the channeled reading quoted in my post ‘What Can I Say’ Shanon had mentioned that my dad, who had passed on, was very much around me in 1988, but I am thinking he’s been with me a lot longer than that!
I touched briefly on the ending of my first marriage in my post ‘Change Your Mind Change Your Life’, but there is much more to this story. I spent the last week of my dad’s life with him in Winnipeg, Manitoba. As soon as I arrived back home my brother Ken called to say he had died the night I left, so back I went for his funeral. It was the month of March 1966. The first hint I had that I had changed was on Mother’s day that year. I wanted to learn how to play golf and my husband Dave agreed to buy me clubs for Mother’s day. It was an insignificant, little thing, but it hit me like a bolt of lightening. We went shopping for golf clubs for me and we came home with a set for him! Ding! Ding! The first wave had hit. I felt hurt and unappreciated by his actions, but as usual said or did nothing about it. I was a wimp in this marriage, completely controlled by this man since day one. I now wonder, where did I disappear to and how did I allow this to happen to me? He had given me permission to join Beta Sigma Phi, a woman’s sorority and there was a weekend conference coming up in June that meant a stay overnight in a hotel. He did not like this idea, but for the first time in our marriage I did not do as I was told. Ding! Ding! I attended and after the dinner on the Saturday night the husbands were to join us. Afterwards, one of my ‘sisters’ came up to me and said; ‘are you aware you are a different person when your husband is around?’ That one comment from another person was the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’ and the deed was set in motion. From that day forward I began to take back my life.
Dave and I moved away from Winnipeg when he was transferred to Edmonton, Alta. He had been having an affair with a woman in his office and when the transfer came along I decided to stay in Winnipeg with the children. I was pretty sure the woman was going to move there too. However, after he left he missed the children so much he asked me to come with him. Did I make a mistake moving away from all my family and friends? It might appear so, but then, Caprice would most likely never have been born, so that pretty much answers that question. However, with no support system, alone and far away from home, I was in a very vulnerable position and he took advantage of this. I was miserably unhappy. The only reason I kept some semblance of sanity was the children. He refused to allow me to get a job even though we could have used the extra money. He was the man of the house and he had to be the sole provider. All that changed when I ‘woke’ up. I took a part-time job! My natural hair color was black - I dyed it red! I began to take an interest in how I looked and slowly my self-confidence grew and as all this was happening I went from looking like a frump to – what else can I say - I looked ‘hot’. I was a new person! There was no comparison to the woman I had been.
I will never forget the look of sadness on my dad’s face the night I came home with an engagement ring on my finger. I was eighteen years old. He knew what I did not. That I was, in part at least, marrying to get away from the constant bickering going on between him and my mother. He was correct of course, but I didn’t know that then. In the 1950’s young woman did not go out and live the single life. They got married and had babies. Well, daddy! You saved me eventually. I just wish we could have talked about these things before you died. No matter. The day came when I knew I wanted out of the marriage and I went to a lawyer. Dave was served the divorce papers at his office while we were still living together, albeit in separate bedrooms by this time, and he had no idea this was coming. I still cannot believe I did that! Where did this newly found defiance in me come from? I do remember asking Dave if he would go to a marriage counselor with me because we needed help before any of this happened. His answer? ‘There’s nothing wrong with me; you’re the one with the problem.’ That pretty much sums up why he was so surprised at my actions. Meanwhile, I was having the time of my life. Elizabeth was back and I made a promise to myself that I would never let another man rule me like that again!
“Life and reality are only what we perceive them to be. Life doesn’t happen to us. We make it happen. Reality isn’t separate from us. We are creating our own reality every moment of every day. Whether we like it or not, we are a participant in our own life, we are a co-creator. We cannot separate ourselves from our life.”- Dancing In The Light, Shirley Maclaine
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Play It Again Sam
September l, 1988 and Caprice was looking forward to grade ten and high school. The school was in a two-story building and for two years prior to this I had been having meetings with the school to install a lift for her. It was promised it would be there. This, however, did not turn out to be the case. She arrived for her first day only to discover she would have to be carried up and down a very long flight of stairs to get to her classes on the top floor. This meant waiting at the bottom of the stairs until the principal arranged for someone to do this and she was always arriving late for her class. I was furious at their lack of concern for this dilemma, but Caprice felt humiliated and more disabled than ever. As if she wasn’t dealing with enough already! She came home in tears every day. After a week of seeing her so sad I made the suggestion that she consider transferring to the high school with an elevator in the city where our stores were located (we lived eleven kilometers away in a small town). Either Roy or myself could drop her off and pick her up. To do this would mean leaving all she had ever known, but as scary a thought as this was, she decided to take the plunge and do it. Best thing she ever did! From the first day she was welcomed as just another student, not Caprice, the girl in a wheelchair. All of the people she grew up with had seen her grow weaker and weaker throughout the years and this colored the way she was treated, but more than that – this fact colored the way she saw herself. She had been feeling so isolated and alone, unable as she was to be a ‘part of the crowd’ and just be a normal teenager like all her friends. In this new school she was no different than any of the other students. By this time she and I were deeply committed to following the spiritual way and we were working very diligently every day with meditations, reading, and affirmations. She made a conscious decision to not be seen as weak and disabled and ‘walked’ into that school a different person from the one she left behind. The change in her persona was dramatic. She remembers having a moment on the first day as she sat all alone at the lunch table wondering if she had made the right decision, but this was quickly gone when a girl walked up to her and asked her if she could join her and a new friendship began that still exists today. The rest, as they say, is history and she hasn’t looked back since. One might even say she was transformed and the sick little girl was gone. Shortly thereafter she had a dream that she got up and walked and the next morning she said to me, ‘my disease is gone mom’.
I wrote the above paragraph immediately after finishing ‘Think, Think, Think’ and then began to relate how Rod Campbell came back for another weekend visit. I had been reading my journals to try and pinpoint the sequence of events that followed and put them into some kind of order. Caprice wasn’t the only one who went through a transformation even if neither one of us knew it at the time. Meeting Rod Campbell and having the opportunity to work side by side with him transformed me into a believer! I went from being good-old-save-the day-logical- rational-analytical-practical Elizabeth to good-old-save-the-day-have faith, trust, all is well, do not doubt, save-the-day Elizabeth. Ah yes! I began to have faith, but it was a blind faith. Ding! Ding! I can feel some of the pieces falling into place in my mind. Rod had complete trust and faith in God. He followed his heart – and in it comes – the reason his name has set my brain on fire; the reason why I am remembering the warnings planted in my brain that I did not understand at the time; the reason why he had to be a part of our journey. Message received. Once you give your ‘word’ to God you had better know the ‘rules’ because it’s a jungle down here.
"Don’t make love by the garden gate, Love is blind, but the neighbors ain’t." (Cousin Betty, as written in my childhood autograph book)
When I begin write a blog entry, I check my journal entries to get a mental picture of what I had written at that time, but for some reason I just kept on reading to the years ahead ……and the triggers in my brain began to flash and I haven’t been able to write until now three weeks later! As I read, I did not recognize the person I had become. How could I have said that! What happened to me? I began to feel nervous about relating the rest of this story to anyone. “I can’t write about this”, I thought to myself. Now what am I going to do? I could feel the anxiety beginning to build and build and for over a week my body and my mind was reeling. I went through a process that I can only describe as some kind of spiritual enema. The door to that hidden compartment in my brain flew open and something hidden in the far recesses of my mind was trying to get through the fog all this remembering was creating. Every thought, every memory, not just of the years from l986 on, but back, back I went all the way to my childhood - and then - add to all these memories the words of the wisdom teachings I have gathered over the years that have sat tucked away in this secret compartment in my brain from all my years of studying waiting, waiting for this day. With every memory that surfaced I also was ‘hearing’ the not-so-easy-to-accept messages from the sages of old, gleaned from the many books I had read over the years that spoke of the extreme sacrifice required once you give your word to the All. Better mean it or do not do it. Not fair I cry!! I gave my word, but I didn’t know, just like Rod didn’t know. Now I know, thanks to Rod and all who followed who came to teach me some of life’s tough lessons.
“Two things are infinite. Human stupidity and the Universe and I’m not so sure about the Universe.” - Albert Einstein
My brain was on overload and I couldn’t stop the tidal wave of images and words no matter how hard I tried. All these memories of the past surfaced all at once and the present ceased to exist. I walked around in a dream-like state, or maybe I should say, a nightmare state. Nothing I did to stem the flow worked. My nerves were on fire, my body hurt and I became very cranky. I kept looking at my bookshelves longingly remembering all the years I used to get up at three a.m. every morning anxious to read and then write. I was consumed then by a need to learn, but there was so much I didn’t know and I wanted to know. It was all so exhilarating and I kept thinking how much I miss feeling that way - and then I felt sad - and then another memory – and the sadness in me escalated - and then another - and that one made me angry - and then another and that one made me happy. What a mess I was! “What triggered this?” I knew it had come from something I had just written, but what? Because Caprice and I are so connected, as I vocalized what was going on in my head, she too began to remember certain events and between the two of us we were both spinning. I have to find the answer and until I do – no more writing (as if anything I wrote would make any sense anyway). This changes everything.
Now I have a problem continuing on in a manner that makes any sense to anyone but my own self. I have heard it said that in the moment before we die our entire life passes before our eyes and we see what we still have left to learn. Well! If this is true, after the space I have been in these past three weeks, I must be dead! The mystics call this place the bardo. I have been here many times before and always the experience is very uncomfortable, but this time was a doozy.
“The word ‘bardo’ is commonly used to denote the intermediate state between death and rebirth, but in reality bardos are occurring continuously throughout both life and death.”- The Tibetan Book Of Living And Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche
While all this was happening we were getting reminders from this world that would send our minds going in yet another direction. We watched a movie titled ‘One Week’ about a man diagnosed with a terminal illness who decides to use the remainder of his life to travel across Canada on a motorcycle. In the process of doing this he finds himself. Ding! Ding! Someone who is visiting mentions Sedona, Arizona, known for its spiritual energy. Roy and I went there twice. When? Ding! Ding! We turn on the television and there on the screen is the story of a disciple of Chogyam Trungpa, one of the foremost contemporary teachers of Buddhism and founder of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Ding! Ding! Back in 1990, I was reading his book ‘Shambhala, The Sacred Path Of The Warrior’ and later Caprice saw a documentary on television about the Naropa Institute and she began to consider going there when she finished high school. At the end of grade twelve in 1991, Caprice and I were invited to Boulder, Colorado by Rod Campbell!! Ding! Ding! While she and I were there she even picked up a catalogue on the courses they offered. Everything happening in the present reminded us of something from the past whether it be an actual physical experience or something we read. I keep ‘hearing’ words and phrases I had read echoing in my mind, but as soon as one surfaced, in came another and another. I wanted to check my journals, but there was just too many to search through. This went on for over a week and finally, I was so frustrated I made myself reach for a book, any book, from my bookshelf. I had always found answers this way before, so even though I had serious doubts about this time, I picked one up. Lo and behold, the first thing I read sparks a flame of recognition!
"Love, not learning finds the way,
Opens the eyes to the Doors of the Day,
Uncovers the wonders of undreamed sights,
And leads the way to the Wisdom Lights."
Gooberz by Linda Goodman
There it is. Breakthrough! Rod Campbell and the words – love, not learning. It all began when I reached the part of our journey when he re-entered our lives. That’s when I hit a roadblock. He had a childlike innocence about him that was infectious. He was a quiet, gentle, kind, loving man who wouldn’t hurt a fly. He did not talk a lot, nor did he read books or watch television. He wasn’t at all interested in trying to understand where this power he had came from because, as far as he was concerned, he already knew the reason. It came from God and that’s all he needed to know. All I ever heard him say was; “Love, Kindness and Prayer can perform miracles”.
I’ve been writing down our story as it happened in a nice, orderly, linear sequence as per my journal entries. Now? Every thought, every experience, every person, place or thing I have experienced have all become connected to one another into one big picture and there is nothing orderly about it. I knew when I began this trip into the past something like this would happen - that hidden between the lines written in my journals I would find a way to connect every experience to the mind-space I find myself in right now. I had written in my post ‘Deep Waters’ that I had it all figured out didn’t I? Guess my soul took me at my word and now, here I am, in deep waters.
Now that I think I have found the answer to what this was all about why continue? Because, I gave my word to myself - and when I give my word to anyone I keep it to the best of my ability. I made the decision to go public and now I have to stay true to my word even if I do not want to. Besides, now there are those of you who have taken an interest, for whatever reason, in our little drama and I feel, no matter what the reaction, for my own sake I must continue. Something is telling me if I stop now everything Caprice and I have worked for will be for nothing. I have to give it all away and let the chips fall where they may.
Daath-the gate of the abyss (the Tree if Life): “There comes a point at which the magician must turn his or her attention away from the mind-clutter in order to listen for the presence of something else. In doing the latter, awareness needs to be emptied, not merely organized, and among the things that need to go out with the trash are the symbols and principles of organization themselves.” Paths of Wisdom by John Michael Greer
So be it! I feel so liberated at the moment but I sure don’t know how I am going to explain it. I will say this - what I have discovered is that not one moment of my life was wasted. Every moment had a purpose - the good, the bad and the ugly. Gives new meaning to the words, have no regrets.
“Time spent in regret is time wasted.” Edgar Cayce
My dad was born in Glasgow, Scotland and he used to sing a little song - “You take the high road and I’ll take the low road and I’ll be in Scotland afore ye.” Thanks daddy. I took the ‘low road’ and I am glad I did. Slow and steady leads the way just like the story of the tortoise and the hare. There is a lot to unlearn about what it means to be human. I am very grateful I took the time to get to know myself before I made the mistake of thinking I can ever know – God. As I wrote in my journal later on – ‘you have to use the mind to lose the mind’ (the mortal mind, that is) in order to even begin to grasp how truly magical and marvelous these bodies we walk around in are and what a privilege it is to be alive.
I wrote the above paragraph immediately after finishing ‘Think, Think, Think’ and then began to relate how Rod Campbell came back for another weekend visit. I had been reading my journals to try and pinpoint the sequence of events that followed and put them into some kind of order. Caprice wasn’t the only one who went through a transformation even if neither one of us knew it at the time. Meeting Rod Campbell and having the opportunity to work side by side with him transformed me into a believer! I went from being good-old-save-the day-logical- rational-analytical-practical Elizabeth to good-old-save-the-day-have faith, trust, all is well, do not doubt, save-the-day Elizabeth. Ah yes! I began to have faith, but it was a blind faith. Ding! Ding! I can feel some of the pieces falling into place in my mind. Rod had complete trust and faith in God. He followed his heart – and in it comes – the reason his name has set my brain on fire; the reason why I am remembering the warnings planted in my brain that I did not understand at the time; the reason why he had to be a part of our journey. Message received. Once you give your ‘word’ to God you had better know the ‘rules’ because it’s a jungle down here.
"Don’t make love by the garden gate, Love is blind, but the neighbors ain’t." (Cousin Betty, as written in my childhood autograph book)
When I begin write a blog entry, I check my journal entries to get a mental picture of what I had written at that time, but for some reason I just kept on reading to the years ahead ……and the triggers in my brain began to flash and I haven’t been able to write until now three weeks later! As I read, I did not recognize the person I had become. How could I have said that! What happened to me? I began to feel nervous about relating the rest of this story to anyone. “I can’t write about this”, I thought to myself. Now what am I going to do? I could feel the anxiety beginning to build and build and for over a week my body and my mind was reeling. I went through a process that I can only describe as some kind of spiritual enema. The door to that hidden compartment in my brain flew open and something hidden in the far recesses of my mind was trying to get through the fog all this remembering was creating. Every thought, every memory, not just of the years from l986 on, but back, back I went all the way to my childhood - and then - add to all these memories the words of the wisdom teachings I have gathered over the years that have sat tucked away in this secret compartment in my brain from all my years of studying waiting, waiting for this day. With every memory that surfaced I also was ‘hearing’ the not-so-easy-to-accept messages from the sages of old, gleaned from the many books I had read over the years that spoke of the extreme sacrifice required once you give your word to the All. Better mean it or do not do it. Not fair I cry!! I gave my word, but I didn’t know, just like Rod didn’t know. Now I know, thanks to Rod and all who followed who came to teach me some of life’s tough lessons.
“Two things are infinite. Human stupidity and the Universe and I’m not so sure about the Universe.” - Albert Einstein
My brain was on overload and I couldn’t stop the tidal wave of images and words no matter how hard I tried. All these memories of the past surfaced all at once and the present ceased to exist. I walked around in a dream-like state, or maybe I should say, a nightmare state. Nothing I did to stem the flow worked. My nerves were on fire, my body hurt and I became very cranky. I kept looking at my bookshelves longingly remembering all the years I used to get up at three a.m. every morning anxious to read and then write. I was consumed then by a need to learn, but there was so much I didn’t know and I wanted to know. It was all so exhilarating and I kept thinking how much I miss feeling that way - and then I felt sad - and then another memory – and the sadness in me escalated - and then another - and that one made me angry - and then another and that one made me happy. What a mess I was! “What triggered this?” I knew it had come from something I had just written, but what? Because Caprice and I are so connected, as I vocalized what was going on in my head, she too began to remember certain events and between the two of us we were both spinning. I have to find the answer and until I do – no more writing (as if anything I wrote would make any sense anyway). This changes everything.
Now I have a problem continuing on in a manner that makes any sense to anyone but my own self. I have heard it said that in the moment before we die our entire life passes before our eyes and we see what we still have left to learn. Well! If this is true, after the space I have been in these past three weeks, I must be dead! The mystics call this place the bardo. I have been here many times before and always the experience is very uncomfortable, but this time was a doozy.
“The word ‘bardo’ is commonly used to denote the intermediate state between death and rebirth, but in reality bardos are occurring continuously throughout both life and death.”- The Tibetan Book Of Living And Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche
While all this was happening we were getting reminders from this world that would send our minds going in yet another direction. We watched a movie titled ‘One Week’ about a man diagnosed with a terminal illness who decides to use the remainder of his life to travel across Canada on a motorcycle. In the process of doing this he finds himself. Ding! Ding! Someone who is visiting mentions Sedona, Arizona, known for its spiritual energy. Roy and I went there twice. When? Ding! Ding! We turn on the television and there on the screen is the story of a disciple of Chogyam Trungpa, one of the foremost contemporary teachers of Buddhism and founder of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Ding! Ding! Back in 1990, I was reading his book ‘Shambhala, The Sacred Path Of The Warrior’ and later Caprice saw a documentary on television about the Naropa Institute and she began to consider going there when she finished high school. At the end of grade twelve in 1991, Caprice and I were invited to Boulder, Colorado by Rod Campbell!! Ding! Ding! While she and I were there she even picked up a catalogue on the courses they offered. Everything happening in the present reminded us of something from the past whether it be an actual physical experience or something we read. I keep ‘hearing’ words and phrases I had read echoing in my mind, but as soon as one surfaced, in came another and another. I wanted to check my journals, but there was just too many to search through. This went on for over a week and finally, I was so frustrated I made myself reach for a book, any book, from my bookshelf. I had always found answers this way before, so even though I had serious doubts about this time, I picked one up. Lo and behold, the first thing I read sparks a flame of recognition!
"Love, not learning finds the way,
Opens the eyes to the Doors of the Day,
Uncovers the wonders of undreamed sights,
And leads the way to the Wisdom Lights."
Gooberz by Linda Goodman
There it is. Breakthrough! Rod Campbell and the words – love, not learning. It all began when I reached the part of our journey when he re-entered our lives. That’s when I hit a roadblock. He had a childlike innocence about him that was infectious. He was a quiet, gentle, kind, loving man who wouldn’t hurt a fly. He did not talk a lot, nor did he read books or watch television. He wasn’t at all interested in trying to understand where this power he had came from because, as far as he was concerned, he already knew the reason. It came from God and that’s all he needed to know. All I ever heard him say was; “Love, Kindness and Prayer can perform miracles”.
I’ve been writing down our story as it happened in a nice, orderly, linear sequence as per my journal entries. Now? Every thought, every experience, every person, place or thing I have experienced have all become connected to one another into one big picture and there is nothing orderly about it. I knew when I began this trip into the past something like this would happen - that hidden between the lines written in my journals I would find a way to connect every experience to the mind-space I find myself in right now. I had written in my post ‘Deep Waters’ that I had it all figured out didn’t I? Guess my soul took me at my word and now, here I am, in deep waters.
Now that I think I have found the answer to what this was all about why continue? Because, I gave my word to myself - and when I give my word to anyone I keep it to the best of my ability. I made the decision to go public and now I have to stay true to my word even if I do not want to. Besides, now there are those of you who have taken an interest, for whatever reason, in our little drama and I feel, no matter what the reaction, for my own sake I must continue. Something is telling me if I stop now everything Caprice and I have worked for will be for nothing. I have to give it all away and let the chips fall where they may.
Daath-the gate of the abyss (the Tree if Life): “There comes a point at which the magician must turn his or her attention away from the mind-clutter in order to listen for the presence of something else. In doing the latter, awareness needs to be emptied, not merely organized, and among the things that need to go out with the trash are the symbols and principles of organization themselves.” Paths of Wisdom by John Michael Greer
So be it! I feel so liberated at the moment but I sure don’t know how I am going to explain it. I will say this - what I have discovered is that not one moment of my life was wasted. Every moment had a purpose - the good, the bad and the ugly. Gives new meaning to the words, have no regrets.
“Time spent in regret is time wasted.” Edgar Cayce
My dad was born in Glasgow, Scotland and he used to sing a little song - “You take the high road and I’ll take the low road and I’ll be in Scotland afore ye.” Thanks daddy. I took the ‘low road’ and I am glad I did. Slow and steady leads the way just like the story of the tortoise and the hare. There is a lot to unlearn about what it means to be human. I am very grateful I took the time to get to know myself before I made the mistake of thinking I can ever know – God. As I wrote in my journal later on – ‘you have to use the mind to lose the mind’ (the mortal mind, that is) in order to even begin to grasp how truly magical and marvelous these bodies we walk around in are and what a privilege it is to be alive.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Think, Think, Think. - Winnie The Pooh
“Thinking adds not one whit to thy stature materially, but mentally, spiritually, it may produce the revolution which brings peace and harmony into the world.” Edgar Cayce
Even though I had so much changing in my material world, as I read back in my journals it was what was happening in my spiritual world that is recorded. I did have a record of the sale of our stores and Roy’s business affairs, which to me were major turning points in our lives, but I am remembering other turning points that came later and when I go to see what I was writing at the time – nothing! Not a line! How can this be? - I am asking myself. To my mind they were so important, but my journals are just filled, page after page, with the list of names of people coming to me for healings, quote after quote from the books I was reading and how all of these things related to our spiritual quest. Well!!! It is written that the way to spiritual enlightenment is to have one pointed focus so I suppose one could say I was on my way!
Since writing my last post something is sure ‘turning my crank’. If I have learned anything over all these years, it is to pay attention to the signals coming from my body and – boy, am I getting signals! I wrote another post the day after my last one, but when I read it again I felt - I am missing something – something important to me. I know this because since my last writing I am experiencing all manner of uncomfortable body sensations. I go to bed feeling exhausted and cannot sleep. Then I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, my head full of what I should write and then, when I wake up it is all gone. I am having moments of feeling a weakness in my legs, dizzy spells and my stomach starts churning. I know this sounds like something is really wrong with me physically, but I have learned - ‘thanks to the memories’ - that the thoughts in my head are directly related to what is happening in my body so….all I have to do is think about where my thoughts have been and - bingo! - my last post! This body reaction always happens when I am about to make a big breakthrough in understanding the spiritual significance for any particular experience in my physical life. Trust me. There is a vast difference between the two.
So? Here I sit, thinking, thinking, thinking, (as Caprice’s namesake, Winnie The Pooh would say) trying to put my finger on what is so darned important it’s stopping me from moving on until I ‘get it’.
Read it again Elizabeth! What were you writing that started all this? It is somehow connected to those who were coming to me in so much pain and the gratitude I saw on their faces after they received healing. More than that, it was the shock on their faces when they asked me how much and I told them there was no charge that created a sense of anxiety in me. Suddenly I became some kind of savior and I did not like it, not one little bit! I was just another human being just like them that had somehow uncovered a secret weapon against illness. Only problem was I had no control over it and until I did? I could not take credit for any outcome. Actually, the opposite occurred within me. I felt so humbled by their thanks, so small and insignificant in the face of something that was much bigger than little old me, but they refused to believe it wasn’t me. This became one of the most difficult challenges I faced as a ‘healer’.
Rod Campbell, the healer from New Zealand, entered the picture. He telephoned shortly after Roy and I had the idea to sell our stores asking if he could come and see us. I was surprised, but happy, to hear from him. Maybe he is coming to help me in some way? I was so busy doing healings on so many people I looked forward to having another person to talk to who could maybe shed some light on what I was doing it all for. As soon as he walked through our door he said our house was special, that he felt incredible power and knew then why he had been ‘sent’ to us. He seemed as happy to be with us as we were to be with him. It is a lonely life being a ‘healer’ it would seem. Just like the quote from my last post, Rod’s sole (soul) reason for doing what he did was for God and his fellow men, period. But where did that leave me? What was my soul reason?
“Love for others must come before love of self. As this ongoing healing is practiced changes in lifestyle and attitudes occur as well as changes physically and spiritually”.
His Healing Touch – Michael Buckley
I had been doing healings on others for months. As I ‘practiced’ I did indeed begin to notice ‘changes physically’ in my body. I was having all manner of strange sensations from a ringing in my ears, nose running like a tap, burning up and down my spine, head tingling, entire body shaking, heart pumping, stomach churning, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, and then the head cracks began. The first time was at my daughter Lisa’s when out-of-the-blue it felt to me like the back of my skull cracked open. It only lasted a second, but boy, it stopped me in my tracks. I continued to experience these for years to come, always unexpectedly. I was also having vivid, wild dreams that, like most dreams made no sense, but they did serve a purpose that I could not have known at the time.
-A large, black dog came into our house, very gentle and friendly - large, furry paw on the roof of our house – looked like a Muppet’s paw. The dream ended with me in my car driving down a street that looked familiar to me and I thought, ‘oh, that’s the street Shera lives on’. As I continued on there was a small building in the middle of the street blocking my way and at that moment my car took off and I was flying through the sky and a tremendous jolt of energy shot through my body. Initially I was frightened, but my fear was soon gone when I realized I was floating through the air. I can still remember the feeling of peace and quiet as I floated along looking down at the ground below me. Our dog, Muffin, woke me up and my legs were numb and my feet felt heavy.
-Caprice was being hurt by someone and I laid my hands on her and called on the Divine and instantly felt the energy through my entire upper body. It woke me up.
-Caprice and I were sitting on the kitchen counter and a man with long, black hair was speaking to us. I leaned over and put my hands on her legs and my entire upper body and arms went numb as the electricity shot into her. Then she got up and walked!
Understand this. I am not relating these strange happenings because I think they in themselves were important. What is important is how, in each experience of this nature, my body was adjusting in a safe way to being able to handle the enormous amount of energy that flowed through it every time I did a healing.
“All healing of whatever kind is of the whole person. There is no healing, however physical it may be, which does not affect the emotion and the soul.”
“For every physical reaction there is a metaphysical reason.”
Well, well! Imagine that! I wrote these quotes and the one above in my journal the same day Rod called to see if he could come for a visit! I didn’t know why they caught my attention then, but I sure do now and I shall try to explain why this is. It has given me the clue I have been looking for, the reason why I hit a stumbling block trying to write this next post. It is all connected to the phrase; ‘It’s not the destination, but the journey that counts’. I did not know I had a particular destination, but another part of me that I did not know existed obviously did. The only way to get the information I needed to know into my brain was to use my life circumstances to keep me pointed in the right direction. These quotes, simply put, contained all I ever needed to learn, but of course, I was still ‘thinking like a human’. Still, there they have sat all these years, the basis of everything that followed from that day forward.
Even though I had so much changing in my material world, as I read back in my journals it was what was happening in my spiritual world that is recorded. I did have a record of the sale of our stores and Roy’s business affairs, which to me were major turning points in our lives, but I am remembering other turning points that came later and when I go to see what I was writing at the time – nothing! Not a line! How can this be? - I am asking myself. To my mind they were so important, but my journals are just filled, page after page, with the list of names of people coming to me for healings, quote after quote from the books I was reading and how all of these things related to our spiritual quest. Well!!! It is written that the way to spiritual enlightenment is to have one pointed focus so I suppose one could say I was on my way!
Since writing my last post something is sure ‘turning my crank’. If I have learned anything over all these years, it is to pay attention to the signals coming from my body and – boy, am I getting signals! I wrote another post the day after my last one, but when I read it again I felt - I am missing something – something important to me. I know this because since my last writing I am experiencing all manner of uncomfortable body sensations. I go to bed feeling exhausted and cannot sleep. Then I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, my head full of what I should write and then, when I wake up it is all gone. I am having moments of feeling a weakness in my legs, dizzy spells and my stomach starts churning. I know this sounds like something is really wrong with me physically, but I have learned - ‘thanks to the memories’ - that the thoughts in my head are directly related to what is happening in my body so….all I have to do is think about where my thoughts have been and - bingo! - my last post! This body reaction always happens when I am about to make a big breakthrough in understanding the spiritual significance for any particular experience in my physical life. Trust me. There is a vast difference between the two.
So? Here I sit, thinking, thinking, thinking, (as Caprice’s namesake, Winnie The Pooh would say) trying to put my finger on what is so darned important it’s stopping me from moving on until I ‘get it’.
Read it again Elizabeth! What were you writing that started all this? It is somehow connected to those who were coming to me in so much pain and the gratitude I saw on their faces after they received healing. More than that, it was the shock on their faces when they asked me how much and I told them there was no charge that created a sense of anxiety in me. Suddenly I became some kind of savior and I did not like it, not one little bit! I was just another human being just like them that had somehow uncovered a secret weapon against illness. Only problem was I had no control over it and until I did? I could not take credit for any outcome. Actually, the opposite occurred within me. I felt so humbled by their thanks, so small and insignificant in the face of something that was much bigger than little old me, but they refused to believe it wasn’t me. This became one of the most difficult challenges I faced as a ‘healer’.
Rod Campbell, the healer from New Zealand, entered the picture. He telephoned shortly after Roy and I had the idea to sell our stores asking if he could come and see us. I was surprised, but happy, to hear from him. Maybe he is coming to help me in some way? I was so busy doing healings on so many people I looked forward to having another person to talk to who could maybe shed some light on what I was doing it all for. As soon as he walked through our door he said our house was special, that he felt incredible power and knew then why he had been ‘sent’ to us. He seemed as happy to be with us as we were to be with him. It is a lonely life being a ‘healer’ it would seem. Just like the quote from my last post, Rod’s sole (soul) reason for doing what he did was for God and his fellow men, period. But where did that leave me? What was my soul reason?
“Love for others must come before love of self. As this ongoing healing is practiced changes in lifestyle and attitudes occur as well as changes physically and spiritually”.
His Healing Touch – Michael Buckley
I had been doing healings on others for months. As I ‘practiced’ I did indeed begin to notice ‘changes physically’ in my body. I was having all manner of strange sensations from a ringing in my ears, nose running like a tap, burning up and down my spine, head tingling, entire body shaking, heart pumping, stomach churning, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, and then the head cracks began. The first time was at my daughter Lisa’s when out-of-the-blue it felt to me like the back of my skull cracked open. It only lasted a second, but boy, it stopped me in my tracks. I continued to experience these for years to come, always unexpectedly. I was also having vivid, wild dreams that, like most dreams made no sense, but they did serve a purpose that I could not have known at the time.
-A large, black dog came into our house, very gentle and friendly - large, furry paw on the roof of our house – looked like a Muppet’s paw. The dream ended with me in my car driving down a street that looked familiar to me and I thought, ‘oh, that’s the street Shera lives on’. As I continued on there was a small building in the middle of the street blocking my way and at that moment my car took off and I was flying through the sky and a tremendous jolt of energy shot through my body. Initially I was frightened, but my fear was soon gone when I realized I was floating through the air. I can still remember the feeling of peace and quiet as I floated along looking down at the ground below me. Our dog, Muffin, woke me up and my legs were numb and my feet felt heavy.
-Caprice was being hurt by someone and I laid my hands on her and called on the Divine and instantly felt the energy through my entire upper body. It woke me up.
-Caprice and I were sitting on the kitchen counter and a man with long, black hair was speaking to us. I leaned over and put my hands on her legs and my entire upper body and arms went numb as the electricity shot into her. Then she got up and walked!
Understand this. I am not relating these strange happenings because I think they in themselves were important. What is important is how, in each experience of this nature, my body was adjusting in a safe way to being able to handle the enormous amount of energy that flowed through it every time I did a healing.
“All healing of whatever kind is of the whole person. There is no healing, however physical it may be, which does not affect the emotion and the soul.”
“For every physical reaction there is a metaphysical reason.”
Well, well! Imagine that! I wrote these quotes and the one above in my journal the same day Rod called to see if he could come for a visit! I didn’t know why they caught my attention then, but I sure do now and I shall try to explain why this is. It has given me the clue I have been looking for, the reason why I hit a stumbling block trying to write this next post. It is all connected to the phrase; ‘It’s not the destination, but the journey that counts’. I did not know I had a particular destination, but another part of me that I did not know existed obviously did. The only way to get the information I needed to know into my brain was to use my life circumstances to keep me pointed in the right direction. These quotes, simply put, contained all I ever needed to learn, but of course, I was still ‘thinking like a human’. Still, there they have sat all these years, the basis of everything that followed from that day forward.
Friday, July 23, 2010
Something’s Happening Here!
Journal entry; March/1988: “the sole reason for any intensive cultivation of this or any other faculty is the desire to know in order to serve and that service is to God and his fellow man.” W.E. Butler - ‘How to Read the Aura Practice Psychometry, Telepathy and Clairvoyance’
By the time spring arrived, Shera had become a regular visitor to our home and - let me tell you! - having a psychic for a friend is very interesting. Out of the blue she would voluntarily give us readings and most of them involved Roy and his business plans. Selling boats and motors and snowmobiles had not proven to be very lucrative and when the opportunity came to become a distributor for a line of golf cars things began to look up. Shera’s readings confirmed what her sister Dickie Motherwell had also predicted. The business was going to be hugely successful and make a great deal of money. Now, if what she was telling us hadn’t appeared to be a fact in actuality it would have been silly for us to believe this, but the truth was, things really did appear to be heading in that direction. The golf business was booming and, sure enough, three months after Shera said this, Roy came up with the brilliant idea to lease the cars to golf courses instead of selling them and the rest, as they say, is history. Even our lawyer said to Roy that he had come up with a ‘license to print money’. To this end he started up a leasing company and slowly began the process of selling off all the stock, closing down the original business and opening up a new company under a different name that was to be devoted entirely to the golf business. It all looked so promising that when Shera spoke of how this new company would eventually generate huge sums of money and have branches all across the country it didn’t sound so out of sight to us. She spoke of having investments in real estate, money pouring in, people calling him to go into business with them, etc. etc. etc. Is it any wonder I felt secure and safe to follow my dream of healing Caprice with no worries? With financial security, (our two original stores were still doing very well providing us with a secure income) there was no pressure for me to go to work every day, I had the freedom to put all my attention on delving into the ‘Mysteries’. With our first business I had always had a say in anything that involved our finances. We were a team. But when he wanted to branch out and sell ‘boy-toys’ I opted to let him run with it, along with our two sons and son in-law, without me. It was a guy thing after all. As I was not a partner I was not involved and really didn’t want to be. Remember that phrase Julia Roberts says in the movie Pretty Woman? ‘Mistake, BIG mistake!!!
While all this was going on, I had somehow been ‘found out’. I am not sure how it happened, but other people were now calling me for healings and just as Dickie Motherwell had predicted, our house became a whirlwind of activity. They came with all manner of ailments, but they all had one thing in common. They were tired, in pain and afraid of what was happening to them with nowhere else to turn. What I know now is that it wasn’t just the healing ‘treatments’ that made the difference. It was the fact that someone cared; someone gave them their time and asked for nothing in return; someone who listened to them; someone who ‘believed’ in them. However! I did not know this then. I thought it was all happening because I had some kind of healing ability. Didn’t know what I was doing, but if people were willing to believe in me I was willing to give it a try.
These people that came to me were my greatest gift. It is because of them I learned that physical pain is not all it seems to be. It is the end result of a lifetime of ignoring the signals from our other bodies. Yes! I said, other bodies. Bet you’re just like I was and didn’t know this! Along with the physical, outer body, we have three more; a mental body, an emotional body and a spiritual body. These three are the ones that those who are called ‘healers’ are able to feel in the space surrounding the physical body that are otherwise ignored by the average person. It is these three invisible bodies that are the primary focus of one who does spiritual healing work, not so much the physical. Depending on the individual there may be relief from physical pain, but it will be short-lived if the cause of the pain is in one or more of the other three ‘bodies’ and are not acknowledged and dealt with as well. We go to a medical doctor and receive physical remedies to relieve the pain in the form of drugs and surgeries. We go to a spiritual ‘doctor’ with the same expectation; the “you-fix-me-because-I-do-not-have-time-to-be-sick” attitude and herein arose my problem. Just like everyone else, I thought if the physical pain was relieved the task was done, problem solved - right? Wrong Elizabeth!
Those who came to me would usually feel a relief from their pain and go home feeling ‘healed’. But? They kept coming back to me when their pain returned, just as we do with the medical doctors. This bothered me. I seemed to ‘tune’ into the hidden reasons for illness - reasons we do not want to look at – in the emotional, mental realms and not so much the physical. I wanted to know why the physical pain disappeared only to return. My thoughts would go to Jesus Christ and my vision of Him. Why me? If the stories written about Him were true He was able to heal the whole body, not just one part of it. So? If I was unable to do the same (and I couldn’t) then I could not claim to be a healer - and so I never thought of myself as such a one. But others did and this created a great deal of conflict in me.
“Verily, verily, I say unto you. He that believeth in me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do also.”( John 14: 12 – 13)
Oh! How I wanted to believe this; needed to believe this; but I knew nothing about this man called Jesus. I didn’t fool myself that I could, in any way, do the things that He did. How ridiculous would that be? Still, there had to be a reason He had suddenly become a part of my life and, however vague, something was percolating inside my brain. It just hadn’t surfaced yet.
Meanwhile, I still had some responsibilities with work and in May Lisa and I headed to Toronto on a buying trip. These trips gave us an opportunity to have one-on-one time together and we always had such a fun time. However, this time I found myself strangely bored with it all and when I came home I wrote in my journal - ‘I feel something is coming to an end for me. I feel I won’t be going back again. Feels good though.’
Roy and I had a partner in our two stores, (I’ll get around to how this came about later I am sure). His name was Jerome and he had several other stores all in which he had partners like us. Once a year we all met to discuss business matters and so, shortly after writing the above in my journal, Roy and I headed to Calgary for the annual meeting. We left the meeting feeling frustrated. We just didn’t fit in with what had now become a very big business (forty stores). Our way was just too simple for the rest of the partners to understand and the arguing and disagreements and the bickering that went on at these meetings did not sit well with us. In the car driving home out of my mouth came the words, ‘maybe we should sell our shares’. I mean, after all, Roy’s attention was on his new business and mine – well - we know where mine was. Shortly thereafter, decision made, we met with Jerome to tell him we wished to sell and he had two people working for him that might be interested. Remember Shera’s reading in March? Well, she had mentioned a shift in the ownership of our stores and that two others would buy the partnership, but the money would come in two stages. Sure enough! We did sell and in September the deal was done, but the money, a very large sum, did indeed come in two separate payments, one in September and the final one in December. Now I ask you. Is it any wonder I began to believe?
By the time spring arrived, Shera had become a regular visitor to our home and - let me tell you! - having a psychic for a friend is very interesting. Out of the blue she would voluntarily give us readings and most of them involved Roy and his business plans. Selling boats and motors and snowmobiles had not proven to be very lucrative and when the opportunity came to become a distributor for a line of golf cars things began to look up. Shera’s readings confirmed what her sister Dickie Motherwell had also predicted. The business was going to be hugely successful and make a great deal of money. Now, if what she was telling us hadn’t appeared to be a fact in actuality it would have been silly for us to believe this, but the truth was, things really did appear to be heading in that direction. The golf business was booming and, sure enough, three months after Shera said this, Roy came up with the brilliant idea to lease the cars to golf courses instead of selling them and the rest, as they say, is history. Even our lawyer said to Roy that he had come up with a ‘license to print money’. To this end he started up a leasing company and slowly began the process of selling off all the stock, closing down the original business and opening up a new company under a different name that was to be devoted entirely to the golf business. It all looked so promising that when Shera spoke of how this new company would eventually generate huge sums of money and have branches all across the country it didn’t sound so out of sight to us. She spoke of having investments in real estate, money pouring in, people calling him to go into business with them, etc. etc. etc. Is it any wonder I felt secure and safe to follow my dream of healing Caprice with no worries? With financial security, (our two original stores were still doing very well providing us with a secure income) there was no pressure for me to go to work every day, I had the freedom to put all my attention on delving into the ‘Mysteries’. With our first business I had always had a say in anything that involved our finances. We were a team. But when he wanted to branch out and sell ‘boy-toys’ I opted to let him run with it, along with our two sons and son in-law, without me. It was a guy thing after all. As I was not a partner I was not involved and really didn’t want to be. Remember that phrase Julia Roberts says in the movie Pretty Woman? ‘Mistake, BIG mistake!!!
While all this was going on, I had somehow been ‘found out’. I am not sure how it happened, but other people were now calling me for healings and just as Dickie Motherwell had predicted, our house became a whirlwind of activity. They came with all manner of ailments, but they all had one thing in common. They were tired, in pain and afraid of what was happening to them with nowhere else to turn. What I know now is that it wasn’t just the healing ‘treatments’ that made the difference. It was the fact that someone cared; someone gave them their time and asked for nothing in return; someone who listened to them; someone who ‘believed’ in them. However! I did not know this then. I thought it was all happening because I had some kind of healing ability. Didn’t know what I was doing, but if people were willing to believe in me I was willing to give it a try.
These people that came to me were my greatest gift. It is because of them I learned that physical pain is not all it seems to be. It is the end result of a lifetime of ignoring the signals from our other bodies. Yes! I said, other bodies. Bet you’re just like I was and didn’t know this! Along with the physical, outer body, we have three more; a mental body, an emotional body and a spiritual body. These three are the ones that those who are called ‘healers’ are able to feel in the space surrounding the physical body that are otherwise ignored by the average person. It is these three invisible bodies that are the primary focus of one who does spiritual healing work, not so much the physical. Depending on the individual there may be relief from physical pain, but it will be short-lived if the cause of the pain is in one or more of the other three ‘bodies’ and are not acknowledged and dealt with as well. We go to a medical doctor and receive physical remedies to relieve the pain in the form of drugs and surgeries. We go to a spiritual ‘doctor’ with the same expectation; the “you-fix-me-because-I-do-not-have-time-to-be-sick” attitude and herein arose my problem. Just like everyone else, I thought if the physical pain was relieved the task was done, problem solved - right? Wrong Elizabeth!
Those who came to me would usually feel a relief from their pain and go home feeling ‘healed’. But? They kept coming back to me when their pain returned, just as we do with the medical doctors. This bothered me. I seemed to ‘tune’ into the hidden reasons for illness - reasons we do not want to look at – in the emotional, mental realms and not so much the physical. I wanted to know why the physical pain disappeared only to return. My thoughts would go to Jesus Christ and my vision of Him. Why me? If the stories written about Him were true He was able to heal the whole body, not just one part of it. So? If I was unable to do the same (and I couldn’t) then I could not claim to be a healer - and so I never thought of myself as such a one. But others did and this created a great deal of conflict in me.
“Verily, verily, I say unto you. He that believeth in me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do also.”( John 14: 12 – 13)
Oh! How I wanted to believe this; needed to believe this; but I knew nothing about this man called Jesus. I didn’t fool myself that I could, in any way, do the things that He did. How ridiculous would that be? Still, there had to be a reason He had suddenly become a part of my life and, however vague, something was percolating inside my brain. It just hadn’t surfaced yet.
Meanwhile, I still had some responsibilities with work and in May Lisa and I headed to Toronto on a buying trip. These trips gave us an opportunity to have one-on-one time together and we always had such a fun time. However, this time I found myself strangely bored with it all and when I came home I wrote in my journal - ‘I feel something is coming to an end for me. I feel I won’t be going back again. Feels good though.’
Roy and I had a partner in our two stores, (I’ll get around to how this came about later I am sure). His name was Jerome and he had several other stores all in which he had partners like us. Once a year we all met to discuss business matters and so, shortly after writing the above in my journal, Roy and I headed to Calgary for the annual meeting. We left the meeting feeling frustrated. We just didn’t fit in with what had now become a very big business (forty stores). Our way was just too simple for the rest of the partners to understand and the arguing and disagreements and the bickering that went on at these meetings did not sit well with us. In the car driving home out of my mouth came the words, ‘maybe we should sell our shares’. I mean, after all, Roy’s attention was on his new business and mine – well - we know where mine was. Shortly thereafter, decision made, we met with Jerome to tell him we wished to sell and he had two people working for him that might be interested. Remember Shera’s reading in March? Well, she had mentioned a shift in the ownership of our stores and that two others would buy the partnership, but the money would come in two stages. Sure enough! We did sell and in September the deal was done, but the money, a very large sum, did indeed come in two separate payments, one in September and the final one in December. Now I ask you. Is it any wonder I began to believe?
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Faith is the Substance of All Things Hoped For
Now! To try and figure out how I did it, that is the question. It all began with Tamie entering the picture. I began this quest with the sole intent of helping Caprice, but now I was facing a new challenge, one I was not at all comfortable with. I was still struggling with all the new information pouring into my brain, all the while trying to understand what to do with it. On the other hand, there I was, waving my hands over Caprice, (and now Tamie), and clearly something was changing in their bodies, but How? What? Why? This just made me more determined to find answers to these constant questions, but the more I read and studied the more questions I had, but even then, I persisted. I will figure this out, I must figure this out, I said to myself over and over again.
Caprice and Tamie were the catalysts for my eventual awakening to a new understanding of how wonderful and magical the body really is and how much power I have as an individual to heal, not only others, but myself as well, without the need to rely on others to do the job for me. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Well! It wasn’t. Know why? Because I did not believe, I did not know about this power that resides within. Why didn’t I believe? What kept me in such a holding pattern for so long?
“He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne’er believe, do what you please.
If the sun and moon should doubt,
They’d immediately go out.” – William Blake
Not true William Blake! I doubted for a long time, but now? I Believe. I did not allow my doubting mind to stop me. I may have said to myself many times, ‘that’s not true’, and then I would set about proving to myself I was ‘right’. But a funny thing happened when I did this. I discovered I was wrong! Interesting how the human mind can get in the way of progress of any kind. All depended on how I looked at it and how I looked at it was programmed into my head from the time I was born until the day came when it was so firmly entrenched it became an immovable object. Ah! But I was fortunate to love another human being so deeply I was willing to sacrifice my precious belief systems altogether to serve another. This is the key to my present understanding. Would I have done all this for myself if I had been the one in distress and not my daughter? Highly unlikely. This is the difficulty I feel we face as human beings. To learn to do for ourselves what we do for others. To learn to love ourselves as we love others. To learn to do unto others as we would have them do unto us – and then – once we have learned to do all these things? DO IT!
“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” - Matthew 22: 37/39
Now this is a sticky wicket is it not? The above quote does not just refer to the person living next door. It encompasses the whole world. Now, think about this. Imagine loving every person in the world and you will have a glimpse of the magnitude of what it takes to change the thoughts forming in your brain right now. It’s easy to love the good ones, but really? How can one love all the nasty, mean people? Now, love at this level takes a soul walking in the body and to gain this knowledge means getting the you-know-what kicked out of you. Why? Because the human mind does not loosen it’s hold without a fight, so the only way soul can get a ‘word’ in is to get you when your defenses are down.
My goodness. How did I get on this topic? It comes from reading ahead in my journals and as I read I am noticing how the quotes I recorded from the books I was reading at the time were giving me a heads-up as to what was coming next. It’s as though I was being led step by step all along the way without my even knowing it. What kept the wheel turning was my constant dedication to learning, learning, learning even when my life was falling apart. I can see it all now, but back then? I didn’t have a clue. Ah! Hindsight is a wonderful thing!
“All the world’s a stage
And all the men and women merely players
They have their exits and their entrances
And one man in his time plays many parts.” William Shakespeare
Caprice and Tamie were the catalysts for my eventual awakening to a new understanding of how wonderful and magical the body really is and how much power I have as an individual to heal, not only others, but myself as well, without the need to rely on others to do the job for me. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Well! It wasn’t. Know why? Because I did not believe, I did not know about this power that resides within. Why didn’t I believe? What kept me in such a holding pattern for so long?
“He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne’er believe, do what you please.
If the sun and moon should doubt,
They’d immediately go out.” – William Blake
Not true William Blake! I doubted for a long time, but now? I Believe. I did not allow my doubting mind to stop me. I may have said to myself many times, ‘that’s not true’, and then I would set about proving to myself I was ‘right’. But a funny thing happened when I did this. I discovered I was wrong! Interesting how the human mind can get in the way of progress of any kind. All depended on how I looked at it and how I looked at it was programmed into my head from the time I was born until the day came when it was so firmly entrenched it became an immovable object. Ah! But I was fortunate to love another human being so deeply I was willing to sacrifice my precious belief systems altogether to serve another. This is the key to my present understanding. Would I have done all this for myself if I had been the one in distress and not my daughter? Highly unlikely. This is the difficulty I feel we face as human beings. To learn to do for ourselves what we do for others. To learn to love ourselves as we love others. To learn to do unto others as we would have them do unto us – and then – once we have learned to do all these things? DO IT!
“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” - Matthew 22: 37/39
Now this is a sticky wicket is it not? The above quote does not just refer to the person living next door. It encompasses the whole world. Now, think about this. Imagine loving every person in the world and you will have a glimpse of the magnitude of what it takes to change the thoughts forming in your brain right now. It’s easy to love the good ones, but really? How can one love all the nasty, mean people? Now, love at this level takes a soul walking in the body and to gain this knowledge means getting the you-know-what kicked out of you. Why? Because the human mind does not loosen it’s hold without a fight, so the only way soul can get a ‘word’ in is to get you when your defenses are down.
My goodness. How did I get on this topic? It comes from reading ahead in my journals and as I read I am noticing how the quotes I recorded from the books I was reading at the time were giving me a heads-up as to what was coming next. It’s as though I was being led step by step all along the way without my even knowing it. What kept the wheel turning was my constant dedication to learning, learning, learning even when my life was falling apart. I can see it all now, but back then? I didn’t have a clue. Ah! Hindsight is a wonderful thing!
“All the world’s a stage
And all the men and women merely players
They have their exits and their entrances
And one man in his time plays many parts.” William Shakespeare
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Deep Waters
“The more you are emptied of your physical abilities the more you are filled with the strength of the soul.” Thomas Moore, ‘Dark Night Of The Soul’
I have been trying to figure out what particular event it was that happened in my life that hit me like a lightening bolt and turned my life upside down. Today, as I read back in my journals it almost feels like I am reading someone else’s story, not mine. How could I have changed so much, almost overnight it seems? A night that has lasted twenty-four years! It’s as though I lost myself for a period of time. Well! Thankfully I am back to my old self, but with a new twist. I may look a little different, I am twenty-four years older after all, but I’m still living and moving, walking and talking and trying to deal with the same old ‘tick-tock’ everybody else does, so what did I do it all for?
“You cannot remember until you are willing to forget.” - The Starseed Transmissions, Ken Carey
This is what I want to do; wipe the slate of forgotten memories clean and begin again, knowing there is no need to hold anything in. No pretenses; this is who I am; let it all hang out; what you see is what you get. The strange thing is that before Caprice’s surgery I had this type of personality, I didn’t think about who I was or how others saw me. It was all done subconsciously.
My sojourn into the place where humans fear to tread was done the same way. Subconsciously. It just happened - sort of like my body operates. I mean, as it was then, (and still is now), I did not have to think about keeping the heart beating and the blood circulating and all the other miraculous things this body of mine does to keep me alive - did I? It’s all done automatically without any effort on my part. So? My question was; ‘who is in charge of this body of mine and the strange activity going on inside it and how could I get in touch with the one who is?’
Asking myself this question propelled me onto the ‘thunderbolt path of karma’, (as author Linda Goodman calls it). This is the place where a person has the opportunity to clear up the debris left from ten lives, not just the present one. Ah yes! I am talking about past lives, a topic I was not particularly interested in at the time. I was having enough trouble dealing with this one and besides, what was the use of knowing my past lives anyway? I mean there was no way I could prove they existed so what difference did it make? However, the thought did cross my mind that it did kind of explain why Caprice was in a wheelchair and neither Roy or I or any of my other children were. Nor for that matter was anyone else I knew. So why did she have to suffer? Why not me? It all just seemed so unfair and made no sense. There had to be an answer. I just could not accept it was all a matter of chance - tough luck kid – that’s the way the cookie crumbles. Oh no! I had to jump into deep, deep waters to figure this one out. It’s taken me a lot longer than I thought, but I did it - figure it out that is.
I have been trying to figure out what particular event it was that happened in my life that hit me like a lightening bolt and turned my life upside down. Today, as I read back in my journals it almost feels like I am reading someone else’s story, not mine. How could I have changed so much, almost overnight it seems? A night that has lasted twenty-four years! It’s as though I lost myself for a period of time. Well! Thankfully I am back to my old self, but with a new twist. I may look a little different, I am twenty-four years older after all, but I’m still living and moving, walking and talking and trying to deal with the same old ‘tick-tock’ everybody else does, so what did I do it all for?
“You cannot remember until you are willing to forget.” - The Starseed Transmissions, Ken Carey
This is what I want to do; wipe the slate of forgotten memories clean and begin again, knowing there is no need to hold anything in. No pretenses; this is who I am; let it all hang out; what you see is what you get. The strange thing is that before Caprice’s surgery I had this type of personality, I didn’t think about who I was or how others saw me. It was all done subconsciously.
My sojourn into the place where humans fear to tread was done the same way. Subconsciously. It just happened - sort of like my body operates. I mean, as it was then, (and still is now), I did not have to think about keeping the heart beating and the blood circulating and all the other miraculous things this body of mine does to keep me alive - did I? It’s all done automatically without any effort on my part. So? My question was; ‘who is in charge of this body of mine and the strange activity going on inside it and how could I get in touch with the one who is?’
Asking myself this question propelled me onto the ‘thunderbolt path of karma’, (as author Linda Goodman calls it). This is the place where a person has the opportunity to clear up the debris left from ten lives, not just the present one. Ah yes! I am talking about past lives, a topic I was not particularly interested in at the time. I was having enough trouble dealing with this one and besides, what was the use of knowing my past lives anyway? I mean there was no way I could prove they existed so what difference did it make? However, the thought did cross my mind that it did kind of explain why Caprice was in a wheelchair and neither Roy or I or any of my other children were. Nor for that matter was anyone else I knew. So why did she have to suffer? Why not me? It all just seemed so unfair and made no sense. There had to be an answer. I just could not accept it was all a matter of chance - tough luck kid – that’s the way the cookie crumbles. Oh no! I had to jump into deep, deep waters to figure this one out. It’s taken me a lot longer than I thought, but I did it - figure it out that is.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
What you see is what you get
"Creating miracles in your life is no more complicated than understanding the metaphysics of the Universal Law. And because that law is indestructible and therefore infinite, we know that the power used by miracle-makers in the past is still available today. Yet, in our modern society we are brought up to believe only in those things we can logically understand. We are not taught either that the Universal Law has limitless potential or that this power is at out disposal and can be used to work miracles in our own lives.”
The above quote comes from a book titled ‘Miracles’ by the author Stuart Wilde. It was a gift from Shera at the time Tamie entered our lives. I know I read it back then, because he became one of my favorite authors. Interesting that I picked up this book and re-read this quote before the Dateline show. Now, in the present, I realize that today I know the truth in this statement, but back then? It was just another seed planted in my brain until further notice. Reminds me of a movie I watched recently called The Secret Life Of Words! Who knew these words I read so long ago led me to a secret that was hidden from my view? And …….I wonder as I wander if these words of mine will unlock the door to the hidden wisdom hidden inside you! The written word is silent and silence is golden and is one of the Universal Laws.
Although Stuart Wilde is a lecturer and author of many books on the subject of Universal Laws (and I quote from the book) – “he does not preach, or solicit donations, or manipulate the individual into a ‘group’ reality”.
I do not know why this group thing has entered my head at this particular time, but I feel it’s important. Maybe it is because after watching Dateline, I said to Caprice – “there, but for the grace of God, go I”. Group reality? Somehow it is connected to the next page in this story of ours. If I have given the impression in my preceding blog that it is not a good thing to seek help from others of like mind, this is not the case.
Groups give us a safe place to begin to listen, to learn and to gather the necessary ‘tools’ to go it alone, because, ultimately, this is how it must be done - or not. Once felt in the body, this spiritual rush cannot be denied. The problem arises when the only way to feel the ‘rush’ is to be surrounded by it, hence the need to keep looking for outside help to ‘go within’ as it is termed. Sounds a lot like an addict must feel does it not? Imagine how difficult it is to beat an addiction once it gets a grip on you and you get the picture. So? Know that the initial ‘rush’ will come and go and this is a good thing. Just because it can’t be felt doesn’t mean it’s not there. However! Feeling up in the air all the time does not lend itself to functioning too well in the tick-tock (Stuart Wilde’s term for the human condition).
In the beginning we all need help and who better to reach out to than our fellow human beings? Hah! There it is. The answer I’ve been looking for. Our fellow human beings!
Well! I didn’t have to go looking. My ‘outside’ help walked through my front door! All I wanted to do was help my daughter, but now a third person had entered the picture - Tamie. I was so happy to see Caprice smiling again. It had been such a difficult year for Caprice. She had been feeling so isolated and alone because all her schoolmates were off having fun doing what teenagers do and she could no longer participate and one by one they had fallen away. Up until then she had no concept of being different, she was just like them. Now? Everything had changed and this emotional pain was worse than her physical pain. Tamie changed this. She too was feeling the pain that comes from no longer being able to work and having to move back in with her parents.
As for me? Now I had two people who needed whatever it was I had to give. Slowly, without my even knowing it, I began to distance myself from people, places and things in order to find more time to devote to my newfound passion. Fortunately for me, I had to come down to earth to handle my responsibilities at the stores, which meant my intellectual brain had to kick into gear. I loved my job! When I was there, I was there, if you know what I mean. I didn’t mention anything to anybody away from home what I was up to as far as the healing work was concerned. Hah! One of the most valuable pieces of wisdom there is and I didn’t even have to be told – “don’t speak, don’t say a word”. This jumping back and forth from the spiritual realm to the physical kept my feet on the ground while my head was in the sky.
The above quote comes from a book titled ‘Miracles’ by the author Stuart Wilde. It was a gift from Shera at the time Tamie entered our lives. I know I read it back then, because he became one of my favorite authors. Interesting that I picked up this book and re-read this quote before the Dateline show. Now, in the present, I realize that today I know the truth in this statement, but back then? It was just another seed planted in my brain until further notice. Reminds me of a movie I watched recently called The Secret Life Of Words! Who knew these words I read so long ago led me to a secret that was hidden from my view? And …….I wonder as I wander if these words of mine will unlock the door to the hidden wisdom hidden inside you! The written word is silent and silence is golden and is one of the Universal Laws.
Although Stuart Wilde is a lecturer and author of many books on the subject of Universal Laws (and I quote from the book) – “he does not preach, or solicit donations, or manipulate the individual into a ‘group’ reality”.
I do not know why this group thing has entered my head at this particular time, but I feel it’s important. Maybe it is because after watching Dateline, I said to Caprice – “there, but for the grace of God, go I”. Group reality? Somehow it is connected to the next page in this story of ours. If I have given the impression in my preceding blog that it is not a good thing to seek help from others of like mind, this is not the case.
Groups give us a safe place to begin to listen, to learn and to gather the necessary ‘tools’ to go it alone, because, ultimately, this is how it must be done - or not. Once felt in the body, this spiritual rush cannot be denied. The problem arises when the only way to feel the ‘rush’ is to be surrounded by it, hence the need to keep looking for outside help to ‘go within’ as it is termed. Sounds a lot like an addict must feel does it not? Imagine how difficult it is to beat an addiction once it gets a grip on you and you get the picture. So? Know that the initial ‘rush’ will come and go and this is a good thing. Just because it can’t be felt doesn’t mean it’s not there. However! Feeling up in the air all the time does not lend itself to functioning too well in the tick-tock (Stuart Wilde’s term for the human condition).
In the beginning we all need help and who better to reach out to than our fellow human beings? Hah! There it is. The answer I’ve been looking for. Our fellow human beings!
Well! I didn’t have to go looking. My ‘outside’ help walked through my front door! All I wanted to do was help my daughter, but now a third person had entered the picture - Tamie. I was so happy to see Caprice smiling again. It had been such a difficult year for Caprice. She had been feeling so isolated and alone because all her schoolmates were off having fun doing what teenagers do and she could no longer participate and one by one they had fallen away. Up until then she had no concept of being different, she was just like them. Now? Everything had changed and this emotional pain was worse than her physical pain. Tamie changed this. She too was feeling the pain that comes from no longer being able to work and having to move back in with her parents.
As for me? Now I had two people who needed whatever it was I had to give. Slowly, without my even knowing it, I began to distance myself from people, places and things in order to find more time to devote to my newfound passion. Fortunately for me, I had to come down to earth to handle my responsibilities at the stores, which meant my intellectual brain had to kick into gear. I loved my job! When I was there, I was there, if you know what I mean. I didn’t mention anything to anybody away from home what I was up to as far as the healing work was concerned. Hah! One of the most valuable pieces of wisdom there is and I didn’t even have to be told – “don’t speak, don’t say a word”. This jumping back and forth from the spiritual realm to the physical kept my feet on the ground while my head was in the sky.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
“First Gain Knowledge” (Edgar Cayce)
In remembering back I am reminded of all the turmoil Caprice and I have gone through, but we also had wonderful, uplifting moments too! Do we remember the good times or the bad? Is this why people don’t remember past events? - Because we are afraid to remember the hurts? How can we remember the good times without also remembering the bad ones? Seems to me we cannot have one without the other. Oh well! Who can remember that far back anyway?
Know what I am discovering as I drift down memory lane? It’s not so easy being that Elizabeth now that I know so much more than I did back then. To remember as accurately as possible I have to be in the same mindset I was in twenty-four years ago. Every day as I write I see a connection to today that began all those years ago. What I am finding is that all of the events are connected, like links in a chain, to a future time when I had reached a better understanding as to why each step was necessary. But! It’s driving me a little crazy because I want to write from where I am today and I have to keep reminding myself, that was then and this is now, and where I am now is very different. To do this means emptying my brain of everything I have learned and become that Elizabeth, who knew nothing.
My journals are certainly helping me tune into the details, but actually, for the past year, memories as far back as my childhood have been surfacing every day. As they surface in my mind I am pulled to a journal entry for a certain date and year that is connected to a specific learning. Depending on what I was reading at the time and what was happening in my life at the time and my thoughts at the time, I find a connection to the present that helps me understand and know it hasn’t all been for nothing. There really is a divine order to this thing called Life.
Writing this blog is showing me how much my life has been one big chaotic circus. Drama, drama, drama!! Still, I know I am not alone. Everybody has skeletons in their closet, but who wants to air their dirty laundry in public? This being said, I am discovering that doing just this is a very healing thing for me to do because it gives me a chance to see if I have any deep-seated hurts I might be hanging onto towards anybody or anything connected to past events. Forgiveness is a virtue you know. Happy to say, so far, I haven’t found any of these sneaky little devils that sit festering away, buried so deep it would take a bomb to release them. Know why? Because once I stepped into the world of spiritual teachings, they all surfaced, one by one, sometimes two and three at a time. If I thought I had troubles before, (which I usually didn’t - think about them that is), they were nothing compared to what my soul threw at me as I struggled to understand the difference between my human self and my spiritual self. Trust me. There is a difference - a BIG one, but just like my memories, there were some great ups that more than made up for the downs.
Now! Back to our story.
I explained to the woman whom Shera had referred to me that I did not know whether I could help her or not, but if she wanted to come and see me she was welcome to do so. She accepted my offer and we set a time for her to come.
Her name was Tamie and she needed help with a knee injury from a skiing accident and was in constant pain from a surgery that had not gone well. I told her straight out that I had no idea how or why or what I was doing in regard to this healing energy, but if she was willing so was I. She had her first session that day and from that day forward became a regular visitor to our home for ‘treatments’, but there was another bonus to her visits. Through their mutual pain she and Caprice had a strong bond and a friendship was forged that has lasted until today. Oops! See, I just flashed forward!
As for me, I was learning that my hands didn’t just pick up pain in the area of concern. For some reason with Tamie, I felt I should move to another part of the body and when I followed the urge to do so, I found another trouble spot. When this happened her body would tense up and her fists would clench. Hmm? What is this all about I would ask myself? By now Shera and I were in constant touch with each other and she reassured me I wasn’t causing any harm to Tamie, which was a concern to me. I felt so frustrated, because I kept meditating asking for help and no help came. “Why isn’t there a book to explain how to create a miracle in ten easy lessons?” While I was wide-awake I heard the voice in my head say, “you don’t need to know; you need to have faith, trust and never doubt.” Well! I did not have faith, I did not trust myself and I had lots of doubts. So there!!
Rod Campbell, the healer from New Zealand said it was God working through him. He believed this; he had faith. Not so with me. I didn’t believe in God, Jesus Christ or any other religious figure. The closest I came to going to church was for weddings, funerals and graduations. I am remembering a day a year before Caprice’s surgery when a woman friend was over for coffee. She was a Born-Again Christian and the conversation between us turned to religion. She was telling me I was a sinner and I needed to get down on my knees to repent my sins and ask for forgiveness. The hairs on the back of my neck bristled and I told her I didn’t need to ask someone ‘up there’ for anything and that ‘God’ has given me everything I need right here, right now, to accomplish everything I need. Honestly, I do not know why I said that. The words just came out of my mouth. I didn’t know that was what I believed. I always believed in a “Something Greater Than”, I just didn’t believe in what the different religions said it was. The question that baffled me then was, - “if there is only one God how come every religion seemed to have a different version?”
Back to Rod! Now the question was - which of the gods was working through him? - And why hadn’t Rod been able do anymore for Caprice than I when he had such success with others? Maybe there is a difference in healers just like there is a difference in doctors? – And the bigger question - if God was working through Rod, - who was ‘working through me’ if I did not believe? It could be anybody and I didn’t like that thought one little bit. Questions, questions and more questions, going unanswered.
Oh! I had found an interesting book called Star Signs by Linda Goodman. While it was on ‘New Age’ topics, that of numerology and astrology, she wrote in a down-to-earth fashion that my intellect could actually follow. Hallelujah! I was able to put some of her advice to practical use and this encouraged me to keep on searching. I referred back to it many times in the years to come. As had become my custom, in every book I read, I always checked the bibliography at the back for new titles I might be interested in.
Know what I am discovering as I drift down memory lane? It’s not so easy being that Elizabeth now that I know so much more than I did back then. To remember as accurately as possible I have to be in the same mindset I was in twenty-four years ago. Every day as I write I see a connection to today that began all those years ago. What I am finding is that all of the events are connected, like links in a chain, to a future time when I had reached a better understanding as to why each step was necessary. But! It’s driving me a little crazy because I want to write from where I am today and I have to keep reminding myself, that was then and this is now, and where I am now is very different. To do this means emptying my brain of everything I have learned and become that Elizabeth, who knew nothing.
My journals are certainly helping me tune into the details, but actually, for the past year, memories as far back as my childhood have been surfacing every day. As they surface in my mind I am pulled to a journal entry for a certain date and year that is connected to a specific learning. Depending on what I was reading at the time and what was happening in my life at the time and my thoughts at the time, I find a connection to the present that helps me understand and know it hasn’t all been for nothing. There really is a divine order to this thing called Life.
Writing this blog is showing me how much my life has been one big chaotic circus. Drama, drama, drama!! Still, I know I am not alone. Everybody has skeletons in their closet, but who wants to air their dirty laundry in public? This being said, I am discovering that doing just this is a very healing thing for me to do because it gives me a chance to see if I have any deep-seated hurts I might be hanging onto towards anybody or anything connected to past events. Forgiveness is a virtue you know. Happy to say, so far, I haven’t found any of these sneaky little devils that sit festering away, buried so deep it would take a bomb to release them. Know why? Because once I stepped into the world of spiritual teachings, they all surfaced, one by one, sometimes two and three at a time. If I thought I had troubles before, (which I usually didn’t - think about them that is), they were nothing compared to what my soul threw at me as I struggled to understand the difference between my human self and my spiritual self. Trust me. There is a difference - a BIG one, but just like my memories, there were some great ups that more than made up for the downs.
Now! Back to our story.
I explained to the woman whom Shera had referred to me that I did not know whether I could help her or not, but if she wanted to come and see me she was welcome to do so. She accepted my offer and we set a time for her to come.
Her name was Tamie and she needed help with a knee injury from a skiing accident and was in constant pain from a surgery that had not gone well. I told her straight out that I had no idea how or why or what I was doing in regard to this healing energy, but if she was willing so was I. She had her first session that day and from that day forward became a regular visitor to our home for ‘treatments’, but there was another bonus to her visits. Through their mutual pain she and Caprice had a strong bond and a friendship was forged that has lasted until today. Oops! See, I just flashed forward!
As for me, I was learning that my hands didn’t just pick up pain in the area of concern. For some reason with Tamie, I felt I should move to another part of the body and when I followed the urge to do so, I found another trouble spot. When this happened her body would tense up and her fists would clench. Hmm? What is this all about I would ask myself? By now Shera and I were in constant touch with each other and she reassured me I wasn’t causing any harm to Tamie, which was a concern to me. I felt so frustrated, because I kept meditating asking for help and no help came. “Why isn’t there a book to explain how to create a miracle in ten easy lessons?” While I was wide-awake I heard the voice in my head say, “you don’t need to know; you need to have faith, trust and never doubt.” Well! I did not have faith, I did not trust myself and I had lots of doubts. So there!!
Rod Campbell, the healer from New Zealand said it was God working through him. He believed this; he had faith. Not so with me. I didn’t believe in God, Jesus Christ or any other religious figure. The closest I came to going to church was for weddings, funerals and graduations. I am remembering a day a year before Caprice’s surgery when a woman friend was over for coffee. She was a Born-Again Christian and the conversation between us turned to religion. She was telling me I was a sinner and I needed to get down on my knees to repent my sins and ask for forgiveness. The hairs on the back of my neck bristled and I told her I didn’t need to ask someone ‘up there’ for anything and that ‘God’ has given me everything I need right here, right now, to accomplish everything I need. Honestly, I do not know why I said that. The words just came out of my mouth. I didn’t know that was what I believed. I always believed in a “Something Greater Than”, I just didn’t believe in what the different religions said it was. The question that baffled me then was, - “if there is only one God how come every religion seemed to have a different version?”
Back to Rod! Now the question was - which of the gods was working through him? - And why hadn’t Rod been able do anymore for Caprice than I when he had such success with others? Maybe there is a difference in healers just like there is a difference in doctors? – And the bigger question - if God was working through Rod, - who was ‘working through me’ if I did not believe? It could be anybody and I didn’t like that thought one little bit. Questions, questions and more questions, going unanswered.
Oh! I had found an interesting book called Star Signs by Linda Goodman. While it was on ‘New Age’ topics, that of numerology and astrology, she wrote in a down-to-earth fashion that my intellect could actually follow. Hallelujah! I was able to put some of her advice to practical use and this encouraged me to keep on searching. I referred back to it many times in the years to come. As had become my custom, in every book I read, I always checked the bibliography at the back for new titles I might be interested in.
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