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’.
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