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“When the inside is like the outside and the outside is like the inside.” (Gospel of Thomas)
I remember her sadness when she first went into her wheelchair (she was seven years old) and suddenly she came face to face with the fact she was ‘different’ and not like everyone else. She came home frustrated and in tears then too, because she couldn’t join in any of the extra-curricular activities and she had to sit on the sidelines and watch all the other kids having fun. I remember trying to make her feel better by telling her; “everyone has a handicap Caprice, yours just happens to show.”
Until Caprice, I had never known anyone in a wheelchair. Why my daughter? Why not me? Why not Roy? Why not my sons David and Jim, why not Lisa? Why not anyone in either our family trees? It just seemed to have come out of nowhere. There had to be a reason and her tears just made me all the more determined to find answers.
I gave her the old pep talk about how it won’t always be this way for her; lots of other girls don’t go on dates or have any more fun than she does, nor do they have the other perks she does etc., etc., etc., but inside my heart was breaking. I just had to find a way to make her pain go away! I wrote in my journal: “Please God, if you’re listening, help us to be strong. Do not let anything deter us. Surely by now you know we will honor our promise to continue helping others? We will not let you down.”
“When the pain of remaining the same exceeds the pain of change, you will change.” (Modern Mantra)
In Dickie Motherwell’s psychic reading in September 1987, she said Caprice would be married in the future. One of Shera’s readings said she would have friends all over the world and lots of them and this is true today. All the psychic readings pointed to Caprice being healed, maybe even walking again! Both Roy and I had also seen her walking in a dream, so had Carleen (her sister in law), friends, and even strangers. As a matter of fact, in May of 1989, Lisa, Caprice and I were in Vancouver for a fun weekend away and we wandered into a crystal shop to look around. We no sooner walked through the door when the owner of the store said to Caprice, ‘I knew you were coming, I dreamt about you last night’. Now - Lisa was having a hard time with all this weird stuff Caprice and I were into and when she heard this her face went white and all she wanted to do was get outta there. He too told Caprice she would walk again! Caprice and I go back to his store (Amethyst Creations, 2746 4th Avenue W) whenever we are in Vancouver and the last time in 1999 he asked Caprice why she was still in her chair and he added, ‘you can get out of it you know’). Imagine that!
Is it any wonder we began to think that maybe, just maybe, dreams do come true? The thought that she might one day be able to walk again kept Caprice and I motivated, so why not go there? Who was I to say that miracles cannot happen? I had learned from the people who came to me for healings that hope is what really heals a person and hope comes from the inside. It was their faith in the thought I was a healer that helped them, not anything I did…except maybe give them a reason to hope. So, as impossible as our expectations were, hope reigned supreme. Why? What made us even think such a thing could happen? Well, ‘what if’ there was a way? We had already seen huge changes in her physical condition since beginning the healings, changes that were not supposed to be possible (I mean, how does one revive dead nerves?) so why not believe that anything was possible?
“Hope is the opposite of despair.” Deepak Chopra
I was caught between a rock and a hard place. Which way do I go? Who do I listen to? I was torn between the pull of two opposites and neither were working; one minute here and one minute there. From where I sat I had no choice. Caprice was all I cared about and to watch her body slowly deteriorate in front of my eyes was not an option. I was willing to head into no-man’s-land and risk losing in order to gain and that is exactly what happened. It is a good thing I couldn’t see into the future. If I had known then what I know now…where would I have found the strength to persevere? Maybe our expectations were too high and maybe we fell short of accomplishing them, but then - we’re not dead yet! If I hadn’t plunged in headfirst would she be alive and well today? The prognosis given for her disease hung like a stone around our necks and I just couldn’t accept there wasn’t another way.
“The body is a learning device for the mind.” Alice Bailey
“Anyone can do what I do if they are willing to pay the price.” Edgar Cayce
We arrived home from Hawaii to three feet of snow and freezing cold temperatures and it felt wonderful! While we had the best holiday it didn’t feel like Christmas to me while basking in the sunshine, so from that moment, I decided to stay home at that time of year. The great thing about getting away was that I didn’t have to think about doing healings or reading or meditating or journaling or the stores. I hadn’t realized how hectic my life had become until I left it all behind. We received good news from Lisa when we returned. She was pregnant with our first grandchild!
She and her husband Russ had been trying for so long, but there was an extra, added bonus to the timing of it all. I love it when the Plan comes together! Lisa had been managing our stores for us since Caprice’s surgery in 1986 and without her help I do not know how I would have survived. She did an excellent job and was receiving a very healthy salary for doing so. The new owners of our stores had taken over in September and had immediately removed her from any managerial duties pretty much delegating her to a salesclerk only. As they did not need to pay a salesclerk such a high salary they did everything in their power to force her quit. She came to me frustrated and in tears. Lisa loved her job and was a talented, highly motivated merchandiser. It was humiliating for her to have to go to work every day and be treated as if she did not exist. I told her no matter what they said and did, try and make the best of it and just get through each day as best she could and take their money. Make them fire you and then they will have to pay you severance pay. So for months she did just that, and then…she discovered she was pregnant, but she didn’t say anything at work. Finally, they got the picture that the only way to get rid of her was to fire her and they did just that. Lisa received a large severance check and was also eligible for maternity leave. Now that’s karma! She would have resigned on her own in a few more months. Who had the last laugh now?
"Karma: the totality of a person’s actions in any one of the successive states of his existence, thought of as determining his fate in the next.” (Webster’s New World Dictionary)
“For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” (Otherwise known as the Law of Cause and Effect)
“For every physical reaction there is a metaphysical reason.”
It really is a true statement when it is said that word of mouth is the best advertising! I had no sooner arrived back home and the phone started ringing from people asking for healings. How on earth were they finding me? I certainly wasn’t advertising. Unlike Rod, who gathered clients wherever he was and whomever he happened to be standing next to, my lips were sealed. Again, unlike Rod, whose clients were mostly cancer patients, I was drawing people with all manner of ailments that were not imminently life threatening, but still extremely painful and for which medical science did not have a satisfactory solution, but no cancer patients…except for one.
Before our trip to Hawaii, on one of Rod’s weekend visits to our home in September, a young man named Darrell brought his mother Retta, suffering from an advanced cancer, to see Rod. While Rod and I were doing a healing on her, I looked over at Darrell sitting off to the side and he appeared to be in a lot of pain. I left Rod and Retta and walked over to him and asked what was the matter. He said he had back problems and he was always in pain. I asked if he would like me to try to help and he agreed. After only a few minutes the pain was gone and with an incredulous look on his face he said to me, “how did you do that?” He was hooked! Darrell took a more hands on route to using the healing energy. To this end, he took course after course after course. He and I were both driven to learn more, to try and figure out what this strange force was that had suddenly taken over our lives. We spent many hours discussing all manner of spiritual topics and today he is still a close friend of Caprice and I. He even shares Caprice’s birth date, March 5th. Eventually he opened a health clinic in the basement of his home which offered many body healing therapies such as colonic irrigation, touch-for-health, massage, etc., along with herbal remedies for every ailment all of which helped me tremendously and taught me much about my own body and how to care for it holistically. One more thing I have to mention; Darrel may have learned about the ‘mechanics’ of the body but he had that ‘something’ else in his fingers – something that no course can give – magic!
As I reflect back to these past memories I am thinking now how so many ‘coincidental’ meetings, that came and went unnoticed by me at the time, were so very relevant to what was to come next. Two people has come into my life, first Rod and then Darrell, both deeply committed to healing others, but with very different methods and then…there was me, caught in the middle of two opposites. Neither Rod’s way nor Darrell’s fit me. Both of them were comfortable with their roles, but not me. I constantly fought against the tide of giving all my control to some invisible being ‘out there’. Whenever Rod and I worked together I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was missing something. Rod noticed the difference between us as well. After one of our healing sessions he made the comment - “the energy is the same, but you work differently than I do in that you talk to people and get them to express their feelings verbally.” I remember saying to him that God had given me this mouth for a reason. Ding! Ding!
“The true voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” (The 21 Lessons of Merlin)
It was December 1988 and the money was in the bank from the sale of our two stores. I had decided a vacation was in order to celebrate our newfound freedom and so I had booked a two-week vacation to spend Christmas in Hawaii for Roy, Caprice, David and I. The first week was spent on Oahu and what a fun time we all had boating, swimming in the ocean, snorkeling with the fishes at Hanauma Bay, a luau, lots of shopping and just generally relaxing in the sun. The second week we left Oahu and headed for Maui, but a strange thing happened to me when I stepped off the plane as soon as I my feet hit the ground. I went from feeling happy, happy to suddenly becoming very cranky and irritable. As we walked around that evening doing some window shopping nothing I looked at appealed to me in the least and I could not have cared less about being there. What on earth was wrong with me I wondered? I ‘came back’ the next day but I didn’t really ever get to feeling relaxed while we were there. One other strange thing happened on the 4th day. Roy and David had left early to go fishing. When I woke up Caprice was already awake with severe pain in her stomach and had to throw up. I did a healing on her and she went back to bed for several hours. She slept soundly until lunchtime and woke up feeling fine and said she was hungry. We went down for lunch and she ate a hamburger of all things, with no ill effects I might add. David and Caprice were sleeping in the same room and when David came back from fishing he told us that on the night before, he woke up and Caprice’s body was surrounded by a glowing green light…‘very big and very bright’ (no wonder she had to throw up the next morning!).
Now, as I sit here in the year 2010 reading my journal entry about our Hawaii trip and being reminded of that glowing green light, another memory surfaces, one I hadn’t recorded in my journal at the time. It was January 1987...I know, I know! - this is getting confusing, but if you think you’re confused imagine being me! Here I am trying to recapture the events from my past in the order they happened, one year, at a time and now I’m backtracking while I’m backtracking. I was staying at Shera’s while taking the Reiki course. The first day had ended and I had just gone to bed. There I was, sitting in the dark and I happened to look at my hands and they were glowing with this same green light. Now I’m thinking – why didn’t I think this was important enough to record in my journal? I looked. Nada. Not a word! Seems to me something this odd would be worthy of a mention?
Then, as fast as this memory surfaces, in comes another and back I go yet again to September 1987 and Dickie Motherwell’s psychic reading (mentioned in my blog post ‘Wisdom In A Mystery’). For some reason the Maui memory made me think of something she had said in that reading that I should check out. It wasn’t much, just a few words; ‘do you like Hawaii? – Maui?” Now why did she ask that? I had never been to Hawaii?
Like links in a chain these flashbacks started a raft of memories of all the times I was given a ‘heads up’ before an event happened (and I have twenty-four years of them in my memory bank!). As I began to write my next post after ‘I’ll See You In My Dreams’ my brain blew up, or at least that is what it felt like. Suddenly what appeared to be insignificant, unrelated incidents that meant nothing at the time now came together in one gigantic explosion in my brain and they just never stopped. All day and all night, day after day after day, back and forth for the past four months the memories came in and went out from the past to the present and back to the past. Talk about time travel!! It’s exhausting! When I sit down to write I have no set plan as to what will appear on the page, I just sit and wait for the words to come to me – no chitter-chatter getting in the way. I had so much going on in my head there was no way I could write anything and besides, my head hurt along with some other uncomfortable, painful body symptoms.
“They say the moral of a story comes at the end, but sometimes it comes at the top and sometimes in the middle and you just don’t get it until the end.”
The above quote came to me three weeks ago as Caprice and I watched the first episode of a new television series called ‘Harry’s Law’. Imagine that! What is the moral, or maybe the word reason would fit better, of our story? Well, is it not interesting that David, Caprice and I all experienced something unusual while we were in Hawaii albeit each of us in a different way? My emotional body shifted temporarily when I got off the plane; Caprice’s physical body was temporarily affected; and David had a spiritual moment, but Roy appears to have ‘missed’ it all (but did he?). And is it not interesting that all this time later my notes, or lack of notes, should cause my body and mind to be so thrown? How can something that happened twenty-two years ago now create such inner turmoil in my body and my mind? I knew from practical, hands-on experience how this force, called by many names, changes the workings of the body. So? Do I doubt that what the three of us experienced was this same energy? Not now - but in 1988 I hadn’t even touched the surface of how powerful this energy is and how It is always with us whether we know it or not. It does not matter whether a person believes or does not believe; the memories sit inside waiting for the right ‘moment’ to make their presence known. Like it or not, the power resides within each and every person on this planet. It’s up to the individual to set the time and place.
When Caprice and I moved into this house in 2003 the backyard was totally overgrown with weeds. The following spring a friend asked me what I planned to do with the garden and I honestly did not know where to start. The following Saturday he showed up unannounced with a dozen people to help me begin to pull out the weeds. Lo and behold, underneath all those weeds was a work of art completely hidden from view. What a joyous day that was! Our yard was alive with so much fun, so much laughter and excitement as one rock wall was uncovered and then another and another. Plants that had been buried for more than fifteen years were still alive underneath all the weeds! To all of you who were here that day, I thank you. This garden is as much yours as it is mine. Now this is what I call a happy memory!
Someone had put a lot of time, energy and thought into designing and building this garden. I do not know who you are or where you are, but I thank you as well. Since that day for the past seven years I have nurtured and tended this garden back to its original glory and today…there are no more weeds!
The body is no different than a garden. Painful memories lie stored in the subconscious like weeds in a garden and can choke the life force right out of the body if they are not ‘pulled’ out. It requires hard labor to restore a body from sickness to health, but with help from friends and a willingness to ‘get the job done’ it can be accomplished. With this thought I have to ask - ‘Who is the designer and creator of the human body?’
“Luck is a four letter word spelled W-O-R-K and lots of it.” (brother Ken)
Guess I can call myself lucky!
THE AWAKENING -“A time comes in your life when you finally get it…when, in the midst of all your fears and insanity, you stop dead in your tracks and somewhere the voice inside your head cries out…ENOUGH! Enough fighting and crying and blaming and struggling to hold on. Then, like a child quieting down after a tantrum, you blink back your tears and begin to look at the world through new eyes. This is your awakening.” (author not known)
What a relief to finally be sitting at my computer again! I was beginning to wonder if I would ever write again. What hit us since writing my last post is a mystery that will have to wait until later, much later to relate. I am presently writing about the beginning of our story and this is the end. I have a lot of ground to cover until any of it would make sense to anyone but Caprice and I.
“The years teach much that the days never knew.” (movie, Shadows Under The Sun)
Time heals all wounds they say. Well! This wound cut deep; so deep we didn’t know it was there. Life has a way of throwing us curves we don’t see coming. Since writing my last post on Sept. 27th my computer has sat closed on my desk. I kept looking at it wishing something would prompt me to get writing but the days went by and turned into weeks and then into months. I had been looking forward to starting on the next one, which was to be dated December 1988 and, as was my custom, had read my journal entries for that time and Bang! - Everything came to a screaming halt. Something had triggered a bomb that went off in my brain and shut me down and because Caprice and I are writing and reliving this together, whatever it was hit her too. Why?
It turns out to be connected to something I was about to write that released a whole mess of garbage long buried. Subconsciously I did not want to remember my pain and so I had buried it deep within the cells of my body where it couldn’t hurt me. I buried it so well I didn’t even know it was there, and there it sat until I began to bring it to the surface by writing this blog. Secrets have a way of being found out, even ones you do not know are there. Given time (which I now have) and the opportunity (gained from all the knowledge I now have) the mind responds triggering a body reaction which in turn triggers a mind reaction and round and round it goes creating a steadily increasing chaos in the body and the mind until suddenly, in a moment, it all comes together into total coherence, order and tranquility……… and then………there is no explaining the elation this brings.
I can see clearly now
The rain is gone
I can see all the obstacles in my way
Seems to me I’ve heard this song before?
In December of 1988 I had become so focused on seeking and learning that I wasn’t paying attention to what was in front of my face. Drugs create chemical changes in the brain and dull the intellect. So does soul work! So many strange, new things were happening so fast and furious I was carried away. It was all very exciting and all I could think of was healing Caprice and to this end hope reigned supreme. I was determined to follow my nose and let the chips fall where they may. I took no interest in dealing with business matters and finances and besides, Roy was going to make us millions. Was it a mistake? All depends on how I see it. If I could, would I change anything knowing what I know now? Why gamble with success? It doesn’t really matter because it’s all in the past now and besides, even if I had been told the truth I wouldn’t have believed it anyway.
“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” (Albert Einstein) Amen to this. Thanks Al!
“From the point of greatest imbalance, comes the point of greatest stability. Perfectly balanced forces result in a net movement of zero – and there can be no growth without movement. Movement should result in the direction of the weakness, where it is most needed. Perfect balance results in perfect stagnation.” (21 Lessons Of Merlin-July1990)
