The Way We Were

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hope is the opposite of despair.”  Deepak Chopra

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

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

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

What Goes ‘Round Comes ‘Round

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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