Introduction.
Throughout my adult life, I have never felt a full connection to life, to other people and to the world around me. There has always been some kind of an invisible wall between me and everything else. It’s like I can see that everything is everywhere and all around me, but somehow, I’m not actually out there and in it, being a part of it and living it. I have an intellectual understanding of life, I’m clear in that but I often find it difficult to experience or really feel life. Some people carry this experience in themselves for large parts of their lives. It happens when something goes badly wrong at some stage in your life. When that happens, you stop integrating. You stop integrating into your environment, into the life around you and you stop integrating yourself into your body. Instead, you go in the opposite direction. Away from your environment. Away from the life around you and away from your body. And you can do this in either one of two ways. You can retreat. Back to where you came from. Back into yourself. Into your shell. Often, into your head. Or you can escape. You push part of your consciousness away from yourself, out of your body and beyond your head where you end up living a life partially outside of yourself, in the space between the physical and the spiritual. Either way, it is how you protect yourself from what is happening around you. Of the two survival strategies, I chose the latter.
I was born unwanted. Not by design, but by accident. I was actually my mother’s hope for happiness. Trapped, at a very young age, in a loveless marriage, my mother did the one thing my father never did; she took a decision and acted upon it. Unable to make her marriage work, she thought that having a child would bring her and my father together. She took inspiration from her own mother who had sacrificed her life for her children in the act of making her own marriage work. As my mother said:
Not loving myself
I grew to hope that
by sacrificing myself
I would love myself
In the same way
I loved my mother
For the way she sacrificed herself.
(From a meditation I did on the theme of sacrifice, during which the spirit of my mother came to visit me and leave me this message, 7 February 2012.)
It is a decision many women take and sometimes it works. In my mother’s case, it didn’t. She realised it within weeks of conceiving me and the realisation brought the prospect of her future into frightening focus.
Her life choices became suddenly very stark. She could leave her marriage and return home but that would be to a father who had interfered with her sexually when she was young and towards whom she carried enormous amounts of bitterness, hatred and unforgiveness. He had never loved her and if she were to return home pregnant or with a newborn child, he would undoubtedly find new ways to show his displeasure. The only other option was to stay where she was. Where else could she go? She lived in a conservative, Catholic country where divorce and remarrying were denied women and where shame and guilt was the actual prevailing religion. Trapped, at twenty-two, to a man eighteen years her senior, who, thanks to his own mother, had become terrified of women. A woman angry at men married to a man terrified of women. And now with a child on the way. The reality wasn’t just frightening, it was life-threatening. Faced with such blackness ahead of her, and in absolute despair, my mother reasoned that the only way out was the way out. Suicide. She tried. Once, possibly twice. Pills. First as a tester then as the real thing. But that failed too. And so, I was born. By the time I entered this world, I was already living partially out of my body as a result of trying to escape from my mother’s womb. I was born confused, lost, very afraid of what had just happened and very afraid of my mother. Unable to trust. Unable to reach out. Into a world where no one wanted to be where they were and no one wanted to face what was happening. It was in such circumstances that I lost my connection to myself, to my family and to where I was born. My roots. It happens.
Of course, I never knew any of this had actually happened to me. The earliest circumstances of my life were subsequently totally hidden from me. My mother, god love her, was too ashamed to answer the questions I had for her in later life concerning the circumstances of my childhood and my father disowned himself of the whole thing as, he argued, it was not his decision to have me in the first place. By the time both my parents had passed away, I still had no idea of the circumstances of my earliest life.
Surprisingly, in the end, the only person who did know turned out to be me. My subconscious me. The me that is remembered by the body but forgotten by the mind. It was my body, from which I had lost all connection, that had all its life been trying to tell me what had happened by leaving little clues for me to solve: two hernia operations in childhood, an undescended testicle, burst appendix and finally the clue which forced me to pay attention: suffocating panic attacks in my thirties. If I hadn’t then found a teacher to help me to listen to my body, I would never have been able to join those dots together, all the clues my body had been leaving me, into a single, linear map that described the course of my life up to that point in time. I would never have realised that your body retains a snapshot of every important thing that happens to you during your life and if you turn your awareness inwards into your body and examine the clues it leaves for you, every part of your life is revealed to you: your past, your present and your future. It’s all there. Even the forgotten or hidden things. All the lessons you need to learn about your life are available for learning. And don’t worry if you’ve never been aware of this and you don’t know how to read your body this way, there are people here to help you. People who are trained in energy and spiritual arts, such as energy workers, light workers, spiritual healers, medical intuitives, mediums, clairvoyants, sensitives, channelers and shamans. People who, for whatever reason, can sense or see things about you that you cannot. And the reason why such people are important is that they can guide you to seeing aspects of your life which you may not yet be aware of but which may be blocking you in your desire for a better understanding of your life, in your desire to heal and let go the past and in your desire to create a better life for yourself. I refer to these people frequently throughout this book and I call them ‘people trained in the spiritual arts’.
This is how this book proves its worth. This book is a guide, a guide to the pitfalls that block your way on your life path, on your way to healing yourself of your past and on your way to manifesting a brighter, happier and richer future for yourself. By revealing the pitfalls, you see what needs to be done in order to make everything go right. Where possible, I offer guidance on the ways and means to do that, but this book is not designed to do all the work for you. This book is ultimately about discovering who you are, not the person you are now, but the person you are destined to be, the you you chose for yourself to be on coming to this earth and about doing the things you need to do in order to become that person. Only you can do that. Not me, for I do not know who you are. I do not know the destiny you have chosen for yourself. But you do. And because you do, you already have the answers. All the answers. They are in you, held deep inside you, at your core. That is your power. That is your strength. And this book will help show you how you can get there. How you can unlock those answers within you and discover that power for yourself.
So, let’s start with the section on healing in which I show you a way to heal yourself of any pain or adversity, past or present, that you may have experienced in your life.
