Happy Day

Today was the AGM of the British Alliance of Healing Associations, the umbrella organisation to which the Soul Therapy Association of Spiritual Healers belongs.  To my delight, I was voted in as Chair and Valerie Packenham Keady, our Student Representative, was also elected onto the BAHA Executive.  I am looking forward to three years of leading the BAHA into better times than we have had recently.  All the members of the new Executive will work well together, I'm sure, and bring harmony back to BAHA.

I have my wings back!

This summer, just before we were due to set off to Uzbekistan to travel the Silk Road, I began to notice that I had some worrying health symptoms. A trip to see Paul of Tarsus, my psychic surgeon who successfully operated on my knee injury confirmed that I did indeed have a heart condition that needed urgent attention. Off I went to my GP, who hit the roof when she found out that my cholesterol level was the highest she and her colleagues had ever found (11.4,) threatened to put me in the Guinness Book of Records, and bundled me off to the local hospital for investigations. The cardiologist forbade me to fly, which put paid to our Silk Road plans, so we drove to Holyhead and caught the ferry to Eire, arriving in Dublin just in time for the worst floods in around fifty years ! Luckily we were staying at the Clontarf Castle, an eleventh century castle (on a hill) developed into a beautiful hotel, so we didn't drown. We spent some time in County Wicklow's beautiful scenery, visiting Powerscourt to see their celebrated gardens, next before heading over to Dingle on the west coast because I yearned to meet Fungie, the legendary dolphin who hangs out in Dingle Bay.

We were lucky, he decided to come and play with us, swimming around, racing alongside our boat, sitting up and looking for all the world as if he were smiling at us. Quite an exhilarating and blissful experience. The boat crew told us that once they threw him some fish and he dived down and surfaced with his own fish in his mouth, showing them that he was there for the company, not to beg for food! He was first seen in the bay in the early 1980s, shortly after a female dolphin - probably his mate? - was washed up dead on the beach, and he has never left the bay since. He was befriended by local fishermen and is the self-appointed pilot for all the boats in the bay. He just likes human company. He was a fully grown adult in 1984, so he must be at least thirty years old now, quite a grand old age.

Later in November, still forbidden to fly, I had to make a business trip to Milan to give a Feng Shui consultation to some lovely clients who had bought a fabulous apartment in a massive town villa near the Brera Academy in the Historical Quarter of the city. My generous clients invited Nick too, and so we travelled by Eurostar to Paris and caught the TGV train from Paris to Milan. It was the weekend that Silvio Berlusconi had to resign as Italian Prime Minister and so everyone was in a party mood. I bought a beautiful red fan in a shop in the elegant arcade leading to the Duomo, and even the shop assistant asked us if we had come to "help to celebrate our freedom?"

On Friday I went to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead to have an angiogram and my doctors were pretty certain that it would show that I needed an angioplasty to insert stents to unblock my arteries. Luckily, apart from taking the statins and aspirin that my GP insisted I take I had also been treating myself with bioresonance on the Living Information Forms Energy (LIFE) System, taking Serranol (main ingredient serrapeptase, an enzyme that unblocks arteries,) CircuFlow (a combination of herbs &c containing hawthorn berry and horsetail) which is brilliant for the circulation system, and CoQ10, which metabolises excess cholesterol. As a result, the consultant cardiologist told me that I had "beautiful arteries"!

Since August, I had adjusted my diet by cutting out dairy and animal fat (even though it has been demonstrated that dietary intake of cholesterol has no bearing whatsoever on the cholesterol production in the liver) and adding oats, almonds and other cholesterol-busting stuff, and by Friday I had lost around 20 lbs and my cholesterol level was down to 4.8 - which my GP thought was absolutely brilliant and only due to the statins. I can see that I have a long argument with her ahead of me. She has never heard of serrapeptase, bioresonance, or the other natural herbal and mineral supplements I am taking, and attributes my amazingly good results solely to her prescribed drug! Bless her .............

Anyway, now that my heart and circulation have been proved to be OK, I can fly again - so the world is once again my oyster! I am amazed at how limited I felt, even though I probably wouldn't have wanted to fly off anywhere these last few weeks it was just the irritating idea that I wasn't allowed, otherwise my insurance wouldn't have covered me.

So now I am back on my Magic Carpet and can go anywhere again. I am a very happy bunny once more - see above!

Six New Healers

I am delighted that yesterday all our six candidates (Samar Labib Wassili, Frédérique Lhopiteau, Carolyn Marham, Bonnie Suchodolski, Hanna Trybowska and Emma Chandler) passed their final examinations to become Registered Spiritual Healers. That means that here at The Soul Therapy Centre we still hold on to our 100% record for success in the external Final Examination for all our students. We are all so proud of them, and wish them well in their shining futures as Spiritual Healers. So many people will be helped by them! They are all justifiably pleased with themselves, too.

Just as I was relaxing after a very hard day sitting in on the oral exams, I thought I could relax, only to be extremely upset by a message from somebody I thought I could rely on. Whilst we were away on our holidays, decisions were made that put me in a very difficult position. One of the pillars I have built my professional reputation on is that I can be relied on never to betray or let down anyone, be they client, colleague or friend. With a committee's permission, I had promised a very dear friend something and find that what had been definitely agreed by that committee was reversed in my absence, and in consequence the commission I have offered (and agreed the fee) to my friend has been withdrawn behind my back. Especially annoying as my friend had set a much lower fee than usual for the project as a favour to me. I hate getting caught up in these sort of dramas. More than that, I dislike the distinct feeling I have of being shafted.

Teaching and learning

Our beautiful new group of thirteen students who started the Soul Therapy course last month are settling in now and beginning to feel at home at the Soul Therapy Centre. The Advanced Year and the Practitioner Group are thriving too, so I guess we can relax and enjoy teaching for the rest of the year. The exams for national accreditation are scheduled for mid April, and the candidates are all busily revising the Manual, the Codes of Conduct and the Disciplinary Procedures. I'm sure they will all do well, and in a few months we should have six more Registered Healer Members of the British Alliance of Healing Associations. Our external examiners are always happy with the standard of our candidates and so far have passed all of them because of their high standard of training and their impressive dedication to the healing profession.

I have been studying just recently, too. I took an intensive course with four other psychologists & psychotherapists to become an Interpersonal Mediator. It was run by Mike Talbot, the Director of UK Mediation, the most highly regarded training organisation in the field. It was fascinating and very different from the therapeutic approach to solving conflicts. It is much preferable to litigation, which is always costly and takes ages, as does arbitration and, unlike the latter two methods, it is usually a win-win outcome, whereas the other methods are win-loose at enormous expense. After the course ended, I had to write six essays and assignments. so now I am even more sympathetic to my own students. After such a rigorous training, I feel well equipped to tackle mediation cases now.

Chesed, the beautiful but untranslatable Hebrew word

I was reading a beautiful essay by Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, in which he defines the Hebrew word "chesed" as combination of love, kindness, faithfulness and compassion. What we are in the end, what our life ultimately amounts to, he reminds us, is the love and kindness we give. We exist to inspire and encourage each other to practice such chesed in our homes and out in the wider community. Theologies may influence our values, but what comes first is the truth that where there is no chesed the presence of God has been forgotten or neglected.

Even for those who don't believe in God, the concept of chesed and its practice gives pause for thought. Where is chesed amidst so much suffering that we see in the world? How absent it often seems, far from the scenes of unjust misery and suffering. If we understand that the nature of existence is a oneness within all consciousness and all being, this must never be turned into a pious excuse for avoiding the reality of suffering. Our awareness of the oneness, and the importance of what Rabbi W defines as chesed, can help us to find a healing perspective that is of use in the world.

Sometimes in life, things that are really quite sad don't appear to be so at first glance. This morning I was reading the Guardian and came across this article about the mayor of Belfast vaulting over a giant human tomato and I'm still laughing! The poor woman sustained a slipped disc when he slipped on wet grass and kneed her in the back of the head. This marvelous photo was taken the instant before it happened.

Isn't laughter wonderful? Embarrassing too in this instance, as a back injury is no laughing matter. The worse I felt about laughing at someone else's misfortune, the more I laughed. I couldn't stop for long enough to explain to my husband what I was laughing about and just had to hand over the paper to him so that he could read it for himself.

It is said that laughter is the best medicine. If that is the case, Nick and I shall be very healthy for a long time to come.

Talking of laughter, I shall be running a workshop called "Heal Your Soul With Happiness" on 7th November at The Soul Therapy Centre. I promise that we won't be laughing at the misfortunes of others on that occasion, but we will be laughing a lot. Do come and join us and have fun whilst we discover the keys to huge amounts of joy! I learnt how to teach the art of happiness from Robert Holden of the Happiness Project and Patch Adams of the Gesundheit! Institute.

The Keys to Love and Happiness

Traditional psychotherapy really can be harmful. People learn to reflect on the history of their lives but psychoanalytic psychotherapy usually screws them right back into the negative aspects of their past. Recently I treated a lovely, talented client who had been in traditional therapy for a long time, with a procession of different therapists. She thought she was not able to connect with an open heart with her partner and children because she had learned as a child to protect her vulnerable heart. I simply created a safe space for her and lead her into a soul journey type of visualisation in which I simply asked her to imagine her heart opening slowly and to its full extent, and to tell me how it felt. She said it felt amazing. I was then able to challenge her erroneous idea that she couldn't open her heart, and offered her the idea that this was in her control, she was not a victim of some supposed psychopathology, as she had just decided to do it. She held the keys to happiness and love in her own hand.

Later, her partner phoned to thank me for "a miracle", as my client was transformed, happy, relaxed and loving. It was no miracle, just righting a therapeutic wrong as far as I was concerned.