Life after crutches

So many times in my life I have thought I am ‘doing well’, only to have some sort of downfall afterwards; or I have been besieged with doubts and have had to build my confidence up all over again.

In reality I didn’t have much confidence at all and sought some sort of false way of boosting myself up, mainly by trying to be friendly and pretending I knew everything to make myself feel better. This resulted in a seeming superiority. It felt so lonely in my isolated place inside me, unable to open my heart to others or receive love when it was offered. The arrogance covered up this lack of confidence and inability to feel my essential strength – to stand on my own two feet and know my heart and mind. If I couldn’t feel the love in me for myself, how could I feel the love of and for others? All was based on need.

So life was one series of ups and downs that resulted in my feeling aggrieved and resentful, mainly because people would ignore me and not appreciate my talents as much as I thought they should. To counteract this I made a drama out of every little crisis that came along, even creating the crises. In hindsight, I realise I was wanting attention, yearning for love; I did not yet know that the love is within me and to not seek for it outside myself, so it was all about my getting this love from others. Lack of confidence in myself and the discomfort this created led me to behave in this way, and to try and control situations. I wanted everything to be as I thought it should be and go the way I wanted – in fact so that I felt comfortable.

The truth is too that I knew somewhere deep inside that I was pretending all the time, but I couldn’t stop it, I didn’t know how to. I could put on a very good mask, but underneath somewhere I knew something I would not dare to admit; that the way I was living was not loving, for me or anyone else. This knowing contributed to a deepening sense of giving up and guilt. I was hidden away from myself and the world, buried under a pile of protections.

The change began to happen when I first came across the teachings of Serge Benhayon. At the time I was very ill, wandering about like a waif, a stray, still trying to hold up my head, taking all my behaviours into therapy and then parading them all over again without true change. At best I was just managing. The illness had come on from those long years of living and striving and driving to make myself seen and heard, and then the death of my late husband from a terminal brain tumour. The nursing had exhausted me. I had then started to have no appetite for the things I had been involved in before and any new venture I started failed; I had no energy.

During this time, I was introduced to Universal Medicine and began to practise the Gentle Breath Meditation®. Life already began to change to a more focused direction and I began the first tiny steps to knowing what is inside me and who I am. A year later I first met Serge. I was on crutches recovering from two hip replacements, and he said to me that it was because I could not support myself, I always needed a crutch. He communicated with me so respectfully. He showed me the truth of myself – no one else had ever spoken to me so truthfully and with so much love. It enabled me to hear it instead of going into reaction, for of course he reflected my deepest feelings back to me of my own inadequacy and inability to stand up for what I feel to be the truth. His love and truth pierced through every barrier and revealed me to myself.

I did not realise quite what had happened at the time, only that I had heard it and taken it in instead of rejecting it, and then began many years of commitment to being a student of Universal Medicine and Esoteric Healing.

Joan Calder before

What may seem strange to those who look from outside, is that I apparently kept on having the same ups and downs, crises, dramas, lack of confidence, wants and unnecessary needs of the past. The difference was that now I owned them. I learned to recognise and nominate them, to uncover the root causes beneath them, and healing sessions began to clear the toxic energy of them from my body. It was slow, difficult work… this journey is not easy, especially if you are approaching 70 as I was. One stage led on to another, a growing honesty developed, but the deep Truth was still elusive. There was much I did not understand in my heart, being so addicted to taking knowledge into my head, and I thought I ‘knew’ what it was all about, but I had not embodied it.

Ah! The body! Early on Serge said to me “body first”. My first (and old) reaction was, “I’ve worked professionally with others helping them to understand the energy with which they move their bodies for twenty-five years, taught Tai Chi and been a professional mime and performance artist, and have been dedicated to understanding and looking after my body all my life, of course I am connected to my body!” This was another lesson to learn as I discovered this was not true; what I had ‘thought’ was being with my body was only thinking into it to bring it alive. I had been abusing my body by driving it and overriding what it was telling me, so that in the end I collapsed from total exhaustion and became ill. How then could I have been looking after it and in tune with it? I had not been allowing myself to connect with and to grow from my inner essence, the truth of myself. The connection is with the energy first, and it was only when I learned and began to live this that I started to truly heal.

Ah! Another reaction! Energy! My reaction? More arrogance! “I have been working with energy techniques for the last 25 years, I know all about energy!” Wrong! More humbling lessons. Everything I learn from the presentations of Serge and the Esoteric Healing courses brings me to a much wider, deeper, more profound understanding about what our whole existence is about, and where we come from, and how everything works, and each time I must face it and learn to accept how true it is from experience.

To be a student is to relinquish all previous ideals and beliefs, ways of doing, relating, concepts, faiths and attachments, and to let go of arrogance and self-centredness. In turn you build a steadfast integrity and increasingly assume responsibility for living the Love we all are, in everything you do in life – that brings Joy and Harmony: you feel more of the things that are going on around you, of what others are feeling, thinking, sensing. You come to know how connected you are with everything and everybody, and that you have a responsibility to make choices that benefit everyone, equally.

So here I am 9 years later and I still find myself exhibiting many old reactions and habits, but even so, there is an undeniable difference in my life; I feel well inside, even though my body has various symptoms. These I now know are my body clearing and releasing old energy, so they no longer give me anxiety, in fact the nervous anxious state I used to live in has receded. I am aware of a deeper form of tension that is only natural living in this world we have created, but now I am learning to live with that. Life is a continual study; I can never be bored, everything is to notice and discern.

Joan - before and after Universal Medicine Therapies

I feel more alive than any other time in my life, more present, more gentle and loving. I never believed I had a heart, now I know I have, for often now I can really feel it. I never knew truth could flow from my mouth unbidden, but now I do because sometimes it does, and it surprises me! In fact, life is full of continual surprises; I work away at ground practical level and Heaven is revealed to me, here and now, present. Now I sometimes carry a metaphorical (and physical) folding stick to use at times when I feel to have a little support. The crutches have gone long ago.

Sometimes I have felt like turning away, going back to the olds ways, giving up, but I know there is no way I could. I would not let go of this way of life, my building of The Way of The Livingness for the world, and I mean that literally, for I now know why I am here, to serve all my fellow human beings by living the loving way I am choosing.

I am learning to appreciate how I have changed, all that I am, and all those around me, and how life unfolds in a most surprising way. Appreciation is the key that opens the door to fulfillment and Love.

In truth, there is no miraculous cure waved by a magician’s wand, just that one day you hear one man express the Absolute Truth that makes such good sense and you feel it resonate somewhere inside in a place deeply known to you. From then on it is your own full-time commitment to evolve in a direction in your life that expands and grows you to embrace all that is offered you, and so to live it.