Full circle to the truth
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Full circle to the truth
As a child my parents sent me and my siblings to Sunday School. They had no particular faith, but they wanted us to be educated about religion and then we could decide for ourselves as we got older.
Sunday School was an absolute joy for me. I loved my teacher Miss Sweet and that she was, and more than anything I loved everything about Jesus. I felt a deep connection to this man, a connection that I have held onto for my entire life.
My parents made us pray to God every night with this prayer.
‘Now I lay me down to sleep,
It never meant anything to me, and it became something that I learned by rote hence why I can still remember it today. But what it did introduce to me was the word ‘Soul’, which I came to connect with much later.
As a young child I remember having this sense that I could never die; it was incomprehensible to me. And even when my sister passed away when I was nine, I did not grieve. In a way it was as if I knew there was something else and she was not really gone.
We went to church a few times a year, but it did not feel the same as Sunday School. It felt heavy and God seemed to be a bit scary to me, as we were told if we did not behave, God had the power to strike us down. I would often pray to Him for things, but my prayers did not get answered, so the word God did not sit with me all that well for quite some time.
The first time I was introduced to anything spiritual was when we visited my great aunt’s place when I was nine years old. She was renowned in the town where they lived for reading the cards and being very accurate in her foretelling. I was fascinated how she laid out the playing cards and how she was able to give readings to people. On this visit she read my father’s cards, describing a car accident where a fair child would be hurt, and that it was related to alcohol. When we left there, a woman driving a car under the influence crossed the white line on a bridge and took our car out. My brother who was fair was hurt and the car was a write-off!
That was the last time my father ever had his cards read and he called my aunt a witch. I still sought my aunt’s counsel every time I went to visit, to get answers to questions that seemed elusive to me, but I was disappointed many times because I had pictures of things I wanted to happen that never did.
My mother would take me to tea rooms where someone in the corner would read the tea leaves. My mother was addicted to readings and as I grew older, I followed suit, wanting to know the future. I had many readings over the years wanting to know about love, money and work, which were the three things they always seemed to focus on. Most of the time nothing ever came true, but it still left me wanting more and in a state of continuous hope. I read the star signs every day and got caught up in thinking that what was said was gospel.
In my early 20’s I met someone who shared a book with me. It was about how if you put your mind to something you can make it happen. This set me off on a journey of self-discovery for the next 30 years. I read every book in the series and could feel there was some truth being offered, but there was always something missing.
The same person asked me to attend a two-weekend course in Sydney with a group that came out of California. It was very intense. There were around two hundred people locked in a room for 15 hours each day with no watches and with only a couple of breaks. We did creative visualisation, meditation, and communication techniques. We practised being present and were told that we all had to get up and express in front of the group before we left – and I went back for more the next weekend! At the end of the course, I felt like I was flying. I thought I was so present, and I was able to go home and talk about an issue I had had with my mother and resolve it.
I attended a few more extended communication courses with that group and then I was asked to be a helper, but something did not feel right. It is hard to explain but there was an underlying feeling that the leaders of the organisation were wanting to control me, and they became very imposing and quite pushy, wanting me to recruit people into doing more courses. They were pretending to be nice, but I could see it was about making money, so I stopped attending the courses.
While I was in Sydney, we went to the Theosophical Society Book Store, and I purchased some books. One was by Kahlil Gibran, a couple of books of quotes by Indian Swamis, poetry by Nanushka and a small white book called ‘I Am’, with no author. It was intriguing at the time because it proposed that ‘God I Am’ and I did not understand, and nor did I want to.
Books became the next best thing for me. I read everything I could get my hands on. Shirley MacLaine, Deepak Chopra, Shakti Gawain, Stuart Wilde, John Gray and Louise Hay who had written a book on affirmations which became my bible.
I would stand in front of the mirror and try and convince myself that I loved me. I did this for 5 years, but it never worked. I read hundreds of books, but nothing ever fulfilled me. There were snippets that I took away that I thought were true, but nothing ever stayed with me. They all ended up being dust collectors on my bookshelf.
Next came astrology books. Chinese astrology, numerology, and the I Ching where I would give readings to myself and others. Then I joined a spiritual church and removed God from my vocabulary completely and replaced it with the ‘Universe’ or the ‘Great White Spirit’ that was the American Indian way of worship, which was another tangent I went off on. There was rebirthing with crystals, reiki, kinesiology, neurolinguistic pathways, meditation groups, more books and still everything left me feeling empty and wanting more. My confidence and low self-worth never changed and the reason I kept at it was that I wanted to be a part of something that I shared with like-minded people. The other reason I kept pursuing this path was that there was a strong sense within me that I would be a healer one day, but I did not know how or what it would be.
The only thing that ever felt true was when the subject of Jesus came up and I would get to express who I felt he was, that he was an ordinary man who came here to teach us unconditional love. I knew that was a truth for me.
In 2010 I attended a local Community Course about hands on healing which I thought would be right up my alley. It was a two-day course, and my partner at the time encouraged me to go as we were both into the ‘New Age’. An art teacher led the hands-on healing course that we practised on the floor. There were twelve of us and we laid our hands on each other and talked about our feelings and what it felt like afterwards. To be truthful I did not feel anything. Afterwards I felt very sick in the stomach and felt the whole thing was a waste of time and money.
A few months later a very close friend contacted me to see if I wanted to do another weekend course with her, as a friend of hers who had previously attended a similar one said it had changed her life. I just said yes and knew nothing more. We arrived at the hall on the Saturday to see 100 massage tables set up and at least 200 people in the room, a far cry from the previous course I had done. At this stage I still did not know who would be presenting or the name of the organisation, all I knew was that it was called Sacred Esoteric Healing Level 1.
The presenter, Serge Benhayon, the founder of Universal Medicine, walked on stage and started speaking about energy, ‘that everything is energy, and everything is because of energy’. He asked the audience if anyone had ever felt that there was something missing in their lives? Many hands went up, including mine; I had had that feeling most of my life. He went on to explain that it was the connection to the true essence of who we were that was missing. So, what I was missing in life was the essence of me.
He introduced the Gentle Breath Meditation®™ that allowed me to feel a connection within me in just a few minutes, a connection that I had not felt before. What was presented was enough for me to turn to my friend within 30 minutes of the presentation beginning and say, ‘this is it’. I knew that I had come home at last; it was such a deep sense of knowing that is hard to explain.
It was blindingly clear to me that every avenue I had taken previously to find the truth was not it. It had taken my whole life to walk in this room and immediately know that everything before this point was not true.
It was shared with us that to lay our hands on another human being, we had to come with an energetic responsibility and an energetic integrity of the highest calibre so as to bring no harm or energetic imposition to another. Nothing like this was discussed at the previous spiritual healing course and it made so much sense.
The first session I experienced was such a feeling of a love and connection to my body and at the same time it was like I had always known it. We shared many sessions over the weekend, with many other students and by the end of the weekend I felt as though my whole body had shifted and my face had softened beyond belief. My friend kept saying to me “you should see your face”.
The Gentle Breath Meditation® I experienced that weekend was so different from other meditations I had dabbled in. There was no position to be in, you could sit or lie down, and it was simply a gentle breath in and out of the nostrils. It only took a few minutes for me to feel a deep connection to my body and to be fully present. The beauty of this meditation was that it could be done anywhere, anytime. I remembered all the pain I experienced over previous years trying to meditate in certain positions and trying to empty the mind. With this meditation there was not one ounce of pain or uncomfortableness, and there was no trying to do anything but just be with my breath and my body.
Serge Benhayon explained that our body is the marker of all truth and how we treated our body was important to the ongoing connection to the inner-heart as he called it, and eventually our Soul.
‘Checking out’ was discussed, which is what many of us do to numb ourselves from the hurts we have experienced and that definitely resonated with me. Some of the checking out ways explained were alcohol, drugs, smoking, gaming, overeating, sugar, pornography and hobbies as a few examples, but it simply equated to anything that took us away from being in our inner-heart and being fully present in our body.
It all made sense to me, I was definitely in check-out mode every day; after work drinking too much, having the occasional joint, smoking cigarettes, and eating chocolate like it was going out of fashion. All because I did not want to feel what was going on in my relationship, not acknowledging my low self-worth, my unresolved hurts from my childhood and never feeling good enough.
The one thing he mentioned about smoking that really affected me was that there was not an animal on the planet that would knowingly consume poison, and as I had been trying to stop smoking for 13 years it was a big wake up call. I stopped that day and have never smoked since… and it is 11 years on.
When the weekend was over, I grabbed some pamphlets on the way out for some upcoming events, Heart Chakra 1 and Sacred Esoteric Healing Level 2, and went home so excited to tell my partner. Over the next days I was telling everyone how amazing I felt because I wanted everyone to feel this way. It was interesting to note that most if not all were not really interested, and they thought I was a bit nuts.
When I looked back at the Spiritual New Age where I had tried to find my way; none of it talked about going inside to find the answers but instead to look outside of ourselves, and that is why it never worked. As Serge explained the answers were deep within us, found in the connection to our Soul.
Over the next 12 months I attended more healing weekends and learned where the teachings had come from and how they had been twisted to suit any religion of the time. The teachings were based on the Ancient Wisdom of many teachers who had lived previously such as Hermes, Pythagoras, Plato, Yeshua, Siddhartha Gautama, Hercules and Patanjali to name a few. I had not even heard of some of them, but I could feel that the teachings were true because my body would tingle all over as if all my cells were activated somehow.
To hear Yeshua (Jesus) spoken about as being a Master deeply resonated with me; I realised that I could not have a connection to Jesus without a connection to God.
As a child I had always felt that my life could never end. From the presentations my understanding of reincarnation was expanded to see that as a being (our essence) we only live one life but with many incarnations in different bodies, which was what I had felt as a child, but back then I had not been able to connect the dots. I now understand that we are all made of Divine particles that belong to the Universe and the something I had always felt was missing was the connection to the essence of me, deep within the inner-heart.
Through the courses I connected with a couple of women in my local area who were offering Sacred Esoteric Healing sessions. The level of care received in these sessions was so beautiful. I felt so special and deeply cared for and as I had more sessions, I could feel the connection to my body deepen more and more and in turn the awareness of my surroundings increased. After one of these sessions as I was walking through the town where I live, it was as if I was seeing it with new eyes and I could feel the connection to everything and everyone.
Universal Medicine Esoteric Practitioners have a code of practice that is applied with the highest integrity and responsibility towards their clients. The level of care provided is second to none and their intention is to never impose any ill energy on clients in their care. This was the model of healing that I wanted to follow. Through these sessions it was a natural progression for me to make changes that brought a deeper level of connection to my body.
It appears to me there is no such (or very little) energetic integrity in the Spiritual New Age as it is quite okay to drink, use drugs, have many unhealed issues but still the practitioners can lay their hands on you, imposing what I have come to know as ill energy.
I learned about loving my body, connecting to it, moving in a gentle way and being present in all that I was doing, such as closing doors and drawers, placing a cup down, driving the car, getting dressed, preparing food and everything else I did in my day-to-day life. Just connecting to my fingertips and toes changed so much in how I moved.
I had always been highly reactionary, creating dramas in life, judging others, having negative thoughts about myself, presenting a protected body, and being hard with a sharp tongue. That has all changed. Today I observe life, I rarely react. I see and accept people for who they are. I love people and speak to them in a respectful way, and I have a body that is gentle and delicate.
There is no more trying to convince myself that I love who I am by using affirmations – that does not cut it at all. The beauty of connecting to the inner-heart is that you just know that you are a part of something so grand that you cannot but be love.
From my experience there is nothing in the Spiritual New Age that even remotely resembles the truth, and I was hooked on it for 30 years, all the time feeling less and wanting more. It is a setup to keep us away from what the truth is, right under our nose. It uses all the ‘right’ words but there is no true depth or substance to it, and it leads you up a garden path that never ends so it leaves you constantly searching.
Over the years I have continued to be a student of the Ageless Wisdom, but I feel I am only scratching the surface of understanding life. I can see that there is much to learn, but in reality, it is simple, we just make it complicated.
I am no longer looking or searching for anything outside of myself as I know the answers are always within if I choose to go there. My fear of using the word God has disappeared as I now know that we cannot be in connection to our Soul without God. I have come to learn that the true meaning of religion is our connection within, to our essence, and to our own relationship with God, not what we are told it is by the doctrines of many religious institutions.
Each and every one of our bodies is made of Divine particles, and therefore each and every one of us is connected through the One-ness that makes up the Universe of God. We are equal parts of the whole and when we align to our Soul though the connection to our inner-heart, we are constantly being called by God through our Divine particles to return to where we came from …
… Full circle to the truth.
Filed under
Gentle breath, God, Religion, Soul, Truth
