Saturday

60.Chemicalisation.

It's all been going pretty well really. The vitamin C has definitely had a good effect and, for all I know, may continue to do so. I've been zinging with energy, creating lovely healthy food that actually tastes nice—and my Shiatsu practitioner gave me a dehumidifyer for raw food on 'extended loan.' Haven't got very far with that yet apart from kale chips which are surprisingly good.

The horse is still scary—she's called Carrie and I've ridden her twice on my own now. The first time was not easy as she tested me out every step of the way, got away from me once and fly-bucked like crazy. Glad to know I'm still a good rider because I coped with it all.

But don't you love it when you get back to the stables and someone says 'did she buck?' No one had previously mentioned that little habit of hers at all...

Before ride number two I thought I'd try a bit of horse-whispering in the outside school at the stables where Carrie is kept. She's used to being lunged (going round in circles on the end of a long rein) and although I didn't do that, she trotted and cantered around me out of habit as I pushed her on for a full half hour.

It's not proper horse-whispering until you get what's called join-up. The horse lowers its head and starts licking its lips and that's a sign that it is becoming submissive to you. You have shown it that you are the herd leader. We didn't get that far but, the great thing was that the half hour took the edge off her freshness and when we went out together, she was as good as gold.

Both times there were no nasty side-effects from riding and I was thrilled. Back at Christmas time I couldn't even use a rebounder because the bouncing hurt so much. Yes, my legs were a bit stiff but that's hardly surprising since it's been about five years since I rode a horse.

So all was well. And then, on Wednesday I decided to do something I 'probably' should have done a long time ago: take down the whole strand of prosperity consciousness teaching that I used to do and have trained others to do. It was still up there on the website and, frankly, I was feeling a bit of a fraud. And, while I'm bearing my soul, I had had the sudden realisation that I had always felt a bit of a fraud with this teaching.

That's not because it's bad stuff—it's classic Law of Attraction even before we all knew what that was. And it's Biblically-based and I stand by all that. And even though my life has been one of adventures (and I wouldn't have missed them for the world) and it's always been a bit of a wing and a prayer financially, it's been an amazing life—and continues to be so. But it was all rather old—and there are thousands of people out there doing newer stuff.

It really should have been disposed of a long time ago. So I dumped it. It felt like I'd shed about three stone!

The next morning I woke up with severe pain under my left arm and it simply got worse and worse all day. By bedtime it had to be codeine even to lie down (and I really don't like taking any painkillers at all, preferring to let my body tell me to slow down or stop). I slept in the spare room because I didn't want to disturb Lion and I put my one-hour recording of the ho'oponopono chant on twice just to get me to relax.

For a while, earlier in that day, I was scared. Was this some new, horrible development that I wouldn't be able to deal with? If this level of pain continued I wouldn't be able to go to Cyprus, France or the Edinburgh Fringe. Then Seth's Blog arrived in my in-box. It was called The Rotten Fish Problem and it read like this:


On the first day, all the fish at the fish stall are fresh.
Some sell, some don't.
The second day, the sold fish are replaced by newer, fresher fish. The unsold fish remains, even though it isn't so attractive.
By the third day, of course, the unsold fish is noticably unfresh, and it doesn't take much effort to avoid them.
At this point, part of the fishmonger's stock is demonstrably unappealing, bringing down the quality of the entire counter.
Pretty soon, of course, the dropoff in business means that the owner can't afford to buy the freshest fish, even to replace his sold inventory, and the end is near.
The alternative? On day two, discard the unsold fish.
Obvious, but difficult. So difficult that we rarely do it. We'd rather lower the average and see if we can get away with it instead.

It was very clear. I'd filled my stall with unsold fish for far too long. And getting rid of it in one fell swoop had created what's known as chemicalisation. That's when you get a kick-back reaction from a major healing. Sometimes it's known as a healing crisis. I had a previous one when I first went to see Suzi the Shaman. A huge, hard lump appeared on my chest practically overnight. Utterly terrifying. I called Suzi at once and she was marvellous. 'Don't worry,' she said. 'It's a healing crisis. It's a good sign.' It was completely gone in a week once I'd had a session with my healer, Cathy, and it has never returned.

Healing crises are never fun, but they do show that something good is happening. This time, to back up the healing theory, my hot flushes stopped at the same time that the pain arrived. Well, not stopped entirely but went down to about 5% of what they had been. That's amazing.

What's more, it made me talk to my homeopath and ask her for a Peter Chapel remedy that we had discussed many times previously. I said it was time to go for it; she agreed so it kicked me into some more action.

Once I realised what was happening, I was fine—happy even. I read some more Catherine Ponder work from The Dynamic Laws of Healing and, with perfect synchronicity, read of a woman with the same symptoms as me who had been healed after affirming that she was forgiven.

A lot of the time, a dis-ease is about the need to forgive, but this rang a lot of bells. I started affirming that I was forgiven, by everyone and everything that could possibly need to forgive me. I mixed that in with the ho'oponopono (I love you, I'm sorry, please forgive me, thank you), realising that the 'thank you' is for forgiveness received.

The next morning I woke up still in some pain but considerably less. And feeling so happy and confident and sure that all is very, very well.




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Wednesday

59. Into the Darkness, part three

There is a magic and a mystery in walking in the darkness every night. You see the sky turn and dance above and around and you become familiar with the phases of the moon. She has rainbow auras and extraordinary cloud strata around her on the clearer nights and you can see how easily she became a goddess.

When the moon is full or verging on full, no torch is needed because the lanes are silvery and the land is bathed in greys. I still take one, to alert any possible cars, in case you were worrying.

Some nights I walk into the full moon and spend most of the walk gazing upwards at her beauty (my feet know the lanes and the potholes very well by now) and walk home with my moon-shadow preceding me. That's a very odd experience in the night time; the shadow is so well-defined as to be slightly un-nerving. And she's a lot slimmer than I'm still used to being.

The moon is so bright those nights that sometimes I turn round to look behind me, certain that there must be a car's headlights behind me but there is only this cold, bright beauty staring down, outlining the trees in black silhouette. And possibly a beagle in a safety-jacket pelting up the road behind me, tongue hanging out and eyes filled with joy.

On moonlit nights the stars are flashes of diamond and the planets are steady lights of silver (apart from Mars who is always reddish) but on moonless nights—wow. The sky is dusty with stars, not black at all. When you look directly at them, the constellations are clear but with peripheral vision there are a million stars beyond the stars and it's a tapestry of light.

The Milky Way streams overhead and every walk is accompanied by Orion, Taurus, the Pleiades, Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Pegasus, the Great Bear ... and other constellations that I've yet to identify. On a very clear night I can just work out Monoceros, the unicorn.

As spring continues, of course, I will be walking in the sunsets and then in the dusk with the coming of midsummer. Every night I walk, is a good night, because I can do it. Yes, sometimes it's annoying and inconvenient and just simply 'bleah' but it is part of the holistic treatment. And for the first time in my life since I was six, I have slender thighs...

After I wrote this, my friend Rachel sent me this by Rilke:

To Darkness You, darkness from which I come, I love you more than all the fires that fence out the world, for the fire makes a circle for everyone so that no one sees you anymore. But darkness holds it all: the shape and the flame, the animal and myself, how it holds them, all powers, all sight — and it is possible: its great strength is breaking into my body. I have faith in the night.


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Friday

58. Into the Darkness part two


About a week after I started walking the nights, I first met the Shaman. Not on the walks, I might add but actually that's the kind of thing you might have expected.

Her name's Suzi but she really should be called Morgana or something like that. She has long black hair, lives in a real witch's cottage and wears clothes that New Age people try to imitate. She retrieves the parts of your soul that you have hidden through trauma or some other reason and which need to be called back to either help you heal or ensure that a transition is clear.

She doesn't want a lot of back-history before she begins the calling, the song and the drumming as you lie, covered in rugs before the fire, and go on your own internal vision quest, so she doesn't necessarily know in advance what's going on in your life.

Her message for me was that I needed to go into the dark. Right into the heart of the Dark Mother. That's my work in this life; that's where the calling is; that's where the dis-ease is; that's where the healing is. She suggested I spent meditative time in darkness every day.

So we were both pretty pleased that I'd already started doing that with the night walks. And that during the session I had been experiencing a death from another lifetime, being laid out and then cremated on the land, first from within the body and then without it.

The message was very much about the feminine—the Dark Mother is the aspect of the Divine which is concerned with the difficult things; it's the scary part of femininity, the part that is often associated with witchcraft and leads to witch hunts.

If you want an icon, think of Sekhmet, the Egyptian Goddess who destroyed the enemies of Ra (I wrote about her in the London-based weeks). She got so over-enthusiastic about destroying them that she rampaged throughout Egypt and had to be duped and made drunk to stop.

All aspects of Divinity are prone to over-excess (the Greek Gods were almost uniformly, bastards); it's the balancing and the Oneness that brings healing. But to balance yourself, you have to call on opposing aspects which will be part of your healing and they are generally aspects that the false self won't like. It won't like them at all.

Suzi also said that this dis-ease is also the dis-ease of the land. My healing is the land's healing; the land's healing is my healing. The lymph is water; water is the lymph. 

Oh thanks Dartmoor. Thanks a bloody lot. There I am walking your hills and knowing that your bones are my bones and the Dark Mother thinks, 'Aha! We can do a double whammy here. This human wants to be cleared as a channel for Grace. Good-oh.'

So, every time I see or bathe in or drink water I must bless it. I must be the channel of Grace for the healing of water. It would be a one or two-word blessing, a sacred mantra, the Shaman said, and I would already know it. It is the name for me to use alone. Others will use their own sacred name in their own time and place.

I had been given that very phrase, that name of God, by my Bishop in a healing ritual just two days earlier.

Oops, didn't give you a Wanky Bollox warning. But I do think there's something in it. If we are one with God (which we are—we just don't know it/like it/admit it because we live so much in the false self) then we are one with the land. I did find out that lymphoma is very prevalent among farmers and people in the country, probably because of pesticides.

So, as well as the night walks, I began to bathe before bed in the pitch black. Our water comes from a bore hole. The land's dis-ease and I are one. And the healing is one.

I need to be in the darkness to find the darkness in me: all the unacknowledged angers and pains and griefs and all the times I never spoke my truth (or didn't even know my truth) in the face of someone else's need to blame or criticise. And I need to meditate in the darkness, whether it's in the bath in the darkness of the Great Mother's womb or with every footfall down the lanes and across the fields of this land. 

There are nights when I go out and burst into tears and then, as I empty myself, the serenity of the Great Mother fills me. She is the Dark Mother and the Light Mother in unity and she is Nature and she is the moon and the clouds and the starlit sky. She speaks words of wisdom and comfort and she walks hand-in-hand with me along the lanes that are our home.

There are nights when I go out and am filled with angers and I talk out my truth to those who have denied it. I have a voice for the first time and she speaks with me and through me so that I am strengthened and I know that, should it be necessary, I will be able to speak those truths, lovingly, to the people who were concerned.

There are nights when I go out and am filled with fear and terror and then She makes me empty my mind and just go plod, plod, plod until I realise that I am alive now and walking and listening and embraced by the land and able to lift my head to be entranced by the sky or even by the falling rain. She taught me how to do wet, to accept the rain and keep walking, to bless the rain. To be the rain.

There are nights when I go out and am immediately filled with joy, delight and the glorious feeling of oneness with nature.

And there are nights when I just walk and think about the shopping list. Probably those are the best nights of all in a way because I'm just me with a future, dealing with it.






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57. Into the Darkness, part one.


Pretty much every night since November, I've taken Dessy, our younger beagle, for a half-hour walk before bed.

I do it because the lymphoma survivors' website says that's one of the important things to do—half an hour's exercise morning and before bed to ensure that what you eat is turned into fats for your body to use rather than sugars for the dis-ease to chomp. That's the case whatever you eat, even if it's mostly just salad and vegetables because pretty much everything except lettuce and sardines has carbohydrates in it.

A wet November is probably not the best time to start such an enterprise but, at least, the lanes around here are very quiet and in the first month we only had to deal with three cars. Both Dessy and I are attired each night in luminous jackets, I carry a powerful torch so we can be seen. Those first nights,  we set of manfully (or womanfully or beaglefully) on a bit of a route-march.

We walked in howling gales and sweeping wet and in grief, despair and hopelessness and hope and anger and resentment and gratitude. Well, I did. Dessy just ran about and jumped up hedges and vanished and then raced past me again and did it all over again.

Except, that is, for the nights that she just sat by the front door with one paw up (which is her pathetic mode) and said, 'you're bonkers. Even I am not going out in this!' Given that she came from Warwickshire Beagles and was used to running fifteen miles a day whatever the weather, you can tell how bad it was out there.

N.B. The winter of 2013-14 in the UK was the wettest and windiest on record and here on Dartmoor we get every gale that's going.

Going into the darkness was awful and awe-full. Sometimes there was starlight and sometimes there was a moon but mostly there was weather. For the first two months even if there was a beautiful sky, I couldn't lift my head to see it without pain or dizziness, but that has passed, thank God. Now I can lift my head and gaze as much as I want and nothing is so very, very awful if you can lift your head and be one with the stars.

We got into a routine ... down past Razzle's Corner, past Three Fields Corner, past the Bog of Eternal Stench (where the farmers store the muck for spring muck-spreading) and down to The Far Gate Before Gooseford and then back. On nights when it wasn't too windy, we'd walk in fields where there weren't any sheep—Mike the farmer is fine with that. One night, lost in my thoughts I didn't realise we were in the wrong field and one sweep of the torch met with sixty green eyes shining at me in perplexed curiosity.

I went with the intention of finding God in the darkness and, on the nights when I wasn't too self-obsessed, I looked and listened and did walking meditations and prayed and asked and begged and pleaded and wept and hoped and asked again. 

There is something about night in the country which is the epitome of the truth that you are both everything and nothing simultaneously. Some nights I felt I was carrying all the world's grief but that if I just kept walking, kept walking, kept walking, it would be lifted from my shoulders by a greater, kinder Beingness. I kept walking. Plod, plod, plod. And it was.


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Thursday

56. The Edinburgh Fringe.

My goodness, what a week it's been.

The lady with the horse has been in touch so I'm going to ride Carrie for the first time on Saturday. Now I'm skinnier my jodhpurs will be a bit loose but I'm sure they're elastic enough for all they're very old. The hat's fine too but I'll have to get some new riding gloves.

We're going to Cyprus to be at Ariadne's christening and to see Tim again for the first time in two years.

We're going to France—Lion's friends, Roger and Barbara, are hosting us at a gîte in Brittany and all we have to do is find the cash to get there and back—and lots for good French mange-ing.

My shiatsu practitioner is giving me a dehumidifier so I can have fun with raw foods.

And this autumn I'll be doing a one-hour one-woman show at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Stone me!  Well, don't. I've been in quite enough trouble lately ... but you know what I mean.

I applied for Edinburgh through Laughing Horse Comedy and they've picked me (and 349 others) from 1200 applications to represent them. That's pretty huge.

I expected a 20 minute gig—but an hour! Wow. Well, that's what people have been telling me I'd be best at—and I agree—a show with time to engage people, tell stories and both inspire and amuse.

Well I'll be living until September then at the very least. Good-oh. Always good to have a fresh reason to live. Not that the old ones were paling—Lion, beagles, Karen, Chris, Adam, David, Michael; the Moor etc. etc. But even so... Thank you God and thank you Laughing Horse.

I've heard about dying on stage (and beloved Tommy Cooper did, of course) and, metaphorically I've done it myself. Taunton. Ouch. But doing it literally would just be taking the piss. I suppose I could just lie there in my coffin but that would be boring—and require a lot of incense.

No, I'll make it to Edinburgh. And I have Cyprus and France to strengthen me on the way. And the love and support of so many people. Already, there's a group of friends and friends of friends asking around to find me a room to stay in, in Edinburgh, for the duration of the festival. That's social networking at its best.

Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you God.

55. We are going to Cyprus!

We are booked to fly to Cyprus for Ariadne's christening on 26rd April.

Thank you so, so much to those of you who donated money to make it possible. Lion and I are so very grateful and so very happy. I'm waking up in the morning and thinking 'We're going to Cyprus!'

It was so lovely to be able to tell Tim that we had booked a hotel and a car and that we would definitely be there (isn't Skype wonderful?). He said: 'I'm really chuffed ... 'I am getting really excited now I know you'll be over here.' Isn't that lovely?

I've travelled a lot in my life ... been to China, Australia, South America, Seychelles etc. But this is delighting me as much as any trip I've ever taken. Probably as much because I didn't know if I'd ever be strong enough to travel again. But I am. And I'm so looking forward to some sunshine.

Even the diet will be fine there—I can eat Greek salad until it's coming out of my ears (I'm allowed goat and sheep products, just not cow). And freshly-caught fish at the local tavernas. Yum. The Mediterranean diet is a good one.

And I have the perfect present for Ariadne. Just in case Tim reads this I'm not saying what. No, it's not new but it's beautiful; I've loved it for a long time but it's something that needs to move on down a generation. Hopefully, when she's older, she will find it as beautiful as I do.

Happy, happy, happy. Thank you.

Time For Some Not Fake Food.