William Bloom is author of Psychic Protection; Soulution; Feeling Safe; Working with Angels, Fairies and Nature Spirits and The Endorphin Effect. He is Director of The Holism Network which aims to get holistic spirituality established as an officially accepted belief by the UK Census 2011.
www.williambloom.com
www.holism.info
 Dear Friends,
Leading a retreat at the Findhorn Foundation in May 2003, I took some time off to visit Eileen Caddy whom I love. Now in her eighties, Eileen is one of the three co-founders of this centre, which is Europe's most well known and respected centre for contemporary and green spirituality. We had a wee chat and I was very grateful when she agreed to come and talk with my retreat group.
There was something about Eileen in that meeting that was more peaceful and joyful than I had experienced before. I wondered why and then she began to share with us. Afterwards she said that this could be shared more widely.
"I'm going to stay around now for as long as I'm needed," Eileen told us. "And I don't want to die anymore."
She went on to explain how she had just been on a trip down south to visit her family. In the house of one of her sisters, she had fallen to the floor and she had also got stuck in the bath. In both instances, she was unable to lift herself up and had to call on the help of her sister.
"I lay on the ground," she told us, "and relaxed. I realised then that I needed help and I was able to say, I need help."
Listening to her and watching her, it was inspiring to see what a deep transformation and inner surrender she had been through. She was flowing, glowing and bubbling with more life and love. The energy and attitude were beautiful.
It was also marvellous to witness a senior citizen still in the process of learning and transforming. With a smile, she was still up for the lessons that Classroom Earth gives us all. I was pleased too that she was now also experiencing relief from the back pain and severe spasms that she had been enduring over recent years. Her body was more comfortable now and so too was her attitude.
Some of you may remember that for a while she was quite grim and impatient about still being alive. She was open about this with everyone. She did not want to be in an old painful body relying on other people. She had done her work and was ready to move on! Her attitude was almost military. Mission accomplished!
That attitude has now melted. Once again, she had surrendered more deeply to the embrace of God's love. She had pulled herself through that huge lesson which the last decades of life present to us all. She was flowing with the natural cycle of physical decline and its lessons of acceptance and new wisdom.
This was personally very poignant for me. Not so long before, my own mother, 'Freddy' Bloom, a war heroine from the Second World War she had spent three years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp and had become the inspiration and support for the spirit of all the women there had not approached her death with such surrender. She was a great, open-hearted, humorous woman and had later participated in reconciliation ceremonies in Japan, but she was strong and fiercely independent. Until the day she died, she retained her fiery sense of self-sufficiency and was intense as she resisted any dependence. She was also in physical pain a pain that was closely linked to her resilient and stoic attitude.
It was a touching paradox for me, wanting my mother to surrender to the physical realities of her old age and yet respecting her courage and character that had been forged in truly cruel realities. The very virtues that had made her a heroine and survivor were now the source of physical pain. Her willfulness and strength had once been the perfect manifestation of the vitality and flow of life but they now needed to surrender and harmonise in order to allow healing.
Illness as a gateway
A major feature of the new spirituality currently emerging across the world is its focus on healing, Professor Paul Heelas of Lancaster University suggested a while ago at an Open University conference. Most of the delegates all scholars studying holism and the new age movement agreed with his opinion. Spiritual healing, hands-on healing, bodywork, counselling, psychotherapy, earth healing, political healing, social healing, planetary healing . . . these are indeed core features of the new spirituality.
In fact, as many of us know, illness is frequently a major gateway into spiritual awareness and development. The most cynical of folk may turn to a holistic approach when in deep crisis. Listening to the lecturers at that conference, it occurred to me that 'healing' is often the acceptable word used in the mainstream to describe the underlying reality of spiritual growth and spiritual development. Perhaps, I wondered, there is no difference at all between spiritual growth and healing. And I started to play with some simple equations:
Illness + Spiritual Development = Healing.
Resistance + Surrender-to-Universal-Flow = Spiritual Development.
In my own major illnesses the first was hepatitis-B that almost killed me and the second was a back injury that had me almost immobile for two years my real physical healing only started when I began to feel some acceptance and love moving through my attitude and into my body and the illness. That love was guided by my heart and mind, which had finally stopped resisting and complaining, and had given way to the flow.
Most healers, whether they work with individuals or groups, know that their main task is to release people back into an open heart and mind.
As Eileen Caddy surrendered and opened to the reality of her aging, she was filled with a greater love and strength. The lesson here is clear and obvious for all of us, isn't it? Physical form and psychological patterns need always to be changing and adjusting to the emerging flow. Nothing remains static.
Life Death Surrender
As I write this, Winter is beginning to give way to Spring. In the rhythm of the seasons and the great spiral of life, death and rest are giving way to birth. At the same time, south and below the equator, Summer is now surrendering to Autumn. And on the other side of the universe and within us, there are seasons surely that are still beyond our imagination. Nothing is fixed.
In some spiritual traditions, the whole of existence is described as a cosmic ocean but even this ocean is not how we might expect it. It is a sea of fire and flames, of many colours, in which we bathe in infinite comfort. Life. Death. Surrender. All deep stuff in a great and mysterious cosmos.
And in the meantime, we wash the dishes, put the cutlery away, watch television and do all the things of daily life. I love this paradox in being human. Don't you too?
All my love
William
Text & photographs © Cygnus Books 23-Nov-2006
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