THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SERIES Pictures of Aura Portraits

For more about the Autobiographical Series and a full list of instalments, see right.

Here by popular demand are the two pictures of my aura that Cheryl coloured for me, as mentioned in Instalment 7.1 and Instalment 7.2.

This is the first one, described in Instalment 7.1. I think it's faded as the brown patches aren't as apparent as I remember them, but it's worth including as a comparison to the second portrait.

Here is the second portrait, the one Cheryl did a year later. As I said in Instalment 7.2, while there are still dark patches, the aura itself has exploded in size.

NOTE Cheryl is no longer available on this telephone number so please don't use it!

7.3 A New Age

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a full list of instalments so far, see right

The concept of a ‘new age’ first arose in the late nineteenth century when a group of people calling themselves ‘theosophists’ started to introduce ancient Eastern spiritual ideas to the West.
    The theosophists also revived astrology, and the term ‘new age’ arose because according to astrology the earth moves from one sign of the zodiac to another approximately every two thousand years and around now (give or take a few centuries) we are due to complete the transition from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius.  
    While the Age of Pisces has meant hierarchical power, institutional religion and external authorities, under Aquarius we will according to new age astrology have greater equality, more connection with nature and each other right across the world, and a focus on individual spirituality.
 
Frog himself was born on the ‘cusp’  of Pisces and Aquarius (on the point where they meet), with some authorities placing him in one sign and some in the other. This perhaps explains the many contradictions in his character.

    For example there was that strange dichotomy which I’d noticed before I’d even been introduced to him when I’d seen him hiding in his cloak but at the same time drawing attention to himself by looking so outlandish. This dichotomy also revealed itself in his radio work: he was performing but invisible. He called himself ‘an extroverted introvert’.
    However, his indecisiveness – you could never ask him whether he wanted tea or coffee for example as he would stall like a stuck record – was definitely Piscean, this sign being usually illustrated by two fishes swimming in opposite directions.
 
Both Eastern mysticism and Western esoteric traditions went on to influence the 1960s’ counterculture (‘hippies’) and have since then gradually spread into the mainstream.
    Much decried for being narcissistic and fluffy, new age ideas and practices had always made total sense to me.
 
I was brought up in the Church of England and while I enjoyed singing hymns, and everything Jesus said made sense to me (even if often misinterpreted, I felt), I found the Church itself a straitjacket. It was like an extension of school and parents, just something else that wanted to limit me.
    At thirteen, I joined a church youth group because I wanted a social life and my best friend at school was already part of the group. The group was ‘evangelical’ which meant it was always trying to recruit new members and it asked us to ‘commit’ ourselves to Jesus in our entirety. That I never dared do. It sounded like prison to me. I couldn’t even commit myself to a relationship with a boy.
 
Both Frog and I were teenagers during the hippie era so too young to really participate in it, but its ideas were all around and influenced us when we were at our most receptive.
    Frog dived into the counterculture through music, drugs, books and later the underground magazine Oz which he first discovered in a shop in Cambridge, the town in which he started work when he left school. With its leading university, it was an interesting place for him to encounter after his restrictive grammar school in rural Bedfordshire.
    I did my exploration in secret as usual, through books and later through travel.
   
When we started living together and combined our book collections we laughed to find that the only book we coincided on – that we both owned - was The Doors of Perception  by Aldous Huxley. (We kept both copies and I have them to this day.) In the book Huxley describes his experiences while under the influence of the hallucinogenic drug LSD.
   Frog himself took LSD several times in his late teens and early twenties (before I met him), but when I was that age and even though people around me were ‘tripping’, I never dared do the same as I didn’t have enough confidence in my sanity. The world was already big, scary and strange. Why would I want to make it any worse?
   
Frog for me when I met him was the personification of all those subversive ideas that so fascinated me but which I’d never admitted to. He already lived what I wanted to be.
    We married in church because we wanted a spiritual aspect to our union. We knew we needed that to give us the strength to persevere. In any case, we already connected on that deepest level and had done from the moment we met.
    And that was perhaps our first mistake. We went back to basics, to convention, for the start of our life together and then instead of Frog liberating me, I gradually tamed him. I couldn’t shake off all that external pressure.
    Or perhaps Frog wanted to be tied down, to be tethered to conventional reality. Another thing I’d spotted in him from the start was an abundance of energy going nowhere. I felt I could help direct that energy. But maybe I was too heavy handed, too afraid.
    He, on the other hand, said he saw in me a huge wound which he wanted to heal.
    So perhaps we had both failed.
 
Whatever. Enough of that for the moment. Back to Cheryl.
    She was therefore helping me to put into practice things that weren’t new to me but which had never before been overt in my life.
    And so my apprenticeship continued.

To be continued . . . 

7.2 Wellness

This is part of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments, see right

I reeled out of Beth’s house, feeling as if something momentous had just happened. I sensed that the meeting with Cheryl was one of those fateful events, destined to change the course of my life. Not quite in the same league as my first encounter with Frog, and very different, but vital nonetheless.
    I made my way back down the main street in a daze, not noticing who I was passing and bumping shoulders at every step.
    As I reached the village square and the exit from the Market, I walked into Frog’s brother Simon and his family who were staying with Frog and me.
    I couldn’t help blurting out what had occurred, thinking that they might understand.
    ‘You paid ten pounds for an aura portrait,’ exclaimed Simon. ‘Are you mad or something? What a waste of money.’
     I hardly heard him.
 
The next morning, as soon as the hour was reasonable and without telling anyone except Frog who was resigned by now to my emotional excesses even if he didn’t always understand them, I made my way back to the village and hammered on Beth’s door.
    I kept on hammering even though it took her a good five minutes to open up. When she did appear she was wearing a dressing-gown and her eyes were half closed. I’d obviously woken her and she didn’t look too pleased to see me.
    ‘You’d better come in,’ she sighed.
    Once inside I refused a cup of coffee and found myself blurting out the whole story of the pregnancy, the termination and Thomas, my face streaming with tears.
    Beth listened in silence and I sensed that she was reluctant to get involved. She had her own problems.
    At last I drew to a halt. I didn’t know what had come over me and began to feel slightly stupid.
    ‘Why don’t you go and see Cheryl again,’ said Beth. ‘Her details should be underneath the aura portrait.’
    Yes, I thought. That was what I needed. That was exactly what I wanted to hear.
 
Cheryl lived in a terraced house in Exeter, the walls decorated with New Agey posters like dolphins and zodiacs. She kept the curtains half closed and burned incense. She wasn’t surprised to see me and sat me down without preamble. Which was lucky as I couldn’t have explained why I was there or what I wanted.
    All I knew was that I was in love with those gorgeous swirling colours. It wasn’t so much that I was concerned about the brown splodges. I already understood why they were there. It was the energy of the aura that drew me in. I wanted more of it. I didn’t want anything in its way.
    The first thing Cheryl suggested was an exercise in intuition. During the week I wrote down every one of those thoughts, ideas and feelings that seemed to come from nowhere and what I did about them. What was the result? There were some astonishing congruences and I began to see that those insights were more ‘right’ – more helpful – than all my lists, plans and conscious attempts at self-improvement.
    She had me read a novel called The Celestine Prophecy which illustrated ‘synchronicity’, a word invented by the psychologist Jung (in the early twentieth century) for those strange coincidences that speak of a meaningful world and a connection between us and the rest of creation. I was inspired.
    We worked on affirmations, positive descriptions about me and my life, such as ‘I am safe’, ‘I am perfect as I am’. She advised me to write each affirmation down many times on a piece of paper and then go through the lines, alternating them with all the negatives my brain came up with. Eventually I would run out of negatives and suddenly see that on a higher level the affirmation was true, at which point my eyes would fill with tears and I would be overcome with relief.
    She led me through meditations and guided visualisations and encouraged me to try doing the same on my own. My walks with Brindle took on a whole new importance as I followed her advice and parked myself daily in secret places at the tops of hills and under trees and dreamed of better things.
    At the end of another year she coloured me another aura portrait and, while there were still dark splodges, the colours reached the edge of the paper and beyond.
 
One of the articles I’d been commissioned to write was on the subject of ‘Wellness’. Full of confidence, I’d trotted out all the stuff I’d already written about and knew so well – the healthy eating, the exercise, the complementary therapies – and sent it off. But reading the article later, I realised that it was missing one huge chunk of existence – the spiritual. I’d said nothing about how we could care for, cultivate and connect with our souls. And I began to realise that this was what Cheryl was teaching me.
 
But there was more, much more to come. I was only just beginning.

To be continued . . . 

PART 7. 1 The Aura Portrait

This is part of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments, see right

1997
 
‘Would you like a portrait of your aura?’ said Beth.
     I knew Beth from my yoga class. She was standing outside her house in Silverton’s main street, her head bobbing among the home-made dream-catchers (Aboriginal mobiles) that she was selling.
    It was August, almost exactly a year after Thomas’s death, the day of the annual village Street Market, attended it seemed by the entire population of the village, plus hordes from outside. The streets thronged with brightly dressed pedestrians.
     ‘Ooh’, I said, ‘that sounds scary.’
    Did I really want to know what was lurking in my ‘aura’? I feared the worst, in spite of all my therapy.
    What with my eating disorders, my migraines and all my life events, I was becoming an expert on complementary therapies. I felt as if I’d tried them all: acupuncture, reflexology, osteopathy, cranial osteopathy, aromatherapy, herbalism, homeopathy, naturopathy, massage and flower remedies, to name but a few. Not to mention counselling and hypnotherapy. So much so that I was now writing about them for magazines and encyclopaedias.
    So I knew a little about auras – the energy field that surrounded our bodies, or ‘subtle energy’ as it was sometimes known. But I hadn’t had much to do with them.
    So, in spite of myself, I was intrigued.
    ‘Go on,’ said Beth. ‘Cheryl’s brilliant. She’s in my sitting-room. Why don’t you go in and meet her.’
    She pushed her front door open and I wandered through, trying to look nonchalant.
 
It was dark inside and I bumped into some furniture before spotting Cheryl at the back of the room next to a small table.
    She was young, in her twenties I guessed, with long, straight, dyed-blonde hair and a delicate face.
    She watched me without smiling or making any form of greeting and pointed to a chair in front of her.
    ‘I can do you either a tarot reading or an aura portrait. It’s ten pounds,’ she said.
    Already I believed in her. Her confidence was rock-solid.
    ‘An aura portrait please,’ I said, sitting on the chair and handing her the money.

    Tarot I vaguely knew about already as Frog had a pack as well as several books on the subject and had impressed me when we first met by doing me a reading with the cards. Auras were what I was here for.
    Cheryl picked a pad off the table and began sketching with a selection of crayons, looking through me rather than at me.
    ‘You get headaches,’ she said.
    ‘Yes,’ I said, taken aback that she’d seen so much so quickly.
    She carried on sketching without answering.
    Finally she stopped colouring and turned her paper round, placing it on the table so that I could look at it.
    I wanted to cry. Even I could see what it meant.
 
Over the summer when Frog and I were planning to marry and our lives were in such turmoil we’d attended a course on ‘human development’ over several weeks in the evenings at a local alternative centre. This was called the Grail Centre and situated in one of Exeter’s side streets with a vegetarian café that Frog and I often visited on a Saturday.
    Here we learned about the seven stages of human life, modelled on the colours of the rainbow. The first stage was the physical, and coloured red (or black). The orange stage was about social connection, the yellow related to the intellect, green (or pink) the emotions, blue responsibility, indigo intuition and violet creativity, spirituality and selfless service.
    Each level had it pluses and minuses, and you learnt to deal with these as you moved up the levels approximately every seven years.
    Ultimately - ideally - you became a fully formed human being, having reached the white level which included every colour.   
     Both Frog and I were fascinated by this model. It made so much sense. And as a result of the exercises we did in the group, we placed ourselves - at that time - at the green level. My mother I decided was probably yellow, and my father blue. No wonder we didn’t get along.
    Later, when I started yoga, I realised that these levels equated to the chakras, the body’s seven centres positioned from the groin to the top of the head, spinning discs where according to yogic philosophy we take energy in and release it back out again. Interestingly chakras also relate to the conventional endocrine system – the glands that produce hormones. As well as to our poetic understanding of our bodies – the head, the heart, the soul and so on.
   
Over an outline of the human body, doubling its size, Cheryl had coloured beautiful flares of pinks and purples, blues, yellows and greens. But from the pelvis downwards around the outside the colours, on the palms of my hands, in the centre of my body above the waist and over one side of my head were foul brown splodges.
    Cheryl pointed to them one by one.
    ‘You have to do something about these,’ she said, ‘otherwise you’re going to become ill.’

To be continued . . . 

6.9 Aftermath

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more about it and a list of instalments, see right.

Around lunchtime the hospital decided it was time for me to go home. I’d had nothing to eat for 24 hours and, when I tried to stand, I fell back on to the bed. Thank goodness for Frog, who vanished and returned shortly with a sandwich.
    ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘It was all I could find.’
    It was ham in white bread. Not the sort of thing I normally ate, but I stuffed it into my mouth, hardly chewing.
    Frog then half-carried me to the car.
 
The next day the local midwife came to see me.
    ‘You’re very pale,’ she said, ‘I think we need to give you some iron injections.’
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘No more injections.’
    I took a week off work and lay in the garden, reading novels. I felt as if my insides had been wrenched out.
    I received telephone calls and reams of kind letters from family and friends. When I did venture down to the village, people I hardly knew greeted me with kind words.
    The only bum note originated from the fertility charity when I rang them to tell them what had happened.
    ‘Oh no,’ they said. ‘The poor baby.’
    Then the guilt kicked in. I followed my usual course of action when in trouble – walking – and on my walks I contacted Thomas through the ether – or my imagination – and said sorry to him over and over again. He forgave me. He was a handsome young man by now. I prayed to God, and an answer bounced straight back to me. It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t need to shoulder the blame. It was the way society was. Society as a whole was responsible.
    The hospital had sent me home with a folder full of leaflets about where to find help, offered me counselling and arranged a special service at the crematorium for babies who hadn’t made it. Attending the service with Frog and me was one other couple who’d had a miscarriage. We all cried all the way through. I spoke to the vicar afterwards and he too said I didn’t need to feel guilty. We laid Thomas’s ashes to rest at the crematorium in a special garden for babies.
    My parents – who were very sympathetic – gave us some money and in September we booked two weeks on a Greek island, Greece being our favourite holiday destination. It was probably too soon. I had a lot of trouble with blood and other discharges (I won’t go into detail) which was frightening and difficult, especially where beaches and swimming were concerned. We did a lot of walking as there was a map of the island’s footpaths drawn by a British geographer who’d holidayed on the island for years. We drank a lot of wine in the evenings and stumbled back up the path to our room. I used to arrive at the top with white knees from all my falls into the powdery soil.
    Back in the UK, I started to read up about the loss of babies, and cried through every book and booklet. I made myself do it. I wanted all the feelings out. I wanted to cry. I wanted to rub my nose in everything that had happened. I didn’t want any weeds left.
    In October I received an SOS from the Dorset publisher. They were short-staffed. Could I possibly come in three days a week and help them out? They would pay my travel costs and a generous hourly rate. I agreed. I’m not sure why as, again, it was too soon. My emotions were still all over the place and I acquired an obsessive (unreturned) crush on one of the people I was working with. This was something I did from time to time as crushes were safe – unlike Frog - as I never did anything about them. Frog was upset. The journey was long – about an hour and half – and not much fun in the icy winter weather and the dark.
    By Christmas I was a wreck and I didn’t go back to Dorset in January.
 
It took a year for my body and emotions to return to something like normal, by which time I felt that my life was over. What else was there left to experience? I’d done it all, hadn’t I?
    How wrong I was.

To be continued