7.3 A New Age

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

Some of you may have seen an earlier version of this post. I deleted that because it was so awful and wrote this one instead. Sorry for any confusion.

Cheryl decided to pass on her methods of reading tarot cards, and put together a small group. This included me and Beth’s charming but alcoholic ex-partner as well as Frog who’d long been interested in tarot. He had his own pack and several books on the subject,  and had impressed me when we first met by giving me a reading.
    The best-known tarot at the time was the Rider-Waite pack of 1909, named after its male creator and publisher but omitting any mention of its female artist Pamela Colman Smith. This pack concentrated largely on presenting symbols, whereas Cheryl used a modern pack called the Cosmic Tarot which included pictures of recognisable modern people and so was much easier to understand.
    Cheryl herself brought the cards alive for me in a way that none of Frog's learned books had ever done.
    As she explained, the twenty-two ‘major arcana’, which contained arresting pictures of ancient and archetypal (another Jungian word) figures such as The Fool, The Magician and The High Priestess, portray our soul’s journey. The ‘minor arcana’, arranged in four groups like ordinary playing cards, dealt with individuals and our everyday ups and downs in four areas - physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.
    Reading the cards Cheryl’s way involved using not just knowledge of traditional meanings but also your own intuition and insights, and putting these together to make a story.
    Tarot cards still had a bad press at the time, like everything 'occult' (meaning 'hidden’ but used pejoratively). But they were, I realised, simply a language, a way of accessing our ‘higher selves’ (an occult term). And perhaps more.
    We read for each other, and occasionally the results could be spine-tingling. It really did seem at times as if a higher power was speaking through the cards.
 

Meanwhile I was still working freelance from home, copy-editing and proofreading books. I liked the independence but the work was beginning to tire me. It made my brain ache as it was too intellectual and now occupied only a small part of me.
    I worked for several ‘Mind, Body, Spirit’ (MBS) publishers as that was a genre starting to be popular and was something I knew a little about and was interested in.
    Even so, during the course of my work I kept coming across words I didn’t know and couldn’t find in any dictionary, just as ‘reiki’, ‘feng shui’ and ‘tofu’.
    Someone should write a dictionary of all these new words, I thought, but no one appeared to be doing so, and eventually I realised that someone was me.
 
I put together a synopsis and wrote some sample entries, for what I envisaged as a sort of ‘devil’s dictionary’, not as scathing as Ambrose Bierce’s, but slightly tongue-in-cheek nonetheless.
    Three publishers were interested and I chose the one which seemed the most honourable and the least likely to interfere with what and how I wrote. However, they wanted me to call the book an encyclopaedia rather than a dictionary and I agreed, not realising how much that title was going to change the book’s content and how much work it was going to mean. I asked for a year in which to write it.
    And so my New Age Encyclopaedia was born.
 
The first thing I discovered was exactly where the term ‘new age’ came from.
    It started in the late nineteenth century when a group of people who called themselves ‘theosophists’ became interested in ancient Eastern religions and mysticism. At the same time a secret society called The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was reviving Western occult traditions such as witchcraft, tarot, magic and astrology. The society was secret because most of the practices were considered deeply wrong and counter to Christianity, if not illegal. (Witchcraft for instance didn’t become fully legal in the UK until 1951.)
    According to astrology the Earth, because of its wobble, moves to face a different ‘sign’ (arrangement of stars) of the Zodiac (star belt) every two thousand years or so. Round about now (give or take a few centuries) we move from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius.
    During the Age of Pisces, institutions, religions and centralised power dominated. During the Age of Aquarius, we will have greater freedom and equality, more connection to nature and each other, and an emphasis on individual spirituality.
    I liked the sound of all that.
    None of it was exactly new to me as all these ideas were flying around during the 1960s when I was a teenager, but at the time I was too young to participate. Now I could.
 
Cheryl next set up a workshop to teach people how to contact their ‘spirit guides’.
    There are many different sorts of spirit beings according to occult and native traditions, as well as in religions, but according to 'esoteric' (secret) spirituality each of us has a human spirit guide, a person no longer on this earth who has elected to look after us. They speak to us through our intuition and imagination.
    I didn’t much like the idea of having a spirit guide. It made me uneasy to think that someone was watching everything I did. Nonetheless I was intrigued, and trusted Cheryl. So I decided to give the workshop a go.
    A group of us met one evening at Cheryl’s house. She was making quite a stir by now, with everyone it seemed wanting her to sort their life out, and there were at least six of us in the group. Some I knew, some I didn't. Frog hadn’t joined me this time.

    We took our places around the room in a sort of circle, with the usual dim lights, incense and evocative posters setting the mood. 

To be continued . . . 

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!

7.2 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