Linda

     Linda is my younger sister. We have been very close and supportive of each other since we were children and we love each other very much. However, we are very different in many ways and she has not always understood my attraction to the spiritual path. I've had to watch myself, being careful not to overwhelm her with my experiences or to push her too hard to try alternative healing. She remembers me well as her healthy older sister, then as a disabled person in severe pain and now, amazingly, as energetic and fully healed. She cannot deny that I have done what conventional Western medicine says is impossible and she had become curious about my healing sessions. Linda did a lot of psychotherapeutic "shrinking" which helped her immensely, but she knew she still had old stuff she was hanging on to.

     I recently went to visit Linda and she asked for a session. I had brought a healing CD, incense and candles with me, just in case. We set up her living room and began the session. After relaxing her, I asked, "Do you see a color?" The answer was, "Brown." I knew at once that this was going to be a useful experience for her. "Do you know what it is? Sometimes we can tell and sometimes we can't. It isn't always necessary to know what it is to release it." She immediately replied, "Loneliness." It was from some very difficult times that Linda experienced during the 90's. Her beloved son was a teenager and her husband was alcoholic. She was trying to get her husband out of the house and still enable her son to have a relationship with his father. In addition, her parents were aging and slipping into physical and mental problems which created a lot of trouble because they lived in the Midwest. She had felt so alone as she struggled with these family issues. Linda began weeping with the releasing process and I could feel the loneliness like a weight in my right hand. Vibration in my little finger (family and pretending) was pretty intense. She said, "I'm floating in a river and it's brown like a river is at the mouth, but I'm moving upstream. I'm floating upstream, but there's no resistance. I'm just flowing." She described the river as having mountains rising up steeply along both banks, covered with green tress. It reminded us of scenes from Chinese paintings. Soon she said, "Now the water is getting clear and blue." We could both feel the energy releasing. Linda's condo is on the upper floor of her building and there are orange trees outside. I saw a hummingbird working on the orange trees! I told her about the hummingbird, which is a sign of joy. I wasn't sure if it was her sign or mine, but I loved watching the bird leisurely move from flower to flower as Linda continued letting go.

     After while she said, "Now the water's getting brown again." "Can you tell what it is?" I asked. After a few moments, she said, "It's my old nemesis, Essie [our mother]." The releasing resumed and once again I could feel the energy like a weight in my hand. "Did you know that water represents emotion?" I asked. She had not known this and we agreed that it was remarkable that the image of her floating in water to release old emotion just came to her. This is also why tears are produced when we cry to express our emotions. After several more minutes of discharging the energy, she told me, "Now the water is clear and blue again and I'm just bouncing around in my inner tube!" Before long she reported that there was a beach alongside the water. She paddled over to the beach, climbed out of the river and sat on the pure, white sand in the warm sunshine. Linda always enjoyed sitting in the sun, so this was a fitting reward after her release work.

     I finished the session by bringing down Absolute Love from Spirit into her body. When she was waking up, she said, "I feel so much lighter!" I was overjoyed that she had seen such distinct images and felt the feelings and, best of all, released them. When I returned home a week later, she emailed me her thanks. She repeated that she was still feeling lighter and in one message described herself as "perky." The next day she thanked me again for the session, adding, "I feel lighter and more loving since we had it."

      It was a great thrill for me to help my dear sister in this way and to have her respond so definitively and positively. It also confirms my belief that traditional psychotherapy is very useful, but its nature is to approach issues from an intellectual standpoint. To truly heal, I am convinced that it is essential to access the spiritual and emotional levels, to release the old burdens and clear them away.

Bobbie Jo

     Bobbie Jo has been my massage therapist for about seven years. She's a 2nd level Old Warrior in the Michael system. When she came for her first session, she was excited because it was my birthday present to her.

     As she was releasing, I noticed that the kingfisher was swooping around the lake and chattering. I usually hear him before I see him. I was led to say, "The kingfisher is outside." She replied, "My first husband's name was Fisher." I said, "Maybe he's here today, helping us."

     At the end of the session, while she was floating in her cloud of unconditional love, I left the room for a moment. When I returned, she had a strange look on her face. She said, "When you left I heard a voice. It said, 'I can no longer protect you, my queen.'" She was becoming emotional. I sat down and took her hand. "Then what happened?" "They put us to death," she replied through tears. We worked a little while longer to release this painful memory.

     A few days later as I was driving to Bobbie Jo's house for my massage/energy work session, I had the thought, "I wonder if Mr. Fisher was the king to her queen in that lifetime." So when she opened the door, I bowed and said, "My queen." She smiled and let me in. I told her my question and she answered, yes, she thought he probably had been her king. Then she said, "We went to a shamanic workshop about twenty years ago and his power animal was the Kingfisher."

     During her second session a couple of weeks later, Bobbie Jo had another even more traumatic recall. She was being dismembered and the perpetrators were laughing at her. She felt the pain and it was pretty intense. After some processing time, I was about to ask her, "Can you forgive them?" when she said, "I forgive them all." A moment later she said, "When I said I forgave them they stopped laughing."

     The processing and releasing of these past life memories was a huge relief to Bobbie Jo. The next time I saw her, I asked, "How are you feeling?" She responded, "I feel so free and energized! For the first time in my life I feel I am right where I am supposed to be." Carrying around the burden of old emotional trauma takes energy away from the present and when it is processed and let go, there is a huge sense of release. It frees us so we can live in the moment.

     Bobbie Jo came back for a third session. We were both relieved that it was very loving and peaceful and not more painful past life memories. She did some releasing, but it was gentle. It seemed to put the finishing touches on her earlier sessions. After each session she would say, "I feel so much lighter." About a month after the last session, she told me she was thrilled because she had lost ten pounds! Excess weight insulates us from the pain of feeling our feelings. Letting go of spiritual and emotional anguish from ancient events that she had been carrying around for so long allowed Bobbie Jo's body to release density without her even trying.

Ricardo

     I met Ricardo when I landed my first real job in an architectural firm in 1975. I was a student in architectural school and my husband the attorney had done some legal work for Minoru Yamasaki, the architect who designed the World Trade Center. Yama, as everyone called him, was writing his memoirs and they needed a writer with some architectural understanding to edit the manuscript. It was a perfect fit.

     Ricardo was one of the designers working in the office. He is a native of Colombia, South America. Since I had studied Spanish in high school and college, this gave us some common ground and I would frequently ask him, "Ricardo, como dice triangle?" or something similar. He had a great sense of humor and I love to laugh and be entertained, so we became friends. Because I had not come into the firm as a bone fide architect, I never quite overcame my writing persona and when the economy took a downturn, I lost my job along with several others. I soon obtained my professional degree and took a job with another firm. But I always kept in touch with Ricardo and his wife Maggie. Even after I met Keith and moved to Atlanta we always kept in touch through Christmas cards.

     Because of his South American heritage, Ricardo was hired to oversee the construction of a Mercedes-Benz plant in Brazil in the 90's. Maggie and Ricardo led a very interesting life during the four years they lived in Brazil. When the first job was complete, he found another one in a different part of that country. They kept inviting us to come visit them, but we never quite made it. At the end of the second Brazilian assignment Ricardo took a job in Bilbao on the northern coast of Spain, but before leaving Brazil, he and Maggie agreed that loved Brazil so much that they wanted to retire there. So they bought a piece of property near the ocean. In 2001 Keith and I were talking about trip possibilities and we decided to go to Spain with Bilbao as one of our primary destinations.

     We were in Bilbao when Maggie was in the U.S. for a wedding, but Ricardo was a wonderful host. He took us to places we would never have known to visit; we ate in wonderful restaurants where he knew the owners, what to order and which wine to choose. He was as much fun as ever and we laughed and laughed. Later we were thankful that our trip planning brought us home on September 6, just days before the fateful 9/11.

     The following spring I decided to attend the BookExpo America convention in New York, May 3-5 to promote my workbook. I sent out an email to my "Cosmic Networkers" with a thumbnail sketch of what I was doing and when I would be out of town. The night before I was to leave I received an email from Maggie saying they were in visiting her sister on the Upper West Side of New York City! I had just decided to stay at a hotel on 61st Street and Central Park West, so I emailed back that I would call them on my arrival.

     We talked briefly the next evening and agreed to meet for breakfast in the restaurant at my hotel in the morning. They walked down in a cool rain and we were so happy to see each other. But before too long they shared with me that Ricardo was having problems with depression and panic attacks because his job in Spain was concluded and he was not working. He described his feelings as, "It's like this dog has me by the throat." I said, "It's your fears."

     As we got caught up on the latest events during breakfast, it was decided that Maggie would run some errands and Ricardo and I would go to her sister's home where I could do a release session with him. I had "just happened" to bring along one of my healing music CD's. As we walked the 20 or so blocks, Ricardo was impressed by how fast and strongly I was able to walk. He remembered when I had been so disabled by my arthritis.

     We arrived at the home and put on the music. I relaxed Ricardo and then asked him to think of a color. "Blue," he said. I put my hand on his chest and instructed him to release his fears and negativity into the blue color and then into my hand. He told me the dog was there. "He's a white dog." "Put the dog into the blue light and then release him," I said. He saw the dog's nose and muzzle come slowly into the blue light. It took about five minutes for it to be fully within the blue light. "OK," I said, "now let him go." I love working with truly creative people because they have such unusual visuals during a session. Ricardo saw the dog in the blue light standing on a piece of plywood on a conveyor like those in the baggage claim area at LaGuardia Airport. These conveyors are not carousels, but consist of flat, black discs that move horizontally from the back area to the claim area. The dog in the blue light stood on the plywood on the conveyor which slowly moved toward the opening that had the black rubber flaps hanging down. Just as he had come into the light, the dog now proceeded to move slowly through the flaps. After a few moments he was gone. Ricardo expressed great relief. We continued the session and I closed by bringing down the unconditional love from the Creator to fill up the spaces that had been vacated by releasing the fears and the dog. When it was complete, Ricardo opened his eyes and said, "How can I ever thank you?" I answered, "How about if you buy lunch?"

     Maggie returned to the apartment and after we all checked our emails, we went to lunch at a nearby Vietnamese restaurant. During lunch I learned that Maggie's brother-in-law works for the City of New York in one of the first intact buildings north of Ground Zero. They had gone there the day before, but were willing to return and take me there. She called and made the arrangements and we took the subway to Chambers Street. After a short walk through barriers and other signs of the destruction and cleanup work that had taken place, we came to an office building. We signed in twice and showed our identification. Maggie's brother-in-law met us and took us up to a sixth floor conference room where we could look right into the site. He had seen people jumping from the Trade Center before his building was evacuated, about 30 minutes before the first tower collapsed. I had expected to be emotionally overwhelmed, but was not; I felt a fullness of emotion, but not an overflow. I think part of it was that the site was nearly all cleaned up. It is a huge construction site, very orderly, with just a few small piles of debris remaining. I was a little disappointed that I had not brought my camera, but I said, "Some things you just have to remember." I still find it interesting that I visited Ground Zero in the company of the only person I still keep in touch with from Yamasaki's office and the same was true of Ricardo.

     We walked over to St. Paul's church which was serving as a place of respite for recovery workers. Its high wrought iron fence encloses the entire block of the church and its graveyard. This fence was completely covered with all manner of signed memorials from all over the world - banners, signs, bedsheets from school children, fire and police departments, union workers; flowers, strings of origami cranes, the Japanese symbol for peace, many touching messages, T-shirts, works of art, etc., etc. After walking around Lower Manhattan and doing a little shopping, we stopped into a coffeeshop. I told Ricardo that I believed that because he had been working so hard and burning himself out, he had neglected his spiritual and emotional sides. I said, "Your Higher Self is not going to let you find a new job until you got in touch with your fears and feelings and release them." As we were sitting there, he started to have a panic attack. I stood up and held his face in my hands and talked softly to relax him, telling him to breathe deeply. He said he felt like crying and I gave him permission. People were looking at us but I didn't care. He cried a little and then after a time was able to catch his breath and recover. I think the painful energy around Ground Zero had exacerbated his personal fears.

     As we left I asked the young man behind the counter if he knew where we could buy some homeopathic remedies. He didn't know, but the customer standing there did - "Right across the park," he said, motioning across the street. As we walked through this park, Maggie was on one side and I was on the other side of Ricardo, holding his hands. He spoke about all the people who love and support him and I said, "This is your healing team that you have put together." He liked that idea. The natural remedies store was closed, but they later got some Rescue Remedy to help keep Ricardo calm.

     We walked to the subway, still holding hands and sat that way on the train. Soon was time for me to get off, I hugged them both, said, "I love you," and hopped off the train. I waited and waved to them as the train pulled away. I floated back to the hotel, overjoyed and in awe of what had happened. This is what I call, "Spirit at Work" and it still amazes and excites me when things like this work out. I had been somewhat disappointed to not have a radio or TV interview that day, but it turned out that Spirit had something much more important for me to do.

     The next morning I ordered room service for breakfast. It came with a copy of the New York Times. On the front page was a photograph of Ground Zero taken the day before I was there - without my camera! - looking directly at the building where we went to pay our respects. On the inside were two panoramic pictures of Ground Zero, one from October and one from May 1. They were much better than anything I could have taken myself.

A month later Ricardo and Maggie traveled to Florida for an interview with a company that wants to create a presence in Brazil. Ricardo worked for a week to put together a proposal. He suffered some anxiety during that week, but a few days later he called me, jubilant, to say that he and the firm had reached an agreement. I reminded him to take time to pay attention to his emotional side and not burn himself out again. They have returned to Brazil on this exciting new assignment in the land that they have come to feel is their true home.