"God, Eve, I don't want to tell you."
"Go on!", I urged.
"When you were asleep your face changed... You had the face of a young child."

Relief flooded over me.  Over the last couple of years this phenomenon seems to happen quite frequently.  It appeals to my wicked sense of humour.  It is usually seen by people who have very little spiritual awareness and they find it confusing and sometimes disturbing.  It just makes me laugh.  The faces seem to vary from a young Inca child to an old woman.  Occasionally a beautiful young woman appears.  I wish that she would stay as it would save me a fortune on Estée Lauder make-up.

I don't know what this is and I have no wish to explore it, not because of fear, but because mysteries are just that, mysteries.  I don't know how a tiny spider, the size of a pin head, has the intelligence to make an incredibly intricate web, so why should I try to fathom out why my face changes now and again. It just does.  The only reference that I have come across is in the book My Life as a Medium, by the world famous healer Betty Shine, who calls it transfiguration but I am not a medium.  I'm just a healer of people's spirits so I do not understand these things.

However, my merriment was short lived as she continued slowly.
"Your face changed from a young child to a new born baby.  It was awful.  Your face was chalky white like you were a dead baby then dark red blood started to trickle from your left nostril... Eve, are you going to die?"

The gruesome image stunned me.  I am used to living with love and light not this kind of stuff.  I knew what she was describing.  I had seen that pallor on the faces of my dead twins.  What a way to end a lovely evening and all that we had been drinking was tea and coffee.  I rarely drink but at that point I could have done with a double brandy.  I felt sorry for my friend.  She doesn't understand these things and she should never have been allowed to see that.

In the silence that followed something quite amazing and weird happened.  My friend's bitch stared at me, padded over quietly and started to lick my arm.  Then she jumped on the settee and started to lick my left nostril furiously.  I couldn't stop her.  Then she licked my whole face.  It was exactly what a bitch would do with a newly born pup that hadn't started to breathe.  The other amazing factor was that she never comes near visitors in the house. She acknowledges their presence then remains aloof.  When she had finished her intense licking she returned to her bed, curled up and ignored me for the rest of the night.

It was as if a hundred veils, carefully layered over the years to protect me, had been ripped violently from my eyes.  I could see the time of my birth and shuddered.  My friend wanted to talk about it but I immediately shut down.  I wasn't ready for this.  I was also angry.  I feel as if my life is beautifully balanced.  It has taken so long to realize that my name is Eve and that I am beautiful.  I want to relax into that and enjoy it.  Not this.  Not now.
 
The key is rejection.  For much of my life I have lived with the fear of rejection and fear of abandonment but not any more.  That has gone so why this?  A line from a Madonna song has also been haunting me for the last few weeks: 'Rejection is the greatest aphrodisiac'. Go further, Madonna! Rejection creates the greatest hunger known to man or woman.

Let me explain how that has felt for me in the past.  Hunger creates the most appalling excesses.  We only have to watch documentaries from the Third World showing people scavenging in rubbish bins for scraps of rancid food or emaciated bodies in Africa grovelling in the dirt for grains of rice or corn scattered by relief workers.  Even survivors of aeroplane crashes have been known to eat the corpses of their dead companions to survive.  How revolting, we may think. Why do we assume that we are so different in the Western world?

The famine of the soul, created by rejection, is no less appalling.  We only disguise it better by driving Mercedes cars, having appropriate social status and labels, living in better houses, acquiring material goods - Western skeletons draped in mink - starved of love, famished and rocking inside like Romanian or Bosnian children.  I know.  I have been there.  I see it all around me - dysfunctional relationships, pressure, stress, one in four likely to suffer from mental illness at some time in our lives.

What is the ugly fear, running like a mosquito ridden swamp, under rejection?  It is the fear of abandonment, fear of criticism, fear of never being quite good enough.  Even our work systems operate on this basis.  Why else do people drive themselves on to the point of breakdowns, heart attacks and stress?  We fear not being approved of, of not doing enough, not getting promotion. If we  don't conform by wearing the right clothes, using the right jargon or 'buzz' words, doing the right thing, being politically correct we can be abandoned and rejected professionally and socially.  Is there room for creativity or of space to know who you are and be who you are? We just fear.  Make anyone afraid and you can control them.  Fear of rejection is the big one.

Thank God I got M.E.!  What a blessing in disguise.  I may get tired a couple of days a week.  In that time I write or read new books, listen to music, relax and watch the birds ready to migrate.  More importantly I have time to have a love affair with myself.  When I was working I was exhausted seven days a week becoming more and more separated from myself and my spirit.  I am still busy but only with things that I really want to do.  Being a healer is such a joy instead of being a dreaded caseload.
 
Where am I tonight?  I am in the home of my dreams.  I am euphoric.  My children have all left now.  This is all mine to do as I please with.  The house is small but beautiful.  It is 150 years old and built of stone overlooking the hills with woodburning stoves.  The garden hangs with buddleia, lavender, roses, hydrangea and other plants that I have not yet identified.  I have just painted the morning sky on the ceiling and the midnight sky with crescent moon in the stone hearth behind the fire.  A wonderful stone wall has just been exposed behind the plaster and I have set candles in it.  The discovery of prints from the ancient frescos of Santorini have delighted me.  These will be painted on the stairway and landing.  I ache to get on with it yet I have put down my paintbrushes and rags and lifted my pen such is the urgency to resolve this other matter.  I ask the Great Spirit why, why, why?

Before I start this return journey I have looked at the dictionary definition of rejection:

If you reject someone who expects love, affection and kindness from you... you behave towards them in a very cruel and hostile way, sometimes even refusing to accept them any longer as part of your family.

Therapy can be done to the self.  Understanding is therapy.  Love is the ultimate therapy.  Therapists, teachers and gurus can help but only for a limited time.  The direction is inward and sooner or later the inward path must be trodden alone. Although, in reality, you are never alone.

The last I heard of her was six years ago when Social Services contacted my sister saying that my mother was deranged and believed that her neighbours were trying to poison her with noxious gasses pumped through her letterbox.  She lived her life acutely suspicious of the motives of others and never trusting anyone, probably because she could never trust herself.  Who knows?

This one is for me.  This is my biggest and most daunting challenge yet.  I am now asking those loving spirits to heal me with gentle hands.  I have suffered enough already.  I will now begin to go back and allow the feelings to thaw and feel all the emotions that have been frozen for so long.  Perhaps I had better do the understanding bit first.  Weiss said that understanding was therapy.  Maybe I am just avoiding the feelings.  I don't care.  This is my life.  Perhaps my cowardice is showing a little bit but it feels right to do it this way.
 
I had a glimpse of this maternal rejection many years ago.  I was on an alternative healing weekend and, being at a loss as to what to choose, I selected a dream therapy session run by two psychiatrists.  I knew nothing about dream therapy and went out of curiosity expecting it to be a load of airy, fairy claptrap.  Nobody in the group had any current dreams so I asked if I could talk about a recurrent nightmare that I had had for years.

I was in my mother's house and it had been ransacked. All her valuable jewellery had been taken.  The drawers were open and her underwear was strewn about.  I knew that it was my sister who had done it. My mother was lying in her bed in a pool of liquid and her body was covered in a white creamy stuff like Vaseline.  Her eyes were red from crying and, as she lay there helpless, she stretched her arms out to me imploring me to touch her and hold her.  All I felt was a shudder of revulsion.  I couldn't go near her or touch her.

I'm crying now, not in pain but in deep sadness for her and for me and also with relief.  Even then, Something must have loved me enough to help me survive till now.  I was loved then so I must be loved now.  It is safe to go on.  More understanding came from Dr Weiss's book.  I'm keeping it open at this part to remind myself that I will be all right if I go in deeper.

"Remember," the voice said, "Remember that you are always loved.  You are always protected and you are never alone.  You are also a being of light, of wisdom, of love.  You can never be forgotten.  You can never be overlooked or ignored.  You are not your body.  You are not your brain, not even your mind.  You are spirit.  All you have to do is reawaken to the memory, to remember Spirit has no limits, not the limit of the physical body nor of the reaches of the intellect or the mind."

I'm going to do that, Dr Weiss.  I am going to reawaken to this memory.  I am going to remember that Spirit has no limits.  Spirit is pure love.  Don't let there be any limit to that.  This is strange.  I have read that many times, given it to others for their light in the darkness, believed it wholly.  Now I have to put it to the test for myself.  By the time this is over I will really know if it is real or not.
 
Another episode of understanding came in my teenage years.  I became a very wild and disturbed teenager and was sent down to stay with my twin aunts who were nursing sisters in Eastbourne in the south of England.  They had somewhat disassociated themselves from my grandmother and the family.  As we walked along the beach one evening aunt Peggy turned and looked at me and said solemnly: "I don't know how your mother lives with the guilt of what she has done to you."

I was stunned.  What did she mean?  As I pressed her for answers, she clammed up and changed the subject.  She had said so little but with so much anger and contempt that I began to realize that, whoever I was or whatever I had become, it was not all my fault.  But even with that, the hunger of rejection did not abate.  I still wanted her love, her approval, her acceptance.  She was my mother.

As I became more needy, her hate became more overt.  I could see why.  My behaviour was atrocious.  Even I could not have lived with me at that time.  I wrote about this in my last article.  I survived by power and defiance - the girl who ran with wolves.

Being pregnant at 17 killed her.  Well, it didn't actually kill her but it brought her to her knees.  She still had more in store for me.  When my twins died of cot death the doctor sent for her immediately.  I was beside myself with grief.  She sent a message back with Dr  Marshall.  "She's made her bed.  She can lie in it." My grandmother and my aunts didn't come either.  I think my twin aunts may have come but they were, by then, nursing in Canada.  Then she sold the story to the newspapers.  That was horrendous.  Cameramen climbed up on the the windows of my parents-in-laws' house trying to get photographs. That time, the inquest, the funeral, the aftermath is still a blur in my mind.

What I do remember is her and my grandmother turning up uninvited at the church the night before the babies were to be buried.  They insisted in opening the coffins which should have been screwed down because post-mortems had been done.  The horrendous sight of the mutilated bodies gave me nightmares which took me to the edge of suicide until I went into therapy with that wonderful psychiatrist.  Not all these journeys like I am doing tonight can be done alone.  I would not have survived without him.  Bless you, M.  The hilarious thing was that I went to see him with a driving phobia and he landed with all this shit.  How he tolerated me for those seven sessions I'll never know.  I spat out some anger at him.  There is a moral in every story - don't take sweeties from strangers and, if you are a therapist, don't even contemplate touching redheaded Scottish females presenting with driving phobias. You may just find that, as you shake her hand, there is a grenade in it.

I never saw her again till I was 25.  By then I had three other children.  I still wanted a mother and a grandmother for my children.  The red warning lights were on but I ignored them.  My sister warned me.  My eldest daughter always seemed to cry when we were at her house.  This irritated my mother who didn't like her anyway.  She said that my little girl had a big slack mouth.  My mother liked rosebud lips as she called them.  My daughter was beautiful with brown almond eyes and soft kissy lips.  My sister told me that when my back was turned my mother dug her long red nails into my daughter's arm.  She was only three.  When confronted she was very plausible saying that her nails caught on everything.  I knew my sister was right but at that time I could not bear the thought of not having a mother again.  Such is the hunger that comes with rejection.  The final break came a few weeks later.

I was quite poor at the time.  My ex-husband was a student and we lived in a two roomed house with no bathroom.  The toilet was outside and shared by two other families. My mother had a lovely home.  It was luxurious and I took myself and the children to be bathed there..  One evening I heard my five-year-old son scream.  The bathroom was filled with steam and she was trying to plunge my son into the almost boiling water.

How I did not kill her that night I'll never know.  I had never lifted my hands to my mother but that night she was lucky not to die.  I saw the terror in her eyes as she backed away from me.  Only the screams of my children stopped me from doing it.  I dressed them and left.  That was the end.  She had done the same to me but I had believed that I was a naughty girl and deserved it.  They would be kept safe from her.  Isn't it strange how we can defend others but not ourselves.  There is always a gift in adversity.  She taught me how to fight for the underdog and to try to alleviate pain when I saw it in others.  Thank you for that one, mother.  I now do the same for myself.
 
I have to stop now.  The understanding part is over.  I feel no pain.  All I feel is 'not guilty.'  The shame is hers, not mine.  I have now to go back to the day of my birth and feel the feelings of being rejected and unwanted.  I must remember that I am truly loved and could never have been rejected.  I don't know how to do this.  I will have to go by instinct.  Please, Great Spirit, do it with gentle hands.  It is late now, too late to call anyone for help.  I have watched others being healed gently and marvelled at it.  I want the same for me but you will need to show me how to do it...
 
I am now entering the body of that new born baby that was me. I can feel myself wrapped in a shawl and put in a cot. There is no one in the room.  She is not there. I don't know where I am yet.  The world is a new place.  I am defenceless.  This is very strange.  I am in the body of that baby yet I am also an adult.  I feel no pain.  I am not afraid.  All I feel is a great deal of tenderness for this little scrap of humanity who will one day be the me that I am now.  Everything will be all right.  She doesn't need her.  All she needs is me.  I am stroking her head now and whispering to her and telling her not to be afraid.  I will protect her because I am able to protect her.  I am crying again.  My tears are staining the pine kitchen table that I have just cleaned and covered with teak oil.  It doesn't matter.  There is still no pain. The tears are tears of relief.

Why was I so frightened of coming back here? There was nothing to fear.  I am going to pick her up now and take her out of her cot and hold her. She is beautiful and so contented.  I have to stop writing now and stay with this to make sure that it is real and that I am not in denial or something else.  I've come too far for that.  I thought that I would have had to confront my mother but she's just not here and she never will be here again.  This must be how you heal the child within.  There is so much love in this room just now.  I feel as if I am being comforted by Something or Someone.  The peace is very deep.  I've stopped crying.  I feel very strong, strong enough to protect both of us.  I'm going to bed now and taking her with me...
 
It is now morning.  From my bed I can see the mist gently rolling over the distant hills... Grandfather Sun is struggling to break through the clouds.  How we are constantly reminded of the Universal Love!  It never fails. The healing last night was real.  I am smiling at how gentle it was.  Thank you Great Spirit or the loving forces in the universe, whoever you are...  I now understand. There is nothing that cannot be healed with love if we are willing to face the fear.  This really is real.  I just feel so much at peace.  I can hardly believe it after all these years of avoiding it.

Now I can go back and track the survival process from that wounded newly born infant to the woman I have become.  Like Sleeping Beauty I was born with fairy godmothers who gave me gifts for my journey.  I am now sure that I was protected from birth.  My gifts were innocence, trust and courage but the one that came giftwrapped was gratitude. Despite everything I have always felt lucky.  Something or someone always turns up for me.  I could always see someone who was worse off than me.

My little sister was grossly fat whilst I was built like a whippet, lean and agile.  I spent most of my childhood protecting her from bullies and name callers although, sadly, I bullied her because she was my mother's favourite.  I was also talented at just about everything at junior school before I went off the rails.  I was top of the class, excelled at sports, represented the school in the Burns' poetry competitions, was artistic often having my work on display whereas my poor sister had learning difficulties and was always bottom of her class.  It was probably my need for approval that drove me on.  I was never an easy child to manage but my natural exuberance was often overlooked because I was bright.  My great disappointment was because my mother never had time to come to sports days or school concerts and watch me.  But this turned out to be another gift in adversity.  Whilst working, I tried to re-educate teaching staff into making schools sanctuaries for children, concentrating on their social and emotional needs.  I knew how important that was.

Gratitude seemed to follow me all my life.  Even when my children died I sat in graveyards and wept for the others as well as myself. The old Victorian graveyards yield so much pain.  Mothers died in childbirth, infant mortality was rife, whole families were wiped out by illnesses that are now prevented by vaccination or antibiotics.  How tragic for them.  How lucky for me.

I ran women's groups for incest victims on the same principle.  No matter how deep their pain I used to remind them gently that although they had belly ache they did not have a headache, their feet were not sore, they still had the faculties of sight, hearing and speech. In truth, we had quite a lot of humour in these groups albeit it was gallows humour.  Life without laughter is a living death.

I had not realized how important this was till I read Robin Norwood's book Why me, Why this, Why now?  In it she says:

Sometimes when things are very dark, a review of our blessings can serve as an antidote to creeping depression and self pity.  The more we focus on our blessings the lighter our burdens become.

For the first time I slithered into a bath of self pity right up to my neck and stayed there for weeks feeling sorry for myself.  I wasn't that strong.  I was oblivious.  I didn't know that I was emotionally damaged.  No one had told me.  Lack of awareness can be a real bonus at times.  It is all about attitude.  You wouldn't hear an African woman with a starving baby in her arms screaming about the cellulite on her ass or complaining about the price of coffee.  She would probably feel grateful that she had got to the relief centre in time to save herself and her baby.  Look around.  You will always find someone worse off than yourself.  That does not mean that you do not have pain that needs healing.  It just makes it a bit more bearable till a healer comes.  You very often heal yourself when you reach out to someone else with love while you are waiting.
 
I had not realized the amount of nurturing I had had till I read The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield.  One benefit of having a human mother that loathes you is she wants you as far out of her face as possible.  That is freedom.  I learned how to play and explore the universe.  School holidays were a delight.  The world, the wildness out there became my home, my friend.  No one knew or cared where I was going so I wandered afar into fields, woodlands, railway tracks, ponds, rivers, anywhere that took my fancy.

Redfield explained it all.  The Mother Earth is our true mother.  It is full of energy fields.  Everything in the web of life has energy which it is prepared to share with us - rocks, trees, plants, wind, rain.  Now that I think of it I was probably very well nurtured and I have never lost that connection.  I can still watch a spider or a worm for ages and marvel at their intelligence.  Everything out there seems to know what it is doing.  Trees know when to bud, rivers know how to flow taking the line of least resistance.  They don't waste energy fighting with boulders.  They just flow round them.

I often do this with people that I have in therapy.  I take them to watch a stream.  I tell them to see themselves as the water flowing with purpose back to the Mother Ocean.  Every boulder, rock or trapped branch is given the label of a problem or a person causing problems in their lives. We watch how the stream refuses to waste energy fighting what could be flowed round.  I don't know how it works but they usually end up laughing with many of the issues resolved.  But then everything out there seems to know what it is doing.  The intelligence is so vast and I am still in my infancy. I think that is probably how I have maintained my trust in life.  The Universe has never let me down.
 
I've had to stop writing for a moment.  How have I got from feeling all that pain and fear last night - a spectre that has haunted me from birth - to writing about worms and spiders and streams within 24 hours?  That takes my breath away.  If that isn't some kind of spiritual healing then what is!  This is more than I can comprehend. It's too much for me to absorb.  How can this have happened?  It's not often I'm lost for words.  I'm stunned.  I've watched it happen with other people.  The healing is beautiful and so gentle but it has never happened to me at such depth and so quickly. Wow! The fear of rejection was an illusion.  Only love is real.
 
I'm going to finish this article but what more can I say.  I hadn't really understood the importance of innocence until I was writing to a friend a few days ago.  Innocence is not naivety or stupidity.  I have always had an innocence about me which has fuelled my need for adventure.  There is so much to learn and I have to expand my horizons or remain with limited understanding.  That is going with the fear into uncharted waters knowing that you will be safe because you trust yourself, your instincts and the Universe.  Estes in Women Who Run With Wolves describes it as a wise innocence entered by shedding cynicism and protectionism and in re-entering a state of wonder and awe.  In Spanish the word innocente is understood to mean a person who tries not to hurt another but who is able to heal any injury or harm to herself.

I have only just realized that I have won my innocence.  By her definition innocence is for the courageous.  Cynicism and protectionism is permeated by fear.  She goes on:

The wildish woman by nature is intense and talented but the feral woman cannot afford to be naive... like wolf pups she memorizes the traps, how they are made and how they are laid.  That is the way she remains free.

It always makes me laugh when people say, quite frequently, "What are you on?  Why are you always so happy?" and I can answer truthfully "Universal Energy, babe, Universal Energy and I don't corner the market on it.  There's loads of it and it's free".
 
I will finish with the beautiful words from Only Love is Real:

'Love is the strongest force in the world,' she said softly. 'Love can grow and bloom even in frozen soil and in the harshest conditions.  It exists everywhere and all the time. Love is a flower for all seasons.'