MEDITERRANEAN MEANDERINGS

26TH FEBRUARY 2011

Here we are in the middle of an amazing time in the world. Scary, yes; all change is frightening, but amazing nonetheless. People’s consciousnesses are coming together and rejecting the yoke they have been under for decades. Some of the stories of the ordinary people which are coming out of Libya, and indeed all of these countries, are truly inspiring. All this has been predicted for many years. The Chief of the Hopi Indians went to the UN in 1946 to warn that this time would happen. That the period before 2012 would be full of uprisings, financial collapse and natural disasters and that mankind would benefit if we could prepare for this time, but unsurprisingly the rational men in the UN laughed this brave man out of the building. 

This week has also been a time of personal awakening for me, but more of that later. First of all we need to discuss the buses. I forgot to mention them in my last blog and they deserve a good old mention. We have real buses! Buses with a screen giving the destination instead of a piece of A4 card stuck to the window. Buses with bells you can ring when you are ready to get off. The first time one sounded while I was on there I nearly jumped through the roof. It sounds a bit like the Family Fortunes buzzer. Most importantly for me, however, is the fact that they have suspension. I no longer have to go over the speed bumps and potholes with my hands firmly clasped over my breasts to hold them in place! We also have a proper timetable. I know, isn’t it brilliant! For all you people that drive I know that it is beyond your comprehension how exciting this is, but just take it from me. 

A couple of weeks ago I went to Essentepe, near Kyrenia, for the weekend with Sue. Our friends Jenny and Temel had married in Istanbul in January and they were holding a reception to celebrate with their friends in Cyprus. It had been very interesting the weekend before as I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to afford to go, and I really wanted to be there to support Jenny (we hadn’t met Temel at that point). So I sent out my thoughts and chanted to be able to go and lo and behold the Universe provided again. They play an occasional game of bingo between quiz rounds at the Corner Pin on a Sunday. Sandra, Lynn, Sue and I always split any winnings we may have between us. These only normally amount to a few Euros each, but on this occasion Sandra won the Snowball and we left with €100 each. Just the right amount needed to get me through! Jenny and Temel kindly put us up and we had a lovely time. It was fabulous to meet Temel. Even with the language barrier (I speak only 3 words of Turkish and Temel speaks limited English) it was apparent to see that he loved Jenny, not that she deserves any less. He was also a wonderful host to the two mad English women who turned up in his house. I wish them many years of blessings. We also got to meet Jane, Jenny’s daughter, who had come over from England to support her mum. She was fabulous company and we had some very funny and some very interesting conversations. Not to mention the fact that she was a fellow rock chick and she went into my heart to stay forever when she requested Pink Floyd at the reception. Jenny has a dog called Scamp and I had a good cuddle with him, but she has also just got a kitten called Bozer and I had forgotten just how comforting it is to lie with a cat prone on your chest whilst it purrs at full volume and strokes your face with his claws fully retracted. I do miss Parkin. However, it is Green Monday next week and I will be amazed if many cats in this area make it through the next weekend. Let alone the fact that I am in a second floor flat with no way up or down for the cat to be free to come and go as it chooses. So have a cat I will not, despite the fact that I miss the freedom of their company terribly. They do not adore, they take affection while they want it and when they have had enough they get up and go, no offence, no questions asked. Perfect! 

So, here we arrive at my journey of awakening and it is a thing that is very difficult to write about. I am aware that people will mock, that they will dismiss it as Catherine being eccentric again. Quite frankly, as I am sure Oscar Wilde once said (or maybe not), I do not give a flying poo! Until we experience anything for ourselves it remains only a concept, an idea. It is a rare person who can take something on trust and go with it and I was with five of the most amazing people this week who did just that. My experience with Deeksha began back in Devon about 4 months before I moved out to Cyprus. I received Deeksha at Quest in Newton Abbot and it was so beautiful. I walked round the corner and a friend who had been having some healing there looked up and said ‘What the fuck just happened to you, you are glowing from head to toe!’ Luckily I found a regular group of Deeksha givers in Totnes (I know, no surprise there!) and the peace that it brought to me was just so profound. The before Catherine is of a very different mindset to the after Catherine. The before Catherine was a profound depressive who did not want to live, who was on so many pills for so many different things, half of which were to combat the side effects of the other half. The after Catherine relies on nothing now. My illnesses are not gone, but my ability to deal with them has changed entirely. Not cured, but healed. I went to a seminar in London just before I moved out here and I left with the determination that I would bring it to Cyprus as I had found out that there were currently no Deeksha givers here. However, there didn’t seem any immediate way of doing this, so it sat on the backburner until I lent the book ‘Awakening into Oneness’ to Sue. She read it and immediately said to me – we have got to go to India and do this. Great idea, but how? So it sat there again for a couple of months until I was giving Cheryl a reiki treatment. Whilst I was giving the treatment a voice was insistent that I lent her this book too. Luckily, she is a very wise and open lady. That, and people are very used to me saying: there’s this book you should read, and just passing them something off my shelves, anything from J K Rowling, to Drunvalo Melchezidek, taking in Milan Kundera on the way. So she obligingly took the book and went home. A couple of days later I get a phone call from her saying: we have got to go to India; I’ve got Ken looking for flights! I said I would pop round for a chat and by this time Ruth had also been passed the book by Cheryl and wanted to be involved. We had found out that they were doing courses in the UK to initiate people to become Deeksha givers, but it would cost a fortune for us all to fly there and find somewhere to stay. I offered to email Jacqui in Totnes (whom I knew slightly from the Deeksha evenings and who, I was aware, had been one of the first Deeksha givers in the UK) just for advice. She emailed back very quickly to say she would love to come out, run a course and initiate us – may 1000 blessings fall on her head! So here we were about 5 weeks later (if you ever want anything done get two Aries women enthusiastic about it, even the universe doesn't dare stand in their way!) all sitting in a room together about to undertake a journey that may or may not go anywhere. I was especially proud of Ken, who is a very rational man. He is not into ‘New Age weirdness’ in any way whatsoever and he took a huge step of faith to be there. 

I will not begin to bore you with all that happened in that darkened room, whilst we searched the dark places of our souls and began to heal some of the bitterness, resentment and anger that most of us don’t even know we are carrying like heavy weights around our necks. All I can say is that on Wednesday afternoon when I received the Deeksha that would enable me to give Deeksha to others I have never felt so whole in my entire life. I felt like I had every single person on this earth in my heart and that I loved every one of them equally. If you think I don’t know how airy fairy that sounds you are much mistaken, all I can say is until you experience it for yourself don’t even begin to judge. It was wonderful to know that one of the driving reasons for us all being in that room was because we wanted peace and reconciliation in Cyprus and that for the first time since I moved here I knew that it was possible. Maybe not within the next fortnight admittedly! But it will happen. So I want now to say thank you, not only to Jacqui, without whom none of it would have happened, but to Ken, Cheryl, Ruth and Sue for having the courage and the love to do something for the world in which we live, from individual to individual, which is the only way that peace can happen. Hopefully Jacqui will be back again to Cyprus and we can run more courses so that more people can take part, but in the meantime you can come and receive Deeksha and find out more about it at The Home of Holistics opposite the Thalassa Museum in Agia Napa on a Wednesday afternoon at 4pm. See here for location: http://www.cyprushealthandbeauty.com/html/home_of_holistics_in_ayia_napa.html.  There is no charge, if you feel like making a small donation towards costs then that would be wonderful, but there is no fee for receiving Deeksha. 

Another interesting thing that occurred was that during the process we needed to connect with our own personal divinity and the form mine took was a Golden Buddha, with a Cockney accent, who told me to call him Sid (short for Siddhartha!) Now what was interesting was that although I am a Buddhist, I am a Nichiren Buddhist and we do not use any icons of Buddha as the original teaching from the Buddha was not to make a God of him, but to realise that all of us had Buddhahood within us. So consequently I have no images of the Buddha in the flat. Also Buddhas come in many shapes and sizes depending on the part of the world you are in. So imagine my surprise when Lynn and Jonathan arrived at my flat yesterday, not only bringing fabulous homemade soup – thank you Lynn – but with a painting that Jonathan had decided to do that week of a Golden Buddha in exactly the form that Sid had taken with me. I was a bit bemused and didn’t want to freak Jonathan out, as he is a very down to earth man, and I probably didn’t express my thanks properly at the time, so here they are now. 

Anyway next time I am sure my blog will be much less spiritual, but who knows! My friends Stuart and Becky are coming out to stay with me for a long weekend in March, which I am looking forward to immensely. But in the meantime I am going to leave you with three quotes. They have all meant a great deal to me and my attitude to life in the last few days. The first is from Chuck Palahniuk (forgive me if that is spelt entirely wrong) who wrote Fight Club: ‘That’s the best revenge of all: happiness. Nothing drives people crazier than seeing someone have a good fucking life.’ How true is that? No more need for weapons or resentment just be happy and piss people off! The second is from Albert Einstein and is just so apt to the way we all compare and judge everybody in the world: ‘Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.’ The final one is from the 15th Century Indian Mystic Poet, Kabir and encapsulates Oneness for me and what I believe that Buddhism, Deeksha and now Physics is telling us. Everything on this earth is made of the same molecules, from the chair you are sitting on to the screen you are reading from, to the eyes you are using to read it, so if they are all the same then surely all humankind must be: ‘All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges with the drop.’ We are all one and I love you all.