It’s not easy to quantify and verbalise the exact route of such study, mine began a long, long time ago, hrmph yes I know, that’s true for all of us, but in this life…
I remember writing endless journals sat on the banks of the River Dee doing spirit releasement work, and reciting affirmations in my early teens!!! It came naturally- without ever being told, without ever questioning it. I remember my grandma teaching me the basics of herbs from her garden, the qualities of her soups and other foods, how to dowse for the sex of an unborn child and dream of the face of your husband to be. The younger adults in the family called it her ‘old wives tales’. My grandma was with us until she was 96 and a great, great grandma. She was my first teacher.
My mother was next. I guess she was in her forties, so it would have been during the seventies, that she embarked on her path. She became vegetarian. She devoured the few books around at the time and was one of the first to study Reiki in our area. She practiced into her eighties and even once dementia set in she retained the knack of seeing through the fog to give whatever was needed in that moment.
When I returned to live with Mum and Dad broken by ten years of intravenous heroin use, it was Mum who dragged me to the acupuncturist and the transcendental meditation classes. It was Mum’s hands that were the first to lay on me with love and reiki. One of the many beautiful gifts she’s given me was when, at ninety already 15 years with Alzheimer’s, she shared reminiscences of her own mother:
You know she was a witch, don’t you? I used to ask her about what was going to happen next, she just seemed to know, she’d put her hands on her heart and tell me. Sometimes I’d pester her, again she’d place her hands on her chest and she’d say: “It’s not ready yet, I’ll tell you when I know”
As a teen I was also fascinated by the tarot, astrology and astronomy although I had no formal training, just one or two books. I was drawn to esoteric groups and all things ‘alternative’ during my twelve years in London and travelling around the world in my twenties. Then as with many people, my thirties brought an interest in physical fitness and mental clarity – transcendental meditation, yoga and the beginning of my journey into energy work….
As a teen I was also fascinated by the tarot, astrology and astronomy although I had no formal training, just one or two books. I was drawn to esoteric groups and all things ‘alternative’ during my twelve years in London and travelling around the world in my twenties. Then as with many people, my thirties brought an interest in physical fitness and mental clarity – transcendental meditation, yoga and the beginning of my journey into energy work….
I taught Reiki from 1999, first studying it in 1994 with my Mum and then other teachers around Scotland.
I first studied Egyptian Sekhem with Simon Treselyan in London in 2000 and completed masters with him along with Cartouche Mastery and initiation to the Order of Melchizedek during a trip to Egypt in 2002. I joined a SKHM workshop with Patrick Zeigler in 2003 and I studied Sekhem Masters in London with Jonathan Cohen 2000-2001. I then decided to train with the Helen Belôt Sekhem Association. I had avoided energy associations until then as I find politics difficult and stultifying, even the playgroup committee when my daughter was young drove me mad. However here was something offering itself as a complete system and I believed that a good basis to teach from. So because of the interesting albeit scenic route my training had taken until that point I decided to get the rest directly from the horses mouth. I spent a week studying and living with Helen in November 2004 in Australia. During this period Helen believed she wasn’t long for this earth and passed to me and five other masters the secrets of a “new technique” which she had used to repair her own heart during illness. I remained an endorsed teacher with Helen for 4/5 years, training many masters during that time and during which time she personally initiated me to master. I am proud to say my final initiation came directly from her. Perhaps inevitably, the rigidity and control began to outweigh the joys and benefits of the system and in 2007 I joined the honour roll of the great “defrocked” having fallen out of favour with Helen.
I continue to teach all I’ve learned giving credit where credit is due. This occurred in perfect synchronicity for me as in the years since then I have found myself and my groups moving towards teaching what is right for the individual student / group at the time, the pandemic and working online has made that even easier, the nuts and bolts can happen online, the magic in person. So now I feel free to teach others and share knowledge and information in a dynamic way particularly at the sacred sites where ‘the agenda’ is written by a higher power. The teachings can come through from the original teachers themselves, along with the stories, from out of my mouth as gifts to share.
Other training and great teachers I have been blessed to work with include Hypnopsychotherapy with Sue Washington; Crystal Therapy and Colour Therapy with Sue Richter; NLP with Bandler McKenna and Breen; Spirit Releasement, Soul Retrieval and Past life Regression with Irene Louis; Indian Head Massage also with Sue Richter; Raindrop Technique and Tibetan Reflexology with Yvonne Jevrons…
Sekhem closed it’s doors around 2005 and I divorced around 2006.
The decision to keep our home in the Scottish countryside meant having a hard look at income. Luckily, I met a clever young man called Billy from Glasgow, he looked more like a gangster than an entrepreneur, but I liked him and handed over the last of what I could call my own money. On Billy’s advice I applied the eighty-twenty rule, and the winner was hypnosis. Billy built me a website and within three months my clients had tripled.
Hypnotherapy was the way to go and I went big style. Aberdeen was like a gold rush town and I was earning on a par with a London therapists, working full time, I upped my psychotherapy training, went all the way to trainer with NLP and went on to teach hypnotherapy for several years and managed to fill the gap of dual income as a therapist. I doubt many can say that, yes I was proud of it and to have kept my daughter in the home she was born in but sadly, it meant other things had to diminish.
Sekhem had petered out since Helen brought in copyright laws, changed its name – it felt all wrong at least superficially, but under the surface and in my heart I knew it was time for this amazing energy to go underground. The karma this energy carried through eons of priesthood in-fighting dictated that it needed to be so. I ignored the new method, left them to it, life had necessitated that I turn my energy elsewhere anyway. I continued to work with those that sought me out and still do. Over these many years I have watched this energy come and go, sometimes I call it in, sometimes a student reaches out unexpectedly and sometimes it wakes me up in the middle of the night and tells me there is work to be done. In 2010 the revolution put paid to spiritual tours to Egypt I had been facilitating since 2005.
As saddened as I was, life was running apace.
In 2012 I started spending holidays in Turkey where I met Seda, an Ayurvedic consultant and yoga teacher and we created a couple of retreats there. The bombings ended that story prematurely and although I made a couple of retreats to Cyprus – like the Turkish ones, based on my now published book: ‘The Me I Want To Be’ I didn’t fall in love with Cyprus. I was also starting to feel a missing ingredient in my work at home. This grew and in 2016 and perhaps unsurprisingly, just before publication of ‘The Me I Want To Be’, I fell into deep self-doubt.
In 2010 I had trained in Hatha Yoga with Zen Master Daizan Skinner, a couple of years later I took a deep dive into Yoga Nidra training with Swami Nirmal Farmer and then with Daizan once again I did the teachers training for Zen Meditation and Mindfulness. So my personal practice was spiritual, my professional practice strongly grounded in psychotherapy and hypnotherapy but inside me something still wasn’t right. Then in 2015 I went to India…
Encouraged by both Seda and the thought of doing the childhood deconditioning course, Primal, at the Osho Ashram in Pune, off I went. The whole trip was amazing, and I came back feeling I had recaptured the spiritual essence of my true self. It seems I had only just sighed that sigh of gratitude when BOOM the biggest karmic truck ever hit me full on in the face. It didn’t only hit me once but it kept hitting me for the next two years and more.
The karmic truck had deepened my personal development in many ways- kicked off a consciousness-driven peeling of layers. I followed the Osho Primal course with the Osho Tantra course and become sannyasin and later a facilitator for one of the Osho therapeutic meditations: OSHO Reminding Yourself of the Forgotten Language of Talking to Your BodyMind. I attended a workshop in Romania called ‘Conscious Medicine’ which brought me a deeper understanding, in fact, a whole new level of ‘knowing’ why the mnemodynamic psychotherapy I have been practising for years worked so beautifully, in fact sometimes in miracle like ways, yet at other times just didn’t hit the spot. As if those clients just weren’t “feeling it”. This encouraged me towards the Osho meditations, the more I listened to Osho the more I understood that the man was light years ahead of his time. I realised the BodyMind connection was something to be experienced over and over, and the mind, the tricky little trickster that it is, so often keeps us blind to our souls truth.
I thought I was settled, but no, there was more to come. As cliché as it sounds these days, I did, I had a run in with a narcissist. Having had a beautiful love affair with ‘Handsome Harry’ my ‘toy boy’ for three years I didn’t hesitate when the universe offered me a replacement. I was so wrong. Harry had been my angel of the heart; taught me a joyous open heartedness, how to have fun again, to love and to trust after so many years struggling as a single Mum. But this one…. this was my dark angel sent to break me open enough not only force my healing to a deeper level but to force my pen onto paper and start writing my autobiography.
It was time to return to mother India and this time I was really me and of course the universe responded. I returned to a different life. Still plenty of stuff to sort out but my work morphed into this beautiful synchronicity it had always been meant to be. I began working in India and started making it home. I couldn’t have been happier.
One of the most beautiful post scripts in all this is that Helen and I ended things well. I had written asking for a review of ‘The Me I Want To Be’ which she did beautifully and over the course of several emails we made our peace. I am very grateful for that as when I returned from India at the beginning of 2019 I realised that she had passed on. Part of her is still within me I can hear and feel her words, even more than the beautiful energy she channelled through to this planet, at great personal cost, she taught me about tough love and telling hard truths. There were times when she made me so mad, yet here now, I find myself in love with life, loving myself, my work and remembering her words resounding in my ears:
You have arrived when you get to the place where colour, light and sound merge.
And you have TRULY arrived when you can repeat it.
That was the tricky bit, it baffled me for a long, long time, but Helen I think I know now, it starts with a simple four letter word, LOVE, thank you.
Sitting here writing from my hut on the beach in Goa thinking what a journey life is!
My dear friend Seda Shambavi, is sitting in her balcony in the hut opposite as we sip our morning tea made from our shared kettle, we’ve just returned from a trip to Hampi where we caught up after two years of not seeing each other> It was during that trip I penned the closing paragraphs of my autobiography:
At last I had finished my story, and Seda, sitting next to me said: “only a really strong spirit would have designed such a karma that you have seen”, I smiled at her wisdom.
Yes, I have been gifted with the people and experiences I needed. I called it training earlier, I meant it, so many of us think of training as the certificates we may or may not frame and display on the walls of our consulting rooms, but it is so much more. Sometimes when you get far enough away you realise what your life has been.
Sitting in the Mango Tree in Hampi last night sharing that last piece I wanted to cry for myself and the tensions my body has been through from challenges put in my path, by people who have wanted me in a way I did not want them, were jealous or somehow thought I owed them something. Mostly people I had cared for. Challenges I gave myself too, I know that. I am content now and while compared to my bed at home I will sleep in a very simple dwelling tonight, tomorrow I only need to watch where I put my feet, hope Seda and I do not get hungry and grumpy at the same time, that I don’t drop my purse, lose my glasses or forget what town we are in as we watch the ever-fascinating kaleidoscope that is India.
The universe gifts us on a daily basis when we have eyes and ears to see it. Like the walk I had yesterday with “Swami I Am”, two new friends going to buy fruit, yet every inch of the way was an act of awareness and a lesson in life. At dinner the night before, that nanoo second of being suspended in space that was extended into “no time” as I asked myself: “what is happening”, then the shock of finding myself on the floor with a bleeding leg followed with my ego’s offence at men trying to force me to my feet before my confused mind had figured out just what had just happened to cause me to land flat on my bottom. “Who on earth could have been stupid enough to leave the stand for an umbrella right next to a guest’s chair in a dimly lit restaurant?”. This was India not the coddled culture we have come to expect in the west. Then there was the young man I sat with over drinks who said: “India will give you what you need”.
In other words the journey leads on…
Over the years our Scottish home became, well I am not sure I can say mine, but I am without doubt the caretaker: a quirky and intriguing, Scottish village variation of a ‘Laurel Canyon type commune’. It has served as a retreat for many visitors including those on the path to self-discovery, environmental warriors, budding artists, writers, and Air B+B tourists. I am helped in this endeavour by woofers, workways, karmic yogis and friends, many who have found it to be a life changing experience. I am proud of my boho existence, of being a Mum and healer at heart, in fact many woofers have left calling me the best Scottish or woofing mama ever.
Something that began out of financial necessity and the deep desire to allow Jessica to remain in the home she had always known and loved until it was time for her to spread her own wings, became something I loved.
There were times during the summer months that the front room resembled a laundry. That was woofer season, and it was great having young people around the house again, they had their own caravan, dubbed the ‘Man Cave’ by my dear friend and long-term woofer Q. By the summer of 2017, this trend was in full force, and I had a very interesting household. Connor, the musical chairs lodger, who literally shifted to whichever room was empty. Graeme the ghillie who occupied the chalet in the garden which they had named ‘Castle Grayskull’, the place to go for pre-drinks. Ukulele playing, blond dreadlocked Paul who turned up from time to time and slept outside in his renovated furniture van. Elia who thought nothing of walking the sixteen miles into the next village on his day off with a raw cabbage in his hand for a snack. Niki, Coline, Antony, Julia, Alex, so many beautiful people that so enhanced my life. Amongst all this Airbnb people came and went and one day I looked around and thought ‘Oh my I have a commune!’
There was as many as ten around the kitchen table on some evenings, friends, family, residents, we would chat away fantastically. I never, ever planned it, it grew organically, the right people just gravitated here. I had big struggles during some of those years and these guys were just so there for me, a great big family, it was fantastic, I realised I was home. I had been all the time.
