God's Callgirl (56 page)

I didn’t want this strange feeling, so I filled up the void with some rich chocolate cake someone had brought me from the coffee shop. I felt bad afterwards, yet also better
somehow. I realised I had desensitised myself by over-eating. I no longer felt the inevitable death of my body so keenly.
None of us is going anywhere and none of us will stay here—
the voice from the void echoed through the silence. My neck, arm and hand hurt badly.

If I couldn’t sink into the bliss of just being, maybe I should get laid, I thought. It had been years now! But there was no one to go to bed with, only memories surrounding me. I wanted a flesh-and-blood person who could see me, put real arms around me. Then I would have the illusion that I was not alone, after all.
The arms would let go of you
, the voice butted in.
He would go—to the bathroom, or to sleep. He would retreat into the nothingness at night, or into the mists of doingness by day
.

Weird thoughts. I was worried that ideas of suicide might come next. But by some grace, I realised that my musings weren’t all negative; they were an invitation to understand something deeper than ordinary life. I called on unseen friends to help me—angels, anyone out there. At an indefinable moment, my feelings changed. I became willing to face death, and in that moment of willingness I entered a new freedom.

Life had brought me to an even deeper appreciation of the profound acceptance of ‘what is’. I saw that it was the same as self-acceptance, because there is really nothing else out there. What is apparently out there is always, only, my self. This is not something I can really explain. It will only make sense to those who already know it.

There was now no suffering, just an incredible feeling of being able to enjoy whatever the moment brought, breath to breath, heartbeat to heartbeat, painful moment to painful moment. Success no longer had anything to do with having money, or a career, or being appreciated. Success was to live this moment in gratitude.

TO SPEED UP
the healing of my broken arm, my daughter Caroline wanted me to see a powerful South American healer who was visiting Perth. I resisted for a long time, mainly because he charged a phenomenal amount of money which I could hardly afford. Caroline offered to pay for me if I didn’t get my money’s worth and, in the end, I agreed to a session.

I stood before Victor explaining the reason for my appointment. He ignored my arm and looked into my eyes. He was a stocky, dark man with unmistakable charisma and loads of optimism. Within a few seconds, he told me that for most of my life my spirit had been partly out of my body. He drew a picture, showing the outline of a spirit body hanging out to one side of my own body; it was in terrible fright and wanting to depart, attached only by the umbilical cord. I listened attentively—this made sense to me, in spite of my new-found peacefulness.

I looked around me, noticing with disdain the large cross in the room with lights all over it, the picture of the Virgin Mary—all the trappings of religion, and the Catholic religion at that!

Victor asked three women trainees to come and look at me. They described symptoms that confirmed his opinion, including having piercing eyes that made other people feel uncomfortable. This really made me sit up and listen. I had become aware that people sometimes tried to figure out what they saw in my eyes. They seemed to think I glared at them, and I found myself screwing up my eyes to make them appear softer. When I wanted to avoid other people’s gaze, I had developed the disconcerting habit of looking straight past them.

I was asked to stand before the illuminated cross and ask for divine help. I closed my eyes and complied, ready for whatever was about to happen.

Victor then asked me to lie down on a large bench, helped by the three women, and he began a ritual to bring my spirit back into my body. He called out loud to my spirit and asked me to shout, ‘I AM HERE!’ as he slapped the soles of my feet very hard. I whimpered at the pain in my feet, but shouted as he’d asked, while the women prayed. Suddenly, he called out, ‘In the name of God, I command you to go in!’ and slapped my feet one last time. A loud, involuntarily cry came out of my mouth—and I felt my spirit enter.

I was helped off the bench and Victor watched me as I walked up and down. I felt renewed, simple, childlike. Not extraordinary, but completely ordinary. I understood, perhaps for the first time, what it was like just to be a human being, fully ‘here’. It was a soft and simple joy. I felt a gentle confidence and natural grace as I walked, and gratitude towards Victor, the man who had brought my spirit back into my body.

He had succeeded in remedying something I’d had no idea of. I had been frightened out of my body at the age of six and had got used to it. It was remarkable to feel at peace with my whole self again. I breathed more easily and felt, at a profound level, that I had joined the human race. It was a special moment.

No mention was ever made of my arm, but it healed remarkably well after a second operation from one of the best surgeons in town.

RADICAL INNOCENCE

IT WAS AUGUST
1999 and I sat in my Dutch friend’s backyard, having arrived at her house in Breda, Holland, via France, Belgium and London. I explained to her that I was broke, but had my return ticket.

I had responded to a strong inspiration to do a certification training course in what is called The Work with a woman called Byron Katie, and had put down a deposit without having the means to pay the rest. I trusted that things would come together for me somehow. I had the prospect of a compensation pay-out coming to me as a result of my road accident, so wasn’t being entirely foolish. The trouble was that no bank or lending institution, nor one friend in Denmark, had been able to lend me a single cent against this pay-out which did not have a firm figure or date. Nevertheless, I organised as much as possible by using up all my available credit. At the very last minute, two dear friends in Perth lent me the airfare I needed.

‘Do you think I’m crazy?’ I asked my friend. Julia, a feisty woman of eighty, burst into laughter. No, she didn’t think I was stupid; instead, she admired my intrepidness and offered on the spot to contribute two thousand guilders, enough to cover my fortnight’s accommodation at the
course with a bit over. I was also extremely welcome to be her guest and she wanted to spoil me at her expense. What a relief! Julia was a wealthy woman with a big heart and we got on very well indeed, enjoying each other’s company.

I breathed in the balmy summer air in her backyard, so refined compared to the roughly scented air of Australia. I was back in my own country again, for the first time in forty-nine years. Only twenty minutes away by train was the town of my birth, Tilburg. I felt as if I was in a story book, one with a lot of bright, friendly pictures.

The course was due to start soon and so I made my way to Heeze, to Kappellerput, an old Jesuit monastery converted into a convention centre with room for about a hundred guests. When I originally booked, they emailed back that there was no room left in the course. I responded that I was coming anyway, and two days later heard that the course had proved so popular that Katie had decided to take on as many as the centre could accommodate.

The Work of Byron Katie began a few years after Katie’s own awakening. Katie, a nicely rounded woman in her fifties, has known what it is to feel unloved and unworthy, what it is to hate and be filled with anger, grief, sadness and despair, how it feels to not function well enough to look after oneself. Simply by grace, she woke up one morning to realise it was stories that had held her bound. She has never believed a single story since.

Jesus said, ‘Knowing the truth will set you free.’ How often have we heard this and equated truth with one belief or another? Real truth doesn’t have to be believed in because it sits deep in the heart.

The first part of The Work involves writing. ‘My father ruined my life,’ I began. I loved my father, and had forgiven him, but it was true that he had ruined my life; this was a
‘fact’ I had come to terms with. In answer to the question from my facilitator, ‘Is it true that your father ruined your life?’, I maintained that it was obvious, an irreversible fact. Wasn’t my whole life since proof of the fact? ‘I can look at how I deal with this fact, but I can’t deny it,’ I maintained.

‘Who would you be without the thought that your father ruined your life?’

The question stopped me in my tracks. My mind went blank and I suddenly felt very tired; I wanted to opt out, faint, do anything rather than face the thought that I could live without this idea. It was a big effort to focus my mind again, to investigate and answer the question.

For four whole days I couldn’t see that this was my
interpretation
of what had happened to me and how my life had evolved. As a result of this story, I had become used to the belief that I was a victim of abuse. A recovered or recovering victim, thank you very much, but still a victim. Moreover, if I couldn’t blame my father, who was there to blame instead?
I
certainly wasn’t going to take the blame for ruining my life!

On the fifth day, light dawned gently. It wasn’t a matter of apportioning blame. What if there was
no one
to blame? What if my father and I had just done the best we could in our lives, given the level of maturity we had? What was I gaining from insisting that my father had ruined my life? Finally I was ready to give up my status as victim, so prized by part of me. The desire to blame others and avoid responsibility must be a deep psychic undertow that pulls us away from a larger truth.

I sought out the person who had started the process with me, four days ago. In answer to her question of who I would be without this thought, I finally replied, ‘I’d just feel plain happy. I’d feel normal, just me, with a whole life, just like everybody else.’

My father instilled in me the belief that I was bad. The most profound thing about The Work is what is called the turn-around. When I turned this around, I found that I had called
myself
bad many more times than my father ever did. However innocently, I had been perpetuating a story. I turned
everything
around and then I had the truth that set me free. ‘My life was ruined’ became ‘My life has been
blessed
!’

And that was a truth so deeply felt that I wept with joy.

A YOUNG MAN
called Brett went up to do a piece with Katie because he felt ashamed of his father’s profession: he ran a brothel. This stirred up similar feelings of shame in me.

Katie had no problem with prostitutes and their work. She said that these women provided a much-needed service, and the prostitutes of Amsterdam did it with style. Their bedrooms, even the doorways where they displayed themselves, were every bit as sacred as churches. She challenged us to believe otherwise; if we did, we were to investigate our beliefs.

Katie’s naive idealism made me feel angry. Was she really unaware of the dirty, sleazy side of the game? The drugs, degradation, violence, subterfuge, pretence and lust for money? How could she blithely describe prostitutes as ‘women providing a necessary service’ as if they were check-out chicks?

In spite of all I heard Katie say, in spite of all my previous experiences, there still lurked at my core a belief that I was guilty. Had I not ignored so many clues to stop? Had I not gone against every insight and continued until I just couldn’t go on any more? I thought that if Katie knew how
I
had been a whore, she’d soon drop her Mary Poppins attitude.

I struggled with this for a while before confiding in one of the staff. ‘I feel shame and I don’t have the courage to face it with Katie.’

‘Good,’ she said, ‘by telling me, you’ve made a start.’And I felt she would support me when I requested to work with Katie.

In a hushed voice I barely recognised as my own, I asked if I could come up. Once seated beside Katie, looking into those clear blue eyes, I explained why I was worse than a normal prostitute and unforgiven by God or nature. I told her that I had become addicted to the lifestyle and that I had prostituted myself just for money, going against what I really wanted to do. I had betrayed myself.

‘Did you do the best you could?’ Her simple question reverberated around the room via her microphone.

My answer was just as simple, and nothing but the plain truth. ‘Yes, I did.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

A delicious feeling of relief washed over me. What a to–do about nothing! What amazing knots we get ourselves into, all unnecessarily. Still, there was something I wanted to mention in particular, it had weighed so heavily on me.

‘I alienated men by what I did, Katie. I feel that the men who came to me weren’t capable of a normal relationship, and I made it worse for them by reinforcing their alienation. They often had guilty feelings and I reinforced their guilt…’ My words trailed off as I studied Katie’s face.

‘If those men were really as isolated as you think they were, it seems to me that you offered them something they needed and couldn’t get anywhere else. And who are you to judge these men, and who are you to say what path they should be on?’Then with her typical directness, she almost
shouted, ‘How do you know that what you did was
right
? Because you did it. We do what we do, until we don’t.’

My self-imposed guilt trip, based on a lifetime of learned shame, was demolished in ten minutes flat. I managed a hoarsely whispered thanks and I went back to sit among the others, enveloped in a sense of peace I had never experienced before. I felt cleansed—not in the Christian sense, as when a sin has been forgiven, but cleansed of illusions and lies. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I was innocent and always had been, even when I thought I was betraying my inner truth. I was just like everyone else: everyone does the best they can, based on present wisdom or ignorance, otherwise they would be doing it differently. I could grant this understanding to others now that I had learned it myself, especially to my parents.