Home | Therapy Centre | News | Linda’s News (7)
Linda’s News (7)
Here is Charles ‘s address from the farewell service for Linda on 22nd February.
“I would like to add a personal thank you for all the support you have been giving me….
(There followed some directions for after the service).
Thinking of the crematorium reminded me of a business plan Linda came up with 20 years ago. It was to set up a mobile pet crem. We would wear smart green uniforms and have a van with an incinerator capable of taking anything up to a small horse. One of my jobs would be to offer bereavement counselling. She would elaborate this scheme in all seriousness and you would never know quite how to take it. But I couldn’t stop laughing when she came to the business name: Crem de la Crem.
I often compared Linda to Dr Bach, a hero of mine. Like him, she was a pioneer at the frontiers of health and she was of the same calibre. Dr Bach abandoned conventional medicine and went walking the countryside to find flowers with healing properties. He found them by intuition. I never quite understood how, until one day in 2002 in Croatia a friend of ours persuaded Linda to go walking in the woods looking for medicinal plants. She found plant after plant and she would tell us what part of the body or what condition or emotional problem it would help. Often there was something in the form of the plant that echoed this. She said it was simply a case of tuning in like a radio to the specific vibration, which contained the information.
It was the same with stone circles. When we went to the Outer Hebrides in 1996 we came across a stone circle in the middle of nowhere. She had me stand outside while she went into the centre and proceeded to move about in a way rather like Tai Chi. She said it was a form of initiation, and after that she started doing these movements around dead bodies, working with the energies to help people pass over more peacefully. It was NMT off the body.
Then when we went to Stanton Drew she took it further and explained to me how these circles were used for healing on a psychological level. She felt the energy of individual stones and each had been programmed with a specific vibration, for an aspect of communication, or relationships or what have you. So when I see experts describing their latest theories on the subject, I chuckle to myself. Little do you know. She could have written books on any of these subjects, but she wasn’t interested. Her focus was elsewhere, helping people.
There are many other stories to tell of these times. We planned to put them in a book entitled Callis in Wonderland. Living with Linda was indeed magical. She taught us to look beyond the physical, beyond the material world, to a world of energy and light and wonder.
In her healing work, she spent 20 years studying not only conditions in the body, but more importantly how the mind affects the body and in particular the impact of emotions. She worked through this with the people who came to see her and she taught it to her students over and over.
So when she discovered she had cancer, while one part of her was experiencing the effects of it, the other was observing, analyzing, problem solving, tracing cause and effect. Many a time I encouraged her to take more or stronger painkillers but she would say she did not want to be drugged up, she wanted to be clear to see what was happening in her. And she chose not to tell anyone simply because she did not want anyone telling her what to do.
Again she reminds me of Dr Bach, who discovered more remedies by putting himself through severe emotional states and then searching out the remedy for them. This process so exhausted him he died within a year, aged 50, but his legacy continues to grow 70 years later. So it will be with Linda.
She often said there is a fine line between great courage and great stupidity, and she walked that line. It’s like a young soldier going off to Afghanistan, she would say, and getting blown up by a roadside bomb. Was he being brave or was he being stupid? It depends on your point of view. She became what she had always dreamed of being, an intrepid explorer going through uncharted territory.
People talk about a battle with cancer but most of it was a battle with herself. She learned to face her fears: her fear of cancer itself, her fear of hospitals; and her fear of being an invalid unable to look after herself. But above all she saw her cancer (and that of many others) as an expression of unresolved anger and resentment coming out in the body. So she spent many months examining these old grievances and working with the NMT to acknowledge and release them. She also had to grapple with self-doubt. Like many talented people, she had a poor regard for her own self-worth and this showed itself in a number of ways, including in her self-image. She hated having her photograph taken and if I had a close-up developed, she would tear it up. So when after Christmas she found a photo she liked and even wondered at, noticing also the light that is streaming out of her, it was a huge step forward. (This is the picture on this page). At last she had started to love herself.
Not only was it a battle with herself, it was, she remarked more than once, a battle for her soul. She came under attack, time and again, from dark forces because she was doing so much good in the world, but we repelled them. They tried to crush her spirit, but you can see from the weblog she had just started this month that her spirit was undiminished.
So her illness was like a dangerous journey of exploration. It was like climbing a mountain never climbed before. She had reached the final stretch to the summit, but it was covered in cloud and she was exhausted by the effort. And when she slipped away in her sleep to rest on the other side, no one knew how far she had climbed. But I know, because I walked alongside her all the way. And I know the love and wisdom gained by both of us on that journey, things we both will share with those who are ready to listen.
Linda did not have much time for religion or for the kind of spirituality that surrounds holistic healing. To her it was all talk. She did not call herself a Christian, but I know no better practitioner of the teachings of Jesus. She was full of life and laughter and she took loving her neighbour to a new level, as so many people here can testify.
She was the most down-to-earth person I know. But she had visions, she talked with angels and sometimes she received messages straight from God. And she lived by these things. The greatest compliment she felt she received came in our vision-quest, as she called it, to Australia, the year before last. We found ourselves in a mission to the aborigine people and Linda was explaining to the priest, Father Anscar, how we came to be there. His response to this was to say:
‘You must be very close to Jesus.’ She was deeply touched by that.
So I say to all of you who feel her loss, know that her spirit is with us still in more senses than one, and if you feel you need her help, ask. But don’t keep on asking because she believed in your strength and your ability to follow your own path without needing to lean on someone all the time. Remember what she gave you. And let us celebrate the wonderful person she was and is.”
Linda’s own first short draft of Callis in Wonderland can be found here…..
More tributes can be found in Linda’s News (6)
