God's Callgirl (55 page)

It was easy to blame it on my religion. Some fault lay with me too: I just hadn’t been prepared to be honest. I had been too afraid to face the truth. And now that I was beginning to face it, what was the big deal? I can say from personal experience that honesty is the best exorcism there is.

I also saw that there was no real spiritual life without honesty. All that squirming about being good enough for
God, for others or for my own inflated self-image—it had nothing to do with spirituality. I felt as if I’d been lifted out of a minefield, which I had mistaken for a path, and placed onto a new and strange way, to which my eyes and legs had not yet grown accustomed.

The past had made a very deep impact and required a lot of undoing. My new-found freedom was only a beginning. Deep-rutted patterns were being reformed, and it would take time and more experiences, not always pleasant ones, to turn God’s Callgirl into simply God’s Girl.

DENMARK TREATED ME
well, even if the only paying work around seemed to be cleaning and a bit of gardening. The government stepped in and had me trained for six months in office skills. I continued to search in vain for real employment for another three years, after which, according to Social Security, I officially became a pensioner. A polite way of telling you that you’re now getting too old and you might as well take a back seat.

I used my new computer skills to write about my experiences. Life was pleasurable—meeting friends for shared dinners, for dances, gatherings on the beach and in the coffee shop. I experienced the wonder and bliss of growing into an ordinary human being, a member of a community. And then it became time for a little explicit learning. If I thought I’d pretty well got my emotional self together by now and could start trading on my new self-image to impress my friends, then I could think again. The disaster that happened on my sixtieth birthday was all my own doing.

I wanted to entertain my friends with a performance. I wrote a script and called it my Sister Act. A nun (me) enters
the stage on her knees, hauling a cross on her shoulders. Resisting temptation from a horny priest, she gradually transforms herself from a prissy suffering nun into a woman who tells risqué jokes and sings endearing songs. Finally, dancing to the music from
The Stripper
, she sheds pieces of her habit, flinging them into the audience, and ends up in a black lacy bra and tiny matching panties. She then runs to the embrace of the priest she had formerly rejected.

The subtext was that I would impress my friends as a truly liberated woman, free of sexual hang-ups and free of fear. I wanted them to think I was funny, titillating, slinky and still in pretty good shape. If only I had
acknowledged
this hidden agenda to somebody, or at least to myself! Even more hidden was my desire for a little fame and recognition, to ‘be somebody’—this was something I definitely didn’t want to admit. I was going to wow my friends with my new evolved self. Unfortunately, since it was only a cooked-up self, as is any supposed new, improved self, I was a sitting duck for my inner censor.

The evening progressed in a lovely mellow mood. About thirty of my friends turned up, bringing delicious food to share. There was a quiet hum of excitement in the air, a delicious blend of the pleasure of being together—chatting, laughing, embracing, admiring—and the enjoyment of shared food and drink, all in the beautiful setting built by my friends Mark and Ray high on the banks of Wilson Inlet in Denmark. I was happy to notice how at ease I felt; my performance was going to slay them!

It was only when my friend Claire was helping me into my nun’s habit, that panic began to invade me. I swallowed hard, breathing deeply to quieten it down, but I was completely thrown. I remembered to let the fear come (accept it!), and it would die down. When the fear didn’t go
away in a hurry, my old strategy of trying to control it immediately came to the fore. No way would I allow myself to go on stage panting with fear and ask my friends to please wait until I’d gained my composure! That would not have been such a bad thing—it might have been the very
best
thing—but my hidden agenda got the better of me.

My embarrassment and discomfort were compounded when my nervousness got worse instead of better after my dramatic entrance. I ploughed on, straining my voice the way I had when I had to sing in front of my class in primary school, and getting very hot under my black habit. My friends were an appreciative audience nevertheless; they loved the silliness and my hilarious impromptu dancing.

At some stage, something took over that had nothing to do with my conscious will. I just enjoyed myself; singing, strutting and stripping with abandon, panting from the effort afterwards, supporting myself with one elbow on the mantelpiece while my friends clapped and laughed and wolf-whistled.

The morning after, however, my self-criticism was sharp and awful. I recognised my old enemy of self-sabotage—would the horror-pattern
ever
let go of me? I was a prisoner again and I felt it keenly. That old devil who laughed at me in the shaman’s forest must surely have been satisfied. I sensed him glowering at me for thinking that I could ever be free of him. How it hurt!

I talked about it to my friend Jill. A friend can change one’s perspective completely and Jill did so in no time at all. ‘How about simply accepting that you had a hidden agenda? Just accepting dear old you for having these secret ambitions? We all have them, you know, and for the spiritual ones the ambition is to hide the fact that we have any ambitions!’

Her response took my breath away and immediately brought me peace. What a relief! There was no need to be anything special at all; I just needed to be ever so gentle with myself and accept myself truly, in spite of everything I perceived as faults, right down to the last little bit. I was lucky to have friends who had realised this long ago and now lived a life of simple sanity.

What else was there to do now but be compassionate with myself? I was beginning to feel that maybe I was no better or worse than anyone else in the world; that given the right circumstances, I too could take the path of a criminal, a lying, cheating bastard, murderer or sadist. I felt the seeds of all these possibilities in me and it sobered me. Paradoxically, maybe because it was the simple truth, the thought also gave me peace. I would always be an imperfect human, full of all sorts of illusions—except the illusion that hating myself was going to save me
.
I did not articulate it, but the truth is, I was taming my devil. I had discovered the one thing that makes it impossible for evil to live long in anybody: true and consistent self-acceptance, which is the work of unconditional love.

WHEN THE STUDENT
is ready, the teacher will appear, so they say. In November of 1998 Isaac Shapiro came to town. Isaac—swarthy, sexy, hefty (he loved food!) and wonderfully
simple—
had woken up to who he was as a spiritual being. It was a pleasure to be in his company. He made himself available for questions and his patience was never-ending as he gently guided others to their true self.

I sat in the audience of a hundred or so and felt a pull to go up and speak with Isaac. However, I grew so hot with fear of speaking up in public that for days I couldn’t find the
courage. Then, finally, I found myself picking my way among the crowd to the front.

I sat next to him, with a microphone in my hand. My heart was galloping at a hundred miles an hour and wouldn’t come to rest. Eyes riveted on Isaac, my vision blurred, I was about to speak when Isaac stopped me.

‘Tell me what you are feeling,’ he said.

‘Fear,’ I replied.

‘Well,’ said Isaac, ‘that’s an idea you have in your mind, a label for what you are feeling. Tell me what are the
sensations
in your body?’

I checked, moving my focus from my mind. The adrenaline that had been pouring through my veins was finding a pleasant plateau all by itself. ‘I feel a warm sort of glow,’ I said, which produced some laughter in the audience.

‘So this is what you have been afraid of,’ Isaac said, ‘a warm sort of glow!’ He chuckled, and looked at me steadily.

I nodded, not thinking all that clearly in that moment, feeling very warm indeed and probably sporting glowing cheeks. I prepared to go back to my seat again, but Isaac stopped me with a request. ‘Please would you sing a song?’ he asked, smiling mischievously but indicating that it was merely a request, not an expectation.

Immediately, the song I had bellowed out in class as a six year old, mortally afraid that I’d be seen as a wicked child, came to mind. Still under the influence of raw adrenaline, I sang ‘
Daar bij die molen
’, not too melodiously but with a smile. At the end, I received a generous round of applause. ‘Stay with yourself,’ said Isaac, before I left his side. In the instant he said those words, I lost consciousness. I entered a space like deep sleep, where I had the experience of thinking nothing. Nothing at all—a peaceful and vast nothingness. It seemed to last for only a fraction of a second as I met Isaac’s steady eyes and his words went deep
inside, like a present on a silk cushion laid on my heart.
Stay with yourself
. I knew these words contained the secret of happiness. I thanked him haltingly, he nodded in recognition, and I returned to my seat in the audience.

Apart from his words, Isaac had given me something else. In that moment of nothingness, I had gone home to essential Self. For something so simple, this is hard to describe. From that place I retained a feeling, different from emotion, of myself as pure being. It was a deep understanding, or an understanding of the Deep in which we live. I felt myself, this Carla, grow up. I sat in quiet bliss, gratitude welling up in me for this tremendous gift.

Back home, I remembered more of Isaac’s words, spoken to someone else.
Feelings are impersonal
. I realised with amazement that the feelings of shame, worthlessness and dread which I had owned as if they were exclusively mine, and lived by as the basic truth of me, were not even my own feelings! I had inherited them, most probably from my parents, who had learned them from their parents, from society, the church and so on. I had no control over these thoughts as a child, and still had no control over them as an adult.

I stayed with these realisations for a while, going back into the past and experiencing the familiar painful feelings starting to shake loose, then snap back, clinging to my skull for dear life. I had given them fifty-four years of life and they were not ready to die just like that. But Isaac had taught me the ultimate reason for self-acceptance: staying with myself, my true self. Acceptance of even the most difficult feelings and thoughts was a way of being with myself.

It was simple science. Self-rejection was a way of losing myself. Self-acceptance was a way of regaining myself.

ON 23 DECEMBER 1998
, barely a month after Isaac’s visit, I was knocked off my bicycle by a speeding truck on one of Denmark’s narrow roads. The driver didn’t stop.

I was hospitalised with a compound fracture of my right arm. The duty surgeon did not seem at all pleased to be assigned this case, so close to Christmas. He had his head in his hands as he sat there, both of us waiting for the operation to begin. He looked up and came over to me, to whisper fiercely in my ear, ‘My job is to tidy you up and sew you up. It isn’t to make you look pretty. If you want to look pretty, get yourself a plastic surgeon!’

The duty surgeon did a butcher’s job of patching up my broken arm. Contrary to what he told me before the operation, he did not insert a metal support for the splintered bones, and his cuts and stitching were very rough. Afterwards, acute bursitis in my elbow prevented me lying down, and I suffered from a severe negative reaction to morphine, not discovered for two whole days. I was going crazy with pain and constant retching. Every time I closed my eyes I saw the letter M dancing in front of them. There were myriads of them and they refused to go away. Finally I asked myself what these Ms meant. The answer came immediately: M was for madness. I was going mad with pain, the wrong medication, an inability to keep down food or drink, and lack of sleep.

To my visitors who came on Christmas Day, I was a pitiful sight. Louis, my chiropractor, took one look at me and knew what I needed. The dear man, he reminded me of something I already knew but had forgotten in the midst of my distress:
Accept what is happening without resistance
. ‘Breathe, Carla,’ he said. ‘Conscious breathing takes you out of your head and into your heart.’

And so, as I breathed in I accepted what was happening, and as I breathed out I continually surrendered to the
mystery of why. I accepted whatever was ahead of me and I sank into peace. ‘What is surrender?’ I had asked Persephone and her friends. For years I had wondered what true surrender might be. Here was the opportunity of a lifetime to better understand! Once again, it was about self-acceptance, bringing me to new depths of myself. The letter M changed to M for meditation.

Back in my own home, I learned to accept the incredible kindness of many friends who came with food and treats and offers of all kinds of help. I learned another meaning for M—the magic that happens when one surrenders.

It was impossible to receive so much love and stay the same. I mellowed in many ways—another ‘M’.

I SPENT LONG
periods in utter solitude and silence as my arm mended. I couldn’t watch TV because it hurt my eyes; for the same reason, I couldn’t read for long. Nor could I write. The strange feeling came over me that I lived in a void, like a shadow. Did I live in this void all the time, utterly alone, with people only thinly present? And was my ordinary activity just to fill this silent void with lots of distractions? I was afraid this might be true.

I played some light, sweet music, dreading the sudden snap back to empty silence at the end. I programmed the recorder to repeat the tape on a loop, thus stalling the end. Was I playing out the whole of my life this way? What was I trying to stall? The idea of annihilation, of disappearing as if I had never existed? I felt the inevitability of death all around me, as if I were existing in a world that had already died.