Beware sour-faced gurus

You know what really gets my goat?  Sanctimonious spiritual people.  Po-faced gurus.  Judgmental New Agers.  Well,  okay, there are more but that'll do for now.  See, what gives anyone the right to tell you (or me) what to do?  There’s a lot of wisdom out there, for sure, but once someone starts believing they’re the only one who’s right, that there’s only One Way and that way just happens to be theirs, I start whistling and examining my toenails.  You know how I feel about religion but, to be fair, there’s an awful lot of crap being spouted in ‘New Age’ or holistic circles too. 

Which is why Barbara Ford-Hammond delights me.  I met her on Twitter (at least I think so, I forget) and she describes herself as ‘a holistic therapist and muse’ which would, under normal circumstances, make me narrow my eyes and pick up my foot.  But she’s alright, is Barbara.  She doesn’t take herself too seriously; she has a good sense of humour (and, see, I rather think a real guru would have a blasted good – if not nigh-on evil – sense of humour). She’s just published a book called The Psychic Way – Fine-tuning your Intuition and, if you’re remotely interested in a world beyond cupcakes and shoes – it’s well worth reading. ‘I believe that we all have natural but often hidden or ignored abilities and talents that are tucked away in our psyches,’ she says.
‘You are responsible for what goes on in your mind. Only you. Others might try to influence you but unless drugs or brain-washing are involved you have the ultimate control of you. When you accept full awareness of yourself and the power within your own mind, practically anything is achievable. The only limitations are those imposed by you.’

Read that again, will you?  See, I agree with that wholeheartedly.  I really do. Whether you do or not is, of course, entirely up to you..  ;)

I actually think the title of this book is a little misleading or maybe it’s just a little offputting.  Psychic sounds alarm bells for a lot of people but really it’s only science we can’t quite measure yet.  As Barbara says, reassuringly (bless her): ‘We will remove the weird, the wacky and the woo-woo without losing the magic and charm available to you in your inner and outer world.’

If you’ve ever wondered about chakras or auras; hypnosis or meditation; clairvoyance and its cousins; spirit guides and angels; cosmic attraction; past life regression or even future life progression, this is your primer.  It doesn’t preach and it doesn’t patronise. Just gives you a matter-of-fact lowdown on the airy-fairy stuff.  Well, that's my feeling.

I gulped this book down like a long cool glass of water.  Yes, I already knew most of the stuff in it, but I like the slant Barbara gives to familiar material.  I’m now slowly re-reading it, trying out some of the meditations, pausing to let some of the images and thoughts settle in my head.  My only gripe about this was that it didn’t come with a CD of the meditations. But then it was pointed out to me that you can get downloads of a fair few of Barbara's meditations at her website: here.
And you can read her blog here...
Let's end with some quotes from the book.  If these please you, or inspire you or irritate the hell out of you, you would probably like to read this book!  If they just leave you cold, then move on...

'It's all make believe, isn't it?'  Marilyn Monroe

'Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.' Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland.

'Since everything is in our heads, we had better not lose them.' Coco Chanel.

'All serious daring starts from within.'  Joan Baez

'Life is like an ever-shifting kaleidoscope - a slight change, and all patterns alter.' Sharon Salzberg.

'It's a poor sort of memory that only works backward.' Lewis Carroll.

'Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.' Niels Bohr.

Positive Thinking and Cosmic Eeyores

I’m driving myself absolutely potty. I’m still waiting to hear back from Hodder and Stoughton about the first draft of Michele’s book (the psychic memoir). I can’t crack on with it until I hear back and I have kept this time free in order to do the work. It’s beyond irritating as – given we are about to move – I had planned on having this project done and dusted by the end of June. Now it will get all snarled up in the move and I am in a totally foul mood about the whole thing.
What is even worse is that, far from thinking ‘whoopee, spare time’ I am sitting morosely at my computer achieving precisely nothing. I am not good at having spare time. My school, the esteemed Nonsuch High School for Girls (very pushy grammar school in Cheam, Surrey) instilled the puritan work ethic in me to such a point that I feel incredibly guilty if I am not sitting at my desk, working hard for at least eight hours a day. My friend Jane says exactly the same – she is possibly the most driven person I know, regularly working until 2am. In fact she’s coming down on Friday for a ‘farewell to Lee Farm’ weekend. We’ve been here nine years and she’s been down maybe half a dozen times. Too busy. Our headmistress would be proud of us.

So I could be cleaning the spare room for Jane. I could, let’s be honest, be cleaning full-stop. Despite the fact that our buyers have been such total phits I cannot somehow bring myself to leave the place in a total mess. But ‘taking time off’ to clean seems decadent. See what a weirdo I am? So, instead, I sit at my computer as if by dint of dogged loyalty to the screen, I can make something happen.

(pause – half an hour later).. And by heck it works! The phone rang and it was Michele saying that she’d had a message from the editor saying it was absolutely fabulous and required very little extra work… Which is fabulous BUT (you heard that coming) I just wish the flipping editor would tell ME…and would also tell me what the ‘very little extra work’ is…so I can crack on and do it. Grrrrr, grrr and triple grrrrrr.

My conversation with Michele was funny – as our conversations always are. She is relentlessly upbeat, a total positive freak, committed believer in Cosmic Ordering and creating your own reality. I’m far more doomy and gloomy, a Cosmic Eeyore.
‘It’s going to be amazing! It’s going to be HUGE.’
‘Yeah, maybe. But it depends on how they market it.’
‘It’s going to change our lives.’
‘I’ve thought that before about books….I was going to be a brand once…’ This said in a very depressed tone. An editor at HarperCollins once got it in her head I was going to be the next Martha Stewart (a sort of cross between Delia and Kirsty Allsop but with a spiritual edge – yes, it’s a strange concept which is perhaps why it never came off). At the time I was very sniffy about the whole thing – thinking it would be prostituting my integrity to have my name on a candle. Fool! Anyhow, the branding was quietly dropped and, with every book I put out, I become more and more cynical as I watch them drop with a quiet little splash into the seventh circle of remaindered hell.

I wasn’t always like this. Once I was as relentlessly positive as Michele. In my twenties I spent hours upon hours and several trees-worth of paper, writing that ‘I, Jane, love and approve of myself’ and ‘It is safe, fun and exciting for me, Jane, to be totally successful.’ For a while they worked really well – the work poured in, so did the money. I was on TV and working for a national. Life was good. I think it all fell apart when I tried the biggie (for me): ‘I, Jane, now choose to be slim and gorgeous.’ I piled on another stone. It was as if my consciousness, higher being, whatever, suddenly took a reality check and said, ‘No sireee.’

So, while I still think it’s great to be upbeat, fabulous to see the positive, I tend to deal in shades of grey nowadays, rather than stark contrast black and white. Life isn’t always easy and I do think that, if you commit yourself hook, line and sinker to the Positive At All Costs movement, then you condemn yourself to feeling a failure when it doesn’t pan out quite how you thought. Also (and maybe this is my puritan school upbringing coming out again) I still can’t help but think that a little bit of the dark, the tough, the hard, doesn’t do one any harm and can even do a lot of good. Look at Paris Hilton (well, I’d rather not, but you know what I mean). Poor little rich girl. Never wanted for anything. Ended up being thrown in jail and kicked her heels when they wouldn’t let her take in her own bed. Now, of course, she says she has found God and is a reformed character. Oh, and she’s going to do a rap record based on her prison experiences. Have to say, it’s quite impressive really. Talk about seeing the positive in everything. Actually the more I think about it, the more you have to confess that this cloud really did have a silver lining. Brand Paris….you watch, there will be a jail range soon. Maybe there is something in this positive thinking after all.
‘I, Jane……’





PS the pic at the top is one taken about twelve years ago, after a draconian diet and a lot of make-up. I have used it relentlessly for all publicity shots ever since and will do so until I am about ninety. This one on the right of the mad woman waving an umbrella menacingly is what nine years on Exmoor does to a woman!!