Intuitive Healing Course!

"Charu’s Intuitive Healing course is exactly what humanity needs and is asking for…… pure love in action!" -Jo Pollit

On the 24th and 25th February, I held the first weekend of my new Intuitive Healing Course here in Cheddar, in southwest England. It was a phenomenal experience to see how fast people can transform and what beautiful healing can come through them after just a couple of days! The participants were drawn from all walks of life, with varying degrees of experience in healing. It was a pleasure to watch them bond effortlessly and mature rapidly in their capacity as healers inside the space the course provided.

We began with a meditation and intention-setting that brought us into clarity and focus for what we wanted to achieve. Each activity we did facilitated deeper and deeper shifts. The sharing and Q & A was deeply investigative, thought-provoking and touching. The attunements were very strong, and the paired healing and sensing was deep and profound. It was beautiful to provide the opportunity for the group to delve into some creative artistic expression and to do a beautiful group healing exercise with each person receiving healing in the middle of the circle of budding healers. We had gorgeous, spring-like weather and got to play outside as well, in the sunny garden with a view of Cheddar Gorge! I am so pleased to finally be offering this teaching, after many years of feeling called!

I am off to North America in a month, teaching and offering individual treatments in several locations. I’m making plans for Vancouver Island early/mid April, San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento and L.A.throughout May, and June, and NY early July. I am in the process of solidifying dates and venues. Please email me with any suggestions and/or contacts you might have for my trip.

If you are in the U.S. and would like to do the course or have a treatment, let me know. Where are you located? Would you attend the course if we could provide accommodation? I take all of your feedback into consideration as I plan venues and the routing of the trip. I am still looking for venues along the West Coast and in New York, and would also very much appreciate a place to stay and publicity. If you know people in the States who might be interested in healing, please introduce me to them, forwarding this newsletter on to them. If you love what I do, tell other people about it! Help me help the world, creating Oneness through healing!

"Charu is a unique and powerful healer; her presence is one of compassion and care for everyone she meets. It was a complete privilege to be offered an opportunity to spend time learning and being with this remarkable healer and carer of humanity. I felt so safe, nurtured and nourished over the 2 days, this allowed me to fully open up and embrace my own healing, whilst learning a powerful, pure, natural healing technique. The only thing that made it easier leaving this course and the energy that it created was knowing that I’m going back!!"
-Jo Pollit

Set yourself free to thrive!

As we enter December, we become profoundly aware of the drawing in of the nights, the approach of the Winter Solstice and the end of the year. All of these signify completion; the ending of one cycle and the beginning of the next. It’s the perfect opportunity to take time to evaluate the year that has gone before in order to set ourselves free to welcome the New Year with a fresh perspective. What steps would we each need to take in order to have closure on 2011, so that we could move joyfully into 2012, with love and clarity?

Getting truly complete requires radical acceptance. It is easy to look back on the past and judge ourselves or another, forgetting that the wisdom that we have now we didn’t have then. Remember, as human beings we always do the best we can in any given situation. It’s the mind that comes in afterwards and condemns or judges. The heart knows acceptance, peace and letting go. The heart has no memory, it is only present, available to the moment. Getting the past complete is an opportunity to open the heart and accept life exactly as it is.

There’s a lot of rhetoric about looking to the future and manifesting our dreams. However the unprocessed past, which we have left unfinished in our hearts and minds, holds us back from really being able to move forward in creating all that we are inspired to create.

For most people, forgiveness is a crucial aspect of completing the past. I have written about forgiveness before, and about how important it is to have the correct attitude of love, compassion and acceptance when invoking the energy of forgiveness. We carry the past with us because we think it tells us important information about the world. We cling to the past in a vain attempt to keep ourselves safe in the future. Forgiveness is simply letting go of the need to hold on to the old perspective. It is the willingness to approach each new situation afresh, trusting our inner wisdom and listening to our hearts.

So what practical steps can we take to get closure on the past so that we can be free to create an inspired life that really speaks to us of the fullness of our hearts? The answer to this question will be different for each person. What I have done in this article is put together a few resources that are designed to support you in this process. Imagine if this Winter Solstice could be THE opportunity for finally declaring the past complete!

If reading this article inspires you to deal with a specific aspect of your life, I invite you to get in touch to book a session either in person or by skype/telephone. One of the things we focus on in individual healing sessions is releasing the past, allowing us to fully engage all our energies in creating lives that really inspire us. You can also work with the resources I have offered you below, including the Garden Meditation which I have recorded to support the release of old contractions and the creation of new intentions. Give yourself the gift of completion this Christmas! There’s no better time to do it, with 2012 just around the corner.

Resources

1) I have recorded a guided meditation to support you with this process, it’s available at Soundcloud: http://soundcloud.com/charusila The script is also available below, for those who would prefer to read it for themselves.

2) A ‘ritual of release’ is a powerful way to invoke the energy of closure. To do it, it’s best to choose a night when the moon is full or almost full. Gather a few friends, or do it alone if you feel safer. Take a bowl of water in which the moon can be reflected. Create sacred space by chanting Om three times, or whatever other invocation speaks to you. Invite everyone present to take a moment to invoke the energy that they are releasing at this time. One by one, approach the bowl of water and offer everything that you are letting go of into the water. Immerse your fingers in the water and focus on the reflection of the moonlight as you make your offering. You may choose to speak out loud, or you may simply speak in your heart. Do whatever feels natural. When each person has taken their turn, offer prayers of gratitude before picking up the bowl of water and carrying it to the sea/lake/river/pond – whatever body of water you have available to you – even the bath tub would do! Hold the bowl aloft and pour the water carrying all that you are letting go of into the bigger body of water, signifying the Earth’s capacity to receive and transmute it all. Spend a few moments in quiet contemplation.

3) Another way to create closure is to write letters to Spirit about the people/situations that you are incomplete with and burn them, setting the past and the people involved free in the fire. Be sure not to project the emotional energy that gets stirred up on to any of the other people involved. This activity is not about retelling your story, but rather about expressing it completely so that you can see through it and let it go!

Inspiration for Setting Intentions!

I thought some of you might appreciate this as an inspiration for setting your intentions and how to work with it during the 40 days!

Question: I'm in a place where 15 minutes is a big commitment, but I think it is the medicine I need. Can you offer some tips on setting an intention? I am wondering how broad or narrow it should be... For example, do you recommend one focus on healing a specific injury or on loving and respecting the body's needs?

Answer: What a fantastic question! Because it's a 40-day process I tend to encourage people to go with the bigger intentions to leave space for all sorts of insights to come to the surface that otherwise might be hidden.
It sounds like you really want to focus on the body, so perhaps the activity you could commit to would be something physically nurturing - 15 mins of self-massage, a hot bath, a nourishing walk etc. It doesn't have to be the same activity every day, it's the commitment that's important.
Through focusing your energy in a loving way, you get to see what blocks you - old/limiting beliefs, negative emotions about yourself, patterns of avoidance and so on.
Once we have engaged with these old patterns and faced them honestly, it becomes much easier to choose whether they really serve us or not. If not, we can ask for support and divine guidance to let them go and create something nourishing and NEW!

Natural Inherent Wisdom

Have you ever noticed how amazing human beings actually are?  Small children overflow with innocent love and exuberance for life.  However, how many of us continue to express this love and exuberance into adulthood?  These qualities become hidden to varying degrees, but they do continue to exist inside each and every human being. 

There is an astonishing magic to the human race that most of us appear to have forgotten: an innocent, loving, joyful passion for life! It is at the heart of everything we yearn for, every act of creativity, each expression of true love and care.  Yet in our day to day activities, it seems like most of us are caught in a multitude of ways of being that are not in alignment with our natural inherent joy and freedom.

We can all think back to a time in our childhoods when there was no doubt in our hearts that we ourselves, and the world around us, were inherently good and pure and beautiful.  This certainty in our hearts is what I am calling our Natural Inherent Wisdom.  Some say that this wisdom is just the ignorance of childhood and that with time the child’s perspective matures, but I would like to suggest that this recognition of the inherent goodness and purity of life and humanity is the truth.  The rest is just ‘beliefs’ that we made up to deal with painful experiences that we could not process at the time. 

We all have experiences that shake our trust in our Natural Inherent Wisdom about ourselves and the world around us.  You can call these moments of disillusionment, though the term indicates that what was lost was just illusion, which isn’t what I’m saying at all.  In the midst of an experience where the behaviour or words of others clash with our NIW, our child minds create ‘beliefs’, in an attempt to explain what’s happening around us.  We give up our innocent heartfelt knowing of goodness and decide that this new ‘belief’ is necessary to survive.  But it hurts.  Deep down inside, we can never reconcile ourselves to this new ‘belief’ and thus starts the internal battle between knowing ourselves to be ‘one with God’  and believing ourselves to be less than, not good enough, deficient in some way.

So how does this process occur?  The simple fact is that it occurs because in the moment of the experience, whether that be something deeply traumatising or apparently relatively innocuous, our tiny child minds and hearts cannot process the intensity of emotional energy that gets triggered and we have no resources to communicate what we need to the adults around us.  Add to this the fact that the adults around us are also out of touch with their own NIW and it often appears that it’s the adults themselves who trigger these emotions. 

In the absence of a safe and nurturing space in which to release these emotions, and express our confusion, we suppress the emotional energy, and build a wall of ‘belief’ to hold it in.  The strength of these walls is dependent on the intensity of the emotional energy that they protect.  They become cemented, and then central to our experience of life.  As we continue to grow, we look for further evidence to back up our ‘beliefs’, filtering our experiences to see only the parts that validate these ‘belief’ walls.  We are terrified of living without these beliefs, thinking that without them we are vulnerable to shock and confusion.

So how do we release these beliefs so that we can get back in touch with, and live from, our natural inherent wisdom?  I would like to guide you through an exercise that can open up small doorways to intuitively sensing it and trusting it.  Of course, this process is ongoing. I look at it like a glass house where all the windows and doors have been boarded up.  There’s a magnificent light inside the house which no-one can see because of all the boards.  The owner of the house (you) has a sense that there’s something really beautiful inside, but is unable to find out what it is.  Every time you do this exercise, it’s like piercing a hole in one of the boards, or even removing an entire board.  Eventually, though there may be many boards remaining, the light which is inside is so bright, the boards become almost unnoticeable.

You start to see yourself as this natural inherent wisdom rather than as all the beliefs you made up to wall in emotional energy.  Of course, sometimes in this process, there will be powerful emotions that come to the surface and it’s good to be prepared for that to happen.  The more you can trust yourself and open to these emotions, knowing that they are not the truth but the energy that you could not process as a child, the faster the windows of light will appear.

Take yourself to a quiet place where you will not be disturbed for about 15 minutes.  Make sure you have with you a notebook and pen.  You might want to light a candle or do something to mark this as a sacred moment.

1. Choose a belief that you know limits your freedom of expression – for example I chose ‘I’m a fraud’ for the purposes of writing this article.
2. Ask yourself what happened that made you believe this? Immediately a memory comes to mind.  For me, it’s the memory of a substitute teacher telling me, when I was 6 years old, that I was stupid.
3. Invite in the energy of safety and love – this might be a spiritual teacher or guide, your highest self or even just the essence of unconditional love.  Bathe the memory in this energy and allow yourself to feel the emotions it triggers – for me it was shock, fear (there’s something wrong with me), embarrassment (now everyone knows there’s something wrong with me) and shame. 
4. Connect into what your natural inherent wisdom was in that moment.  For me it was carefree, joyfully creative, spontaneous and playful.  I knew I didn’t need anyone else’s approval and that I was whole, complete and perfect just as I was.  Allow yourself to get the impact of this.  For me, it freed up so much energy, I had to go for a walk and then for a run! 
5. Take a moment to recognise all the additional ‘beliefs’ and subjective evidence you had piled on top of this original ‘belief’ wall.  For me, it was astonishing to see how much I had convinced myself of this ‘belief’ and limited myself accordingly.  You may need to take time to tune into your sense of your NIW a few times over the next few days, especially if more emotional energy from later experiences arises to be released.
6. Write a few words that remind you of your sense of your NIW and stick them on your mirror to keep it alive for you.  You may want to share your experience with a close friend or family member.  Speaking about your NIW can help make it more real for you. The more real you can make it for yourself, the better!

Moving Beyond Forgiveness

How would it be to finally realise and accept your own humanness:  your fallibility, your struggles and challenges, your imperfections?  Wouldn't that give space for everyone else to be utterly human too?  We hear so much about forgiveness in healing and self-development circles, but do we really need to forgive?  What does forgiveness actually mean?

If we unpick forgiveness, we realise that inherent in any idea of forgiveness is the judgment of something as bad or wrong that needs to be forgiven.  Yet aren't we also encouraged to give up all our judgments?  How can these two things go hand in hand?  Aren't these two concepts mutually exclusive?

Imagine what happens to our internal relationship with ourselves when we try to cultivate self-forgiveness.  On one hand, we are believing the judgement that something we did was bad and wrong, and then on the other hand, we are telling ourselves that we are a good person: big enough to forgive and deserving of forgiveness.  It’s really giving ourselves mixed messages!

Last week I had the experience of realising that it was possible to recognise that something I had done did not serve me without making myself wrong for it.  I didn't need to forgive myself because I was able to distinguish that I didn't need forgiveness.  What I needed instead, was to acknowledge that the choice I had made did not serve my highest intentions. I also needed self-love and compassion to understand what limitations had held me back.

If this is true with something we ourselves have done, would we be able to apply it to the actions of others or even past events that we have carried with us?  So often we get caught in the trap of feeling stuck because something happened in the past that we are unable to let go of.  If I want to forgive you, I am actually belittling you by judging your behaviour as wrong and then being the big person, the one who forgives you!  It is in effect a power play, a way to strengthen our own egos, in the guise of being good and right and loving. 

In the process of trying to forgive past events, we solidify them in our own minds as wrong in order to cultivate the forgiveness that we seek from ourselves, from others, or for others. We are underscoring the idea that we or another person ‘should’ have done better. Is it not true that we all do the best that we can at any given time? We may not live up to the highest capacity that we know resides within us, but we do what we are capable of in that moment. If we drop the idea that we or others have done something wrong and ‘should’ have done better, we can investigate in a much more constructive manner. We can calmly analyze, with love, not criticism, why our capacity was limited at that moment, and learn from this reflection.

What does it mean to ‘move beyond forgiveness’?

The idea is simple, instead of judging and determining that a particular behaviour is bad or wrong, you simply look and see: did it really serve your or the other’s intentions?  Did it reflect your/their highest capacity?  Was love present in the choice and in the action?

Look for what you know to be good and loving in yourself or in the other person, and then acknowledge any limitations you or they might have – challenges from the past, insecurities or fears about how you/they will be perceived or whether you/they will be liked, guilt because you/they didn’t communicate as clearly as you/they would have liked, difficulty in expressing your/their needs.  For whatever reason, recognise that you or the other person were just not able to do any better in that moment. 

It’s all very basic human stuff at the end of the day, and the more we can allow ourselves to be fallible and admit our weaknesses, the more we can give the same space to others.

Changing Perspective: Letting go of your grievances

Wouldn’t it be nice if by letting go of our grievances, we could immediately and tangibly change the energy in our interpersonal relationships?  If simply by changing our perspective and attitude, the other person’s perspective and attitude could shift? This is indeed the case.  The power does lie within us to create that shift, that change that can dissolve a day’s worth of bickering, or years’ worth of mistrustfulness.  A positive intention to change our attitude is infinitely more effective than a manipulative attempt to force another to respond how we would like.  The essence is in realising that we hold the power.  It does not lie outside of us, in the other person.  We are not dependant on others to create that change, we ourselves can shift the relationship simply by being willing to let go and bring love back to centre stage.

What follows are an example and a testimonial demonstrating how powerful letting go and changing our perspective can be in creating a breakthrough. 

Example:  A friend of mine and her partner were having a difficult day, recently, and she confided in me that her partner had been extremely angry and reactive.  She’d left the house to give her some space, and was really baffled by what to do; they’d had plans for that evening. Another friend who was with us reminded her that she probably just needed a lot of reassurance, because they’d gone through a really rough time a few months back. She took the advice in, and realized, “yeah, she must still be really scared because of what happened.” After thinking for a few minutes, she called her partner on the phone. Her partner had independently shifted, and was apologizing for her behavior. “I know. It’s okay,” my friend told her. “I love you. I just love you..... It’s okay. I love you.” 

I could not help but note that as soon as my friend had changed her perspective, allowing more love and softness in, her partner felt that she was loved, and softened as well. What a beautiful way to spur dramatic change in our relationships. How inspiring to know that the power lies within us!

Testimonial: About three days ago, Charu did a healing on me that focused on my relationship with my father. I was facing a lot of fear of him. Charu led me through an exercise in which I created a sphere of golden light around me, a safety sphere that he could not enter into. With that protective sphere surrounding me, I played hide-and-go-seek with my Dad, drew with crayons with him, and re-lived other childhood times with him. Not only did I feel completely relaxed with him for the first time, but I also saw his humanity for the first time, his tenderness, his vulnerability.

            I felt a bit wobbly after that healing session. I could feel something fundamental shifting inside of me; it seemed as if something was sorting itself out in my subconscious.

            A few days later, I suddenly remembered that it was Fathers’ Day.  I hurried to call home. Dad asked me, “So what are you doing in London?” Panic started to rise in my throat, a familiar closing feeling. Dad doesn’t know anything about my life these days, and certainly nothing about healing and emotional processing.  But almost as soon as it began to rise, the panic dissolved, my throat unclenched, and a settled feeling came to my chest. I was able to tell Dad about the amazing healings I’d been having.  I talked about “emotions”, a word I’d not dared to say to Dad for years, and told him for the first time how incredibly afraid I had been for years after I’d broken my back, something I’d never admitted to. Dad kept saying, “uh-huh” really digesting what I was saying, and he shared thoughts and feelings from his side. It was astounding, yet the conversation was completely natural. I hung up the phone and stared at my partner with shock. “I have not had that open of a conversation with my father for 20 years!”

            It was clear to me that I was much less scared of my father.  Because I had stopped defining him as such a scary guy, he was able to not be!  I had given him the space to grow and to change, to not remain the young father of that scared little girl.  This is a profound change, a dramatic shift in our relationship. To think that I’d energetically been holding us static all this time, unnecessarily!

Practical Exercise:  This exercise only needs to take a few minutes.  If you want to make it longer you can, but sometimes it’s best just to let it flow through you, feel the sense of letting go and then move on with your day!

1)    Sit or stand in a comfortable position.  Feel your feet on the    floor and imagine roots growing down into the earth, allowing the energy of the earth to flow up into your body.  This will ground you and help you to stay present through the exercise. 

2)    Take 3 deep breaths, and with each inhalation, feel yourself drawing all your strength, all your power, all your energy from any person, place or experience where you may have left it, into the centre of your belly.  You can continue this for a few more breaths if it feels helpful. 

3)    Imagine golden light radiating out from your heart, into your body and out through your skin to fill the space around you.  You are creating a golden orb about 6-12 inches all around you.  This is your safe space. 

4)    Bring a person to mind with whom you have had difficulties.  It’s probably best to start with something relatively ‘light’.  Ask yourself ‘what was I feeling in that situation?’ and acknowledge that it is OK that you felt that way.

5)    Next ask yourself ‘what was I needing in this situation?’ and brainstorm ways that you can meet those needs for yourself. 

6)    Give yourself a hug!

7)    Put yourself in the other person’s shoes.  Ask yourself what they might be feeling at the time of the conflict with you.  Acknowledge that it was OK for them to be feeling that way.

8)    Ask yourself what they might have been needing in that situation. Investigate whether you are able to support them in meeting those needs.

9)    Take some time to forgive both yourself and them and feel the flow of love between you.

10) When you feel ready, get in communication with the other person and see how the energy has shifted.  You may be surprised that they get in touch with you or apologise even before you have a chance to say anything!