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Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Magic at work
I am one of those rare creatures who has the gift of doing the work she loves almost every day of her life. I know beyond doubt that even if I were to have no financial necessity to work, I would still continue to do what I now do. My work is an integral part of my life; it is the expression of who I am.
I cannot begin to describe how fulfilled I feel after every therapeutic session with a client. Sometimes I listen to terrible secrets told to no other human being but I know that in that revelation is the beginning of healing. Yes I am a deeply saddened by the misery we humans chose to inflict on one another, but to participate even in a small way in the liberation of a soul from the weight of such suffering is to live a life that is truly blessed.
It is not always the deep dark secret wounds that I see; often it is the life disabling phobias. A spider phobia might seem laughable to those of us who cherish the creatures and have no fear of them, but for someone who is truly phobic, they are creatures from hell to be avoided even if in their panic, they endanger themselves and others. I have had mothers leave children in the middle of a busy shopping mall as they ran from a wasp; a teenager nearly killed running into traffic to escape a dog who was some distance away. Lives are severely curtailed by such phobias and they are often passed on from parent to child. It is so unnecessary.
In NLP (neuro linguistic programming) we have a wonderful technique called the fast phobia cure. Within a two hour session, a woman who had had life long panic attacks at the sight of a spider, who could not talk about them or even look at a photograph, without hyperventilating, walked out of my office finally free. She gave me a great hug as she left and told me that she just knew something had changed.
She laughed when she phoned me a few days later to report that she had even found herself feeling sorry for spiders, instead of hating them. Her family still cannot believe that she can walk into the bathroom without sending someone in ahead of her to check first. She may never learn to love spiders but the important thing is that her life is no longer straitjacketed by an overwhelming terror. Care to guess, how that makes me feel? You got it - that's me up ahead walking on air!
Move over Harry Potter - magic doesn't just happen in books.

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