Anniversaries you don't like to Remember but can't avoid!

Time heals all wounds so they say. And in a sense it is true. The raw grief and pain after bereavement does ease with time , but it never totally goes away. I have lost friends and extended family, as well as losing both my brothers and my parents. We have nieces and nephews, as well as their offspring and other extended family, but of our core family unit of six, it is now just down to my sister and I.

My folks and I shared a house for 13 years after their retirement. They were in latter years both sickly and frail admittedly, but they passed away within five months of each other and it was a great loss. My Mum died on 10 October 2006 of massive heart attack just two months short of their 50th wedding anniversary, and my Dad on 6 March last year.

Funny, my folks had a warring relationship, not a peacable one, but the day my Mum died , my father gave up the will to live as well, he was broken hearted at losing her. After my Mum's death, I could not care for my Dad on my own, he had suffered strokes and was wheelchair bound, so we were forced to move out of our house and into a granny flat beneath my sister's house. It was very traumatic for both of us as we had not only lost my Mum, but we had lost our home of 13 years moving from a 3 bedroomed house into a one bedroomed granny flat. We both hated it.

It is toay the first anniversay of my Dad's death and it has been a horrid week for me. My Dad has been in my thoughts a lot. The Thursday before he passed away, I knew he was dying, and I told my sister I wanted to try and nurse him and let him die in peace in his own bed. The Saturday before he died , I got him out of bed for the last time because he wanted to watch the rugby on telly. He was up for all of about 20 minutes, and then asked me to return him to bed. He stopped eating and was sleeping a lot, barely talking.

By the Sunday night, I knew he was in heart failure and battling to breathe, so I with my sister made the decision to have him transported to hospital so that he would not have any discomfort. The ambulance people wanted to intubate him before transportation and had to sedate him for this, and so they advised us to say our goodbyes as they did not think he would survive. That was the last time he spoke to us and said goodbye to little Erin too.

He lapsed into a coma and finally passed away at a quarter to 2 in the morning of Tuesday the 6th March.

I stayed with him the whole time. I did not want him to die alone. It gave me time to sit and talk to him even though he was comatose. I spoke about the boys and my sister, about the fact that the boys and Mum would be waiting for him. I talked about the grand kids and great grand kids. I sang him songs that he had sung to us when we were younger etc.

It was also a time for me to confess my guilt and ask for his forgiveness for the way I had treated him after my Mum died. I had "cared" for him and nursed him as best I could, but it was not an easy task I was full of resentment and tempers were frayed and conversations often ended in battles and arguments.

It was very hard tiring work, feeding him, lifting him in and out of his wheelchair , cleaning him and medicating him etc. His hands had been affected by the strokes, so he could not even hold a bottle himself, so although he was in adult nappies, I had to get up to him sometimes four or five times a night for toilet patrol. I didn't have a whole night's sleep through in five months. Befor her death it was my darling Mum who had tended to him at night, arthritis and dicky heart and all.

He was aways an angry impatient man and not the easiest patient. Add to that the fact that I was (we were both) grieving my Mum greatly, and that yes I 'spose in my messed up state I took it out on him for past hurts and injustices.

Still he was my Dad, and I have guilt battles with things like the Saturday before he died ( the night before he was hospitalised) , when he got me up at about 11pm for about the fifth time and I screamed at him as I was so tired, and he burst into tears and sobbed and said to me, "Do you think I can help it? Do you think I would do this to you if I could help it?"

Those are things which I will live with for the rest of my life. I have asked his forgiveness and for God's forgiveness too and I know if He could, my Dad would put his arm around me, hug me and say . "It's OK my girl it doesn't matter"

So you see why it's an anniversary that I have not welcomed. I have not slept well and each night since Thursday I have been remembering what happened at that time a year ago.

On Saturday night the family went out to a braai and I stayed at home. I just wanted to salute my Dad in my own way, a way he would understand.

I poured a stiff whisky, watched Strictly Come Dancing which I last watched when my Mum was alive. (We all three loved the show). I have to admit that I balled my eyes out when Joseph Clark sung "Time to say goodbye"

Then when it was time, I sat and watched City of Angels, and cried my way through that too.

This film has particular significance. When my Mum died, my Dad and I were totally adrift without her. My fiancee - who I will refer to as Woo (bless his soul) gave us a a whole lot of DVD's to watch that would appeal to Dad. Nature DVD's war movies etc. But among them was "City of Angels". this turned out to become an obsession with my Dad as it made him think of my Mum and he said it made him feel a little easier about her passing. I cannot tell you how many times we watched this film together in those five months, my Dad and I.

So Saturday night for me was a little vigil in a sense, and I woke up this mornig early and lit a andle for my Dad at 01h45, the time he passed away last year.
But it is time in a sense to say goodbye, and take that next step towards living my life again, and I know that my parents and brothers are the first to encourage me to do so, and to live life to the fullest.

I got an email from an old school friend on Thursday. We have known each other sice Std 5 and her Mum , who is suffering from cancer , was a good friend of my Mum's too. Anyway Debs mentioned that she had been to see her Mum who had asked after me. Debs told her I was OK, was engaged and was planning a wedding. Mrs H's response to that was that she would pray for this to happen as I deserved to be happy and settled now. I will end with her last words about me as they are what I am taking to heart and will apply:


“life is for the living you know Debra and we cannot ponder on the past – we need to make each day count."


That's what I aim to do!

Me Da I salute you!

Be prepared all the time - Crime is largely Opportunistic!

Be prepared all the time - Crime is largely Opportunistic!


I try to be optimistic. I voiced my opposition about those who slated Alan Knott-Craig's letter about optimism because I truly feel we need to be positive and make a contribution to changing the negativity and fear in our country.

But it is hard to be objective when one becomes a victim or almost...

I have been mugged twice before, the first time in 1993 and the second attempt was just over two years ago when I was attacked at knife point in my own driveway by three men. Fortunately I escaped major physical harm then too.

Today I did a stupid thing. I left for a job interview without filling up. I am currently unemployed and doing temp work and typing from home etc and money is tight and I have got used to being amazed at how far my little old red golf can go when the needle is in the red zone

I had just entered the N2 Highway Durban bound from Edwin Swales when my car coughed, choked, valiantly tried to go and then just spluttered to a halt.

I phoned family to ask them to come the rescue with some petrol and while waiting for my brother in law, I looked in my rear view mirror and saw a youth of about 17 or so sauntering slowly up the hill behind me on my side of the highway. As I was on a slope, just as a precaution, while watching him in the rear view mirror, I put my car into reverse and let the hand brake down keeping my foot on the brake pedal just in case and waited. Anyway, he just walked on past me and disappeared over the hill. I still felt guilt about my suspicions and this fear that any person one sees could mean potential danger.

About ten minutes later this young man reappeared on the brow of the hill walking this time towards me. But he now had both his hands inside the front pocket of his t-shirt, and it looked to me as if he was holding something in his hands. I knew then what he had in mind as he could not have been on a return trip from anywhere on that road in such a short space of time. So I started my car and managed to drive about 100 or so metres past him up the hill.

He carried on walking down the hill behind me but stopped about 150/ 200 metres down just where the road took a natural bend, and I could see him watching me. I sat there just praying and willing my brother in law to arrive to protect me. This youth then started walking back up the hill towards me. I was in a state 'cos I didn't know what he had in his pocket and what he wanted to do, so I jumped out of my car, locked the door, I then quickly opened my boot and shoved my handbag and cell phone into the boot, closed it and and stuffed my car keys into my bra. At this he started to run up the hill towards me. I just panicked, and although watching the traffic, I ran across all four lanes of the highway to the grass center lane. I didn't know what else to do.

I stood there screaming and waving my arms like a mad thing and pointing to him whilst he still tried to break my passenger window. This at half past eight in the morning , broad daylight , cars whizzing past.

Eventually a truck, a bakkie and a car pulled over and stopped virtually all at the same time. As they got out he stood up and looked at them and casually sauntered over to the middle of the highway near where I was standing and he then just stood and grinned at us all. It was only when the driver of the bakkie made as if to run after him, that he darted across the other side of the highway and disappeared into the bush.

I am totally freaked out about this, and I need to regain my objective and my positivity. I cannot let this latest incident get the better of me. I did still continue onto my interview, but had a mini melt down when I got home afterwards.

One thing has been highlighted for me as the title of the blog says, and that is that this type of crime is purely opportunistic. But is is such a frightening thought to know that there are vultures out there - everywhere- waiting to take advantage and that one is not safe anywhere.

If you do read this blog, I would urge you to always be prepared, be on the alert, and to try as much as possible to avoid becoming a potential victim.

I would love to turn my vehicle into an armoured car, but failing that, I will now always make sure that I am as protected as possible, that I have enough fuel, and that my car is as serviced and as roadworthy as I can make it. No matter how long or short the trip.

I don't want to be caught short again and be vulnerable like this, and I would urge all of you to take the same kind of precautions. On my way to and from the interview, I couldn't help but notice just how many ordinary passenger cars like mine were stopped on the side of the highway for whatever reason. It is just not safe people and not worth risking one's life.

So now I am going to go away have a cup of tea and try to find my positivity and optimism again. They have kind of gone into hiding and I know its going to be a tough job to regain perspective.

Evidence of the Paradigm Shift - by Franci Prowse

Cleve Backster noticed decades ago the similarity between science and religion. The outdated beliefs of mainstream science were/are just as entrained and defended as any fundamentalist religion. One of those working a parallel path to Cleve's work was Olga Worrall. I compose this article because I have read for decades about her and the remarkable work both she and her husband did, basically blowing off the prison doors of the mind of traditional science. But did they emerge? We haven't failed to notice those doors keep getting replaced. Most scientists have to "stumble upon" their own realizations.

Olga Worrall, now passed over, was born November 30, 1906 in Cleveland, OH. She was the wife of the famous "Mr. A" whose healing abilities were phenomenal enough to keep him mostly anonymous. (Yes, even in the 70's healers had to defend themselves from attacks of negativity similar to the inquisition.) Olga was also a healer, and carried on his work after his death. She graciously agreed to be tested by scientists for years. Cleve Backster was acquainted with Olga and her husband Ambrose back then in the 70's.

The following information related to the remarkable difference she made is from three articles, two found online (google Olga Worrall) and the third from a Science of Mind magazine I saved in a dusty file. Notice how the scientists avoid trying to explain how healing works, even though the evidence is piled high and deep. That would be crossing the line. It is daring enough just to run experiments. Enjoy reading Olga's own words as she spells it out for us at the end.

1. From an IONS article 1993

Beverly Rubik is a biophysicist who became interested in bioelectromagnetics in the 1970s after a personal experience with a spiritual healer. She has applied her training in science to a systematic investigation of scientific anomalies, including phenomena associated with "subtle energies." Dr. Rubik is the founding director of the Center for Frontier Sciences at Temple University, Philadelphia. This article was adapted by Christian de Quincey from Dr. Rubik's presentation at the Heart of Healing conference.

Fifteen years ago, the field of bioelectromagnetics was virtually unknown; very few people paid attention to the possibilities of a scientific basis for phenomena such as therapeutic touch. In those days I was quite an athlete, but had a lot of knee trouble which interfered with jogging and dancing. I had the good fortune to meet a phenomenal person, Dr. Olga Worrall, who claimed to be a spiritual faith healer. I agreed to a session with her, and within minutes of her placing her hands on my knees I felt a sensation of tingling heat, and experienced a spontaneous decrease in pain in my knees. Being a scientist, I was intrigued both by the empirical evidence of the efficacy of her healing touch, and by the fact that this was not explainable within current scientific or medical theory. As a result, I decided to apply my training in biophysics to investigate this and similar phenomena.

My doctoral dissertation had involved motility in bacteria. I took microphotographs of swimming bacteria using stroboscopic light, enabling me to see successive images of individual bacteria as they moved. Their swimming tracks appeared as gentle curves on the photographs. As part of the experiment, I often added a well-known motility inhibitor to completely paralyze the bacteria, and the tracks would come to a stop. I decided to apply these techniques to test Olga Worrall's healing power. I added a large dose of motility inhibitor to an assay which completely immobilized the bacteria. Worrall then cupped her hands around the microscope slide containing the specimens. Twelve minutes later I examined the slide and discovered that between five and ten percent of the bacteria had recovered motility. The results were surprising because in five years of research, using this same dose of motility inhibitor as a control, I had never seen the bacteria recover motility. Subsequently, I tried this experiment with a naive participant (who claimed no healing power) to control for the possibility that the simple warmth of human hands near the slide might account for the recovery - but it didn't. I tried many naive participants, including myself, and none was able to revive any bacteria in this kind of assay.

Next, I started adding an antibiotic to the bacteria to inhibit their growth. I wanted to see if a healer's laying on of hands could enhance growth - even in the presence of an antibiotic which under normal circumstances thwarts growth. We tried an experiment in which Worrall placed her hands near the rack of test tubes but didn't touch any bacteria directly. At a high dosage of antibiotic, Worrall did not register much effect; but at a lower dose - which slowed down but didn't completely thwart bacterial growth - the results showed a significant difference between Worrall's treated bacteria and the controls handled by a naive participant.

There really is no well-understood explanation of what may be occurring in the interaction between a healer and the biological system of the healee. As a biophysicist, I naturally started thinking about the possibility of electromagnetic fields emanating from healers and impinging on those being healed.

2. Excerpt from an interview with Dr. Beverly Rubik by J. Mishlove in 'Thinking Allowed'

RUBIK: I was raised as a very conventional biophysicist, through the years at Berkeley. Of course the current paradigm in the life sciences is what I would call reductionism. It's taking a living system and dissecting it down into bits and pieces, often with no sense of life anymore. You get down to the biochemical realm and you're just dealing with a bag of biomolecules that was once a living, intact, holistic system, and studying the bits and pieces to try to make sense about the whole -- to try to make some statement about the living state, looking at the essentially dead biomolecules. I was bred on that paradigm. One of the turning points for me in my career was writing my dissertation. I got pneumonia; I called it dissertation disease. It was pretty severe, and I wasn't getting over it, and I remember going deep within and asking myself why was I so sick, and what was the meaning of this illness. And the fact that I was always previously healthy, and suddenly this whopping disease. The answer that came was that somehow this work didn't speak true to me; there was something missing that didn't quite speak to the depths of my soul.

MISHLOVE: You mean, there was something in effect about your very research that was sick, and that expressed itself in your body.

RUBIK: Right, exactly. My body was an expression of my deepest self, and it was saying, this work is not truest to you. And I had to make a decision whether to finish -- I mean, after six or seven years it was sizable hunk of one's life and life energy and time, etcetera -- whether to seriously continue with it, or just simply drop it, I was so sick. I decided to continue with it, and I remember writing poetry, which helped me get over my disease. I was really focusing on that inner process of the disorder and what it meant, and the poems became part of the dissertation, in fact.

MISHLOVE: They must have loved that in the biophysics department.

RUBIK: Something I slipped in after it was approved, you know, just to be sure. So I vowed at that time in my life never to do more of that type of science, and consequently did not go on to Harvard to a position I had arranged, but instead took the position over at San Francisco State University at that time, doing teaching where I could be pretty much my own boss and look at the gentler aspects of the universe such as healing and holism, interconnectedness and relationship. Because San Francisco State University is primarily a teaching school and not a research institution, I would have a little bit of time to devote to research, and didn't think much attention would be paid to that realm over there.

MISHLOVE: So as a teacher, you're almost getting, really, into the humanities, because of the human relationship that you have to have with your students. So you began to move away from the reductionistic paradigm which is so implicit in physical science and biological science today.

RUBIK: That's right. Well, another way I saw that break down, in fact, was in some of my experiments with the psychic healers. I recall some experiments just simply did not manifest with so-called positive results. We couldn't seem to replicate from session to session or day to day some of the results we saw with Olga. That was disturbing, and then I later realized, well, the days that things didn't work, that we didn't get the effects that she somehow apparently had manifested on other occasions, were days that her breakfast didn't agree with her. And on another occasion some intruder came and popped in and tried to disrupt the whole experiment, and there was definitely a difference in the psychology, the psychological makeup, of both the psychic participant and the experimenters, myself. We were all agitated, and under those circumstances we did not manifest those results. And I began to see it -- it was really pushing the limits of the scientific methodology, because of course science demands replicability and reproducibility of experiments, by any observer at any time point, if there's true objectivity here. And I began to realize that was a serious limitation for so-called parapsychological experiments.

MISHLOVE: The very notion of objectivity, when we're measuring the direct effects of the mind itself on a physical system, seems to be a paradox. Paradox - a statement contrary to common belief; a statement that seems contradictory, unbelievable, or absurd, but that may actually be true in fact.

3. Science of Mind (SM), April 1983

Olga Worrall: All evidence suggest that there's a close relationship between science and religion. In fact I think they're now engaged and just waiting for the marriage. Because I think science must support religion I went into the laboratory to prove there's an energy flowing from those people who are known as "healers," an energy so powerful that it accelerates the normal healing processes of the physical body. Until lately religion was asking people to accept on faith that the effects of healing energy could be demonstrated. But because of my successes in the laboratory, we now have concerted proof that what we knew intuitively can now be accepted as fact. Science and religion therefore have all the more reason to work hand-in-hand.

Science can help religion move from being regarded superstitiously, to the place where, in our scientific culture, it can once again be used on a practical, day to day basis. Nor more will religion be for Sunday only, and for only an hour. When science and religion work together harmoniously, the jealousy between scientists and religionists will be eliminated, and the world will have a beautiful religion-science-philosophy to guide its course.

SM: Do you know what the healing energy is, or how it works?

Worrall: My husband, (Ambrose), who was an engineer, labeled it paraelectricity. Easterners call it prana, while others call it life force or subtle energy. More than sixty years ago, my husband maintained that this energy, which surrounds all people, can be tapped into to accelerate healing processes and a return to original patterns of perfection. He claimed it has electrical properties. And even now when I heal people, they say that an electric current passes through them.

God created us from a perfect pattern, a perfect mold, so to speak. When we fall out of balance or harmony with that perfection our energies don't behave right. This causes illness, and so the healing energy, the paraelectric current, returns us to our original pattern. We are surrounded by this natural healing energy all the time, without it we would decompose into nothingness. This energy field activates the body during life and when we die, it withdraws and carries us to the next dimension of existence. This energy, which is the power of God, has innate intelligence and when I as a person get out of the way, it flows through me and heals people in the most precise and individualized way possible.

Thank you, Olga Worrall! See the following related pages at Tools for Transformation:Print-friendly version + Recommend this article More at Counterpoint Article Library

Last minutes leaping about!

Isn't it ironic how we as human beings leave things until the last minute?

Take the submission of our (South African) tax forms. We are all filled with the joy of at last being able to submit tax via the internet. ( Well truth be told for most of us I think it was more the fact that we could extend the deadline for tax submision !!)

So ... that deadline has dawned and it is Thursday, and I am rushing about trying to get IRP5 forms ( proof of income) from former employers.

Some I may add are not so friendly, and I need to check I have had all my shots before coming into contact with them. So they are not generally inclined to assist me with quick last minute delivery.

Why then do / we wait so long and leave things until the last minute?

I am a procrastinator by nature, and yes I could give you all my angst filled psychological reasons as to why.

Suffice to say, that when I do eventually have to tend to matters last minute, I am always surprised at how little effort it takes to sort them. And here in my mind I have built up this huge fear of what I am going to have to go through . A bogeyman of fear that generally doesn't exist.

So why knowing this logically and intellectually, do we not change those thigs that cause us such stress when we realise just how much easier it would make life?

A conundrum indeed, and my answer for myself, is that I am so entrenched in the patterns formed over years, that I fall back into them without even thinking twice!

Perhaps I need some kind of rewiring or re-programming. (said with wry grin)

Truth be told, I can no longer kid myself that this procrastination and forgetfulness is just me, part of my whimsical charm. I am afraid no-one is buying that old story anymore.

So then if I am in this rush .... why then am I wasting time on this blog?

HHHHhhhhhmmmm!