Healing an Unbeliever by Patricia McLoughlin
Rita Nicholls
I have known Rita Nicholls for many years. She owne d her own hairdressing salon, brought up two children, went through a long drawn out divorce, became a healer….
Yes, a healer. When I asked about this increasingly important aspect of her life she always prefaced replies with “I know you don’t believe in this stuff but…”
And, indeed, I didn’t and perhaps I still don’t but, having experienced this healing, I admit that, to quote Shakespeare, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’My first session was thrust upon me. In the barter system of women’s lives, I had done some literary favours for Rita and her sister, Leslie, and they decided to give me a healing in lieu of a free lunch.
Lying on cushions on my living room floor, a candle burning nearby and serene eastern music playing, I suppressed my desire to laugh and decided to give this a fair go.
And go I did. Told to visualise a place where I felt safe, I was back in the craggy Stiperstones countryside of my native Shropshire . But – wow – this time I was flying above it, yes flying! I kid you not.
I don’t know how long I was soaring like an eagle but I definitely felt weird when I came back down. Instructed not to blow the candle out but to let it burn down I carefully guarded the flame. Flummoxed? I certainly was.
On the occasion of my second healing session, I was persuaded onto the couch by Rita when I was having a particularly stressful time. No flying, no rocky landscape, this time spark out but vaguely aware I was breathing heavily. There was certainly a shift afterwards, my fists had unclenched, my nerves unjangled.
I went home with a shiny stone in a little pouch which Rita had worked her magic on and found myself holding it in my hand from time to time, strangely comforted.
Rita, is in her sixties and content to be. She is not a dabbler, not someone who has thrown together a pick and mix of therapies, but a spiritual healer who has spent a decade learning techniques and sitting at the feet of one of the world’s greatest spiritual teachers. She has her own teachers and her own guru, who she can connect to without resorting to telephone or email.
Everyone, Rita says, has the ability to use healing energies but most people don’t use this gift. Healers have a heightened proficiency because they have dedicated time to developing something innate, something inside them.
We are not talking about curing terminal illness – miracles are few and far between. Healing can and does, however, help those who are ill, says Rita. It can bring therapeutic calm and serenity where once fear and stress exacerbated symptoms.
But it also helps those suffering from the stress of modern living, dashing from task to task, always anxious, important relationship balanced on a knife edge.
“When I run the energies with someone for the first time they invariably go out and afterwards say, ‘I think I must have dropped off.’ What has happened is they have gone into an inner space that they couldn’t access on their own. This helps lift the stress and clear emotional blockages and helps people answer questions for themselves which they had thought unanswerable.”
Rita’s “sacred space” is a room with pictures of spiritual teachers on the walls and a couch. It feels strangely charged and this is because before I enter she has spent a long time in there preparing for my healing, focusing on me. When she welcomes small groups for meditation she will already have spent an hour or more in her “sacred space” meditating in readiness.
Ask her about how her healing works and she smiles, she chooses her words carefully, knowing that terms like healing, energies, meditation are out of kilter with the modern world and make people nervous.
And perhaps I am still an unbeliever, but now I am a sceptic with a small, smooth stone in a pouch in my handbag and a feeling that there are, indeed, more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of.
ritamnicholls@hotmail.co.uk
Thu, 03/06/2008 - 15:48 — Tricia