Heal With Your Pen
The words came to me in a meditation. I wrote them down: HEAL WITH YOUR PEN. Since that morning, almost a year ago, I have come to understand so much more about what those four words signify.
Heal with your pen. At first I thought that was a pointer for my own life, that I would heal myself by writing my story, that I would evolve—progress on the spiritual path and thus “heal”—through sharing my experiences, be it in books, blog posts or on social media. Yes, I thought, that feels right.
But there was more, I realised, as I began to meet women who have extraordinary life stories they are bursting to explore. I say “bursting” because of the readiness with which they shared their life journeys with me. In a way, we seem magnetised to each other. What an honour. One of these women, Lisa, has become a dear friend (a true Spirit Sister rediscovered!) and I am honoured to be writing her biography this year. What a task, what a joy, what a story.
All the women I’ve met share this in common: I marvel—marvel and bow down—at what they have endured, and how they have emerged on the other side, as teachers of love and grace and resilience. Meeting such women made me wonder; Am I to use my pen to serve them? Will I write, edit or publish their stories? All three perhaps? Me, a publisher?! I don’t feel like anything is impossible with spirit at the helm.
Lately, something else has become apparent. I am being drawn to HEAL WITH MY PEN by encouraging others to do the same. In this scenario, my pen will offer tips and pointers to help people heal themselves by freeing their stories. For example, later this year, I have been asked to talk about writing and storytelling to children who’ve suffered trauma. I am thrilled to do so.
I have also been sharing my story verbally at a couple of talks. So to heal with my pen has permutations, as I am discovering. Thinking of stories, and of the healing power of sharing them, reminds me of something I read the other day. There are myriad names for that universal force that connects us all: many call it God, others call it the Universe, some describe it as Divine Intelligence, in scientific circles, it is “the field,” in Aboriginal culture it is “the Dreaming” and in certain Native American traditions it is the Great Spirit. Ultimately though, all the names can only point to that unfathomable vastness that cannot be contained by any name, as the Tao te Ching teaches: “The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” I accept that, and yet I love this description I came across in an old prayer:
God—that is, that which goes by many names and none—is “the author of love.” And love, of course, is the ultimate story that heals.
Miracle on a Monday
- At August 28, 2016
- By Karina Machado
- In Awaken, My books, The spiritual path
- 2
The most astonishing synchronicity happened to me a few weeks ago. Even the most skeptical of friends opened their eyes wide when I shared this with them. Eckhart Tolle teaches that certain moments—seeing a beautiful sunrise, or an exquisite flower, for example—have the power to pull us, for a few fleeting seconds, out of the “machinery” of thoughts that is the ego mind. I like to think that this story offers a similar jolt of wonderment that returns us, albeit temporarily, to the mystery that’s at the heart of being.
On this particular morning, I was opening mail at my desk. As the books editor at a magazine, I receive a lot of parcels—almost all books. I’d opened a few when I noticed a smaller-than-usual package. Something in me knew, even as I began to open it, that an extraordinary situation was unfolding. Inside, was a delicate necklace. The pendant was inscribed with “Breathe in love.”
Enchanted, I turned over the package to read the address label. Sure enough, I’d opened something that was intended for someone else. It was easy to understand the mix-up: the recipient was also called Karina, spelt just as I spell it. She works in my building and has a surname that begins with M.
I began to repackage everything and reseal the parcel, ready to send on to the right Karina—but not before I took a photo of the lovely pendant and texted it to my sister. “I think there’s a message in this,” I wrote, in love with the instruction to “Breathe in Love.”
An hour later, I returned from a meeting to find an excited text from my sister (Natalie, together we’ve co-authored AWAKEN, a book of spiritual insights): “Call me! Amazing synchronicity!!!” Feeling a bit fizzy in the belly, I picked up the phone. I could tell immediately from the pitch of her voice that something special had happened.
She explained that she’d organised a giveaway of AWAKEN through an Instagram account, The Daily Guru, that has over 14,000 followers internationally. The administrator had just notified her of the winner. “Guess who won it,” she said. “Just guess!” For a second, there was silence. I had no idea. I offered a few lame suggestions, knowing they wouldn’t be right.
There was only one copy of AWAKEN to give away. The lucky winner? It was Karina M. The other Karina M. The one who works in my building and whose package I’d mistakenly unwrapped an hour earlier
I should also mention that prior to this, I’d never heard of the other Karina.
Within a few minutes, that had all changed. I emailed her and soon delivered into her hands the necklace and her prize of AWAKEN. We keep in touch now, appreciating the strange sequence of events that brought us together and understanding that, one day, we may come to understand why we were destined to meet.
But I’ll never understand the machinations that made it happen. What I felt on that Monday morning took me back to being a little kid burning with curiosity about spirits and mysteries—the unfathomable secrets of the invisible world—and the welcome sense of delightful surprises awaiting, never anything scary. It’s a powerful natural high. There’s a subtle pause before the brain begins to process a situation where the magical universe reasserts its dominion over the world of time and matter we dwell in.
That’s what I remember most about that miraculous Monday, when a what-are-the-chances moment delivered a precious gift of wonder into my hands.
Lipsticks at Bergen-Belsen
- At July 08, 2016
- By Karina Machado
- In My books, The spiritual path
- 0
Earlier this year I read a wonderful book called One Mind by Larry Dossey M.D. The book’s subtitle is “How our individual mind is part of a greater consciousness and why it matters.” One of the stories Dossey includes to support his premise had me in tears … have you ever heard of the shipment of lipsticks delivered—origin unknown—to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly after its liberation in 1945?
In April of that year, British troops liberated the camp. The horrors they witnessed are beyond comprehension: 40,000 prisoners in 200 huts and 10,000 bodies (including, somewhere, the gifted young diarist, Anne Frank). The hardened troops, as Dossey recounts, “cried like babies” but got to work. By the end of the month, food had arrived and survivors were receiving treatment.
British Lt. Colonel Mervin W. Gonin described what happened next in his diary: “A very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of a genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance,” he marvelled. “At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.”
This moving story not only illustrates the “kind of breakthrough that can occur when minds unite in the Great Connect,” as Dossey writes in One Mind, but it also reminds us of how a small “luxury” like lippie can help lift the spirits of a woman in need. Charities including The Beauty Bank understand this, and put together gift bags of toiletries for people escaping situations of domestic violence.
As Nat and I plan events and workshops tying in with the launch of Awaken and our Awaken Sisterhood initiative, we’re resolved to support this life-changing local charity in any way we can. Wishing you a beautiful weekend.
Introducing AWAKEN
Dear spirit sisters,
The final chapter in my last book, Love Never Dies, is called “The Path Winds and I Follow,” which describes both the trajectory of my daily walk around my neighbourhood—with its hills and curvy footpaths—and the trajectory of my spiritual life.
I suspect that I’m not alone in feeling that the path unfolds before me, and the universe, in perfect divine timing, places signposts to guide me on the way. I’m directed where to go next, step by small step. And so it was that one day, maybe in late 2013, I was flicking through Oprah magazine, and an article about her seven favourite soulful reads caught my eye. I shared it with my sister, Natalie, and we decided to read every one of the spiritual books on her list …
I am not sure if we could have imagined then, that some three years later, Natalie and I would be publishing an inspirational book of our own. It’s called AWAKEN: The Search is over, and it’s full of insights that we’ve gleaned during the last few eventful, eye-opening, heart-expanding years of finding our way back to our true selves—of heeding the call of the soul.
I find it extraordinary because, even though, ostensibly, it was reading Oprah’s list of soulful books that eventually birthed AWAKEN, if I travel far, far back into my memory, I know this is a path I’ve been on since I was a child. As a little girl listening, entranced, to my mum’s stories of premonitions about the deaths of loved ones, I was on the path. As a child fascinated by spooks and mysteries, I was on the path. As a schoolkid who yearned to connect with something vast and all-encompassing that I felt lay beyond our world of the senses, I was on the path. As the first-time author who published Spirit Sisters, a collection of women’s experiences of the paranormal, I was on the path. As the magazine journalist who had the chance to interview Deepak Chopra and see Wayne Dyer on stage a week before his passing, I was on the path.
And so it continues, and I am happy to surrender to the Divine Intelligence steering the ship—AWAKEN, the first book Natalie and I have co-authored, represents the manifestation of our joint decision to allow this Divine Intelligence to flow through us, unhindered. Many of the insights it contains arrived via Nat’s meditations, from a realm beyond the three-dimensional plane of our everyday lives. We call it a little book that creates big changes, and our ardent hope is that it helps put you on your own path back to your soul.
Love,
Karina x
New lease of life
- At April 17, 2016
- By Karina Machado
- In My books, This writer's life
- 0
I am sitting in my hotel room in Melbourne, where, outside my 8th-floor window, the light is just beginning to soften, turning gently golden, before twilight falls. The oval across the road is silent now, though seconds ago it was busy with the jagged shouts and cheers of an AFL match.
Melbourne sits serenely in my heart. It is a city I could live in, though that’s not on the cards for now, or perhaps ever. I’m content visiting when opportunity allows. I’m here this time to record my books as audio publications with Bolinda Audio, an experience I’ve loved. “Meeting” my interviewees again, “hearing” their voices (albeit it “through” me) and wrapping myself once more in stories that first hijacked my heart years ago, has been something magical.
As ever, I feel honoured that I was entrusted with these powerful personal stories, and reading them, I’m reminded with excitement how one would make a wonderful feature film, or basis for a novel, and another could be an entire memoir. It’s inspired me to re-establish contact with my open-hearted subjects, to find out what they’re up to now, learn how their lives has evolved since the moment snap-frozen within the pages of my book.
It’s also illuminating to revisit the yarns from my new perspective, since the spiritual path I’ve travelled since writing them has led me to some new perspectives. For instance, I now understand that love, forgiveness and compassion are our primary functions in life, and that our consciousness creates our reality through our beliefs. However, this doesn’t cast doubt on my subjects’ stories, on the contrary, now I see them as more profound than ever. Each experience fits, somehow, perfectly into the puzzle of each interviewee’s multi-dimensional self.
And I do believe we are multidimensional beings, and that there are some events that befall us on Earth that we will struggle to understand from our limited perspectives, or perhaps never understand at all (while we are still in our bodies). That’s part of the reason I love reading about near-death experiences (NDEs). The people who experience an NDE almost always say that the secrets of the universe were revealed to them. In a fraction of a second (in our terms) they understood it all … yet that knowledge was not theirs to keep for the journey “back”.
As you can see, I still love a good mystery. I still love the thrill of a spine-tingling story. These days, though, the tingles aren’t usually of the scary variety. Which brings me back to Melbourne, and part of the reason it’s so special for me. Last August, I flew to Melbourne to attend a two-day lecture by US author Wayne Dyer, which I found brilliant and life-changing (goosebumps aplenty!) A week later, I was stunned to learn that the “father of motivation and inspiration” had passed away—at his Maui home, of a heart attack—exactly one week after he’d poured out his final lessons to us. He was 75.
For I did get a sense that Wayne was “pouring out” his final teachings, and we, the audience, were drinking them up thirstily. I felt very, very lucky to be there—I couldn’t work out why that feeling was so strong in me, until Wayne passed away and then I understood. I’m forever grateful to Wayne and his teachings, which have helped steer me on this spiritual course, which is ultimately back to my heart. To me, following a spiritual path is about finding your way back to yourself, to your own connection with the divine, and taking flight into your life from that perch.
Now I’m back in Melbourne, helping my books soar again, this time in a new way. It’s a new lease of life for the series—2009’s Spirit Sisters, 2011’s Where Spirits Dwell and 2014’s Love Never Dies—and I’m thrilled that they’re going to find new audiences. As I wrote at the end of Love Never Dies, “the path winds, and I follow.” Let’s see where it takes me next.
Love,
Karina x