EILEEN CADDY - SURRENDERING TO AGE
By William Bloom
Network News, Findhorn Foundation
Autumn 2003
Original Link.............
Many of you will know that Eileen Caddy, a wonderful woman and co-founder of the Findhorn Foundation, died... December 2006 -- at the age of 89. Those of you who want to know more about her can visit the Findhorn Foundation website to learn more (see below for links).
I was lucky enough to count her as a friend. I wrote the following piece in 2003.
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What follows is a short article about Eileen Caddy, co-founder of the Findhorn Foundation. It describes how she changed her attitude towards her own death.
This is a wonderful and inspiring story, which I hope touches you as much as it did me.
Leading a retreat at Findhorn in May 2003, I took some time off to visit Eileen whom I love. We had a wee chat and I was very grateful when she agreed to come and talk with the retreat group. But there was something about Eileen that was more peaceful and joyful than I had experienced before. She told me a few things that I would normally keep confidential -- but she then also shared the same things with the group and has been talking about it with other people. So I feel free, with her blessing, to share them more widely.
"I'm going to stay around now for as long as I'm needed," Eileen told the group. "And I don't want to die anymore."
She went on to explain how she had just been on a trip down south to visit her family. In the house of one of her sisters, she had fallen to the floor and she had also got stuck in the bath. In both instances, she was unable to lift herself up and had to call on the help of her sister.
"I lay on the ground," she told us, "and relaxed. I realised then that I needed help and I was able to say, I need help."
Listening to her and watching her, it was inspiring to see what a deep transformation and inner surrender she had been through. She was flowing, glowing and bubbling with more life and love. The energy and attitude were beautiful.
It was also marvellous to witness a senior citizen still in the process of learning and transforming. With a smile, she was still up for the lessons that Classroom Earth gives us all. I was pleased too that she was now also experiencing relief from the back pain and severe spasms that she had been enduring over recent years. Her body was more comfortable now and so too was her attitude.
Some of you may remember that for a while she was quite grim and impatient about still being alive. She was open about this with everyone. She did not want to be in an old painful body relying on other people. She had done her work and was ready to move on! Her attitude was almost military. Mission accomplished!
That attitude has now melted. Once again, she had surrendered more deeply to the embrace of God's love. She had pulled herself through that huge lesson which the last decades of life present to us all. She was flowing with the natural cycle of physical decline and its lessons of acceptance and new wisdom.
This was personally very poignant for me. Not so long ago my own mother, 'Freddy' Bloom, a war heroine from the Second World War -- she had spent three years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp and had become the inspiration and support for the spirit of all the women there -- had not approached her death with such surrender. She was a great open-hearted, humorous woman and had later participated in reconciliation ceremonies in Japan, but she was strong and fiercely independent. Until the day she died, she retained her fiery sense of self-sufficiency and was intense as she resisted any dependence. She was also in physical pain -- a pain that was closely linked to her resilient and stoic attitude.
It was a touching paradox for me, wanting my mother to surrender to the physical realities of her old age and yet respecting her courage and character that had been forged in truly cruel realities. The very virtues that had made her a heroine and survivor were now the source of physical pain. Her willfulness and strength had once been the perfect manifestation of the vitality and flow of life -- but they now needed to surrender and harmonise in order to allow healing.
The major feature of the new spirituality is its focus on healing, Professor Paul Heelas of Lancaster University recently suggested at an academic conference at the Open University. Most of the delegates -- all scholars studying holism and the new age movement -- agreed with his opinion. Spiritual healing, hands-on healing, bodywork, counselling, psychotherapy, earth healing, political healing, social healing, planetary healing . . . these are indeed major features of the newly emerging global spirituality.
As many of us know, the most cynical of folk turn to a holistic approach when there is a physical or emotional crisis. Listening to the conference, it occurred to me that 'healing' is in fact the respectable and acceptable word that is used in the mainstream to describe what is really happening: spiritual growth and spiritual development. Perhaps, in fact, there is no difference at all between spiritual growth and healing. And I started to play with some simple equations:
Illness + Spiritual Development = Healing.
Resistance + Surrender-to-Universal-Flow = Spiritual Development.
In my own major illnesses -- the first was hepatitis-B that almost killed me and the second was a back injury that had me almost immobile for two years -- my healing only started when I began to feel some acceptance and love moving through my illness. That love was guided by my heart and mind, no longer complaining or resisting, but giving way to the flow.
Most healers, whether they work with individuals or groups, know that their main task is to release people back into an open heart and mind.
As Eileen surrendered and opened to the reality of her aging, she was filled with a greater love and strength.
At the Findhorn Foundation's Spirit of Healing Conference this coming Easter, we shall focus on how we can apply this understanding of healing to all aspects of our lives -- personal and communal. Our goal, our highest ideal surely, is to bring the whole community of life into the liberation and paradise-on-earth that comes through healing.
I look forward to the Easter conference and experiencing the wide range of skills and inspirations that will be on offer.
I shall also really enjoy watching Eileen light the ceremonial candle that opens the gathering. Her body may be slight, but her eyes will be twinkling. Physical form and psychological patterns need always to be changing and adjusting to the emerging flow. Nothing remains static.
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RELATED LINKS:
Eileen Caddy QuickTime MovieEileen Caddy Information & Links------------
PREVIOUS NHNE NEWS LIST ARTICLE:
FINDHORN'S EILEEN CADDY DIES AT 89 (12/19/2006):
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nhnenews/message/12301