Monday August 7th 2008 12.18

Month: geng shen the metal Monkey

Solar Fortnight: lap chow Autumn Begins

Healing in High Heels

A metal monkey month again; like the year 2004 if you want a comparison. A time of standing back and minding our own business. Some people in Georgia (the Caucasus not USA) will know this already.

My friend Bernadette is back in the country after a long time in South East Asia. She tells me she is returning there in a month or so. I don’t know when she will be back.

Bernadette is a uniquely gifted new age healer; sexy, funny, down to earth and with a heart as big as the Malacca Strait. Very flesh-and-blood but with an extraordinary connection to the divine. Her particular focus is relationship. I have seen her mend marriages across a crowded room with a silly joke.

Most of my best friends are women. This has not always been so. I was a particular sort of male fool in my twenties, pursuing money, status and women as if all three were commodities. But things happened, one of my sisters died, I met my wife Sheila and I re-discovered my soul. A big part of this learning process was a series of workshops I undertook during the 1980’s and 1990’s with a variety of Masters some Chinese, most not – covering issues such as sex, money and violence. Much of what qualifies me to talk now within the schtick of feng shui is that I have spent hundreds of hours dealing with my own screw-ups in most of the issues that matter. Much of this journey was in Bernadette’s company.

Now I’m a different sort of male fool.

At the turn of the century she wrote a book that did not sell much though typically, unlike many of us, she got a major publisher to pay her properly and spend money on promotion. It’s a good book but it’s out of print now. In the latter half of the 90’s, having learned the ropes promoting an American teacher/healer/guru/what-have-you, and after falling out with him and his tireless demands, she started putting on regular weekend workshops of her own. These would take groups ranging from half-a-dozen to fifty plus from whatever dark place each was in to euphoria in forty-eight hours. How did she do this?

I don’t know but I can tell you that when my twin 20-year-old daughters caught up with her last week, they reminded her of the afternoon they had spent together a decade ago.

“Every one of the purposes we set that day have come true,” Henrietta told her and there was mist in Bernadette’s eyes.

I know how demanding it is to put on workshops. Sheila and myself have a rule which is that we will only put one on if the universe absolutely demands it. It has to be effortless. When the going gets tough, the growing let go. Bernadette has a particular sort of indomitability that keeps her pushing doors even when the weight behind them is a thousand times her own. Over time putting her workshops together ceased to be effortless.

Although she has a thousand good friends, her ba zi shows gip choi, that is poor quality control. Of all the wise people I have known she has perhaps the worst idea of what a friend actually is. So many of her “friends” just wanted a piece of her. And she’d give it: full breakfast, onion soup for lunch, free overnight accommodation and her full attention. In time she just had to take herself out of the picture. So many needy people needed her so much and she needed so badly to be needed that she could see no way out but to scarper.

And as you might expect, although her special gift is the mending of relationship, she’s not been so great at it herself. As Richard Bach wrote: “We teach best that which we need to learn.” This powerful sensitive woman spent decades trying to get her father to respect her gifts. He would in the way of the Northern working man devastate her by mumbling, “load of rubbish” and changing the subject.

I did some feng shui for Bernadette perhaps seven years ago. She and her splendidly tasteful house needed grounding. The major things I did were to place pebbles at the base of her toilets which were too close to the heart of the house and to move some pipes around at the rear of the building. Water of course is the most powerful weapon in the feng shui arsenal. If your house faces onto a sea front you don’t want untamed water to the rear or at the tai chi. In a sense she was floating away. The next time I visited, the pipes were back in the chaos I’d rescued them from.

“Rocky did it,” she said.

Rocky was her partner, a big cheerful likeable bloke without a complex sinew in him. They had been together around ten years. This verbal dismissal jarred.

She rang me a month later.

“The doctors say I have a hole in my heart.”

“There’s no hole in your heart,” I reassured her.

“So what’s it all about?” she asked wearily.

This is not a woman who asks advice easily. I have seen her address her own heartbreaking problems – children, lovers, loss – in a group session and refuse to break down, saving her tears for a later private moment.

“You’re not running your own relationship in line with what you teach,” I told her.

She did not speak to me for a year. That can be the freight you pay in my business. After that she rang again.

Rocky had been having affairs all along. There was no hole on that huge heart but now it was broken.

“How did you know?” she asked.

“How you spoke of him,” I said “And the pipes.”

“I didn’t know,” she said softly.

She stopped running workshops, sold her house and fled to Sumatra. Before she left I asked for help with some dramas of my own; ironically concerning a house move we did not want to make. Call it the Universe, Goddess or whatever, the tao has a sense of humour.She was typically generous and helpful.

Over the next few years we kept in some sort of touch. Whenever I found myself with a moment I’d contact her, once from a hotel in Hong Kong another time from a motel in Bermuda, myself working away from home, alone and disoriented. We’d exchange twenty-word texts and be some sort of up-to-date.

Now she tells me she has some sort of fibrosis which she has been treating with traditional Chinese medicine.

“They say it’s water,” she tells me.

“Not water,” I say. I don’t need to consult her ba zi or see her hut on stilts to know this. I’m not even sure exactly what fibrosis is. “Metal.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Metal is competition, authority, the hurly burly, gurus, fathers. And er.. the mature man. Water in this sense is communication. You have no problem with communication.”

“I always knew it wasn’t my heart,” she says.

“The problem was always the pipes,” I say. “Anyway the heart would be fire.”

She’s off now to undergo Hoffman Quadrinity in Manhattan where she can be sure she won’t bump into someone else who needs processing. Then South East Asia, then who knows?

Further News Flash: Be the mouthpiece of the Tao: On the weekend of October 19^th we host another ba zi workshop. This is a life-changing interactive event not a teaching weekend. We plan also a separate series of weekends teaching ba zi, construction and interpretation, spanning the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009. But only as I wrote above, if the universe wants it. Express the will of the universe by letting us know if you are interested. Thanks R.

Richard Ashworth © 2008

Names have been changed to protect..uh…me.

Feedback is welcomed including that you never want to hear from me again if that happens to be the case. Please also let us know if you are getting too many or too few diaries or that they are appearing in Cinemascope on your screen or whatever. Thanks. R

My (still) super-duper (still) revamped website is atwww.imperialfengshui.infoand my book The Feng Shui Diaries is available now from:

Amazon(www.amazon.co.uk/Feng-Shui-Diaries-Richard-Ashworth/dp/1846940176/sr=8-4/qid=1166798863/ref=sr_1_4/026-3383613-4930062?ie=UTF8&s=books

Waterstoneswww.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/displayProductDetails.do?sku=5567853)

or indeed Tescos. Do buy it from a bookshop if you can.