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Magician
Of The Mind
| Shirin
Naidoo is a woman with a mission. She talks about her work
with a consuming passion and is thoroughly committed to making
a difference in the world. Last month saw the launch of
her charity, "The Shirin Naidoo Trust" an organisation
dedicated to making holistic treatment widely and freely available
to people living with HIV, Aids and other immune-disfunctional
illnesses. Some of the people with full blown Aids that
Shirin worked with seven years ago at the Terrence Higgins Trust
who had been given between three to six months to live are alive
and well today, confounding their medical prognosis.
The Terrence Higgins Trust presented Shirin with a special award
commending her for her "exemplary contribution and outstanding
service to the community in the field of HIV and Aids".
It is these qualities, together with the exceptional results
she achieves, that seem destined to make her one of the
best-known as well as one of the most capable healers of
our time. |
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I believe that
the techniques we offer are very powerful indeed," she says,
That is why we have now set up the charity. We wanted to make
these methods available on a much wider basis. People with life-threatening
illnesses such as Aids and cancer need to have far greater choice
in their lives than may currently be available to them."
While Shirin does not deny the efficacy of orthodox medicine in certain
cases, she believes her own approach allows people to access their
own power in the midst of crisis, ultimately allowing them to
transform the quality of their lives, as well as their health.
"One problem with orthodox medicine," she says, "is
that it tends to zero in on isolated areas of the physical body,
and heavily underplays or ignores the fact that there's a whole
person there with a lifestyle and behaviors that could have a very
great bearing on the course of the illness. It's also heavily
biased towards the pathological and uses all kinds of potentially
harmful chemicals to attack the illness. I know that many of the
people with Aids who have come to see me have given up on orthodox
medicine because they found they weren't getting well using all
the drugs they'd been given. In some cases I had people coming
to see me taking fifty to sixty tablets a day, and I had the feeling
they weren't dying of Aids, but of excess medication."
"What I do is very different, you see," she says,
warming to her topic. "When you come to see me I'm looking
at the whole of your life, your patterns of behavior, how
you relate to the people around you. I am looking at the whole
person - a real live human being with a physical body, but
also with thoughts, with feelings, with families and very
painful issues to deal with - all of which can have a very,
considerable effect on the course of an illness."
While Shirin sometimes uses aromatherapy massage and hands-on
healing with her clients, it is upon the role of the mind in the
self-healing process that Shirin places particular emphasis.
"So much research has been done that has proven the ability of
the mind to influence the physical body. The mind is the most
powerful piece of equipment we have. It's much more powerful
and versatile than any computer you could ever design. And the
mind can make a tremendous difference in the whole quality of our
lives - and not just our health - as long as we know how to
use it properly. And that is basically what's on offer at
our workshops: the techniques that we teach are not just about
healing your physical body but about shifting and growing in all areas
of your life. We offer people more choices as to how they can
see, feel, think and act in the world. And that doesn't
just apply to people who are ill. We also do workshops for people
who are fit and well but who want to transform the quality of their
lives."
All this is not to deny the role of viruses and bacteria and their
effects on the physical body. "They may well be there.
But the fact that we all have cancer cells in our body does not mean
that we're going to all get cancer. I believe it was Claude
Bernard who said that the microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything.
If you think in a certain way, hold certain beliefs, live
in a certain way and follow the processes that we teach, there
is no doubt in my mind that you can heal yourself of cancer, Aids
or of any other so called terminal illness. That may seem like
a monumental statement to make, but then I believe in the monumental
power of the human mind, body and spirit. And this has not
just been borne out by the people I've worked with. Just look
at the work being done in the States by Dr Siegel, Dr Simonton
and Louise Hay.
Shirin strongly believes in the efficacy of self-healing meditation
and visualisation. "We do a lot of this in our workshops.
I work a lot with people in altered state. I believe that true
magic can happen in an altered, or meditative state of consciousness.
We do exercises that work with people's limiting beliefs as to
how they can heal themselves and who they can become in the world.
We do a lot of very gentle, yet powerful visualisations to release
negative emotions - fear, anger, resentment, shame,
guilt - that can weaken the immune system and engender disease.
If someone is harboring a lot of suppressed anger or resentment,
for example, can there be any wonder that negative energy is caught
up internally and is one day going to have some kind of effect on
the physical body, manifesting as arthritis, for example.
That's why forgiveness is so important."
Some of the people with Aids that Shirin sees are from the gay community
and may feel a considerable sense of guilt and shame at some level
of their being if they have grown up with parents, peers and their
religion all seeming to condemn them for the way they were living
their lives. "But for me nothing is wrong. People are
not wrong or bad. We have all come to this planet to learn.
For me, each and every human being, whoever they may be,
whatever they may do, is and remains a spark of God. Everybody
is at their essence divine. And if I didn't believe that,
I couldn't do this work, because I'd be coming from a
place of judgment - and who are any of us to judge or condemn
other human beings in that way?"
Shirin Naidoo spent her childhood in the South Africa of the 1950s
and 60s. Her father, an associate of Nelson Mandela, was
obviously a prime target for the authorities, and her childhood
was thus a time of considerable turbulence and uncertainty. "I
can remember the police coming to question me about the where abouts
of my father. I think that growing up in such circumstances -
living on the edge if you like - led me to search for meaning
in peoples lives at a far younger age than you might normally expect.
She has very clear views about her father's life. "I believe
that what he was doing was fine to the extent that he was looking
at the quality of people's lives and how they could be enhanced.
There was certainly a strong impulse to serve humanity there.
But I am personally more drawn towards Mahatma Gandhi's non-violent
way, because it really encourages a complete shift in consciousness.
If I look at my father's background, I can see that he was
always fighting for justice in his life, because as a child he
had been brought up by his uncle and had never been given the same
love and respect as his uncle had given to his own children. So
he took this sense of injustice, along with a whole lot of anger
and resentment, and sought to resolve it in a cause outside himself.
But he was still looking to resolve things that way. If you can
resolve something within yourself,
Shirin lays great emphasis upon this issue of personal change,
and the idea of working on yourself continuously, whether or not
you have an illness. "Listen," she says, "I
couldn't do what I, do if I didn't continuously put this
philosophy into my life. I am always working upon myself,
and all the people who assist me have made the commitment to do the
same. I never tell others to do what I have not been able to do
for myself. And it's a process that never stops. You see,
I take full responsibility for what is happening in my life. On
some level I created it, or chose it to learn and grow. And
nobody's been through a tougher or more traumatic life than I
have - illnesses, marriages, family problems, you
name it, I've been there. I feel like I've had three
lifetimes in one. But," she emphasises, "the so-called
crises were often in retrospect the greatest of blessings. They
were opportunities for me to make quantum shifts in my life, and
without them I would never have reached the levels I am now reaching."
So does she believe that at some level people actually create their
illnesses? "Look, everything in our lives happens for
just one reason: so that we can learn and grow. Illness is
no exception. It is a signal in our lives telling us that something
needs to be done differently. It may be that we need to value
and love ourselves more by making changes in our diet, our lifestyle
or in how we relate to others. Some of the people I've seen
with Aids have even said that Aids was the best thing that happened
to them because it forced them to completely reevaluate what they
were doing with their lives."
The issue of death is clearly a fundamental one for anyone working
with people with life- threatening illnesses. Shirin sees
death as part of what she terms 'the bigger picture!'
"For me, life is just a play of consciousness; none of
it is real, however real it may seem. It's just about
learning lessons and evolving to new levels within ourselves -
that's all. Death is not an ending as far as I'm concerned.
It's part of the process of life we're all going to through
some day. I sometimes tell my clients who have Aids that,
whereas in the West we mourn when someone dies and rejoice when someone
is born, in India it's often the reverse: death is seen
as a cause for celebration, because people believe that the soul
is going to a far better place than this."
Shirin's work, however, is ultimately a vibrant and emphatic
affirmation of life" It is about assisting people in transforming
their lives in the here and now, whatever their present situation.
"My workshops are about helping people to realise the tremendous
powers that lie latent within each and every one of us and to which
we can all ultimately become the magicians in our own lives." |
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