The Washing Line

The Washing Line

What do you see dangling from this washing line?  A pair of ankle socks, one pair of knee-length socks, a pair of trousers and an all-in-one garment.  (Well, actually a pair of pyjamas, top and trousers pinned together!)  I took a photograph of these items to illustrate this week’s topic.


A few days ago, I had the pleasure of chatting to a young girl who was sitting next to me while her Gran (my friend) had gone off on business for half an hour.  Knowing that the girl, after spending her primary years at a small country school, had recently started at a large secondary school, I asked her how she was getting on.


Clutching her mobile phone, she looked up with a sad and worried expression and replied “Not well.  I don’t like it.  I get panic attacks and I’m getting treatment for anxiety.  I try to meditate, but…”  Her voice trailed off miserably.


My heart went out to her.  Such a lovely sensitive-looking girl, only eleven or twelve years old, who should be enjoying this new chapter in her life!  But, alas, like many of her contemporaries, she has been badly affected by the many negative aspects of our present day: constant news of political uncertainty, violence, hatred and awful disasters, on radio, TV and the internet, possible cyber-bullying via her precious mobile phone, worry about the future –now including the effects of climate change…


As a retired teacher, I know how difficult it is at the best of times for young teenagers to cope with the switch to secondary school, in addition to the bewildering physical changes which puberty brings.   How I wished I could help her!


Looking at her tense posture, her nervous fingering of her phone, the way in which her left leg was placed over the right one with the left foot turning restlessly round and round – seeing all these, I was suddenly reminded of ‘The Washing Line’.  That is the title which I have given to a set of instructions which I learned long ago at a conference.  They have helped me to relax many times over the years whenever I have been under stress.  So, in the hope of helping the young schoolgirl, I took her through these instructions, one by one.  Perhaps they may be of use to you or a friend, so here they are…

The Washing Line

Find a quiet place where you are unlikely to be disturbed for twenty minutes or so.        Switch off any device such as mobile phone, computer, TV, radio, etc.   Sit upright on a comfortable chair, your back supported by a cushion if necessary.  Place your two feet flat on the floor.  Rest your hands, palm side down, on top of your thighs.  Try to relax your shoulders.  Close your eyes.


Now begin to breathe slowly in for a count of five, with your lips closed then out for a count of five, with your mouth slightly open.  At first you may still feel tense as you breathe in, but aim to release this tension every time you breathe out, through open lips.  Continue like this until you begin to feel relaxation descending into your lungs.  Don’t worry if this takes quite a few minutes, the first time you try it.  Just persist, perhaps managing to increase the count gradually from five up to ten each time you breathe in and out.


Now for the Washing Line!


Concentrate first of all on your feet and ankles.  Visualise them as a pair of ankle socks dangling from the washing line.  Continue breathing in and out, as before, until you can no longer feel them. 


Now move your concentration up to your knees, and visualise one pair of knee-length socks hanging loosely from the washing line.  Keep breathing slowly in and out, as before, until you can no longer feel your legs from the knee down.


Then move up to your waist level, and visualise a pair of trousers dangling from the washing line, until eventually your concentration is limited to the upper half of your body.


Pause.  Imagine that there is a little wheel spinning round inside you, just above your waist level.  Visualise putting a finger on it to slow it down, until it is rotating at a slow, steady rate.


Now, as you breathe in and out, concentrate on releasing the tension from your shoulders and the palms of your hands.  Visualise an all-in-one garment hanging from the washing line.  Let it dangle down in the gentle breeze.


Then, when your body below you is completely relaxed, concentrate on your head.  First, as you breathe in and out, relax your jaws, then your cheekbones, then your forehead.


Now imagine that there is a little space at the top of your head, through which your mind can soar up into a beautiful, peaceful place of your choice.  (I chose a moonlit garden; the young girl chose a sunny beach.)  Take time to enjoy its beauty and its peace...  Then think of something, however small, for which you are thankful, and silently say “Thank you” to God.  (Don’t worry if you find it difficult to believe in God.  Just say “Thank you” anyway.)  Silently ask for help with your problems.


Once you have done that, it is now time to come back down from your beautiful place, taking care to close the little space at the top of your head (known as the ‘fontanelle’.)  Imagine that soothing golden oil is now being poured into you, filling every part of you.  Silently, say “Thank you” again.


Open your eyes. Twiddle your toes, and stretch your feet, legs, hands and arms.


Get up and go!

Protection Needed!

Protection needed!

After the shock of my father’s sudden death, followed by the overwhelming realisation that loving contact can sometimes come to reassure us from ‘beyond the veil’, I slowly regained my equilibrium – but now knew that I needed protection.


 On the advice of a friend who had had similar experiences, I began to say the Lord’s Prayer at the start and the end of each day, concentrating especially on ‘Hallowed be Thy name’, ‘Deliver us from evil’ and ‘Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory’.  In addition, I established a new routine of reading my Bible twice a day - first thing in the morning before I got up and again at night when I went to bed.  A Plain Man’s Book of Prayers by William Barclay, the popular Scottish preacher, was also of great help.  It had not only a Biblical quotation but also both a morning prayer and an evening prayer for each day of the month.  This meant that I had to know which date and day of the week we were at – something which previously, in my misery and confusion, I had neither known nor cared about.

As you can see from the photo, the Barclay book eventually began to fall to pieces!  I then subscribed to The Upper Room, a pocket-sized book issued three times a year.  Each day has a Bible quotation chosen by a reader, who then tells us why it is of special importance to him/her.  This little book has provided me with help and spiritual support for almost fifty years!  - sometimes through days of great sorrow and anguish.  (It can now be ordered online, at www.brfonline.org.uk)


Did you notice the little sleeping cat in the photograph?  I put it beside my bed as a reminder to relax, to ’let go and let God’.


But now, today, I have to admit that this week another little cat completely freaked me out!  At breakfast on Wednesday I was idly scrolling down through Facebook when I came across an irresistible item about a dear wee kitten- and its reaction to a horror movie!  Its face was close up to the screen, its eyes moving faster and faster from side to side as the film music got louder and more sinister…  Then, as the action was obviously reaching a horrible climax, a voice suddenly said my name!!


Aghast and horrified, I hastily switched off my Kindle.  How could that have happened?  Was this a new development in Artificial Intelligence?  I thought of ‘Alexa’, of how my bank now offers ‘help’ from robots, of how companies get to know one’s name and preferences.  How had that speaker come to know my name?  Did everyone who watched the kitten get their own name pronounced at the climax of the horror film?  If so, I thought indignantly, there must be many other viewers, including innocent children, feeling scared out of their wits!  Maybe this was meant to be a pre-Halloween joke?  Is there any form of protection available, perhaps from a company such as Norton, from this new personalised addition to a horror movie?


These thoughts troubled me all morning as I went shopping in the town centre.  Still feeling shaky, I decided to treat myself to lunch in a cafeteria.  I asked a young waiter if he or any of his colleagues knew of any such recent development in AI which had enabled someone to say my name aloud as I watched an item on Facebook.  The young man replied that he was not aware of any such thing, but that he understood my alarm and would try to find an explanation.  (Fortunately, the cafeteria was almost empty just then!) 


He soon came back, brandishing his smart phone.  “I ‘googled’ kitten and horror movie, and I got an article on the Daily Mail website.  Apparently, the cat had been watching Psycho.  The scary action takes place at the Bates’ Motel.  The climax comes when the young woman discovers the corpse of the evil Norman Bates’s mother in a rocking chair.  So that’s why the voice you heard said “Mrs Bates”.  It’s just a coincidence that it happens to be your name too!”  We laughed at this simple explanation, especially when I told him that I write about coincidences!


But…


There must be many other women known by the name ‘Mrs Bates’ who could be freaked out as I had been.  Back at home I ‘googled’ Psycho and Mrs Bates, and saw the crucial moment in the original film when the young woman screams in horror on seeing Norman’s mother’s corpse.  Needless to say, there was no over-voice politely announcing, “Mrs Bates”!


What surprised and intrigued me next was that when I told some friends about my freaky experience, they did not laugh, but said somewhat nervously that they thought such a personalising trick was very likely possible now, given the rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence.  It is very alarming to think that there might be people “out there”, as we say,(referring to cyber space), who might not only want to use AI as a means of stealing our money, but also as a means of destroying our mental health, for their own purposes.  Perhaps it is time for humans to stop watching horror films, and avoid wandering thoughtlessly around the Internet.  We are all vulnerable.

We need protection!

As usual, I turn to the Bible for spiritual comfort, and look up words from the letter written to the Romans by Paul, whose supernatural encounter with the resurrected Jesus completely changed his life.  (Romans 8, verses 38, 39)


‘In spite of all, overwhelming victory is ours through him who loved us.  For I am convinced that there is nothing in death or life, in the realm of spirits or superhuman powers, in the world as it is or the world as it shall be, in the forces of the universe, in heights or depths – nothing in all creation that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.’

Deo gratias

Lost, then Found

Lost, then Found

“Your trouble, Mrs Bates, is that you have a Dependent Personality,” declared the psychiatrist.  “And”, he added, “you probably read too many women’s magazines.”    I stared at him in angry disbelief.  “He just doesn’t get it” I thought.


After my father’s sudden death, followed by the frightening growing awareness of possible psychic connections between the two sides of ‘the veil’, my mental and spiritual turmoil had become unbearable.  I had lost my former sense of identity and felt like a strange restless zombie.  During the day I somehow managed to look after my family and attend to the housekeeping, but once the children were in bed the huge unanswered questions tormented me continuously: Where is Dad now?  What happens after death? Where is God in all this mess?  I have always been told not to ‘dabble’ in Spiritualism – so am I wicked to be having these thoughts?


I knew of nobody who could help me.  My kind minister sympathised but just suggested that I should see a doctor.  Any talk about death seemed to be taboo in polite company!  Bob tried his best to soothe and comfort me, but he too was at a loss for answers. 


One evening when he was out at a meeting, I found it totally impossible to sit still and watch the television.  I roamed restlessly into the kitchen – and spied a sharp knife.  I looked down at my wrists…  Temptation…   Of course, I did not want to abandon my beloved family – but, now at the end of my tether, I was simply desperate for this agony to STOP…


Horrified, I made my trembling way to the telephone and dialled my mother’s number.  As soon as she heard my distraught voice, she told me that she would come immediately, and that meanwhile I was to put on the kettle for a cup of tea, and look out some biscuits!


 How blessed I was to have such a practical down-to-earth mother.  To this day I still thank God for her pragmatic help that evening.  She herself had suffered a nervous breakdown after losing a baby boy two years before I was born – but had come through it, and remembered how important rest was, plus little manual tasks.  We agreed that I urgently needed medical help. 


The next day I managed to get an appointment with my doctor, who prescribed a course of tranquillisers and arranged for me to have some sessions with the afore-mentioned psychiatrist, Dr M.  However, it soon became clear that Dr M did not wish to engage in any talk about paranormal experiences or religious faith.

After telling him about the strange thud at the door after my father’s sudden death, I described two other inexplicable occurrences which Bob and I had experienced, separately, four years before, at the birth of our first baby.  Having had little or no dealing with new-born babies, I expected that ours would be a small, red, squawking creature!  Instead, when Sally was placed on my stomach only a few minutes after her birth, she was pale and composed,and stared straight into my eyes, as if to say, “Well, hello, here I am!”  Half an hour later, when Bob arrived at the hospital, she did exactly the same to him, as a nurse held her up for him to see for the first time. This had filled us full of wonder!                                               

(Here she is, still keeping an eye on her Daddy!)

“Oh, don’t be silly!” exclaimed Dr M.  “You wouldn’t feel like that if you were a mother of six, having her seventh baby in a one-room Glasgow tenement flat!”


What had that to do with anything?  Such a crassly insensitive response confirmed my suspicion that Dr M. and I were on completely different wave lengths.  By this time, I was feeling a little more like myself, thanks to the tranquillisers which had allowed me to sleep at nights. So, my anger at Dr M. had a positive effect! I now felt independent of him and ready to try to cope on my own, without any psychiatric ‘help’.


Then one morning, as I was hanging out the washing, I suddenly realised with joy that I could now believe the Gospel story of Jesus’ resurrection!  Not because a preacher in a pulpit had told me to, not because I wanted to be a dutiful church member, but because of my own experience.  At long last I had found someone – Jesus Christ – who understood about life after death!


 Full of relief and gladness, I resolved to re-read the Gospels (the ‘Good News’) in this new light.  I noted that in the story of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16, verses19-31), Jesus had included the possibility of someone returning from the dead.  He had not said that this was evil, but had simply emphasised that such a psychic event was not of any spiritual value.  All that really mattered was to: ’Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and your neighbour as yourself.


Jesus also said: ‘Blessed are those who know their need of God. The kingdom of Heaven is theirs.’  (Matthew 5, verse 3)

So, my desperate need of God – my ‘Dependent Personality’ – far from being a negative trait, was a positive asset!  And, I thought, if I occasionally happened to be aware of something that others might call ‘paranormal’, well, so be it!  The most important things were to trust in God and to pray – remembering especially ‘Thy will be done’ and ‘Deliver us from evil’.

Gradually, gradually, I emerged from ‘the valley of the shadow of death’.  It was then that I began to notice startling coincidences, which brought me comfort, joy – and laughter!

Deo gratias

Someone at the Door

Someone at the Door

Someone came knocking at my wee small door.

Someone came knocking, I’m sure-sure-sure.

I listened, I opened, I looked to left and right,

But nought there was a-stirring in the still dark night.

So begins a poem by Walter de la Mare which was one of the first I memorised as a child.  My mother composed a little tune for it, and we used to enjoy singing it together.


Fourteen years after the life-changing incident described in my last blog post, A Startling Discovery, I had cause to remember those words.  By then I was thirty years old, happily married to Bob, with two lovely little daughters.


One Sunday morning in April we had just arrived home after visiting Bob’s mother and father when the telephone rang.  Bob answered it.  Looking shocked, he turned to me and said “It’s your mother.  Your father has just died”.


I rushed over to my parents’ house.  As I entered the living-room I saw the familiar sight of the balding top of my father’s head above the high back of his armchair.  But then I was confronted by the pale silent presence of Death on that beloved face…


My mother told me what had happened.  On his return from the Sunday evening church service, he had sat down for a cup of tea, about to tell her a piece of local news, when he had suddenly given a gasp and died of a massive heart attack.


It seemed to me that a terrible subtraction sum had been made.  There in front of me was his body – but minus his spirit.  This body, familiar as it was, was not my Dad.  It was meaningless without his personality, his essence.  Where was his spirit now?  That I could no longer communicate with him felt like torture.


He and I had been very close.  A street photographer took this photo of us on holiday in Rothesay when I was five.  (My mother is in the background.  She didn’t feel well enough dressed to be in the picture!) 

Every Sunday morning the two of us would walk together to church, leaving Mum in peace to cook the Sunday roast!  (She preferred to attend the quiet evening service.)  Before the children left to go to Sunday School, I loved to hear my father singing the bass part of each hymn.  He instilled in me a great love of music.  He played the piano and sang in a choir.  When I was seven, he took me to my first orchestral concert – the SNO conducted by Walter Susskind.  On Sunday afternoons we would often set out together on what he jokingly called our ‘Sunday Walk’ – our aim being to travel on as many different kinds of transport as possible! – a bus, a tram, the Underground, and (best of all) the Govan ferry across the River Clyde.


A chartered accountant, he worked hard to support my mother, my younger sister, Freda, and me.  (Freda was born in Ayr after we moved there from Glasgow when I was eight.)  Quiet and calm, but with a good sense of humour, he was our rock on whom we all depended – something we realised only too well after his death.


Now, in the midst of my shock and grief, a strange, unfamiliar worry tormented me.  Did he know that he had suddenly passed on?  Was there anyone there to receive him, to comfort him?  His mother, my Gran, for example?


Totally unprepared for the traumatic suddenness of this parting, I did not know how to react.  On the funeral day and for the next two months I struggled to maintain an air of composure, while inwardly I battled with the huge questions which now confronted me: Where does the spirit go after death?  Will we meet our loved ones again some day?  Where is God in all of this? 


At home I tried to appear cheerful and normal for the sake of Bob and our two small daughters, not allowing myself to shed a single tear – but all the while the little girl inside me was silently sobbing, ‘Oh, Daddy … Daddy!’


All this was difficult enough to cope with, but something even more mind-blowing was to follow. One night, about six weeks after the funeral, Bob and I were just settling down in bed when we were startled by a loud thud at our front door.


“Someone’s trying to break in!” we exclaimed, sitting up in alarm.  But what burglar would make such a loud noise?  It sounded as if he had made a rush at the door, trying to force it open.  Hastily we reached for our clothes.  I was trembling with fright.


But suddenly something strange happened. A wonderful sense of peace and reassurance enveloped both of us simultaneously.  Puzzled, we stared at one another.  Somehow, we knew there was nothing to worry about.  We continued dressing, but less hurriedly, then made our way to the front door.  There was not the slightest sign of any unwelcome visitor, nor any damage to the door.  We looked to left and right, but both garden and street were silent, deserted.  And yet we had both heard that sudden loud noise, just before the strange calm had descended on us!


Whatever could it all mean?  Troubled, I began to wonder if maybe, just maybe, it could possibly have been my father, trying to reassure us that all was well with him?  That thud on the front door was the sound which, in the month before his death, had announced his arrival.  Because the newly-painted door had tended to stick, he would thud his shoulder against it and give it a strong shove in order to open it.


A few mornings later my mother phoned me, in a considerable state of agitation.

“You’ll have to phone the police for me!” she said urgently.  “Last night an intruder was at the back door, ringing the doorbell!”


I felt my hair stand on end.  Being of a nervous disposition, Mum had been in the habit of barricading herself in whenever Dad was out at night.  Both front and back doors had a lock, bolts and a chain.  There were two different doorbells – another safety precaution, so that she could tell whether the caller was a stranger at the front door, or Dad, who always used the back door after parking the car at the rear of the house.  He was the only person who ever rang the back doorbell.


“You must just have had a bad dream”, I replied as soothingly as I could – trying to control my own alarm – “In any case, what kind of burglar would announce his presence by politely ringing the doorbell?”  That worked for a couple of days - until the same thing happened again! 


Now I faced a dilemma.  What was I to do?  Phone the police, as she requested – but tell them what, exactly?  Remembering that she always steered clear of any talk of a possible after-life, I could not risk frightening her by suggesting that these might have been paranormal experiences.   That would have been too unkind, especially now that she was all alone at night.  I just had to continue my attempts to try to soothe her.


A few days later I was bending down, tying four-year-old Sally’s pixie hood under her chin when she suddenly came out with “I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m really dead!”  then skipped off out into the garden!  I straightened up, looking after her in amazement, but she was busy playing with a toy.  She obviously had no idea of the significance of the words she had just uttered…   (Some years later she told me casually that she had seen her Grandpa after his death.  He had peeped out from behind a door, playing ‘Keek-a-boo!’ with her, as he had done ever since she was a baby.)


By now I felt close to breaking point.  Day and night, I battled with huge questions concerning life and death, until I was in a state of total nervous exhaustion.  To my shock and grief had now been added the primitive fear of an invisible dimension of spirit!


Dear blog reader, what would you do in such circumstances?  What would you expect to happen next?  What advice would you give me?


What actually did happen is described in Chapter 4 of my book Joyful Witness.  If you don’t have a copy, here are two clues! –  the first is the title of the book; the second is the title of that Chapter: Reborn. 


Suffice it to say here that over the next few months, the words of the Lord’s Prayer became more and more precious to me, as did the 23^rd Psalm, especially verse 4…   

Deo gratias