The Journey that led to bocArus
by Issabella

When I look back on the process that resulted in bocArus, it is almost as if I had no choice in the matter. As if something bigger than me picked me up and stripped me down, until I finally realised that my life did not belong to me after all.

We are conditioned to think that a 'spiritual life' will reward us with perfect partners, fabulous wealth and eternal happiness. I came to understand that these things, which I so longed to create in my life, could only be given to me when I was truly willing to let go of them. What I was finally graced with in terms of peace, contentment, a sweet compatible relationship and material abundance only came when I understood that my life, and everything that happens to me, belongs to God. To get to this understanding I had to give everything I had. It wasn't easy.

Now, looking back in deep gratitude, I can hardly remember what it's like to feel helpless, hopeless, frustrated and often angry to the point of outrage. More than once I was diagnosed as being biologically 88 years old. Once, when I was with an Ayurvedic doctor, he could not find my pulse. He told me I was too weak to even have a massage. Often unable to lift my arms or even speak, I knew that for me there was only one way through: to go inside. I instinctively knew that we create our world from inside ourselves and understood the 'Kingdom of Heaven' to be inside me.

Finding the answer within
So I told God that I would sit down and find the answer within. And if this did not work, it would be preferable for me to die. For many years my deepest wish was, in fact, to die. Being in this life felt strange, disorientating and excruciatingly painful. I realised that I was not living fully, not crying all my tears, not laughing all my laughter, but merely existing, clinging to hopes and dreams of creating something better.

I lost my health, my income, my marriage and the house in which I felt connected to this strange world for the first time. I was ridden with resentment, victim-hood and self-destructive tendencies. It seemed the rules kept changing as soon as I started to get a grip on how to play the game of life. Every time I created some vestige of hope to survive this onslaught it was ripped from under my feet. As if the sole reason for this whole process was to teach me how to listen, and how to surrender.

Today I know that is exactly what needed to happen. I had to learn how to listen and surrender.

Ascended Masters, bliss and the deconstruction of the ego
Soon after the prayer to live my life fully escaped from my soul I started to make contact with the Ascended Masters. Thus began a process in which I was often transported into states of great bliss, blasted with a light and the experience of Love that I cannot even begin to put into words. Lost in another world that brought solace, sometimes for hours, I soared away, unable to comprehend the vastness of that which was taking me. Hours later I would return to normal consciousness, often not knowing where I had been.

A directive I got repeatedly was that processing my inner stuff was the only way for me to work myself out of the extreme grip of victim-hood and dysfunction. So, for years, along with using the Waters and the Gold and communicating for hours a day with my beloved Ascended Masters, I learned to process my issues from every angle I could find. When other people watched television, I processed. When other people got together and partied, I processed. There was nothing more important to me than unravelling myself, although it was rather painful as every bit of darkness hidden in the corners of my psyche showed itself huge and clear.

Many things are so much clearly today. I see that I must have been in constant detox, which must have been a huge part of the debilitating exhaustion I lived with for so many years. Another thing that happened for years (and to a lesser degree still happens now and then) was that my mind would get wiped out. At these times I wouldn't be able to read or even listen to what intelligent people do with their brilliant minds. Quite frankly, I would often not remember ordinary words for everyday things. To accept this state without the fear that I was in the grip of Altzheimers was a challenge.

Slowly, as I used Byron Katie's Loving what is, Leslie temple-Thurston's squares, triangles and polarities, Body Alignment, E.F.T, Brandon Bay's Journey, Releasing, and any other technique I could lay my hands on, shifts started happening. I felt a gradual easing of the experience of being slaughtered by human life.

I am continually amazed that people with an advanced understanding of spiritual concepts seem to know nothing of the unbelievable freedom that comes with the processing of their past, their dysfunctions, their human prison. It is utterly beyond me how anyone can dismiss Inner Child work or processing as 'New Age drivel'.

I have no doubt that Grace can unravel the personality self faster than processing. However, in my experience Grace is not a magic wand that gets wafted over your head when you read the right books or attend the right workshops. Grace is the energy that gives you stamina on the difficult journey of facing your shadow. Grace is what carries you when all else fails, when life as we know it becomes more and more empty and senseless, and picks you up to do the necessary work, even when you're half dead.

I felt so driven to do what was necessary that I once, instead of celebrating my 40th birthday, performed an American Indian burial ritual. I wanted to overcome fear, so I had myself buried in a grave for hours with only a plastic pipe to breathe through. Over and over I accessed the deaths experienced in past lives. Over and over I transmuted them, going into the light.

Whenever I could, I would sit at the feet of enlightened beings. Sometimes I would have to travel far, sometimes they would come to South Africa.

For many years I did the Sudarshan Kriya breathing practises for hours every day. I went to many silent retreats that were offered by that beautiful system called the Art of Living. This was a very strong clearing and healing in my life.

Then I was guided to do a Vipassana, as taught by a Burmese businessman, Mr Goenka. This is the original seed of enlightenment as taught by the Buddha himself, but not linked to Buddhism itself. Again a major piece of the puzzle fell into place.

I studied, and even taught, every system of initiation I could lay my hands on. I asked to be taken through those initiations and was shown in my meditations whenever I was to be taken to the next step. (Recently I have found, in the work of Llewellyn Vaughan Lee, a clear, pure and simple method that makes total sense to me. It was so delightful when, true to mystic tradition, he stated the contradiction of the whole initiation system being not true at all!)

All this inner work slowly released me from the powerful grip of the masculine. Besides processing, I had to take definite steps in my practical, day-to-day life to reclaim my power. This was not easy. The amount of reclaiming was so much. Over and over I had to do this, until I finally accepted that I would probably be doing this for the rest of my life.

And then, one day, I realised that I had changed from a victimised woman who thought that men were rotten and untrustworthy, to someone with beautiful male friends. I was able to dance in trust with a partner. I now find the masculine inside me a robust, generous creature filled with humour. The bind of the debilitating infatuation that I developed with men fell away. How sweet the freedom! Everything I wanted from a man I knew I could give to myself.

Another thing that happened in the process was that my desires became less and less. To want things became so very unimportant. More and more it made no sense to focus on acquiring things, giving away my precious life and freedom to create a certain safety in this world that means nothing. I realised slowly that I was so deeply loved and cared for it was ridiculous to fret and fear. I saw in my own life that when you let go, everything you will ever need gets given to you in an entirely different way. All your needs are taken care of.

Gold, Waters and the willingness to be a fool
I also received some pertinent answers about my physical condition. The Waters and the golden e.f.e's were given to me, first of all, to help my own body cope with the onslaught of what was happening to me. Over time I was guided to realise that it was largely man-made electromagnetic smog that was draining most of my life force. The greater part of humanity is ignorant of how electromagnetic radiation is killing them slowly, how they're gradually getting used to being more and more broken down physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

It felt very odd, listening to some of the direct instructions given to me on the inner plains regarding the gold and the Water. At times it was so weird that I more than once begged on my knees for another way to live. For a long time I had a secret fantasy to go on Prozac and work in a bank, anything to live an ordinary life and be like everyone else.

How afraid I was that all the stuff I accessed in meditation was an illusion. When the Masters told me on the inner planes these Waters and golden disks would heal my body and, on top of that, would bring the Real into this illusionary world, I thought, 'What if I am making all this up? What if I am deluded?' By that time, in the process of getting to know myself, I had made the painful discovery that I had a tendency to delude myself. I realised that I would have to check myself every step of the way. And how do you check whether you are deluded if you're already deluded?! All I could do, was to pray constantly for the highest possible guidance and that I would be willing for my fantasies and their resulting life forms to be crushed, if this was part of the delusion. And this is what I got.

I made every mistake in the book, yet there was always something in me that was willing to keep on taking risks. I learned what it's like to be the fool, but also to simply sit and taste the pain of being foolish, instead of trying to avoid the mistakes. I learned that life is a whole range of pain and joy, excruciating humiliation and blissful love. The aim was to taste both equally; after all, it is such an unusual opportunity to be in a body and experience all of this, we might as well do it properly!

I had to be surrendered to the point where I realised that the gold, the Waters, the CD and the Open The Door process didn't belong to me. I am simply the gatekeeper. I knew if my ego got hooked onto what was given through me, the latter could be whipped away in an instant.

Today I see it was my willingness to listen, to trust what I heard and to follow through, willing to be proven wrong, that allowed these products to be made. I had to learn to believe in it. I had to feel the results and validate them inside me. Finally, I had to offer them to a world blinded by spiritual poverty and forgetfulness. (While I, myself, felt blinded most of the time!)

Now I know that the proper use of gold is one of the long lost secrets of all the Golden Ages that have to be restored for us to move forward into our full potential in the next couple of years. Nothing can ground, restore and anchor life force like gold. Without gold, no one on this planet would have been alive. In fact, ancient truths that are now being restored tell us that the pursuit of gold was the very reason why this planet was populated in the first place. I have also come to understand on a much deeper level how we have to work reverently with water, one of the most important substances in our universe.

Often when desperately broken down my inner voice would say, 'Why did you stop drinking the Waters? Why did you stop using the Gold? You know this was created for yourself first and foremost.' And sure enough, when I did start using them again my life force would pick up and things would start flowing again.

Giving up the "connection"
The time arrived that I was asked to not only surrender my intense states of bliss, but also my connection to the Masters and what is known as 'channelling'. At some point in our development every one has to claim her/his True Self. Lifetimes of conditioning to worship, to the feminine way of surrender, have created a large imbalance. In order for the masculine to balance itself in me, I was pushed out into the cold. 'Become that which you channelled,' they told me.

Suddenly I was on my own. My heart was broken. The Grace and the almost unbearable bliss I could contact, my only reason for living, was gone.

Over time I realised a broader perspective and deeper insight. As I learned to let go over the ensuing years, a profound simplicity was slowly installed. An ordinariness developed, where the Divine would start to seep magically into my life, a life that became simpler and simpler. As I gave up the entry into states of bliss, a soft peace found me. The golden light I used to reach out for on other dimensions with the passion with which a drowning man longs for oxygen started to reveal itself in the simplest of ways, often on the most mediocre of days, sometimes for a moment, sometimes for a couple of weeks. A world of luminosity and purity would sometimes unfold, linking everything in its slow fluidity. I would be filled with a burning passion to be of service. It was during one of these times that the bocArus CD was created. Read how the bocArus CD was created...

I simply followed the Light that guided me in a very practical way. I was shown what to study and do. Every piece of the puzzle fell into place through direct guidance. Very practical, ordinary things started happening in my life. A deep willingness to listen and follow where I was taken developed.

Things always change, and when you are ready the teacher will find you
In the years since then everything has changed again. I see that spiritual life is not separate from ordinary life. In order to bring the imminent changes and extraordinary into this world, it is extremely important for us to be ordinary, simple, grounded people. To simply walk with reverence every step of the way, to wash dishes with God, to find hope and respect, to live with forgiveness and gratitude, these are the important things. They are far more important than being a great or 'spiritual' teacher. There is a very different world waiting to be born. Only as we become vulnerable and willing to do whatever it takes can it be born through us. Only as we are humble can it take us.

At last, when I was ready, my teacher found me on the inner planes. This connection has made everything I have experienced up to now seem like doll's play. When I finally met him in the physical body, it was as if everything up to that point had been a preparation for the real work that had to be done with him. This teacher, the Sufi master Llewellyn Vaughan Lee, who had trained me many, many lifetimes ago, stresses how each of us has a unique note to play in the symphony of life. If we are not available, Life will have to be sung without that note.

Whether we are willing to sing that note as clearly as it can be sung depends on us and us alone. To me, nothing else has life force; everything besides the singing of that note is so very dead. Life, on the other hand, enchants me. It has fun with me, my Beloved mocks me, proves me to be useless, forces me to become empty, but at the same time fills me with the deepest fulfilment, the intoxication of a love that sweeps me off my feet. And always, always there is a promise of choosing the magical, luminous moment where creation comes into the world, a pure moment of such potential.

I have to admit, I am addicted to that luminous possibility. I am addicted to living the Life of my Beloved.

Issabella now hosts Golden Sufi meditation groups in her home in Somerset West near Cape Town, South Africa. They meet regularly for silent meditation, tea and dream discussions.