Welcome to the blog of Nicola Mannering.
I am an author, artist, mother, sojourner on the spiritual path.
My book, tentatively titled Crystal Journey, is soon to be published.
Many excepts from the book are here at NicolaMannering.com
Discover the depth of heretofore untold experiences with the Masters of Wisdom, The Ageless Wisdom Teachings, Natural and Spiritual Healing, my journey with the Hopi Crystal, my encounters with the medical establishment and mental health system, my understanding how to live with cancer, and my voyages through personal relationships of motherhood and marriage.
Along the way you will hear of messages from Spirit. My journey through the extremes of life circumstance have been punctuated with life affirming messages from Spirit which tie the book’s narrative to a deeper meaning than the details of my life’s diary.
In this lifetime…
I was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, and was raised on a sheep farm on the Canterbury Plains, where I would spend long hours by myself, happy to sit quietly under a tree and listen to the wind, or lie by the water-race watching the cockabullies and water-boatmen darting to and fro in the current.
I had two older sisters, and a younger brother, and we all went to the local country school, which was five miles away, surrounded by trees and paddocks. At times we rode our bikes all that long way, with our school satchels on the carrier, down the long dusty drive, past paddocks of sheep or horses, across the stony riverbed where water only flowed in winter, and where the small, yellow flowers of the gorse and broom in summer sent waves of sweet perfume floating through the clear air.
I spent my secondary school years away from the farm, at an Anglican boarding school, about two hundred miles South. In the holidays we would often go up to the mountains of the Southern Alps, where we had a cottage, all six of us squeezing into a space a fraction the size of home. We would walk up the mountain rivers, white water tumbling down the course of boulders, ferns and moss thriving in the damp, beech trees dripping with honeydew on the dark, soft bark. Bellbirds and fantails and cicadas all called to us as we picked our way through the rocks, or up the green banks to find a path through the bush. I would often go climbing with my father, either onto the rocky tops, or through thick snow and ice, in crampons and ropes, and wielding an ice axe.
My parents were both people of great integrity, and we were loved deeply and well. My mother was always the perfectionist in the kitchen and the home, and in the beautiful garden that surrounded the house, and my father forever worked to improve the farm, planting more trees, and caring for the livestock. He also spent much time representing the community on local bodies such as the County Council, and the as chairman of the Lyttelton Harbour Board.
Then I left home and made a life as a student in the early seventies at Canterbury University, at the Ilam School of Fine Arts. Since the sculpture tutor had developed a passion for conceptual sculpture, and my first love was figurative work, I decided to major in painting, which turned out to be a good choice, and suited me very well! I would spend even weekends in the studio there, in preference to participating in what would be considered to be a normal student social life. I just couldn’t find the point. I discovered books on an extensive range of spiritual subjects, and read widely. Spirituality and art were really the only two things I was deeply interested in. A vast wave of new spiritual understanding and information was sweeping the world, and the idea of the Earth being a global village indicated the new, global, spiritual awareness that was washing over humanity as a response to the slowly receding memories of the World War, not long having played itself out in a swathe of devastating suffering.
I embraced this new renaissance of thought and expression with passion, and began to explore spirituality not just through my artwork, but through the new drug culture that had emerged. I sought authentic religious experience through a chemically induced, expanded consciousness, as many seekers were at the time. I received what I longed for, which confirmed to me what I felt deeply to be true. I had many profound insights and experiences of oneness and of greatly expanded reality and purpose, although at very great cost. There would be a phenomenal opening, and then a painful and difficult closing, which required returning to the “real” world, no longer real to me, and an agonizing adjustment to an everyday state of consciousness which was so incredibly reduced as to seem nonsensical.
But I never lost the sense of the vast perfection and intricacy of creation, and of our magical place in it. I never forgot the immense cosmic opening, and the examination of the minute, the miraculous veins in a cabbage leaf, which I was about to eat, God into God! And the sitting silently, watching even the plants breathing.
Thankfully it didn’t take me long to work out the futility of chemical help in my search for the divine!
I set off on another type of inner exploration, with a teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, following him to Perth, Western Australia, and then travelling through India, where we stayed a while at the well-known but little visited monastery of Rumtek, in Sikkhim.
After living for a year in Perth, practising Tibetan Buddhist meditation, I returned to New Zealand, and finally relinquished a seven-year relationship with the man I loved. It seemed to be going nowhere. I embarked on a new journey of discovery in the form of life on a small community in the heart of rural Nelson. I had been a “hippy” since my years studying at art school. I took this adventure to a whole new level!
The community was tucked into a secluded valley, and surrounded by gardens and regenerating native bush. There was a stream, and small dwellings scattered over the few acres, and a house cow and goats and hens. I learned to milk the cow, and how to treat wounds and fevers with plants, and many other wonderful skills which brought me into a deeper relationship with Mother Earth. I learned to still my mind and focus more on everything I did, which served me well when the next phase of my life was to unfold.
I had prayed constantly to be shown the truth, and I was granted my prayer in a way I could never have foreseen. I was led to a mentor, who provided the perfect environment to actualise this prayer, this longing. In an even more remote rural location – a place without running water or electricity – I was shown how to live in the awareness of the illusion of the ego.
The small group of people who gathered in this place, all entered into the spirit of the endeavour. We never spoke of I, me, or mine. Rather, it was “this person” if ever we needed to refer to ourselves, which was seldom. In other words, “this person” was no different to “that person.” There were no mirrors, which had the effect of helping to break the identification with the body. We never talked of the past, or of the future. In fact we very seldom spoke, except to offer gratitude for food, and everything Mother Earth had to offer – which was everything we had. There was no judgement of anything, except perhaps when it came to what might be harmful to the Earth or the body, and then it was less a judgement, and more a decision made not to participate, and to actively discourage. There was no personal ownership – even food was passed around the circle in an act of giving and letting go.
At first it was a difficult task to keep my attention always in the present, without engaging in any of the distractions society accepts as natural, and without the comfort of being able to slip back into past stories, or forward into future plans. I was incredibly self-conscious, and experienced intense emotional pain as layers were stripped away before I even had a chance to get used to their disappearance. One after the other, my ego illusions finally dissolved. I was no different to anyone, or anything else – I was simply awareness.
I was sitting on my own, on top of the hill overlooking the sea, when it happened. My mind suddenly stopped without warning – completely! Then slowly, a feeling of something shifting in the heart area – a feeling I could liken to some inner wheel turning like a gear – and my heart became suffused with bliss! It was a powerful bliss that spread quickly to all parts of my body and then appeared to overflow. It was absolutely steady. That was the extraordinary thing about it – it didn’t lessen or come in waves. It was a constant, self-regenerating sensation of incredibly deep love, a type of love I had never felt before. And who was doing the loving? It was love that was loving, for there was no longer any “I” in the accepted sense of the word. At that moment, there was the feeling of being completely and utterly healed and whole. There was nothing missing – nothing that was needed or wanted – I simply wanted to give. Somehow, I thought, I would like to learn to heal, and perhaps I could share this extraordinary happening with others.
So I was given a glimpse of what I had always longed for, but what I had deemed impossible to experience in this lifetime. Now I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt – as my father used to say – that all the wisdom teachings I had read were true.
It was soon after this that I was to receive my first message from Spirit. I had returned to the community and was learning about healing with herbs, when it came. I was in the garden by myself, and was bent over the dark earth, planting out seedlings. The voice said, “There is a deeper healing than with the herbs, and it is with the hands.”
That was all I needed to know. I left the community, although that was difficult, as I had grown to love the place incredibly! I went looking for this healing, and came across a spiritual path called Mahikari, which was Japanese for True Light. I joined, and learned how to give light with the palm of the hand. Although the bliss receded, especially in social situations where I had to talk and break the one-pointed concentration, it would return on regular occasions. I was to experience it on and off for years, though not in the intensity of the first few months. And my life was never the same. I had glimpsed the illusion of the ego, and the silent heart at the centre!
Over the following few years, I established a Mahikari Centre with help from a friend where we lived in Christchurch. Then I was married and my husband and I had three wonderful children, a great blessing in our lives! We moved to Nelson and set up a gallery where we sold our ceramics and my artwork, and the work of other local crafts-people. We also gave Light to anyone who wanted it, and at times, took part in an active Mahikari group in Christchurch. We had a healthy lifestyle, and never used medication. All the children were born at home, without so much as an aspirin.
So it was a great surprise when some fourteen years later, I found myself slipping into ill health and depression. My children were all at secondary school by this stage, and I was becoming less and less able to care for them and run the house and business as I had been doing for so long. It was to be a number of years before I was to be diagnosed with terminal cancer, which by this stage was unable to be operated on, or treated with chemotherapy or radiotherapy. In fact, by this time, all the children had left home, and my husband and I had separated. I was utterly alone.
I do not have the space here to describe the nightmarish journey I took with the mental health system – suffice it to say there were important lessons to be learned, and the effects are still with me. No doubt I drew this experience, along with all others, into my life for a deep and useful purpose.
It was at this point in my life, when I was sent home from hospital with the advice to get my affairs in order – I was told I might not have long to live – that things on the inner plane began to happen.
Messages from Spirit began to come again, in a way similar to the message I had been given all those years ago about healing with the hands. I was also receiving guidance in a manner that I never had before. Something had changed. I began to regain the weight I had lost at an alarming rate, and a little of my energy returned, but the tumour remained resistant to any natural treatments I tried, and believe me, I tried quite a few!
All these happenings led to me finding the Ageless Wisdom Teachings, given by the Tibetan master, Djwhal Khul. These teachings were given to Alice Bailey by thought transference. D.K. (as He is so often referred to) was still in a body in the Himalayas at the time, and Bailey was living in America, although she was born and raised in England. The Tibetan chose Bailey because of her level of evolvement and her considerable mental abilities. They worked together over a period of about thirty years, producing seventeen incredible books, and Bailey also wrote five of her own.
Anyway, I was much confused by what I was experiencing, and it was only by reading these books that I was able to make any sense of it! As I was beginning to unravel the seemingly irrational experience my life had become, and was beginning to make some little sense of the senselessness, I came across the Hopi crystal. This is a story in itself, and will be fully told in my book, Crystal Vision – or other title – this could change at any time!
My life thus took another astonishing turn. The Hopi Crystal is an ancient and powerful crystal, according to White Cloud, an Assinboine Native American, no longer in the body. He becomes a central figure in the book when I meet the man who channels him at a spiritual study group. He tells us it is a very ancient crystal, one that was given by the Star People, long before the birth of Christ. As you might imagine, I was extremely cautious for some time. It took a series of extraordinary events that finally led me to accept that the crystal needed to be returned to the Hopi, cancer not withstanding. My daughter, a friend and I, made the long and gruelling trip from Nelson to Arizona, America, against the stern advice of my oncologist, in search of a medicine man called One Who Sleeps with Snakes! That was just over two years ago.
I am now work from home, writing, reading, meditating…
We have a meditation group which meets weekly here and is called The Rainbow Bridge Group, where we work on building and strengthening the Rainbow Bridge (the Antahkarana), the link between the lower and higher self – the personality and the soul. I am also part of a study group which meets to study A Course in Miracles.
And I still live with cancer, though I consider it a great blessing, since through it, my consciousness has changed irrevocably.
Such is the brief synopsis of the book, and my life, and hopefully in sharing it, it may be useful in some small way.
