This is a personal account of the visual healing events around my 76^th birthday, December 9, 2018. After a year of medical challenges, I am now savoring this lesson and using the techniques daily in addition to traditional and alternative medical care. It is my hope that through clarity and openness I can offer additional help to any who resonate with visual imaging.

Painting at Villa Leonor

I sat at a table beneath sun dappled canvas looking once again at a most familiar patch of dense jungle foliage. It was the day of my seventy-sixth birthday and I’d decided to spend it at a favorite beach place, Villa Leonor just south of Uvita. The drive was its usual spectacular with hillsides of ferns beneath yellow blossomed Corteza Amarillas, various palm trees and always the ubiquitous blue-leaved plants that were my first subject choices to paint when I moved to Costa Rica ten years ago.  Their real name is Bijahua, or Calathea lutea and their magnificent leaves were once used to wrap tamales – before banana leaves became popular.

Bijahua and jungle

Now, seated I began lightly sketching first the Bijuahua leaves and then gestured in suggestions of the cacophony of shapes and colors in the multi layered jungle beyond.  Where to begin?

I felt the so subtle shift in focus as I began, leaf by leaf and shape by shape from the closest back through the jungle chaos.  My habit was to focus on one thing – like a leaf, or a plant – and then to note one of the colors I saw along with one of the shapes.  Then I would roughly replicate using the pointed edge of my 1/2 “ wash brush. My objective was to respond into my sketch book with a colored shape I’d briefly noticed. Then, I would do it again.  Slowly and almost imperceptively, I kept transferring my split second visual impressions to the white paper. Every once in awhile I deliberately squinted in order to see the overall design of the painting sketch in process.

My process was a product of over forty years of practice:  Observing. Identifying shapes and colors. Squinting to see the overall shape of a plant or a tree. Adding in dark darks and bright shapes of color, being careful not to cover a linear shape that could be a branch or a stem.

When I had finished covering most of the 8” x 8” paper, I simply stopped. I knew I was at ‘Adolescence’, which was a time to pause and take a break.  Fresh eyes would be needed for the next part – the finishing. And a fresh view would let me know what next to do…

Birthday watercolor sketch

Back home, I placed the painting in my studio where I could glance at it whenever I passed by. This is a time tested way to get my critical left brain out of the way so my visual right brain could whisper what to do next.

In the night I woke to a now familiar, though subtle event. Throughout the years since my beloved husband and best friend Frank passed away on March 10, 2014 our occasional contact always began the same. Suddenly I would be wide awake to see the digital clock display a noteworthy numerical sequence:  11:11.  12.34.  Now it was precisely 12:00.  I got up and went to my computer to wait to see what he had to say….

Dearest Jan, I have been with you on your birthday today at the beach and remembering our wonderful times there – swimming and laughing and enjoying ourselves. And I was remembering the seared tuna salad that I always wanted to share and you always wanted to have all to yourself. Jan – we did have such a lovely time together and we remember those times well now. You have been focused on your physical limitations in the recent months and now have almost received a complete new and clean bill of health. It is a new and exciting time for you to step forward and focus on those things you really want to finish and do while you have the time. I’m holding the door open for you, dear Jan and will be helping you pursue your creative pathways now.  What am I doing?  I am quite involved now in moving souls forward on their paths toward higher creativity here on the other side, too.  It is kind of on a parallel with you. It is each soul’s highest development to move into true creation, and it is something I am able to help with.  You are seeing it in your life on earth with your creation of healing your body. You are not understanding that as creativity? And perhaps it is the definition of creativity that needs to be understood. Re creating. When you sat today at the table and painted, you were placing strokes or shapes of paint, of color onto a piece of paper. You were actively arranging colors and shapes as you went. It is the same in healing – actively re arranging or arranging cells and pieces of information in one’s own body. The difference is in your view of it. In neither do you know exactly what you are doing. But you trust that you will be guided. You look into nature and see the health there and then softly duplicate the light, the dark, the color.  That is what you do with your own body in healing. Softly duplicate the beauty of nature in its purest and most elegant shapes and colors. Within.  Using your mind and your heart. Mostly it feels like letting go.  Now I can help you with the process whenever you ask. Jan, do enjoy this new place where you are. It is a gift and you are ready to use it well.  I am here, as always whenever you speak my name. You are loved.  *

In the morning I had no recollection of what I had channeled during the night and was surprised to read the words. Especially,

” In neither do you know exactly what you are doing. But you trust that you will be guided. You look into nature and see the health there and then softly duplicate the light, the dark, the color.  That is what you do with your own body in healing. Softly duplicate the beauty of nature in its purest and most elegant shapes and colors. Within.  Using your mind and your heart. Mostly it feels like letting go. “    

And so I made the decision to use Frank’s suggestion to visually re-create health in my body.

In the early morning hours before the sun rises I sit in meditation and after stilling my body and mind, I ask for help and guidance from my personal spiritual guide, Archangel Raphael. And I ask for help from Frank and any who will assist him. Then I take a position of viewing my body as an observer. I see myself as a painter with my body as a completely transparent and organized collection of parts, all clearly visible. With each part that is currently needing healing, I allow a visual image from nature to suggest colors and patterns to soothe and heal. I trust that I will be offered the appropriate image from nature.

• Lungs I look from outside my body deep into my chest to my lungs seeing them slowly expanding and contracting with each breath. The first image that springs into my mind is a familiar open golden hibiscus flower with its soft undulating petals. The colors vary from yellow through deep gold and into red and magenta. The velvety texture of the petals is smoothed and caressed by the sun and the tropical breezes. I allow the image to remain as I breathe it in and out.
• Achilles tendon:  As I see my lower left leg, I especially focus on the repaired and healed tendon that is still slowly recovering from the trauma of rupture and surgery. And I see all the muscles and ligaments that surround the healing tendon. And all at once I see the sky and the colors of sunrise and sunset –  from the soft and pale peach glows to the strong orange and reds. There is strength and softness as all the colors and shapes move together, effortlessly. Such energizing color!
• Sciatic nerves and lower back:  There is a larger area from my waist to my right knee that is in need of attention and relaxation. After five months without walking, this area is struggling to find its path again. There are so many parts included – bones, nerves, muscles and ligaments. A visual image appears – the jungle, with its deep dark and light shades of greens and lavenders and deep red golds. I see mosses and ferns entertwined with the branches and leaves, kind of like a visual symphony in motion punctuated with flickering light and cool, comforting shadows. The complexity is a perfect metaphor and in my meditation I paint it all with the imagined colors and shapes in soft healing light.
• Skin cancer on my nose:  My most recent body part requiring healing after a surgical removal now requires some healing energy. As I view this part of my skin I see gentle moving water – and all the soft blues and greens and reflected sky lights. The clarity and vibrancy is perfect. It is filled with life energy for healing.

After I’ve applied each visual image to my body I feel a deep relaxation and harmony. As the sun slowly rises over the San Isidro de El General valley I am profoundly grateful for healing.

Thank you dear Frank for this loving lesson in healing through re-creating.

*Note:  I am currently writing a more complete book about and including my conversations with Frank over the past 4+ years since his death. Much of the first year conversations were included in my book, A Woman Awakens: Life AfterLife, published in 2017 and available here:  https://www.amazon.com/Woman-Awakens-AfterLife-Adventure-Consciousness-ebook/dp/B01MSJ2C50