by Alan Johnston, Pottsville

I have just finished with a twenty-year abusive relationship. Even though we ‘divorced’ ten years back, it carried on. Several weeks ago it ended up in the Supreme Court where it finally broke open on this stern, bewigged, legal reef.

No alcohol, physical violence or passionate emotions were involved – just brittleness, control and karma. Karma – for those not familiar, is reaping what you have sown, facing the consequences of previous loveless actions or lack of truth.

I’m talking about a business partnership gone wrong. Even though it was long terminated, like television’s ‘The Walking Dead’ it refused to die. Relatively recently, I realised that it was me that was animating the whole thing, in a sense my real opponent was myself, but realisation and completion are not necessarily bedmates.

The guts of this understanding came through my engagement with Universal Medicine and very specifically through the straight talking, loving reflection of Serge Benhayon. No lawyers had helped, except themselves to hundreds of thousands of dollars – no matter how well meaning they were. They cannot, for the legal system is broken, mired in complexity, the mind of man gone mad.

What was needed was a game change, something to overturn the whole dire mess –which so easily could have gone through the scheduled seven day trial, waited half a year or a year for a judgment and then proceeded on to an appeal in the High Court. Note those courtly adjectives.

The breakthrough began quietly some time back, with my learning (with more than a little support) to just stop giving myself away. What does this really mean, ‘to stop giving yourself away’?

Simply this: in any situation if I can stay connected to what I am really feeling and speak from there, then that is enough. Because I always know the truth, it just needs to be felt and then expressed. Not with any revelatory drama, just said. And in the nomination and expression more is revealed, for all.

So there I was, in a dark-panelled office dripping with gravitas, with a Queen’s Counsel, another barrister and two lawyers – combined fees north of two thousand dollars an hour – and effectively in the space of a number of meetings over two weeks they dismantled my case before my eyes; this expensive and carefully constructed edifice of years of legal work. The final, necessary, almost complete pulling out of the carpet happened an hour before the trial was to begin.

That’s how it can go it seems, in the hot-house of gearing up for a trial, flaws in a case are revealed, lines of argument abandoned. It is all designed to be very disempowering for the uninitiated (client). The legal world is deliberately obtuse, with its own language and rituals. Quasi-religious even. Lawyers as priests, barristers as bishops, senior counsel as cardinals, all classic intermediaries between the penitent and a ‘higher authority’, that is, the ‘Law’. A ‘golden calf’ (Exodus 32:4) reincarnated and fattened over the centuries.

How did I fare?

I didn’t freak out, I dealt with any rising anxiety as best I could with humour and self-nurturing. Then and there, when the legal quartet was singing its dirge I chose not to sing along but instead to feel my body and my breath. My spouse was even steadier and simply beautiful through it all. Things were faced as they arose.

So then a series of minor miracles unfolded and a last-gasp negotiation initiated by my opponent at the door of the court led to a ‘decree absolute’ being drafted that day, albeit with a chunk of ‘maintenance’ for me to pay (my karma). As my spouse said of me to a friend right in the middle of it all, “He’s fine, he’s got help”.

Yes, I had.

I chose against all the odds to listen. To introduce into my life the practices in self-nurturing and presence that are at the heart of what Universal Medicine presents. A soul inspired decision. How so?

I feel the multi-dimensional resolution of this situation is directly attributable to my listening more to my inner voice, rather than drowning it out with strain and distraction. In the ‘radical simplicity’ of such an ongoing shift, Serge Benhayon and other Universal Medicine practitioners have all been as one, as love.