Another Colourful Weekend with Insight…
An account written by one of the Insight Holistic Diploma students
This month, Lilian Verner-Bonds and Dr. Ron Bonewitz ran workshops on Colour Therapy and Crystals for students on our Diploma course and as it was such popular topics, we were joined by other participants just for this weekend.
On Saturday Lillian, who is one of the countries leading healing and colour therapists, gave us an introduction on the use of colour in healing and therapy. Personally I found her combination of psychic power and ability to interpret colour rather un-nerving when during the introduction round, she very accurately summed up individuals in the group whom she had only just met, including me. She encouraged us to use our own inherent, instinctive understanding of colour. We worked through exercises which included choosing bottles filled with various coloured liquids, drawing butterflies and guided meditations where the use of colour led us to a deeper level of understanding and unconscious messages. I was impressed by how much could be learned from our simple drawings of butterflies not only based on colours chosen but positioning on the paper, size, symmetry and the combination of colours. Likewise the order in which coloured bottles were chosen gave insight into possible future directions, indications of our health and blocks we might encounter or indeed construct in our future pathways. It was a busy day but one which I know all of us found affirming and inspiring. Lilian is an extremely glamorous, charismatic and energetic woman and I was not alone in being surprised that she had been around long enough to have memories from the 2nd World War. For me this was inspiration in itself and further testimony to the life enhancing qualities of colour.
On Sunday it was Ron’s turn to astound us all over again. He has a background in geology, mining, gem cutting and archaeology, having written extensively about history and mythology. He began by introducing us to the scientific basis of crystals giving a potted history of the universe which made many of us wish he’d been our science teacher at school since suddenly chemistry and physics seemed very accessible. As he says “Science is a branch of mysticism that deals with the measurable” and “The laws of physics and spiritual laws are the same, they just use different words”. I was particularly taken with the notion that star dust formed the minerals and that crystals are merely a highly structured form of those minerals. He described crystals as a perfect balance of energy and structure and it seemed to me that perhaps we humans are instinctively drawn to them for their harmony. For Ron, a crystal is a tool for healing which is best used intuitively and not in a prescriptive manner. For the second part of the day, he broadened his approach, looking at disease, healing and past lives. Again he linked scientific and spiritual teachings. One of his many memorable quotes was that “Disease is the message your body sends when you have missed all the other messages… and it is the hardest to ignore”. Another was “Life is the movement of energy through structure”. As he talked, it was easy to feel connected with universal energy and to agree with his assertion that our bodies are just there to teach us lessons for this life. Parents in the group took heart from the concept that perhaps children are given the parents who will teach them what they need to learn in this life. Again there were two meditations, the first while holding a crystal and visualising ourselves inside it. In the second we took ourselves into caves of crystals that represented and positive and negative aspects of ourselves.
As with all good workshops, it seemed that in spite of a wide range of content and packed days, we had barely scratched the surface. However the positive aspect of this is that we were left feeling curious enough to further explore two complex and fascinating fields of knowledge.
The Monday took us back to our usual Diploma course. We were all painfully aware that the next time we met as a group would be our last weekend. However in good NLP tradition we utilised an advert for ORIGINS spotted by one of the course leaders, Marie, in a local supermarket which brought together our learning for the previous two days. There were further questions concerning our Life stories which we were to take forward for as long as we needed. We returned to the exploration of facilitation skills spending time working in pairs or trios to look at our personal paths. This left just enough time for us to create a presentation for the Dinner planned for 31st October to celebrate INSIGHT and what for most of us is the end of this Diploma. As always we left tired but contented little souls if not a little apprehensive about the impending presentation.