The recent death of Professor Stephen Hawking has affected many people. Since the success of his best-selling book, A Brief History of Time in the 1980s, Hawking came to symbolise science itself and an archetypical ‘clever person’ with mysterious knowledge of the universe. That he had to overcome great difficulties due to a debilitating illness seemed to add to his charisma.
But it was not his public image that I was interested in but his science. Stephen Hawking had pioneering ideas about black holes that would profoundly affect me. So in the article, I wish to discuss the topic of Stephen Hawking and me.
Public Image vs Science
I never met him and I didn’t particularly wish to either. For me, he didn’t hold the glamour that he did for so many. Of course, I saw him as a courageous person who despite his physical situation, stood up for human rights and used his celebrity to draw attention to various causes and I admired him for that.
The general public saw him as the greatest scientist of our era. In the minds of many scientists, it was a different picture; he was seen a great science writer and communicator but most of what he wrote about in his best-selling books and his TV series was not his own ideas but the prevailing views in science that he elegantly and wittily conveyed to the public. You could argue that his greatest legacy was his substantial wit.
A Rebel Idea
But there was something else that in the furore over his celebrity that often gets overlooked. He was one of the first people to say that something could escape the vicinity of a black hole, thus daring to challenge orthodox concepts. He described his discovery in his famous book, A Brief History of Time and how the insight came to him as he was getting ready for bed in the early 1970s.
Back then, the concept of a black hole was fairly new. It was thought that they are dark, guzzling monsters ready to suck in everything in their path. Hawking realised that the quantum vacuum also exists in the vicinity of black holes. Virtual particles cycle from light to matter and antimatter and back again, just as in the rest of the universe.
He postulated that one of the particles may fall in and the other may be radiated out, which contradicted the concept that nothing could escape from black holes. Hawking realised that they weak radiation could escape black holes. This is called Hawking radiation and it was this concept that would provide one of the stepping stones for The Black Hole Principle.
The Path Begins
One day when I was browsing through a Waterstones bookstore in Hampstead, a book dropped off the shelf in front of me. It was called The Nature of Space and Time by Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose. I bought the book but was unable to understand much of the technical text.
Nevertheless, the incident made me look more into Hawking radiation. Later, when I had the vision which gave me The Black Hole Principle, I knew I was looking at Hawking radiation in action.
I knew, however, it wasn’t due to the destructive nature of black holes (which is a false concept) but their creative properties. At the edge of a black hole, particles of light split into antimatter and matter and are seen as radiation.
This indeed correlates with the data we glean from telescopes – matter and antimatter coming from the centre of galaxies at near light speeds and we measure streams of electrons come from the edge of a black hole. Although this is similar to Hawking radiation, he expected it to be much weaker.
A Lost Opportunity?
Nobel prizes are given once a prediction about the universe has been proven by observation. In my opinion, the evidence for Hawking radiation has been staring us in the face but nobody else has put the pieces together.
For many years I have finished my workshops by saying that we have just won Stephen Hawking the Nobel prize. Sadly I never got to tell him and he never did win the Nobel prize. He leaves this earthly plane not knowing just how right he was.
As mother’s day is approaching in the UK at the time of writing, I would like to do something I have never done before and come out in public as a person who is Childless not by Choice or CNBC. For the first time, I am going to sharing my personal journey and also be reflecting on childlessness and The Genius Groove.
Some of you may have noticed that my website was absent from between 2015 – 2017. There is a myriad of reasons for this but one of them is that I was on a journey of grief due to childlessness. This has led me to lots of realisations as to who we are as human beings and what our purpose is on this planet so I thought I would share.
The assumption of family
I have always wanted to be a mother. I grew up with two sisters and a working mother and father. Ours was the sort of house where we would gather around the kitchen table and chat. We also went places as a family to visit other families, as is the norm for Asian culture, so I always expected this family-centric life to continue.
I did get married quite young at 21 years old, but I was still a medical student and because I had a working mother who was away for long hours, I didn’t want to have children during my years as a junior doctor. I wanted to be in a position where I could focus on my children.
So, in the late 1990s, I envisaged a future for myself where I would travel the world as a speaker and author, earning enough to also have time for my children. My future children were always at the heart of my career plans.
To juggle or not juggle?
Image: Shutterstock
I went on to train as a GP and this is when a lot of my colleagues started to get married and have babies. I looked at them juggling their breast pumps and their bleeps and I thought again that I did not want to put my own children through all that. I thought it best to wait until I could take a career break.
But as many of you know from my book The Genius Groove, by the time I had finished my training as a GP, my marriage was on the rocks. I would not dream of bringing a child into a relationship that was not stable and about to collapse so although my long hours had diminished, I was no longer in a suitable relationship.
My marriage ended and after a few years I found my new partner and looked forward to starting a family with him. To save our privacy I will not go into the details of what happened next, but suffice to say that we did not have a child together. All the while my career as an author and speaker took off, but it was a lot more work than I envisaged back in the late 1990s.
There were many times when I would travel with very little notice. Looking back, hand on heart, if I had been a mother at that point I would have had to say no to all those dream opportunities. And I would be sitting here now without that sense of achievement.
Reaching the end and reaching out
It all came to a crashing halt when my body went into menopause a lot earlier than expected whilst still in my early 40s. That same year no less than eight of my friends were in various stages of pregnancy, some of them for the first time. So not only was I facing a future of childlessness, some of my friendships would never be the same again.
I had an uneasy feeling growing inside me. I was happy for my friends. I love children and babies and even did a conference about indigo children so I am delighted to spend time with children. But the uneasy feeling would come to me at times.
I looked online for discussions about women without children and only found articles about people who were adamant that they never wanted children and were happily childfree. Or I found sites discussing infertility. But what if the fertility journey had come to an end? I did a google search for ‘childless and don’t want to be’ and at last, I found Jody Day and Gateway Women.
A new gateway
Jody Day is a British author and psychologist who found herself childless by circumstance. She has broken down barriers in this taboo subject and is doing a lot to get the subject of being childless not by choice into the public eye.
Crucially, she realised that people who are childless not by choice, feel grief. Grief is normally only assigned to parents who have lost children but those who have never had them also feel a type of grief that is often not recognised as such.
She has founded an online community called Gateway Women. They also have in-person meetups around the world. This subject is still so secret and taboo that I had to go through various checks before being allowed in.
Healing the healer
So here I was, an international speaker, Amazon best-selling author and even TV host. I had written books on the subject of emotions and had been a holistic therapist for some years not to mention having been a GP. But I had no road map for these emotions. I needed help to navigate the torrent of feelings that were going through me about not being a mother when I so badly wanted to be.
Being part of the community for some years now has helped me so much to heal the grief I feel. Along the way, I have come to learn a lot about the dynamics of having children and also where we get our sense of purpose. So here are some of the things I have learnt.
Children and Purpose
This is one of the biggest lessons I have learnt on my healing journey. It is sometimes an unspoken tenet of society that your children are meant to be your greatest purpose in life. Otherwise, why would you be working at a job you hate to bring in money if it wasn’t to build a life for your family? Having children makes it all worth it.
It’s been said straight to my face – what is your purpose if you don’t have children? Luckily for me, such comments are rare as I have a public life. My sense of purpose is out for people to see. It has amazed me that in all the time I have spent travelling the world speaking when I was on my own, nobody asked me if I was married or if I had a man in tow. My work spoke for itself.
I found my Genius Groove but people don’t always find theirs. Our education system is designed to numb out our creativity and funnel us into jobs that pay the bills instead.
So if the children that your life was supposed to revolve around do not manifest then what are you supposed to do after that? People stay in jobs that they do not love where they don’t feel a sense of purpose and not having children compounds these feelings.
Excusing our dreams
But what does that say about wider society? That to some degree, we have substituted having children for having a purpose and fulfilling our creative dreams. For some, having children and being a parent might truly be their creativity. But we are also individuals and part of our inner journey and our path in life is to discover who we are in our own right.
But this can be hard work: to stand up and be counted for what you really want to do and who you really are. It feels much easier to cover all that over and children give the perfect excuse to not fulfil your true potential. You can point to your children and your responsibilities.
A lot of children are not planned so it cannot be said that they are consciously brought into the world as an excuse to not face ourselves. But once they arrive they can take on that role.
So this gives another double whammy for childless people. They not only haven’t had the child and have all that readjustment to do, they also have to face questions that people with children may put aside such as why am I here and what is my purpose?
Moving on
With childlessness from all causes on the rise and about a quarter of women in Europe and the USA reaching menopause without having had children, these conversations are only going to become more prevalent. Thanks to Jody Day and Gateway Women and others for getting that ball rolling. They have helped me immensely.
As time goes by I feel very different. The grief, although it never entirely goes away does diminish as I do the work of processing my feelings. I realise now that I could not have fulfilled so many of my dreams if I had been a mother. Although it has been a tough journey, I understand and even now celebrate why I chose at a soul level not to have children.
It is mainly the work of Jody Day and her community that gave me a map to understand my own feelings that I could not articulate that has moved me forward into this place where I feel whole again.
At this unprecedented time in human history when childlessness from all sorts of reasons is so prevalent, we can gain new insights into our dynamics around parenthood and our sense of purpose. Together we can greater insights into parenting and The Genius Groove.
I know this is a controversial post. Please do not leave suggestions in the comments as to how I can adopt or some other solution that you think is being helpful. I would welcome your thoughts on the main points though.
What is it that happens when we step into our creativity? In this article, we shall look at embracing your creative journey actually creates a new way of living that is like tapping into a Bigger Magic from before the dawn of time.
Elizabeth Gilbert’s interesting assertion
As you may have seen me discuss before, Elizabeth Gilbert has released an amazing book called ‘Big Magic’ which brilliantly describes the creative process. Although the book does not provide any scientific mechanism for how the creative process works, the way she describes creativity very much fits The Genius Groove.
She has personally discovered that creative ideas sit outside of the self and partner with us in order to be birthed into the world. She also said something else that made me realise perhaps there is bigger magic at play in the world that she may not know about.
During the book, she clearly says that you should not ask for your creativity to financially support you to pay the bills. If it ends up doing so, as in her case, then fine but she believes that she is an exception, not the rule. In other words, she asks you to not follow your passion as your career which is the opposite of the advice of many others.
Stepping onto my true path
This was very interesting to me. Those of you who have read The Genius Groove will know that I was catapulted onto my current career path, after a series of events which ended with me leaving a career in medicine. I did not intend to suddenly leave the medical profession in that way. My ex-husband and my parents made a case to the General Medical Council that I was not mentally fit after I separated from my husband, citing my multidimensional abilities as evidence.
I myself would have liked to have carried on working part-time in General Practice whilst writing on the side. Hand on heart though, I know I would not have been able to fully commit to the new book and a new way of living had I stayed in such a fear-based paradigm as medicine. The whole setup is to fix people who are ill therefore this is a paradigm that says that illness is a problem, not a learning experience and that it should be eliminated rather than understood.
Dipping in and out of this paradigm on a regular basis would realistically have meant that Punk Science would have been written in a very different way, if it had been written at all. But back in 2002, my immediate question was, how would my creativity support me? Well the answer is, I somehow did get supported. Partly through my repentant ex-husband when I moved back into my house after the loss of my job. I paid my personal expenses through healing clients and talks and it was always just enough to keep me going, whilst he paid the mortgage.
IMAGE: Graphicstock[/caption]
The Road to Abundance
Eventually, I met my current partner, James who has in fact invested a lot of time and money into supporting my career because he believed in what I was doing. For me, the situation has been less than ideal as I would have preferred to have fully supported myself, but I have realised that somehow, yet again my creativity has been supported. I noticed that bigs shifts came when I started really believeing in myself and what I had to say in the world.
So I somehow have managed to survive what should have been a catastrophic loss for many years now. I have also lived an incredible life by following my creativity. I have been flown around the world to speak at conferences and met many wonderful people. It seemed the more I let go of, the more wonderful experiences came my way. So the very thing that should not have supported me has in fact brought me great abundance in terms of experiences and enough financially to carry on doing what I am doing.
Living the New Paradigm
I have found that other people too are stepping onto this path. They are leaving conventional professional careers and are somehow managing in a way that they could not have imagined whilst still in the straight-jacketed career and dependent on the monthly paycheck.
Very few are earning enough to retire to the Bahamas, but that isn’t what a lot of them want anyway. Usually, they just want to earn enough to cover their basic bills and expenses so that that are free to be creative and to follow their mission. In the book, The Genius Groove I call this way of life New Paradigm Living but really it does defy explanation or rules.
What is interesting is that this way of living does exist and it seems to unfold once a person has really committed to their creative path and their spirituality. It is almost as if people slip through the cracks of the rules of 3-dimensional life whilst still living within it, tapping into a bigger magic from before the dawn of time!
Another thing I have noticed is that when people flounce out of their previous lives saying they are going to ‘make art’, they do not necessarily enter this state of New Paradigm Living. It seems to be entered into in a centred way, when the way is made clear, rather than when the ego self wants it to happen.
Conclusion and further information
So Elizabeth Gilbert I disagree with you. Sometimes by committing to your path and your authenticity in a centred way, a different path opens up. The universe can show you a different dimension, a slip door in the back of the wardrobe: the bigger magic from before the dawn of time.
In 2007, I was invited to the studios of Press TV in West London alongside the world-renowned author, Diana Cooper to discuss the Science of Angels. But soon I was also discussing some of my angelic experiences.
The whole day was pretty amazing as the Press TV studios were very well equipped and plush, with makeup artists for all the ‘talent’ as well. Some time later, I made several trips to the then BBC studios nearby and it was disappointingly drab in comparison. This interview was actually my first taste of the live TV set up in a studio even though I had already appeared in several documentaries. This studio experience came in handy later when working for The People’s Voice TV.
I am delighted to find that this interview has now resurfaced on Youtube courtesy of the presenter Rebecca Masterton who did a great job. So here is the discussion on Press TV about The Science of Angels. It is in several parts.
Have you ever had an encounter with angels? Please leave your comments below.
The Science of Angels is just one of the topics discussed on the Online Course Simply Divine as well as the science of tarot, energy healing, the law of attraction and much more. Click the button below to find out more about Simply Divine.
Harry Oldfield has been an important figure in the field of alternative health for many years. He is a scientist and inventor and his invention of the Polycontrast Interference Photography or PIP has allowed us to perhaps look into dimensions of the universe otherwise invisible.
I feel he is a real unsung hero. I am just so honoured to know this gentleman. On our very first meeting I was attending one of his talks. The organiser of the lecture had given Harry my paper – Quantum Bio-Cosmology and Harry had read it in the car on the way to the venue.
When I introduced myself and he realised I was the author he shook my hand and said that it was an honour to have me in his lecture.
And it has gone on from there with mutual respect for each other’s work.
So I was excited to have the opportunity to present the idea to the Hidden Science team of doing a special dedicated to Harry Oldfield and his work which indeed we did.
You can see the results in the video below. Enjoy!
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