Loss of a Great Man

Just after my last blog in November 2011, a dear and much loved man died of multiple melanomas on the 18th November.  I didn't know it till recently when the news came along the grapevine.  This man was Dr Roger Woolger, a warm, humorous and healing person with a depth of knowledge and understanding that made us all respect and love him.  Roger was a Jungian therapist but his speciality was what he called Deep Memory Process, a technique he developed which helped many people get in touch with buried memories, often of past lives.  Bringing these memories to consciousness was a tremendously liberating process and a healing one as I can vouch from personal experience of his workshops. 


My son originally brought his work to my attention when he gave me Roger's groundbreaking book, Other Lives Other Selves, as a birthday gift.  I got in touch with Roger and attended one of his workshops in Malvern in 1991.  As soon as the Malvern Hills came into sight through the train window I began to choke with tears.  I immediately felt this place was my spiritual home and have always felt so and in 1999 moved from London to Malvern with my husband who loves the hills as much as I do.  I also made some other friends from this period who will always be special to me.  Thus on life's journey, we meet some particular faces once again, people who feel so familiar. . . .this is how it seems to me. Friends who will be with one perhaps through many incarnations.

Roger became a close friend for a while but over the years we lost touch though I often heard of his brilliant work and punishing schedule as he toured the world teaching his process to others.  The workshop experience was a life turning point for me in many ways.  At these workshops, Roger would play us music, read poetry and he put me in touch with the sublime mystic poetry of the Sufis, especially Jellaladin Rumi.  I shall never forget the regression experiences in which I had an amazing sense of coming close to the Divine, an uplift of the soul that cannot be expressed.  It freed me and healed me in many ways. 
Thank you, Roger, for all you gave to us at the cost of your own health.

Here is a poem from his web site http://www.deepmemoryprocess.com/ which expresses so much of the mystical view of life and death.

DEEPENING THE WONDER

Death is a favour to us,
But our scales have lost their balance.
The impermanence of the body
Should give us great clarity,
Deepening the wonder in our senses and eyes
Of this mysterious existence we share
And are surely just travelling through.

If I were in the Tavern tonight,
Hafiz would call for drinks
And as the Master poured, I would be reminded
That all I know of life and myself is that
We are just a midair flight of golden wine
Between His Pitcher and His Cup.

If I were in the Tavern tonight,
I would buy freely for everyone in this world
Because our marriage with the Cruel Beauty
Of time and space cannot endure very long.
Death is a favour to us,
But our minds have lost their balance.

The miraculous existence and impermanence of
Form
Always makes the illumined ones
Laugh and sing.

~Hafiz


From: "The Subject Tonight Is Love" (60 Wild & Sweet Poems of Hafiz translated by Daniel Ladinsky