Noreen Clarke interview, copyright Victoria Mary Clarke, 2003

Noreen Clarke woke up angry. Her husband had walked out on her, so she had no-one to be angry with.  She went driving in her car and waited for someone to cut her up in traffic, so that she could rage at them.  But the anger never went away.  Except when she was depressed. Life had dumped Noreen on the scrap-heap and she had plenty of reasons to be depressed.  Having survived divorce and subsequently a violent relationship, she had reared three kids on her own, and now the last one was leaving the nest.  There was no longer any reason to get out of bed in the mornings, but she carried on doing so, wondering why she bothered.  Every day she went to work as a cleaner, smoked her way through a hundred fags and looked forward only to the few drinks at the end of it all, nothing more.
            Apart from the loneliness and the futility, Noreen had had chronic back pain for years.  She also had a lump on her breast and was scheduled for a hysterectomy.  These, she figured, were the least of her worries, just the inevitable deterioration of the body.  Something happened to Noreen, in November of that year.  Three months later, the back pain was gone, the lump was gone and her doctor told her that she no longer needed a hysterectomy.  Gone, also was the desire to smoke or drink.  Noreen calls what happened a miracle and she believes that it’s possible for any of us to experience miracles, so she’s changed career.  She’s no longer a cleaner, now she teaches people to find their own miracles.
            What happened to Noreen was a weekend workshop called ‘The Journey”.  The workshop was a gift from her employers, an Irish couple who were into New Age therapies.  Noreen, being a no-nonsense Mayo woman had no truck with New Age, but she accepted their gift because she was lonely at weekends and she was looking for a man.  There might be a man at the workshop.
            Brandon Bays is the woman behind ‘The Journey.  Brandon is petite and blonde and Californian, with perfect white teeth.  She was everything Noreen wasn’t and Noreen hated her on sight.  But she looked and sounded so vibrant that Noreen said to herself ‘I’ll have a pint of whatever she’s having.’ When Brandon told her story, Noreen perked up and paid attention.  Brandon had been at the height of her profession as PA to Tony Robbins, America’s leading motivational guru and she was giving her own seminars in the field of mind-body medicine.  Something was amiss, however.  She had noticed her stomach was getting enormous, even though she ate well and exercised regularly.  Eventually, she consulted a doctor and was told that she had a tumour in her uterus, the size of a basketball.  An operation was immediately prescribed.
            Brandon was devastated. She was obviously a failure.  How could she tell other people to heal themselves without surgery, if she was dying, herself?  And she vowed to find a way to heal the tumour without the knife.  Six weeks later, having dedicated herself to her own healing, the tumour had completely gone.  In the process of healing herself, Brandon had uncovered long-suppressed memories from childhood and had allowed herself to feel the pain and to forgive her parents for having caused it.  This resolving of repressed emotions, she now believed was the key to letting go of the illness and she set about teaching other people to heal their own emotional baggage, using a simple guided visualisation which she had successfully experimented with.  This process, she named ‘The Journey”, and wrote about in a best-selling book of the same name.
            The Journey worked on Noreen, she didn’t find a man, but she found a new lease of life, free from her health problems, free from addictions and free from anger and hopelessness.  ‘It was truly the first time I had looked at my emotions” she says.  ‘I knew they were there, but I didn’t know what to do with them!”
            The process is not complicated.
            ‘You simply feel whatever it is that you are feeling and then instead of pushing it away, or trying to fix it, you relax into it and drop through to whatever is underneath,” she says.  ‘Underneath my anger was a lot of hurt and inadequacy.”
            Underneath all of the emotions, however, was a deep and delicious sense of peace.  Noreen explains that this sense of peace or connection with our ‘Source’ or true nature is always present, underneath everything else that we feel.  When we are babies, we feel this connection most of the time, but as we grow up and experience the pain of being shouted at, of being told to shut up, being told not to cry, not to be afraid, to ‘put up and shut up”, we learn to distrust and to fear our emotions.  So much so as to spend our time avoiding them with distractions such as work, television, food, alcohol, relationships and meddling in other people’s affairs.  When Noreen told me this, I also perked up and paid attention.  I remembered how often in my life I have reached for the tub of ice-cream and the duvet and the telly, after a boyfriend hadn’t called or worse still had dumped me.  I remembered wanting to die, the first time I was dumped, because of the pain of the loneliness.  And I agreed to try the process myself, to see whether it would work on me.
            In Ballina, in a small terraced house, we gathered on a Saturday morning.  Ten ordinary looking people from all over Ireland, some of us had travelled from Cork, some from Dublin, some from the North. People launched into what feelings they were afraid of.  I found myself crying, as I listened.  The general theme was of not feeling good enough, no matter what anyone tried to do with their lives.  As we paired up and guided each other through the process, everyone found themselves in that place of peace and unconditional love.  For some of us, it was the first time we had discovered that we were capable of that.
            In my own life, I have tried plenty of therapies, in an attempt to banish that feeling of loneliness, of abandonment, that fear that I will live and die alone.  And in the process, I have discovered many memories, and cried absolute buckets, but never have I resolved any of it.  I just seem to stir it up and then run away from it, because it all seems too hopeless, too overwhelming.  During the weekend, we all uncovered agonising feelings, but we didn’t analyse them.  We found the relevant memories, spoke to the people involved and found out what had really happened.  Then, most importantly, we were asked to forgive those people, from the bottom of our hearts and to let go of the hurt.  A surprisingly tangible feeling accompanies forgiveness, when it is genuine.  A sense of release, of lightness, of newness.  I felt as though my actual cells were changing.  Noreen says that the cells are capable of releasing the memories of repressed feelings and of disease and that, she believes is what happened to Brandon.  I don’t know if that’s true, but what I do know is that I feel lighter, no longer scared to be aloneh.  I’m no longer afraid of whatever I might be feeling, because underneath whatever it is, is always peace.  This, Noreen says, is what her work is all about, putting people back into that place where everything is as it should be, so that healing can take place at every level.
 Noreen’s workshops take place 26+27 April, 3+4 May, 17+18 May, contact her on 096 71706, or 087 136 4900
Or www.noreenclarke.com
‘The Journey” by Brandon Bays is published by Thorsons 10.99 euros.