The following testimony is offered as a personal account of the destructiveness of the New Age and the power and love of God to restore us again to life in Christ…

I was a New Age healer.  The true story of how I left the Catholic Church in 1984, my journey into the deception of the New Age and, in 1989, the miraculous intervention of Jesus and Mary to bring me back to the faith is, above all, a love story.  It is the story of how an infinitely humble God watched and waited patiently for me to come back to Him and acted decisively to bring me back from the pit.  It is also a story of how this same loving God has used my fall to now witness to the preciousness of the Catholic faith.

I was born the middle child of a family of nine.  My family, although very religious, was not a happy one. When I left for college, I planned to leave this unhappiness behind, especially the overbearing religiosity of my father.  In my junior year,  I began to date a kind and gentle college student.  After three years of dating, I became pregnant and we were reluctantly married.  (While we had cared for each other deeply, the relationship had been a difficult one).  During the first few years of the marriage, communication was difficult between us, as it had been before, and finances were close to unworkable as I had chosen to be a stay-at-home parent.  I became clinically depressed and escaped my loneliness and sadness by plunging myself into parish functions and activities.  My church community became my sole support system and life line during this unhappy time.  I knew my marriage had been a mistake but I believed that staying married was the right thing to do.  In 1981, our then two year-old daughter was diagnosed as being partially deaf due to frequent ear infections. While at her pediatrician's office, we saw a notice on his bulletin board of a Catholic healing service in Olney given by Father John Luby.  I will never forget the night we took her to the service and up to the altar for a blessing.  Alarmed at seeing people falling on the floor right and left, my husband only reluctantly  carried our daughter up to the altar.  As soon as Father Lubey reached to give her a blessing she fell back into my husband's arms in a swoon.  She had been slain in the Spirit and was indeed healed that night.  This event marked the beginning for me of my desire to find out more about the charismatic renewal and about spiritual healing.

Not long after that evening, I participated in a Life in the Spirit seminar and felt the wonderful, giddy feeling of leading a new born life in the Spirit.  It was a time of much healing and consolation for me.  My relationship with the Lord deepened and brought me great comfort.  I began to attend charismatic prayer meetings and sought  marriage counseling with a Christian counselor.  I really thought that this was the beginning of a new life for me and my family.  However, as with the seed that did not fall on good ground in the Gospel story, the seed of my new life in the Spirit came under attack from a number of directions almost immediately.

The first trial I had to face was the fact that just because I was Spirit-filled did not mean that a seriously flawed marriage could be sanctified.  Our relationship remained severely strained and took a tremendous toll on all of us.

The second trial was that the charismatic group which I had attended seemed to be experiencing problems in leadership.  Issues involving control surfaced and I feared the group was in trouble.  I felt confused and could not understand how the Spirit could work so strongly through some members of the group and yet how the group could be so unhealthy.  I opted to leave the group and focus my time on my family and parish.  The parish had a thriving young "basement" community.  All the young families with noisy children usually attended Sunday Mass held in the downstairs meeting room where our children wouldn't disturb others and where there was much joyful singing and participation in the Eucharist.  I felt for the first time that I had found a home, and what it meant to truly live in community. 

However, trouble entered the scene again, when this wonderful community of love that had grown over a couple of years was splintered.  Both of our beloved parish priests were transferred within months of each other to be replaced by a pastor who decided to cancel the basement Masses.  Many families left the parish.  At the same time, two of my closest friends and their children moved out of town. 

I felt betrayed and abandoned.   More traumas followed.  My family home in Southern Maryland burned to the ground in the winter of 1983 and only one year later my mother died of lung cancer.  I didn't realize it at the time, but I was shell shocked.   

One seeming ray of sunshine entered our lives during this difficult time.  My husband and I developed a friendship with a young priest who was a serious practitioner of yoga.  Rising everyday at 4 am, he would travel to a nearby ashram to meditate, sing, and practice yoga before daily Mass.  He was a joy-filled, earnest lover of God and Jesus, and thought he was doing no harm.  He interested me in yoga and in two books which have had a profound influence on others as well as on me; The Course in Miracles, which is supposedly the words of Christ as received by a psychologist named Helen Schukman and The Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. 

By this time, I felt that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was an outdated, old-fashioned punishing figure, and that the Catholic Church was out of touch with the Gospel message it purported to serve.  Instead of thinking that I was going to leave the Church, I had deceived myself into thinking that the Church had left me. 

I began to find solace and joy in studying Eastern mysticism and yoga, two systems that advocate a personal, guilt-free, joyful relationship with God.  I also began a year-long daily meditation in The Course in Miracles as well as a serious practice in a type of yoga called Kriya Yoga. The benefits of these practices seemed almost immediate.  Meditation techniques and yoga exercises gave me a calmness and peace I had never had before.  I experienced dreams and signs that proved to me, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that God was leading me away from organized religion and into what has become labeled as the New Age. I truly felt the Spirit was leading me away from the Catholic Church. 

It is worth recounting at this point several extraordinary experiences that happened to me that seemed to me to be confirmations of my spiritual path into the New Age.  Since then, of course, I have heard others recount to me strikingly similar experiences that also served to lead them on their own paths of destruction.  My first extraordinary experiences took place during sleep when I sometimes seemed to float out of my body and around the room.  Many people now report these kind of out-of-body experiences, as they are called, some of them during near death experiences.  I became interested in out-of-body experiences and found a book about it written by a noted businessman, Robert Monroe.  Monroe had established a center to study out-of-body experiences, and spurred by my own experiences, I began to read his books on how to actually facilitated these experiences. 

Because of my continued practice of meditation, I had developed the ability to remember up to six and seven dreams each night, and to consciously go out of body at night during what seemed like a very vivid dreams.  I saw this as a wonderful adventure into beautiful spiritual realms.  Believing that "the universe is good", I saw no harm in doing this.

On the night of my 28th birthday, after falling asleep, I had an out-of-body experience that I would never forget. I seemed to be lifted out of my body and saw who I thought was Jesus, together with my mother and grandmother.  This dream figure of Jesus took me by the hand and brought me to a man who looked like an eastern guru.  Jesus appeared to be giving me His blessing to leave the Catholic faith to practice eastern meditation and yoga.  I awoke filled with happiness and peace. 

It was only much later, after hearing others trapped in the New Age relate to me their stories that I realized these kinds of extraordinary visions and dreams which include the apparent figures of Jesus or Mary or other loved ones, are in fact, can be deceptions.  I also learned that many people made vulnerable by life crises, as I had been, are also only too open to these kinds of spiritual escapes as a way to avoid the pain of their losses.   

Many more books, techniques, conferences, workshops, and friends followed.  From crystal therapy to body-mind therapies, to wholeness and healing seminars, I thought I had found a new and joyful way to look at the world.  I met new friends, many of them lapsed Catholics.  We thought we had indeed found a brave new world.  As I look back, it seems as if there was indeed a plan in place that led me from one experience and person to the next.  At the time I thought in my heart it was God's plan.  Later, I felt it was diabolical.  Now, however, as I look back, I see the hand of Providence even during the times of my worst self deception.  Judging now from the serious injuries and tragedies I have learned about in the lives of others, I feel that I was spared from experiencing the real consequences of these horrors so that one day I might help others.  To this day, I can still feel the overwhelming love of God for me in all of this.

The events that were to follow would lead me to the newest techniques and leaders of the New Age movement.During one meditation at the time, I asked God to please send to me a teacher.  The name that quickly came to my mind was the name Ramadya.  This prophecy took place weeks before I joined a study group devoted to yoga.  Shortly after that, I was introduced to a well known therapist, physicist and spiritual healer named Barbara Brennan.  Her books are now the best selling books on spiritual healing.

The first time I met with her she described a guru she psychically saw standing next to me.  The next week I actually saw a picture of this guru at the yoga center and learned his name was Ramaya.  This seemed a definite confirmation that I should study with this guru, which I did.

After two or more years studying New Age theory and yoga, I had decided to enter a four-year training program in spiritual healing with Barbara Brennan, who is now considered one of the foremost leaders of the New Age movement. The program I entered involved studying the body, mind and spirit as a field of energy, and working with spiritual guides and angels to channel energy to heal.  Members of my class included doctors, lawyers, psychologists and physicists- not the kind of people one would normally associate with a cult. 

Over the year and one half that I studied and practiced "healing" with these classmates, my psychic abilities increased dramatically.  Many of us students were able to "see" what are called "auras" and see or hear angels, and we all developed extraordinary powers of "prophecy" and "discernment".  We all formed a close knit group of friends who traveled to spend several days together every two months in a workshop environment.  I felt that I had finally found what God wanted me to do with my life.

Meanwhile my marriage had deteriorated to cold silences as my husband grew interested in someone else.  I planned to separate as soon as I could find a job and a place to live.  Looking back, I see my New Age adventures as just another way to escape a relationship which I should have had the courage to end years before.  Additionally, during my classes, Brennan "channeled an entity", as it is called, or rather, allowed a spirit to come into her body during ceremonies in which she manipulated the group's energies to be channeled into the Earth.  These infusions of group energy were purportedly to serve the planet.   Interestingly, Brennan now claims to be receiving the Eucharist miraculously from the Blessed Mother.

Along with Brennan's training, she included psychological training and counseling, both on a group and individual level, which included deep psychological release work.  The purpose of this was for us to "clear out old negative patterns" and to open ourselves to new growth.  Of course, now I see it as a way to open us on deeper levels to spiritual bondage. 
 
One day in 1989, a series of disturbing events occurred at one of our weekend workshops which resulted in my break with the New Age.  One "student" was announced to be a warlock and to have placed spells on a number of people in the group.  His romantic partner, also a member, had become psychotic that same day and left the group to seek medical help.  A number of people also left early in great fear while this rather ominous melodrama enfolded.

I, myself, had experienced a one-on-one "counseling" session earlier in the day with the center's therapist in which he role-played my parent, and I a small child.  I felt myself to be in a very tenuous psychological state after this emotional "release work", as it is called.  When these events occurred, I felt a great blackness descend on the group, and I, myself, became terror stricken by the events that were unfolding. 

Brennan tried to downplay the events in a lecture in which I witnessed her flipping between personalities, saying, "There is nothing to fear.  This is all an illusion".  I was reminded of the scene in "The Wizard of Oz" where Toto pulls aside the curtain to reveal the true identity of the wizard, as the man behind the curtain shouts, "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!".

For several days after returning home from the workshop, I remained very fearful and was unable to sleep.  I began to suffer from an intense heat in my spine and head.  By the third day, I began to feel what I clearly sensed was the presence of a violent spirit near me.  I contacted Brennan, who challenged me for deliberately "refusing to be grounded".  I also contacted the class therapist, telling him of my fears, and that I felt Brennan herself was severely off in some way.  He said this had actually happened to her previously, but that she "was just fine".  He promised to call me back in a couple of days.  I sensed a great deal of fear in his voice, as I am sure the possibility of having another member of the group break down would be a blow to the group's reputation.

By the fourth day, still unable to sleep, I feared possession or insanity.  I realized finally that what I had been involved in was very wrong and I asked God to help me.  I contacted and visited a local priest in the deliverance ministry in an attempt to solicit help. 

My brother accompanied me to the priest's rectory.  After a brief discussion, the priest left the room to go upstairs to make a phone call.  He returned, shaken, asking me if I has gone upstairs with him (which I had not).  Only moments after I began to speak with him, he began to grow very sleepy.  I turned to look at my brother who had fallen sound asleep.  Fearful, the priest said a short blessing and stated that he would keep in touch with me after he talked to others about my problem.

I returned home and telephoned Father Luby, who so many years before had helped my family.  He said a brief blessing for me over the phone.  As I hung up, I was slain in the Spirit for the first time in my life.

At that moment, a figure I firmly believe was Jesus Christ came to me, and over a period of what seemed a half-hour put me through a grueling and terrifying deliverance.  This was not a New Age "christ" of hearts and flowers and angel bells but the true Jesus Christ who commanded me to renounce the life I had come to lead. There are no words to explain the physical and spiritual deliverance that took place inside of me.  It felt as if the Lord were taking me apart and putting me back together again.  For a long time after this I was to wonder how God could have allowed me to suffer so much during those days and the almost 5 years that followed.  Now, I see in others what horrors could have occurred to me, and that in His tender mercy He administered swift and strong medicine which I needed to save my soul. 

I then spent three weeks in continual, almost insufferable interior heat and mental anguish.  Despite what equaled an emotional breakdown, the next year was spent working not one but three jobs as my marriage ended, and a three-year bitter divorce followed.  During all this time, I was rarely free from the physical sensation of intense interior  heat and emotional trauma.  Only years later, reading a book about a saint who had seen and categorized the pains of hell, did I realize that I was experiencing, in some way, the very pains of hell itself including the feelings of total separation from God and despair.  I resigned myself to living the effects of that weekend for the rest of my life.  Although I had been delivered, it would take another five years to be healed and one year  more to be converted once again.

This healing and conversion began in the summer of 1993 when I had an opportunity to visit a monastery where an icon of the Blessed Mother weeps tears.  By a blessing with these "tears", the heat, the anguish, and the fear vanished.  The Blessed Mother had closed the wound and delivered me from the hell into which I had plunged myself.

It was not until nine months later, on the feast of Pentecost, that I made a trip to the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception to thank Our Lady for rescuing me.  That night as I fell asleep, I felt the Spirit of the Lord descend upon me and I received an extraordinary grace of feeling the love of God as my true Father.  His loving presence showed me that my body, mind and soul were a holy temple which had been violated in a profound way by my renunciation of my faith and of Jesus Christ.  He truly restored my soul that day. 

Since that time Our Lord and Our Lady continue to bless me and my daughter in countless ways: not with extraordinary visions, voices, and glittering miracles, but with overflowing graces.   My daughter, now twenty, suffered greatly during all of these experiences.  Like so many children of my generation, she is wounded by divorce and been made vulnerable by the relative poverty of being the child of a single parent. Spiritually, she is very guarded even now about any kind of spirituality because of my experiences, but is definitely wise to the New Age culture that is so prevalent on college campuses.

And what about my life now?  As His Holiness John Paul II has said, I am "called to daily conversion".  Every day the Lord shows me a little more of how I need to change to be all that love demands me to be. 

For a number of years I have been trying to get the word out about the dangers of the New Age through talks and articles and have been actively trying to help others trapped in the New Age movement by praying for them,  witnessing to them and referring them to others who might heal and deliver them.  Now as never before, Christians who have become involved in the many dangerous practices of the New Age, from Reiki, yoga, and meditation, to trance channeling and energy healing are suffering severe repercussions.  Many of them are practicing Marian Catholics, taken in by practices such as Healing Touch International and Reiki, very popular among Catholic medical professionals and church ministry leaders. 

I believe that we are now being called to witness in whatever way we can in these extraordinary times, not in flashy ways but by sharing our own stories, grief, sufferings and joys in the Lord and by preaching Jesus Christ, and Him crucified, as Saint Paul also did in the face of the Gnostic heretics of his day.   Most importantly, we are called to pray and intercede for our loved ones and our friends who are unwittingly bringing into our families and congregations the poisons of the New Age which are denial, narcissism, arrogance and spiritual bondage. It is also this New Age culture that is having a profound influence in U.S. and U.N. global policies.   We are spreading the cancers of abortion, population control and euthanasia which the New Age religion condones and promulgates as necessary works of mercy. 

My faith walk since my conversion has been one of waiting for the Lord to allow me to help others caught in the New Age.  Nowadays, I take great joy in sharing this most precious faith to which Our Lord and Lady have restored me.  We truly have a treasure whose worth is unknown, a truth that really does set us free and keeps us safe - in the arms of Jesus and Mary. 

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