Courageous Caroline

> Reaching out to women to look within and discover their ‘authentic self’

Asense of humour is probably the first thing you will notice about Australianborn author Caroline Ward. But underneath her funny nature is a courageous soul who has gone through the trauma of losing her beloved to cancer.

SPRINGTIME

Twenty-seven years ago, Caroline was just like any other young girl; one fortunate to have met the man of her dreams and found life to be perfect as it was. However, tragedy struck when her loved one was diagnosed with lung cancer and hadn’t long to live.

To help her partner – Australian actor Michael Long – confront the disease, and to aid herself in coping with the fact that she would lose the love of her life, Michael and Caroline decided to explore something they stumbled upon – meditation.

Two months before Michael’s passing, the couple got married. The actor succumbed to the disease on April 17, 1991.

THE SEARCH

“This was when I really began the search to find myself; when I started to look within,” said Caroline, who through exploring meditation, discovered an unusual sense of peace, calm, strength, security and contentment – “feelings I’d never felt before,” she shares.

Since then, Caroline has courageously embarked on a journey, one that has brought about much change. From uprooting herself from the comforts and familiarity of “home” in Sydney, taking her all the way to Chile in South America; to a life transformation through daily meditation, learning to look within, even becoming vegetarian; as well as writing two books, My Courage, Your Courage (in Spanish) and the globallyrenowned The Four Faces of Woman (first in Spanish, then in English), plus con- ducting workshops based on the fundamentals of the latter (book) to empower women. She shares some of her observations, experiences and insights with theSun.

GOD AND I

“It was one of the toughest moments for me when Michael was in his last stage battling cancer and doctors couldn’t save his life. I remember saying to God, you have to do it, I can’t do this any more. At that instant, all my pain, sorrow and sadness disappeared,” Caroline recollects.

She shares how she felt the presence (of God) which stayed with her, right through the last days of Michael’s life. “I felt like I was ‘accompanied’, in a way that I had never experienced before. It was like a presence that was always there and all I had to do was turn to ‘it’ and ‘connect’,” she explains.

Having discovered meditation, Caroline shares about how it helped her. “I felt an authentic power,” she says. “When you meditate, what you are doing is you are finding your way back to your core, your essence. It connects you to ‘who you are’ and not ‘who you have learned to become’ or ‘who you are today’, instead ‘who you were born to be’.”

Through meditation, Caroline discovered a place “inside her” where soon, a natural confidence surfaced.

FINDING ‘I’ IN ‘ME’

After years of practising meditation, Caroline found herself becoming more and more connected with her “authentic self” and has since, been sharing her realisations and insights with other women.

“We are just disconnected with our essence and need to find our way back,” she believes and explains how one can find their true self. “Firstly, one needs to do it on their own, by searching deep within themselves.

“No one is going to find ‘me’ in ‘me’; I have to do it and you can too,” she says and expounds.

“The journey to discover one’s true self and change starts when one recognises the ‘four faces’ within the inner self. It is about an awakening of the real self and the uprising of a strength which had already existed within,” she says.

The “four faces” Caroline speaks of is really about a whole, one being, who often shuttles between four facets of ethos – the Eternal Face, Traditional Face, Modern Face and the Empowered Face.

FOUR FACES

“The Eternal Face is the ‘face’ we really are – the I behind the mask; who we were born (to be),

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