My Story

Dr. Catherine Wilkins

When I was young I felt constantly sick.  I was always nauseous and it was a good day if I didn’t feel like throwing up at mere thought of eating something.  Sometimes when I stood up I felt as though I was going to pass out, other times the world turned shades of grey and began to darken as if I was going blind. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with me and told me, in exact words, that I was a hypochondriac.

Added to my distress was the confusion that came from the connections I was aware of, yet no one else noticed. My parents, two brothers, two sisters and I all lived on a small property.  This gave me lots of opportunity to see patterns in nature and to observe how things were interconnected, but things that seemed obvious to me appeared crazy or impossible to the rest of my family. I just didn’t know how to connect with this world.

At the same time, there were things I could do. I was a problem solver from the beginning – whether it was a complex maths equation or detangling my mother’s snarled cotton from her sewing machine.

One of my biggest problems was just how different my perception was from other peoples.  As a child I perceived energy directly, spoke to Beings from other realms and befriended tree spirits. I learned a lot but had no idea of how to apply what they showed me in the world and my own life. No one could help me because just as I didn’t understand how they saw the world they didn’t understand how I saw it.

At first I tried to solve the problem by switching off those other levels of awareness, but not dealing with a problem is no solution. By shutting off a lot of myself I also closed down my energy. My father was a mathematician and ensured we’d all had a good education. By my early twenties I was half-way through my veterinarian training and very ill. By trying to force myself into only the left-brain linear or science-based reality that my family had I’d allowed my illness to grow deeper. Specialists and doctors couldn’t help.

My mother heard of a friend of my eldest sister being by a naturopath. Desperate, she insisted I see one. I was reluctant but didn’t have the energy to argue, despite this going against my scientific view of things at the time. Yet the naturopath was very professional and put me on the road back to health – but she’d used a system that appeared to not follow linear logic.  Now I was back at the same old problem.  The reality I had chosen clearly didn’t have all the answers.

In one of the first practices I worked in my boss sent me to a personal development course. Like the naturopath, it didn’t fit in with my upbringing but as he was going to pay for I went because he obviously must believe in it. The workshop was facilitated by Robert Kiyosaki – this was years before he wrote any of his books. The workshop was focused on the participants finding their personal blocks and by the end of the weekend I realised I was miserable and if I was going to change things I had to stop shutting myself down the way I’d learned to do when I was little.

That meant I had to open my energy up again.  With that, all those other levels of awareness came back too. Initially it made things worse. I was completely unstable with energy that shifted about, seemingly at random. I was overwhelmed, out of balance, and had no way to make sense of it all. My mathematician father had taught me to never be afraid to ask questions – but the first one I had to ask was; am I going crazy?

By this time I’d graduated and during surgery one day I got a clear answer. Delusions have no effect in the real world and certainly none on an anaesthetised dog. The client’s beautiful Samoyed had eaten the wrong type of bones so I had to remove them before they perforated its gut. I could see in the Xray where the bones were lodged, and I could see in its aura how its energy was impaired. During the surgery I worked on both.

The next morning I came in to find Bob, the old vet I worked for, standing by the cage shaking his head. “What did you do?” he asked me.

“I removed the bones.” I said. “Yes, but what did you do?” he asked again. He just couldn’t comprehend why the dog was up on its feet, barking and demanding to go home. From all his years of experience he knew that just didn’t happen. After bowel surgery he expected it to lie in its cage like death warmed-up for at least 3 days. Whatever made my perception so different from other people’s it was real. What a relief! I wasn’t crazy.

In my hunt for answers I opened myself up to realities that were very different to the science-based one of my childhood. It was scary but exciting. I was leaving behind what I’d grown up with and had no idea where I would end up but I was on the hunt for answers to my problem – how I could live without denying either side of myself. The pain of not being able to do that was greater than any fear I might have had about leaving the security of the life I’d known, and incurring the disapproval and lack of understanding that that inevitably brought with it. My science training told me if it was real it would follow principles – there would be natural laws which would define it and how it worked. As no one was able to tell me what those laws might be I began to research it for myself. Over the next several years I struggled with both problems simultaneously. So often, it felt like I had two personalities – one was left-brained science-girl and one was right-brained intuitive-girl. It would’ve been so much easier to shut down one side or the other, but that would’ve left me with just half a brain.

I went down many and diverse roads seeking answers. I trained in breath work, learned about crystals and meditation – all of which gave me some insight into the workings of my right brain. I was getting a feel for it, but like so many people before me I couldn’t put it into words. A year at art college helped a little – colour theory is a great way of learning about different resonances. I still enjoy painting and it’s another way of expressing what I was beginning to understand of the patterns of life.

It was while I was visiting my dad that I finally got a solid clue to the solution I was after. I was out walking when I had a powerful experience. It seemed that everything was coming into existence as I walked towards it, and going back into nothingness as I walked away from it. If you’ve ever watched Star Trek you’ll be familiar with the concept of the holodeck – a lifelike holographic creation. I had the thought that this must be what it was like to be in such a reality.

As soon as I could I asked dad how holograms were made. The parallels between that and the creation myths of many of the spiritual traditions I’d been learning about struck me immediately. The pieces were finally falling into place – reality was a hologram, just like the theory in physics, and it has a fractal structure.

And of course that meant that everything in reality also had to have a fractal structure. This was the key I’d been looking for all along. Fractals are the basis of right-brained logic – or pattern-based logic. While my right brain perceived the whole pattern, my left brain worked with the detail of each specific repetition. I soon realised that this was also how my intuition worked – it grasped the entire fractal pattern to take me places I’d never reach without it – and also how it worked with my left brain – it used the fractal map to understand where’d I’d got to, what it meant and how to return there whenever I chose. My left brain could use the fractal to track what my right brain was doing, and my right brain could use the fractal to develop greater precision and consistency.

I had finally resolved both my problems. All my varied paths came together in this.

I now had a conscious intuitive process that met my scientific understanding. It was a solution that not only worked for me but it works for anyone who wants to learn it. Like music, once you know the principles you can develop the skill – no matter where you are to begin with.  Being able to teach it to others – and have it work for them – was the final proof I was searching for.

That kind of repeatability is one of the hallmarks of scientific truth. Even though my journey had taken me a long way from my science roots, it’s still very much with me.