24. Brazil: After the Miracle, We Still Must Return to Life

I went there seeking healing and found myself at the border between miracle and consequence, grace and responsibility. Whatever I experienced at the Casa, the harder lesson was practical: healing could not excuse me from life. If it meant anything, it had to return me to life with greater discipline, courage, and clarity.

In that small healing town, prayer and blessing felt closer than they ever had before. I also began to imagine a world in which spiritual care might find a meaningful place within ordinary life — a possibility I would later learn to hold with greater discernment.

In the hidden geometry of a life, what appears accidental often later reveals itself as part of a deeper necessity. I did not know any of this when I saw a Facebook advertisement for a crystal healing bed. At the time, what I noticed first was the discount.

The offer was simple: pay for one person, bring a second for free.

My first reaction was hardly spiritual. I was pleased. If I could find a friend to come with me, we could split the cost. At that point in my life, anything that promised even a small measure of healing felt worth trying. A discount made the invitation more persuasive.

I had meant to go with someone else, but through a small chain of inconvenience and coincidence, I ended up going alone. Looking back, that detail feels strangely exact. Events that alter a life rarely announce themselves with grandeur. Sometimes they arrive as an advertisement, a casual appointment, or the private satisfaction of thinking one has found a bargain.

The healing room was small, with two crystal beds placed side by side. Above each bed hung seven Vogel-cut crystals, aligned with the seven chakras. Coloured light passed through them and fell softly over the body. Gentle music moved through the room. The sheets were clean and faintly scented with laundry. Within minutes of lying down, my body loosened, and I slipped into sleep.

When I woke an hour later, I was still half-dreaming. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw my body surrounded by fragments of coloured light. Inside, something that had been held tight for a long time seemed to be released.

Leanne woke me gently and told me the session was over. I sat up, smoothing my hair and clothes, surprised by how deeply relaxed I felt. Perhaps because sleep had softened me, I asked where she had found such an unusual healing bed.

The question opened something.

Her eyes brightened. She turned to a drawer and pulled out a brochure for a spiritual tour to Brazil. The crystal bed, she told me, had come from a healing centre there: Casa de Dom Inácio de Loyola. She travelled there every year and took groups with her.

When she spoke of the Casa, her whole face seemed to light up. She told me stories of illnesses improving after doctors had offered little hope, prayers answered in uncanny ways, and spiritual clearings that visitors understood as the removal of attachments, dark energies, even alien implants. She said she herself had experienced profound healing there. Her stories did not have the slickness of a sales pitch. They carried the conviction of someone who believed she had witnessed grace with her own eyes.

I took the brochure and said politely that I would think about it. Leanne urged me to decide soon. The July group was filling quickly.

Inside me, two forces pulled in opposite directions. One part longed for healing powerful enough to change the course of my life. That longing came from exhaustion, from the place a person reaches when body and spirit have grown tired of merely enduring. Another part remained wary. By then I had seen enough disorder in Chinese spiritual circles — exaggeration, performance, manipulation, money wrapped in sacred language — to hesitate whenever anyone promised miracles or a rewritten destiny.

I wanted to believe. I was also afraid of how badly I wanted to believe.

When I returned home, I laid the tri-fold brochure on my table. At the centre was a photograph of an elderly man in white, placing his hand on the head of a patient. Around him, faces looked upward with the strained hope of the sick and the desperate. His name was printed in large letters: John of God.

This was May 2018. Everything that later came to light around that name would force me to look back on the journey with a more complicated mind. At the time, I knew none of it. What I had before me was a brochure, a photograph, and the sudden shock of recognition moving through my body.

I stared at the man in white.

The feeling came like a memory rising from somewhere below thought. I had seen this image before, during dream contact with the luminous extraterrestrial beings: a male healer dressed in white, standing in a field of light, placing his hands on people who had come for healing and blessing. I had never understood where that image belonged. Now, as I looked at the photograph in front of me, the two scenes seemed to overlap.

Could this be the place the extraterrestrial beings had been guiding me toward?

Brazil. Casa de Dom Inácio de Loyola.

The name no longer felt like a travel destination. It felt like a door.

To be careful, I returned to Leanne’s healing room and asked her for details. What was the place really like? How did the process work? Was it safe to go alone? Where should I stay? What had she actually seen?

For more than two hours, she told me about her own experiences, the people she had taken there, the routes, guesthouses, rules, and practical warnings. What persuaded me was not only the mystery, but the specificity. Once the sacred was translated into addresses, schedules, meals, and local instructions, it became strangely more real.

At last, I decided to go.

I did not wait for the July group. I booked the flights, arranged accommodation, and began preparing for the journey alone. On the surface, I was planning a trip. Somewhere deeper, I felt I was finally obeying an instruction that had been waiting for me to hear it.

So, in May 2018, I boarded a flight to Brazil, bound for Abadiânia, the small town many people called a place of healing and miracles.

At the time, I thought I was going in search of a cure, a miracle, or an answer that might change my fate. Only later would I understand that the journey was asking something harder of me: whether, if the sacred had truly touched my life, I would be willing to return to ordinary reality and change that life with my own hands.

***

After landing in Brasília, I took a taxi for another hour and a half across the interior of Goiás. The road ran through a dry, open landscape washed in hard Brazilian light. By the time we reached Abadiânia, the town had already lived in my mind for weeks as a place of signs, healings, and impossible stories. In reality, it looked almost disarmingly ordinary: low buildings, narrow streets, red dust, small shops, the late-afternoon heat rising from the road.

Yet the longer I looked, the stranger the ordinariness became. Everywhere there were signs of the Casa.

Shops sold crystals, rosaries, white cotton clothing, prayer cards, spiritual books, and framed images of saints. White garments hung from doorways like flags of surrender. Murals in bright Latin American colours covered some of the walls. Cafés and guesthouses sat low to the ground, simple and sun-worn, waiting for pilgrims who had come carrying cancer scans, photographs of loved ones, impossible wishes, and the kind of hope that appears when ordinary solutions have failed.

At the centre of it all was Casa de Dom Inácio de Loyola, known simply as the Casa. The town seemed to breathe around it. Taxi drivers, guides, guesthouses, cafés, laundries, and crystal shops all depended, in one way or another, on the stream of people arriving in search of spiritual intervention beyond what medicine, psychology, or ordinary life had so far provided.

The taxi finally turned left and stopped in front of my guesthouse, only a short walk from the healing centre. The building was plain, but the courtyard had a quiet warmth. When I stepped through the wooden gate, the air smelled of plants, earth, and the faint coolness that gathers after a hot day.

The owner came out to greet me with the open, full-bodied warmth I would soon associate with Brazil. Her voice was loud and cheerful, her smile immediate. She made me feel less like a stranger arriving from the other side of the world than someone expected. She led me to a simple, clean room. The white sheets smelled of sun. From the window I could see the dining area across the courtyard, with square tables covered in checked cloths.

Then, after I had put down my bags, her manner changed.

“You should go to the Casa tonight,” she told me. “There is an orientation for newcomers. You need to understand the rules. Follow them carefully. Otherwise it can affect the healing.”

The warmth did not leave her face, but her voice grew firm. She was no longer speaking like a guesthouse owner explaining breakfast hours. She sounded like someone passing on a warning.

“John of God sees people from Monday to Wednesday,” she added. “On the other days the Casa is still open, but only for crystal beds and prayer.”

I listened carefully. Until that moment, some part of me had still imagined the place as a kind of spiritual retreat, unusual but manageable. Her seriousness corrected me. The Casa had its own rhythm, its own boundaries, its own discipline.

That evening, standing in my small room with the smell of clean sheets and warm dust still around me, I felt the first true shift of the journey. I had crossed more than distance. I had entered a town where suffering had been organised into pilgrimage, where hope sustained an economy, and where the desire to be healed required obedience before it asked for faith.

***

On Monday morning, I dressed entirely in white, as the Casa required. The act felt strangely formal. Buttoning the shirt, smoothing the fabric, I had the sense of putting on something more than clothing. It was a temporary skin for entering a world governed by ritual.

When I stepped outside, the street was already filling with people in white. They came from everywhere: Brazilians, Americans, Europeans, Japanese visitors moving in small groups toward the healing centre. Portuguese rose and fell around me with its quick warmth; English sounded suddenly familiar; German, French, and Japanese threaded through the morning air. For a moment, the narrow road became a procession without a nation, a river of the sick, the hopeful, the desperate, and the devout.

The gates of the Casa were open. People moved in slowly, almost solemnly. Near the entrance stood a simple station where newcomers wrote down their illnesses, requests, and prayers. It reminded me oddly of filling out an arrival card at an airport, except here the destination was invisible. Heads bent over the forms. Some people wrote with the concentration of students taking an exam; others paused for a long time, as if translating suffering into words required more courage than they had expected. A few held photographs of children, parents, spouses, or friends. On those small pieces of paper were cancers, debts, broken marriages, pain without diagnosis, fear without language, and wishes too fragile to be spoken aloud.

The waiting area looked, at first glance, almost ordinary: rows of benches, lines of people, volunteers directing the flow. Yet the atmosphere was unlike a hospital. No one complained about the waiting. People sat quietly, eyes closed, hands folded, lips moving in prayer. Some seemed exhausted; others carried an alertness that bordered on trembling. Everyone appeared to be listening to something.

I joined the queue and moved forward inch by inch. Around me, strangers spoke softly. I was told that Monday to Wednesday were the busiest days, when thousands of visitors might pass through the Casa. There were other forms of healing as well: crystal beds, prayer rooms, photographs left for blessing, evening prayers, and soup and bread offered at midday. Much of it was free. In a world where spiritual need was so easily commercialised, that fact struck me with unexpected force.

The line entered the building and passed through rooms that felt like a small Catholic chapel. People sat in rows with their eyes closed, holding the space in silence. I had been told that their meditation supported the healing field, that each person became part of the current moving through the room. Whether one accepted that explanation or not, the effect was undeniable. The air felt concentrated. Even my thoughts seemed to lower their voice.

Then the line turned, and suddenly I was in front of him.

John of God sat behind a long table. Beside him was an interpreter who moved between languages with practiced calm, receiving the needs of strangers from every continent and reducing them to a few essential words. The man in white looked older than he had in the brochure, heavier, more human. Yet the room around him carried a charge that was difficult to dismiss. People approached him with the raw obedience of those who had already tried everything else.

At the Casa, people believed John of God worked as a medium for healing entities — doctors, saints, and spiritual beings said to operate through his body and consciousness. Stories circulated everywhere: his eyes changing when a different entity came through, his manner shifting, a few words or a gesture bringing relief, sometimes even a cure. Whether or not one accepted those explanations, belief in the Casa did not move as abstract doctrine. It travelled through testimony, repetition, bodies, photographs, scars, crutches, and the faces of people who felt they had been touched by something beyond explanation.

When my turn came, I handed over the paper on which I had written two health concerns and one wish. The interpreter conveyed them briefly. John of God took my hand, looked into my eyes for a few seconds, then nodded. I was told I had been given a Divine Intervention.

The words were simple, almost procedural, yet they landed inside me with a force I had not expected. I followed the remaining instructions given by the volunteers and left the Casa in a state of quiet happiness. Nothing dramatic had happened outwardly. No sudden collapse of the old world. Still, as I stepped back into the brightness of the town, I felt that some unseen permission had been given, and that my life had entered a process whose meaning I did not yet understand.

***

Back at the guesthouse, I became aware of an unusually bright orb, about the size of a golf ball, hovering near me and following me from place to place. Its light carried gentle warmth. Through telepathy, it conveyed a simple message: You will be healed. Do not worry. The words moved through me like warm water, and a quiet calm settled in my chest.

That night, I went to bed early.

When I opened my eyes the next morning, I felt so weak I could hardly move. It was the kind of exhaustion one imagines after major surgery, as if something deep inside me had been opened and worked on through the night. Then I heard the voice of a male spiritual being: You have just had an operation. Do not get out of bed or go outside before ten tomorrow morning.

I could clearly feel that something had been done to the left side of my back. The sensation was precise, almost surgical. Yet when I reached behind me, there was nothing there — no bandage, wound, or stitches. Whatever had taken place seemed to belong to another order of reality. I was too tired to think further and drifted back into sleep.

The following night, after that spiritual “operation,” the Virgin Mary appeared at my bedside.

What startled me first was her youth. She looked nothing like the solemn, distant Madonna I had unconsciously carried in my mind. She seemed like a woman in her early twenties — radiant, alive, almost girlish in presence. She wore a pure white robe with a luminous blue mantle and stood as if poised at the edge of a bank of clouds, surrounded by golden light.

“There are two things I need to tell you,” she said in a light, almost playful tone. “I actually have a sense of humour. And second…”

Then she spoke about what I understood as an arrangement within my fate, as if some higher level of reality had already seen the outline of my future and was offering me a glimpse of it. What she said filled me with surprise, joy, and trembling gratitude. It felt as though a lamp had been lit somewhere ahead of me.

“Come up,” she said with a smile.

At once, an image appeared before me: the beanstalk from Jack and the Beanstalk, rising upward through the sky, connecting earth to the clouds and the heavens beyond. I understood immediately that she was speaking of more than ascent in any literal sense. She was pointing toward an elevation of consciousness, a call to rise beyond the level at which I had been living.

“If you climb up,” she told me, “heaven will be there waiting for you. Heaven will give you the reward that is meant for you.”

She looked at me with a gaze that was tender and immeasurably deep. I fixed every detail of the encounter in my memory. Then, still exhausted, I fell asleep again.

***

A few days later, another presence came.

It was May 22, the feast day of Saint Rita of Cascia, known in Catholic tradition as the patron saint of impossible causes. I knew only a little about her then, but enough to understand that people turned to her when ordinary hope had been exhausted. That alone made her presence feel intimate to me. I had come to Brazil because several parts of my own life had begun to feel impossible.

I was in the guesthouse dining room, about to sit down with my plate, when I suddenly entered a trance-channeling state. A feminine consciousness crossed into my energy field with quiet force. I felt her essence before I could name her: gentle, steady, maternal, with a strength that had nothing theatrical in it. I knew it was Saint Rita.

Her presence opened in impressions. Through inner sight, I glimpsed the quiet life of a convent: women caring for one another, prayer held in silence, work done without display, the small daily disciplines through which a soul becomes clear. Then her awareness seemed to pass over my own life. She did not judge. She simply saw. A blessing moved through me like warm light.

The encounter lasted perhaps twenty minutes. After dinner, I returned to my room and wrote it down before ordinary consciousness could blur the edges.

A few days later, after another spiritual operation, I saw her again with my inner sight. She lingered near the doorway of my guesthouse room, as if keeping watch over my recovery. There was something deeply moving about that image: the saint of impossible causes standing like a concerned elder outside the room of a tired woman far from home.

During that journey, the Virgin Mary had appeared with radiance and humour. Saint Rita, too, had a light sense of humour. Once, she seemed to joke that she was the true heroine of Mission: Impossible. I found this unexpectedly charming. Even after ascension, these saints did not seem stripped of personality. They still carried warmth, wit, and a recognisably human tenderness. Saint Rita’s gift, however, was quieter than Mary’s: the feeling that even what cannot yet be solved can still be accompanied by grace.

***

I slept until lunchtime the next day. When I finally rose, I moved slowly, still carrying the heaviness of the spiritual operation in my body. The guesthouse dining room was already warm with the smell of food—rice, beans, vegetables, soup, the comforting abundance of a Brazilian buffet.

That was where I met Ross, a middle-aged man from New Zealand. He had just received what he described as an eye operation from the Entities and was sitting at one of the tables, frowning at work emails on his phone. When he realised I spoke English, he asked if I could help him read them. So I sat there with my plate of food, reading and explaining his emails while he listened, half-amused by his own helplessness. In that ordinary way, over lunch in a small Brazilian town, we became acquainted.

I told him what had happened to me: the spiritual operation, the weakness afterward, the appearance of the Virgin Mary at my bedside. Ross did not seem surprised. He only smiled, as if I had told him something unusual in any other town, but entirely plausible in this one.

“There are countless real miracles here,” he said.

He told me about a journalist who had once come to Abadiânia to report on the Casa with no particular belief in it. Walking through town, the man noticed blood on his white shirt. When he opened it, he found marks near his heart, as if an operation had been performed without his knowledge. The illness that had troubled him for years was said to have disappeared afterward.

Ross watched my face as he spoke, clearly enjoying my astonishment.

“The spirits don’t just stay inside the Casa,” he said. “They move around the town. Sometimes they operate on people wherever they find them.”

Then he asked, “Have you been to the miracle room?”

A miracle room inside the Casa? I had never heard of it. But by then, nothing in that town sounded impossible anymore, so I told him I would look for it.

“You should go,” he said, suddenly more serious. “It’s full of crutches and wheelchairs left behind by people who were healed.” To Ross, and to many believers at the Casa, the room was a public testimony that miracles had occurred there.

By then I had heard enough stories that disbelief no longer arrived cleanly.

I promised myself I would go.

For the next few days, I remained mostly at the guesthouse, resting. After the spiritual operation, my body felt lighter than it ever had before, almost as if some dense layer had been washed out of me. It was not only my head or back that seemed to have been treated. I felt cleansed from the inside, as if an invisible light had passed through the body and left more space behind.

With that lightness came another sensation, harder to explain but unmistakable to me. My higher self seemed closer, more able to express itself through my body and mind. It was as though a veil had lifted, revealing a version of me that was clearer, quicker, more decisive, and less willing to waste energy on the small confusions of ordinary life.

Even when I looked in the mirror, I seemed different to myself. My eyes looked brighter. My face appeared more open, more alive.

I sensed this higher self almost as a younger version of me: disciplined, sharp, and impatient with the disorder of my usual habits. She seemed to stand beside me like a youthful but severe teacher, quietly demonstrating the person I could become if I stopped negotiating with my own weakness.

There was something mysterious, almost amusing, about it. I had gone to Brazil hoping to be healed. Instead, I was being introduced to a version of myself who would not let me remain as I had been.

***

Although I had managed the first visit on my own, I soon realised that the Casa procedures were complicated for first-time visitors, so I hired an English-speaking guide named Tracey to help me through the process.

Tracey was American, probably in her late forties, lean and restless, with the free-spirited air of someone who had long ago stepped outside the normal map of life. Her hair was the first thing one noticed: cropped, sharp, slightly dramatic, with a height and angle that reminded me of Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One in Doctor Strange. It suited her. There was something both severe and playful about her, as though she had chosen long ago to belong more to threshold places than to ordinary society.

She had come to Abadiânia years earlier for healing and never really left. By the time I met her, she had been living in Brazil for more than a decade. She had first come to Abadiânia seeking healing and had remained for years.

Tracey was talkative in the generous, slightly relentless way of people who have accumulated too many stories in a place where stories matter. After taking me to try what she insisted was the best açaí in town, she began telling me about the miracles people spoke of there: sight restored, legs strengthened, debts resolved, lives redirected after a few seconds before the Entities. Some would have sounded absurd anywhere else. In Abadiânia, they entered conversation almost like weather.

Then her tone changed.

“You’ll hear miracles every day here,” she told me. “But you need to understand something. The Casa is not all-powerful. Even John of God has said that only about seventy percent of requests are answered.”

By then I had already visited the miracle room and seen the crutches and wheelchairs left behind by people who believed they had been healed. The sight impressed me. Still, a question kept pressing forward.

“If miracles are real,” I asked her, “why can’t everyone be healed?”

Tracey gave a short laugh, almost impatient with the innocence of the question.

“Because that’s not how it works,” she said. “Do you think everyone who comes here is pure? Do you think every illness is just an accident? Some things are karmic. Some things have to be worked through by the person themselves. The spirits can guide and help. They can soften the suffering. But they don’t just erase every consequence.”

Tracey recounted a story she said circulated at the Casa about an elderly Brazilian woman with a severely bent back who had come seeking a cure. According to Tracey, the Entities attributed the condition to a past-life pattern of cruelty and miserliness and told the woman that generosity and kindness were part of the healing she needed to undertake for herself. Tracey said the woman’s suffering had been eased, though the deeper cause could not simply be removed on her behalf. I had no way to verify the story; what mattered to me then was the moral framework it expressed.

The story unsettled me. It carried a moral severity that felt almost old-fashioned, even harsh. Yet it also answered something I had been struggling to name. In that town, grace was everywhere spoken of as real, immediate, and sometimes astonishing. Still, even grace had boundaries. It did not cancel the soul’s responsibility for its own becoming.

Then Tracey shifted again, smiling as if she had remembered a better story.

“The Entities have personalities, you know,” she said playfully. “Some of them are very gentle. Some are funny. Some do not tolerate disrespect.”

She told me about a foreign man who had arrived at the Casa full of contempt. He was, in her words, a hard materialist who wanted to expose the whole thing as nonsense. When he came then challenged the Entities, asked aggressive questions, and treated the entire process as theatre. He then lost the use of his legs and spent more than a year in a wheelchair. Only after returning to the Casa to sincerely apologise and repent did he regain the ability to walk.

“After that,” Tracey said, laughing, “he believed.”

At the time, I laughed with her. There was a strange satisfaction in the story, the kind one feels when arrogance meets a force it cannot control. Some part of me enjoyed the reversal: the proud rationalist brought to his knees before the invisible.

Later, I would think more carefully about that laughter. It revealed something in me too: a longing for moral order, for a universe in which contempt, cruelty, and arrogance eventually meet their answer. I wanted to believe that the sacred was not sentimental, that it did not merely comfort the wounded while allowing the malicious to move through the world untouched.

Slowly, I began to understand that the Casa was teaching me a harder idea of compassion. Divine mercy, if it exists, is not the same as indulgence. A miracle may open a door or relieve suffering, yet it does not dissolve cause and consequence. No spirit, saint, or healer can complete on our behalf the moral labour that belongs to the soul.

In every country, beneath every religious language, I began to sense two quiet laws at work: karma and reverence. They did not announce themselves or always act quickly. Yet over a longer measure of time, I felt them holding the world within an order more mysterious and exacting than I usually dared to imagine.

Later, when allegations of sexual abuse emerged and Brazilian courts eventually convicted John of God in multiple criminal cases involving serious sexual offences, I had to hold the whole journey with a more complicated mind. The Casa could no longer remain in memory as an untouched field of grace. It was also human: vulnerable to power, projection, harm, and the blindness of devotion. That later knowledge did not erase what I experienced there, but it forced a harder question on me: can grace be encountered in a place that is also compromised—and how do we honour an experience without surrendering judgment about the people who surround it?

***

In the days that followed, with Tracey’s help, I moved through nearly every form of healing the Casa offered. I received Divine Intervention, lay beneath the coloured lights of the crystal beds, stood under the waterfall for cleansing, and joined the prayers and chanting on weekends. Each ritual had its own rhythm, its own instructions, its own atmosphere of quiet expectation. I could feel myself being cleared layer by layer, as if old heaviness were lifting from the body and something brighter underneath were beginning to breathe.

Abadiânia was full of small foreign circles: Americans who had settled into the town as if into a second life, Germans who moved in their own groups, French and Swiss residents, Japanese visitors on organised tours, and Brazilians who belonged to the place in a way the rest of us never could. In the evenings, I often joined people for dinner. Around those tables, stories flowed as naturally as food: healings, answered prayers, uncanny coincidences, lives redirected after a few weeks at the Casa.

I was truly happy there, in a way that felt almost dangerous.

One evening at a group table, moved by the warmth of the company and the strangeness of everything I had experienced, I said aloud that I wished I could stay. The town had miracles, healing, friendship, spiritual conversation, and a sense of daily meaning that ordinary life in Australia so often lacked. Why return to legal work, city noise, and the heaviness of the life I had come from, when this place seemed to hold me so lightly?

A woman named Ruth heard me. She was an American who brought groups to the Casa every year and personally knew many of the long-term foreign residents. She leaned closer and lowered her voice.

“Don’t say that,” she said gently. “I know people who have lived here for years. They received real healings here, powerful ones. Yet their lives are still difficult.”

She paused, letting the words settle.

“Do you know why? Because healing can loosen a knot, but it cannot live your life for you. A blessing can open a path, but your soul still has to walk it.”

I listened without answering.

“Many people get too comfortable here,” she continued. “I understand why. This town feels safe. The Entities feel close. Every day someone tells you another miracle story, and after a while you start thinking that if you stay long enough, everything will sort itself out.”

She gave a small shrug.

“But life doesn’t work that way. Say someone is meant to become a pianist. A real one. She needs the practice, the discipline, the boring hours, the failures — the whole life that makes her into that person. If she comes here, gets helped, and then decides never to leave because this place feels better than the world outside, what happens to all that?”

She looked at me, not unkindly.

“She may be safer here. She may even feel blessed here. But she’ll still be unhappy, because somewhere inside she knows she isn’t doing what she came here to do.”

For a moment I could not speak.

Part of me resisted her words because they were true. Abadiânia felt safe in a way that ordinary life did not. The air itself seemed gentler there, as if even suffering could be placed inside a larger mercy. Yet it was a sanctuary, not a life. To remain because it was easier would have been another form of avoidance, more subtle than despair because it wore the clothing of devotion.

I remember thinking: this woman has wisdom.

Her warning entered me like a needle finding the exact tender place. She was telling me to leave the town, but the deeper message was larger: do not outsource salvation to any person, place, spirit, healer, or miracle. Healing may rescue a person from collapse, but the rest asks for discipline, action, and the courage to return to the unfinished work of one’s own life.

That evening, something became clear to me. The Casa had given me grace, but grace was also a summons. It had lifted me from the edge of exhaustion, then turned me back toward the very life I still had to transform.

Whatever blessing I had received in Brazil, the road ahead remained mine to walk.

***

During the remaining days in Abadiânia, the trance-channeling experiences continued.

They came without warning. Sometimes I was walking toward the Casa. Sometimes I was standing in the bookstore, browsing through shelves of spiritual books and prayer cards. Suddenly, the ordinary surface of the moment would open, and I would enter that altered state again. Several spiritual beings came through, including Saint Rita. They greeted me with warmth, as if they had known me for a long time and had only been waiting for me to arrive.

Their presence comforted me. It also carried a quiet authority. I felt that certain wishes I had buried deep in my heart — wishes I had almost stopped daring to name — had been heard somewhere beyond this visible world. They had not yet appeared in life, but inwardly I felt they had already been received.

After I returned to Australia, those wishes began to unfold one by one.

I could not explain it in ordinary terms. I only knew that something had shifted. A current I could not see seemed to move ahead of me, arranging meetings, opening doors, softening obstacles. I carried a deep gratitude for that sense of unseen assistance, and for the strange mercy I believed I had encountered in a small Brazilian town.

I also came back changed.

For a time, my whole being felt unusually bright, as if I had brought back a trace of the light I had received there. Almost immediately, I threw myself into a complete reconstruction of my life. I joked with friends that I had become like the heroine of the Japanese drama Nobuta wo Produce, undergoing a total makeover. Yet beneath the humour was a serious discipline.

I changed my hair, makeup, clothes, weight, and posture. Then I turned toward the harder work. I bought a notebook and began writing down my weaknesses with almost brutal honesty: laziness, bad temper, emotional disorder, scattered habits, lack of discipline, the tendency to drift instead of act. One by one, I tried to correct them. I cleaned my room, changed my living environment, adjusted my work life, and pushed myself to become more awake and orderly.

This was the part no miracle could do for me.

Brazil had given me blessing, healing, and what I experienced as evidence that grace could intervene. Yet once I returned, the work became practical. It entered my schedule, habits, speech, and choices. The light I had received had to be carried into ordinary life, or it would remain only a beautiful memory.

Looking back, I still find the timing striking. I was thirty-three, and at the Casa people often spoke of thirty-three spiritual Entities working through the healing field. I noticed the coincidence and, at the time, found it deeply meaningful. More important was the feeling of a death-and-rebirth passage: the old self could no longer continue, and a new one was pressing forward as a demand rather than an idea.

I had gone to Brazil because an extraterrestrial message had once told me, simply: You need to go to Brazil.

At first, I thought the instruction was about my personal healing. Later, I wondered whether Abadiânia had shown me something larger. Beyond its human flaws, I had seen a town organised around spiritual healing. People came with illnesses, grief, attachments, prayers, impossible wishes. They were given ritual, attention, blessing, and hope. Suffering had a place to go.

Through inner sight, I began to imagine another possibility for what I called the New Earth: places where spiritual suffering could be met with compassion rather than exploitation, and where prayer, healing, discipline, and service might find a place within ordinary life. I did not yet understand how much discernment such a vision would require, or how easily sacred authority could be distorted by human power.

Perhaps this was why Brazil mattered so deeply to me. It had been a personal pilgrimage, and also a glimpse—imperfect, compromised, but still meaningful—of what it might look like when suffering was given a place to go and the sacred was allowed into ordinary life.

Brazil returned me to ordinary life with a larger imagination of what healing might mean. It also left me with a question I had not yet learned to ask: what happens when grace is offered, yet the person receiving it cannot—or will not—take the next step?

I was only beginning to understand the work a miracle could never do in our place.