abundantly clear that spiritual development was not the passive endeavour
many of us had believed it to be. Nor was it an adjunct to how we lived
our daily lives: it was how we could practice living all of the time.
For the most part, I was used to these no-nonsense encounters, and I
went with the flow, but there came the time when a particular lesson put
me on the defensive as well: The session had just broken up, and as I stood
to leave Bonnie caught my attention and nodded toward an accent pillow
on her couch.
"What?" I said.
"The pillow," she replied.
"What about it?" I said, puzzled.
"Is that where it was when you sat down?"
"On the couch, sure."
"Wasn‘t it propped in the corner between the side and backrest?"
"I guess."
"Two things." she grinned, making a peace sign. "Don‘t guess, and
you need to make a practice of leaving things the way you found them,
unless it is an improvement. For the time being, you don‘t appreciate what
constitutes an improvement, so it‘s probably best that you leave things as
they are… if you can remember that much."
Understanding that she was already back in research mode—
discovering what her student-character‘s response to any spontaneous
circumstance would be—I returned to the scene of my odious crime and
positioned the pillow in the way she said it had been before my arrival.
The next week, I remembered the pillow lesson but I didn‘t put it exactly
where it had been, touching only the backrest. The week after that I forgot
to re- fluff it.
As far as the group was concerned, this circumstance was a joke
between Bonnie and me, because they had no idea how detailed, decisive,
and uncompromising she could be in our one on one lessons; this was the
idea that had brought to my attention how special I was.
The number of times I forgot to properly place and/or fluff the pillow
grew to embarrassing proportions, and I came to suspect that Spirit was
purposefully influencing me to disregard this task, to suit my belief that it
was too petty to bother with. I knew they could do this, and I also
suspected a similar influence would explain Bonnie‘s attraction to Josh,
but I didn‘t know if it was within the rules. It seemed too puny to fit the
category of a divine intervention.
But so was the pillow. So was I, for that matter.
Overall, in spite of Bonnie fulfilling many of her student‘s
expectations about New Age teaching, such as holding lessons and
