Two days ago, Misha Norland passed away in his sleep. Quietly and peacefully, in the middle of a storm. I never met Misha, but I have heard so much about him. He was the teacher, the healer, the guru, the wise man, the mentor for my wife, in her journey into homeopathy. He was the founder of the school, the teacher of thousands of homeopaths, and a great personality in his space. A space that is both spiritual and physical, a space of learning, a space of discovery, and a space of healing. He had the mental clarity to see things with a unique perspective that blew the minds of his students and his peers, and that clarity were his wisdom flew from, building what we call legacy. His absence will be felt by many, but his work has been experienced by thousands or even millions.
I was raised a Christian, and so I always thought of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as the entity that can help me in my life. Him and His mother, the Virgin Mary, have become part of our daily vocabulary when we want things to go well, or when we need protection from events or people around us. We learnt from our parents and grandparents, that when there is a need, Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary will help us. We learnt that when there is no hope, they can be our only hope. Our last glimpse of light may come through the divine intervention of God's Son. We also learnt that we should show our thanks and gratitude to Jesus and Mary for their help and presence in our lives. We built churches to honour those that God blessed, and those that achieved the spiritual height as to be able to inspire us with faith and through faith we accepted hope.
I am convinced that all religions are built on similar principles. God reached the people through different deities that each one embraces the local culture and inspires the people to become better, to treat each other with kindness, and to love one another. Independently of the geography that each of us was born in, we were all introduced to a higher power, and most of us accepted the existence of that power, because it makes us feel safer, it fills us with purpose, it supports us in times of need, and it answers unanswerable questions. Just like a good friend, or mother, or a sibling, or a partner. Our earthly existence needs, builds, and relies of the earthly saviours that we build or accept in our lives. Nothing is real unless we share it with our own personal Jesus, just like a divine force that makes or takes our life on earth.
In our everyday lives we constantly come across obstacles, large or small, and we are using every kind of help we have available to us. We use our physical strength, we use our mental strength, we use the skills we have learnt, we use the people we know. We build our own support system and we start to rely on our people. Mother, father, brothers, sisters, friends, school mates, army buddies, teammates. They all start to have their own space in our ecosystem, where they can help us, support us, believe us, challenge us, comfort us, make us laugh, be a shoulder to cry, or be someone to watch the sunrise with. They become the person we will say "Thank you", or the person they will say "Please help me", and they will endure this life with us, giving us hope, making us dream. They are our own personal Jesus. Our own on-earth religion. They are those we need in order to move forward in this life. At the same time, we also become someone else's personal Jesus, we become the support system for those around us that need us, and we try to help our friends, our family, our people, live a better and happier life.
Misha Norland was one of my wife's personal Jesus, along with those soulmates she calls hers friends. Misha was more than a support system. He was the impersonation of hope, of wisdom, of kindness. When everything in this world stopped making sense, a call to Misha was enough to bring back hope. When the problems become too much to handle, Misha's wisdom was capable of shining a light towards a solution. He could take the pain with a wise word or a quick joke, and if you were close enough, he would hug tightly your troubles away. As I already said, I never met Misha, but I cannot claim that I didn't know him. His presence is always visible through my wife and all those that learned from him and believed in his teachings. The torch of enlightenment passes on from the teacher to the students, and the students shine for him in this dark and cold world.
As a Christian, I sometimes wonder how Jesus' disciples must have felt when they violently lost their master. They felt the darkness, they felt the fear, they felt the doubt, they felt the hopelessness, but most of all they felt the grief from the love they lost. But soon enough, they realised their own baptism of light and understood their purpose on this earth. The wisdom, the love, the ideas of their own personal Jesus, were now theirs to spread to the world. Jesus was everywhere for them and they needed to embrace the memory and the infinite presence of a superior power. And they did conquer the world, in their own spiritual way, and although the world is going through a crisis of faith, they became the personal Jesus of billions of people.
Misha was not a god, but a mere mortal. A special human being that shared his physical, mental, and spiritual gifts with the people around him. His absence noticeable even to me, that I didn't know him. The void left behind will be difficult to fill. Although his family is in pain after this sudden loss, Misha himself would be pleased if his people remembered his teachings. He managed to live a spectacular life and he managed to die a spectacular death. A death that will only remind us what a great person he was.
Now, the students must step up. They need to move forward and continue the good fight they have been giving all these years. They need to honour their teacher with their own life examples, and they need to become the personal Jesus for those that need it. Just like Misha did for them. They are a new generation of healers, and they must find the strength to rise above the grief, beyond the desperation, past the tears and move into the light. With the same principles, with the same love, with the same conviction. A new generation of healers that will become the personal Jesus for those that are looking for a helping hand, for those that are lost within their own mind, for those that are suffering in their own body. For every person around them. After all, what better way to spend your life than bringing light, love and hope to the world?
Thank you Misha, we will always keep you in our hearts.