That's how much Liber can mean 1

Cornelie: healing after a split existence

Her life was called successful. Married, children, contact strong. She was a nurse, held leadership positions and was a humanistic counselor. 'All exterior' she says, 'copied from others. To survive. Inside I have always been anxious and insecure. On the suicidal side.

Cornelie is from 1944. Child of traumatized war parents. Hunger. Hiding. Bombing. Shelters. Houses shot to pieces. Born into a composite family. Her father a widower. Left behind with two daughters with TB.

'Like growing up in a basket of stray cats' she says. 'Begging for some crumbs of love. You get bitten and pushed away. Saving yourself. Guilt because you are healthy and your mother is still alive. But who is mostly concerned with the suffering of your half-siblings. Pain? No one was in pain. Tears? Unwanted. Everything was denied.

'Successful on the outside, rotten on the inside. Like I was a failed soufflé. That's how I've always felt. Split. It drove me crazy. What if it were discovered?

'Psychiatrists, medications, psychologists, group therapy, the alternative circuit: I tried everything to get rid of it. Nothing helped.'

'And then I came across "Liber. Just like that. On the Internet. I knew immediately: this is going to get me out of my worries and fears. And pretty soon a sense of healing presented itself. Only by doing the exercises. Every day again.

I discovered an inside of myself, separate from my environment. The need to always be alert, feelers out, alert to danger, diminished. That gave me peace. I began to relax and became less defensive. My environment also noticed the difference immediately.

'I understood how I had been looking for the wrong solution all these years. For a better-looking Cornelie. Instead, Liber brings me more Cornelie. I appear to be so much greater than that insecure, fighting girl.

'I think humanist. That's another reason Liber appealed to me. There is no religious word involved. But ask me what a year and a half of practice brought me and I have to use spiritual language: the consciousness of being 'secured in God'. To be allowed to live 'in his hand'. In which no one has failed.'

'Liber summarized? Rest and peace at last. No longer pining for a course. Because I have found the answers within myself.'