January 23, 2013
THE VIEW FROM BONAC
Wafa
The Road From Morocco
BY KELLY ANN SMITH
Wafa Faith Hallam’s, “The Road from Morocco” begins in her
13-year-old mother’s arranged wedding bed in Morocco and ends with Hallam’s
spiritual awakening after reading Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth: Awakening to
Your Life’s Purpose” and her move to Sag Harbor.
“I’m so happy, it radiates from me,” said Hallam and she’s
right.
When I first met her outside the Waldbaum’s in East
Hampton, Hallam handed off her book to me and I immediately was struck by her
positive energy. Her smile was so genuine, I could feel it. I could feel it in
the very short moment it took to accept the book and I continue to feel it now.
But life was not always so easy going for Hallam. She
spent most of her life as a very angry, controlling and fearful woman who got
involved with the wrong men and experienced self-inflicted pain. She fought
violently with her parents, her sister, her lovers, husband and
eventually her own daughter. She worried incessantly about money, which
she considered the root of all her problems.
“Anxiety was killing me,” she said last week, sitting on
her white couch in Sag Harbor.
She was wearing a navy GAP T-shirt, jeans and wool slip-on
shoes. Her dark eyes were slightly lined and her dark hair hit her shoulders in
waves.
Hallam began to write the story of her mother Saadia’s
life in 2007, but by the time she finished in 2010, it became her own story.
“I had to discover things about myself,” she said.
When she finished the book, she knew she had to publish
the book herself and share her story of hope. Four thousand people downloaded
it for free during a three-day giveaway last month.
“People can be happy. There is a way out of depression and
it doesn’t have to do with money,” she said.
Hallam’s mother was forced to marry her father, who was
33, when she was only 13. She had Hallam, her first child, when she was
16. The lives of mother and daughter were intimately intertwined until the day
her mother died in Morocco at age 65. There was no way the author could write
her mother’s story without writing her own. So what begins as a lesson in
Moroccan history turns into a story of an American’s spiritual awakening.
Her shift of consciousness was not the only thing to
change along the way. Hallam was born with the first name of Ouafae. She first
changed it to Faith, a literal translation from the Arabic. While she was
married and even afterward as a Wall Street analyst, she used Faith O’Brien,
obliterating her ethnicity altogether. Then, in 1993 she legally changed her
name to Wafa Faith Hallam, simplifying the French spelling for her first name,
keeping the literal translation for her middle name and returning to her
original last name.
To get a better idea of Hallam’s shift in consciousness, I
began to listen to Eckhart Tolle. Tolle said that a crisis situation
facilitates a shift in consciousness. In doing so, one goes from thinking
with the ego to being in the present. The ego signifies the past and the future
but to be truly happy, one must be open to the present moment because that is
where life resides.
Tolle made his own shift just as he was ready to commit
suicide. As he said to himself, “I can’t live with myself anymore,” he realized
there were two people within him, the I and myself. At that point, he detached
from his ego and let it go.
There is more power in letting go than clinging to
something or someone, including your own ego.
“The ego dislikes, and resists the present moment. Make
friends with the present moment. Make the present moment your primary focus in
life,” he told Oprah on their joint 2008 webcast. “Recognize the mind
activity that dwells on negativity,” he said, “Worry pretends to be necessary
but it serves no useful purpose.”
“What you fight, you strengthen and what you resist,
persists,” Oprah agreed, quoting from Chapter Three of “A New Earth.”
Hallam took these words to heart and made peace. She
started meditating five minutes a day and now she is up to one hour a day.
“I have to stop myself,” she said, grinning ear to ear and
jumping up from the couch.
“Things happen when you are relaxed,” she said.
She tells me she is still living on a shoestring, but
she’s not worried about money or finding a nine-to-five job, as she was in the
past. She has started a new career as an artist’s agent and with her new
relaxed attitude, synchronicity is working in her favor.
“I met an artist in Paris who wanted me to help him in
America and at the same time, my friend opened a gallery specializing in
unknown European artists,” she said barely able to contain herself. “Art is the
most spiritual endeavour.”
Hallam is working on her second book, this time fiction
and she soon hopes to hold seminars to inspire women.
“It’s been hammered into us that life is a struggle,” she
said, “I want to tell people, ‘It’s a lie!’”
But as Tolle said, you must be ready to make a change in
the way you think. Not everyone who picks up his books are ready for them, but
if you are, you too can be just as happy as Hallam.
“Everything you always wanted is on the other side of
fear,” she said.
Check out Oprah and Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth” webcast
videos on her website, where each chapter is discussed in detail with the
author. If you like those, pick up Tolle’s books, as well as “The Road from
Morocco.” You might be ready.
KellyAnn Smith lives on Accabonac Harbor with her husband
and three dogs and is fascinated by Bonac culture, pop culture, agriculture,
poetry and nature—human and otherwise.
