Irish former nun, a midwife and acupuncturist, Oonagh, 73, author of an inspiring memoir, “The Voice of Silence,” 2002, tells of her childhood in Ireland, her training in Chinese medicine, her own brush with death, miraculous recovery, leaving the convent, getting married, and her work with Princess Diana, and Edward VIII, better known as The Duke of Windsor.
On 9/06/1989, after her first acupuncture session with The Princess of Wales, Oonagh Shanley-Toffolo wrote in her diary: “Diana has a mission in the world to help humanity.” It was Oonagh, through her own experiences in Calcutta, who would soon introduce Diana to the work of Mother Theresa. Neither could have fathomed that eight years later to the day, Mother Theresa would have just passed and the world would be transfixed watching Diana’s funeral.
Oonagh is an extraordinary woman, a born healer. She’s lived life on her own terms and has elements of Dr.Quinn Medicine Woman and Maria Von Trapp. She speaks confidently with an engaging Irish brogue, and has always known that her role was to serve and to heal. After an acupuncture session, client report that they feel they could levitate off the table.
Shelley Ackerman relates that she asked about her first meeting with the Princess and she replied, “Diana had heard of my connection to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and asked that I see her. When I arrived, she was waiting for me in her white toweling and bare feet. She was not in good health, her fingers and toes were blue-ish, and the whole landscape of the body was in depletion.” According to Oonagh, much of Diana’s misunderstood emotional condition was due to an untreated post-natal depression. As a matter of fact, that’s how this book came to be. “The first idea was to write a philosophy of mothers and babies,” Oonagh says. “The first breath is so important and it’s essential that we’re not cut cruelly and unconsciously from the umbilical chord.”
“Being a midwife, I have always been observing and interested in birth, and I‘ve seen many times, when a child suffers from the trauma of a speedy separation from the womb. It’s dangerous, and sometimes leaves them severely handicapped.”
She is emphatic in her protocol for how delivery should take place and more so about the need for at least six weeks of tender care for new mothers after birth to avoid post- natal depression, and a subsequent lifetime of imbalance.
Inevitably, the issue of Diana’s marriage to Prince Charles came up. Oonagh was discreet, “We’re talking about love, and I don’t want to point the finger of blame at anybody. Diana loved Charles, but what she didn’t realize was that at the time of their engagement and marriage, Charles was suffering from a broken heart too. He had loved Camilla and when he returned from his service on the high seas, Camilla was married. Both were victims with broken hearts, misunderstood, and had more in common than either knew.”
The sessions between Oonagh and the Princess occurred regularly. She encouraged the Princess to “learn to look people in the eye, and to have confidence in her own worth.” Diana was a deeply spiritual person, as was evident in her being the first royal to shake hands with lepers without wearing gloves. It is a little known fact, that Diana’s great, great, great uncle was a saintly Anglican Priest, Ignatius Spencer, committed to the unification of all Christian Churches.
Even Prince William requested of his Mom to meet with Oonagh. “He was 7 or 8 at the time, and when he arrived without having been here before, he knew exactly where to go, it was extraordinary. He asked if I could put a pin in him that would make him sleep and wake up the next morning at 9AM, and it worked.” “He was psychic himself and he set the time.”
In Paris, she tended to The Duke of Windsor during the last three months of his life and was present at his death in May 1972. “He was generous in his affection and loved his Duchess so. His deepest wound was the Royal family’s treatment of her and the withholding of the HRH title.” “I was a witness to their great love”, Oonagh adds, “His eyes would light up like a young lover when he’d hear her footsteps down the corridor.”
Sacrifice and the need for love seem to be a reoccurring theme in the royal family. “The Duke, Diana, and William are all Cancerian, the sensitive sign of the zodiac that requires and gives tenderness and nurturing,” Oonagh points out. (Camilla is Cancerian too.) Prophetically, Diana said to Oonagh soon after they met, “If anything should happen to me, would you please tell the world who I really was, and not the person who they made me out to be.” Says Oonagh: “She had the innocence of a child, she didn’t have the experience and thought everyone was like herself. She believed people were trustworthy and that she could say things to them. But most didn’t understand the spiritual language she had to offer.”
Oonagh’s philosophy: “The secret of unhappiness lies in trying to please everybody. It is a moral impossibility and compromises our true selves.” Regarding Diana’s mission in the world: Oonagh adds, “Diana, I believe, was born to change the world and roll back the shutters of a rigid and distant monarchy.”