Phyllis Levy recording her songs

A SPIRITUAL healer, poet, painter – and now musician. Phyllis Levy, 90, has lived many lives, and now is part of an album that was recorded in Highgate Care Home in Hornsey Lane.

“Believe it or not, I’ve lived nine lives,” said Ms Levy, talking about the near-death experiences that have bookmarked her life: her home in Sydney Square being bombed in the Second World War, contracting diphtheria, and having a stroke.

“I’ve survived all of these experience and, at this age, I look up – because I’m quite spiritual – I look up and I think ‘they’re testing me’. I thought I’d be helpful to my kids from up above, but that doesn’t seem to be the plan.

“I still don’t know what the plan is,” she said.

After her stroke, Ms Levy was sent to rehabilitation classes where she was asked to write and paint her feelings and emotions. Out of that grew an award-winning book of poetry and countless artworks.

“One of the teachers there said to me, ‘why are you painting like this?’ I said, ‘well, how am I supposed to paint?’ And she said, ‘you should paint what you feel’.

“She brought me these large pieces of paper and all kinds of different paints, and I painted being ill, and ‘I can’t do this, and I can’t move that’. The tutor came back and said, ‘oh my, yes’,” Ms Levy said.

Prior to that, she trained as a spiritual healer, and says she once healed a friend’s injured shoulder with just a touch.

“I saw the Dalai Lama speak. The place was absolutely chock-a-block. The Dalai Lama was laughing about something that was being said, and this voice boomed down, and a woman said ‘how can you be laughing? Look at what’s going on in your country’.

“She was really going on about it – how could he be here laughing and joking, all this stuff. He went very quiet and said, ‘madam, if there were things I could do about what you’re talking about, I would have done them. What I do is I put all problems I can’t deal with in higher hands, and then I say thank you and get on with my life.’

“That changed my life, and I became a registered healer.”

Ms Levy now lives in Highgate Care Home and has written two of the songs on an album, called Reflections, that she and other residents, together with music therapist Phil Evans, have produced.

She sang two of her songs with her daughters. Sing Together, which Ms Levy co-wrote with Mr Evans, features more than 35 soloists, each singing a line, and ends in a mass We Are The World-style outro singalong.

Despite this impressive feat, Ms Levy has not always been musically encouraged.

“In school, this priest came up to me, I was about 12, and he said ‘just mime Phyllis, just mime’. So, I don’t sing like other people, evidently,” she said.

“But, I love singing. I had one friend who used to sing like me, and we would walk along the pavement just singing together.”