Paro

Paro Christine Bolam was born in 1946. She discovered her creative streak at an early age: she painted enthusiastically at pre-school, wrote her first poems at the age of six and her first crime novel at sixteen. By this time, she knew that she wanted to become an artist. But it was going to be a long road ahead. Although her life was always colourful and very diverse, she did not reach her true fulfilment – the path to true creative expression – until the mid-1990s.

Her development was shaped by a wide variety of influences and experiences: Paro travelled to India to meditate, acted in theatre and sewed costumes in London and painted in Amsterdam, finally discovering her artistic intuition.

Numerous further training courses contributed to Paro’s career, including meditation, inner experience, creative writing, biodynamics, regression therapy, hypnotherapy, intuitive and psychic massage, tarot and intuition training, as well as body- and energy work. She also learnt how creativity works, what blocks it, and how to free it.

Paro (meaning ‘transcendental’) had a small school in Upper Bavaria, where she ran training courses for painting, writing and life skills, and gave individual one-to-one sessions to support creativity and to deal with crises and life changes.

She has three published books, a film and and was currently working on her fourth book. She was also planning to release a CD with exercises and meditations.

Text credit to the author’s page (literaturtipps.de) for her book, Love to Create: Wecke den Künstler in Dir! (Love to Create: Wake up the artist in you!) (amazon.de) and to her website (cbolam.com)

Seemingly endless creative joy

by Sajjad

I first met Paro during my time at Thalamus. She had previously been in Bielefeld where she ran a naturopathy school. She helped us out and we got to know each other. Her open and warm manner was refreshing and immediately welcoming.

A short time later she moved to the countryside in Uffing at the Staffelsee and we lost contact. In spring 2000 I became a father, and after an initially turbulent time looking for a place to live, we found a flat – it was in Uffing am Staffelsee!

We immediately reconnected. She was looking for new creative opportunities in the village and set up a studio, Atelier für Worte & Farben (studio for words and colours), and my daughter became part of a film project of hers (photo).

Paro was a tireless person and her creativity seemed to constantly drive her forward. Just seeing each other for a coffee and chatting casually was not her thing; she was constantly ‘on the move’ – there was always some translation that had to be finished…

These last few years we lost contact and I was shocked to hear that she had stopped being creative – at least here on earth.

A colourful, creative and seemingly endless creative joy will remain in my memory when I think of Paro, as well as her spirited laughter which came from the bottom of her heart ♥️

Thank you, dear Paro, R I P, Paro Christine Bolam!

Sajjad

Paro, you are missing!

by Savita

This is the last photo I took of Paro in Iffeldorf (Ostersee) in 2023, where we celebrated her 77th birthday, as we so often did in recent years. I will remember her so beautifully and vividly!

We have known each other since 1981, from the Berlin Commune period,;we lived together for a while, eventful and exciting times back then.

After I moved to Munich in 1988, we didn’t have much contact for a while, then only again when she came to Munich 10 years later. This is where our intensive time together began: she helped me with the translation of a book by Robert Adams (Advaita teacher from USA), which then led to her taking over and continuing the major part of the translation of Eckhart Tolle’s first book Power of Now, from me two years later. And this in turn led to her translating a number of books for Kamphausen Verlag in the 2000s.

Later, under her guidance, I discovered painting for myself. We developed many great and crazy ideas and discussed them for hours (including her books) – and spent a lot of time together at the beautiful Staffelsee and elsewhere in Bavaria.

She was always an important person in my life, especially with her positive and optimistic attitude to life, her great enthusiasm, her openness to everything and everyone, her boundless creativity and wealth of ideas, her great love and passion for painting and writing and teaching – colorful and wild, colorful and chaotic – just Paro!

Known and appreciated in Uffing as an “unusual bird of paradise” (Paradiesvogel)!

In the last few years, her physical strength unfortunately diminished more and more. She was unable to overcome the sudden death of her beloved younger brother Leeladhar (Mathias Vietmeier, also an incredibly creative and ingenious person) exactly one year ago…

On 5th May she suffered a very severe stroke. After two days in a coma her heart stopped beating on the evening of 7th May.

Thank you for being in my life,

Savita (Marianne Nentwig, Grünwald)

More Tributes

This is Paro in 1978 at Findhorn, just before she went to Poona 1.

Because of her love and enthusiasm, I also decided to change my plans in India and landed at the ashram. We both had huts in number 120, so lived very close by.

Bless her sweet heart.

Viharo

You can leave a message / tribute / anecdote, and send a photo, by writing to web@oshonews.com (pls add ‘Paro’ in the subject field). Your contribution will be added manually, typically within 24 hours.