I live in a town that is, frankly, dominated by a university teaching hospital. This place doesn’t just have branches, not just satellites, it has tentacles. They have an urgent care center in the damn grocery store. It’s becoming like our own special version of Waffle House; somebody stands in the parking lot of a just-completed clinic and throws a rock, and then they start building a new one wherever that rock lands.
It is a huge, huge, huge business.
And it kinda permeates the prevailing attitude in this area. They do some of the latest and greatest medical research right there, and do more cutting-edge surgical procedures by lunchtime than other hospitals do in a year.
Being a purveyor of alternatives to alopathic medicine, I am frequently confronted with a thousand-yard stare when I mention what I do. “Light Language? Reiki? You’re studying sound healing? What on earth is that?”
Okay, maybe I am exaggerating. And maybe they piss me off a little.
Most of the time, I don’t think about them very much. I so rarely get sick that I don’t tend to pay much attention to them, other than to notice, a couple-or-three times a year, that they just built another behemoth structure along one of my regularly-traveled routes. And to notice that more than half of my music students either work for the hospital or are a child of someone who does.
But when I really put some thought to it, I realize that they are just a symptom of something much bigger.
I could go on a rant about how medical science has brainwashed us into wanting immediate fixes to problems, and to believe that there is no physical problem that can’t be solved with the ingestion of a pill or submission to the knife. But enough people have done that, and it would require more research to back up my irritation than I have the gumption or the interest to do.
No, my concern is never with looking backward and beating anybody up.
I’m going to quote from my own journal, because that is where I tend to muse and speculate and sometimes, yes, come to a deeper understanding of Life, the Universe and Everything.
Healing is arduous sometimes, and requires desire like nothing else. We must love ourselves enough to sustain the enormous effort that this kind of healing requires. Lord, modern medicine has programmed people to expect the opposite of that. Self-loathing demands a quick fix because we honestly don’t feel worthy of the long fight.
There it is. We get sick, go to a doctor, get a prescription, go home, and within a few days we hopefully are feeling better. In the case of a bacterial infection, that’s great. I can’t even imagine how many people would have died of a simple infection without antibiotics. Myself included, many times over. Abso-friggin’-lutely. I even had surgery to cut pieces of cancer off my body.
And then I decided to look into not getting sick at all anymore. Healing some of the core issues that I struggle with, because I knew there was a greater purpose to my life and I wanted to be able to fulfill it to the very best of my ability and capacity.
The first place that it made sense for me to look into was nutrition, because I was suffering with chronic indigestion. I was taking medicine to keep my stomach acid under control twice a day, and had been for years. Since I was in high school, in fact. But the tipping point was spending several months having a severe allergic reaction to something that the allergy medications did not do anything to relieve, at all. I was going through 300 tissues a day, people. Stronger and stronger medication literally did nothing at all except make my indigestion worse. I quit taking the medication and got no worse.
I started researching nutrition, and according to multiple websites, people suffering chronic allergic reactions found relief when they stopped eating wheat. Try it for a couple weeks and see, they said. If it helps, then you have a solution. If it doesn’t, keep looking.
I decided to try. Within two goddamn days my allergies cleared up completely.
Within two weeks, the chronic inflammation at the base of my spine was gone. I decided to skip the medication for my acid-reflux, just to see, and have never taken another tablet since that day. I also lost 7 pounds in those first two weeks. I felt so much better, in the way that coming into mastery of something only makes you aware of how much more you have to learn.
And so I dug in deep and totally revamped the way Michael and I eat. He was 100% for it, totally encouraging and supportive, and benefited greatly himself; his chronic severe headaches went away, he didn’t spend the entire winter sick with sinusitis, and he gradually lost the 35 pounds he had gained over the past couple of decades. Our diet has continued to evolve over the past 5 years, as we learn more and as our needs become more specific. The big things, wheat and dairy, those took care of the really big stuff and allowed us to see the incredible potential for good health and intense well-being was being suffocated by processed foods.
I also began to study Reiki with my cousin, drawn by the intensity of the fire and the power of it. I had been looking for “magic,” for real, touchable evidence of the world beyond the physical, since I was in my teens. Here it was. Reiki is energy that we channel through our hands into the body, to ease pain, speed healing, lower blood pressure, lift moods, to help restore a confidence after an accident or a fall, to help absolutely any healing process. Oh, the heat and fire and oh, the peace and bliss. Becoming a Reiki Master was an effortless “yes.” I wanted it, crazy wanted it. It took almost two years, but it was worth every minute of practice and study.
Light Language came next, and has been a near-obsession. Light Language is also intensely powerful magic, possibly the most powerful form of magic I have ever encountered. Over and over I have witnessed major transformations in the world around me that bear uncanny resemblance to the desires I expressed in a Light Language grid, including profound healing for gravely ill people. And every time I thought, this just can’t get any cooler, I’d discover something more, something deeper, something bigger, and I’d be signing up for another advanced certification class.
And every step of the way, each little thing I would discover and learn would inform my quest for my own healing, and I’d find myself getting better, getting stronger, having more energy, fighting off cold and flu and all manner of other things with virtually no sweat. Baby steps. Tweaks and increments.
And time, time, time.
I have been at this five years and am only now starting to feel like I am becoming truly healthy. Currently, I am digging into sound healing, which is a perfect marriage of virtually everything I am passionate about, and yes, the healing continues. Sound has such a direct impact on the body, that the combination of sound with Reiki and Light Language is like an unstoppable healing juggernaut. In another year (give-or-take) I will have full certification as a sound healer, and I couldn’t be more excited.
The point of all of this is, it has taken me five years to get to the point where I can see light at the end of the healthy tunnel. It has been a journey filled with side steps, missteps, detours, and quantum leaps. I started seeing a chiropractor a year ago, too, and that has added another dimension to my healing, but what we are working on has taken nearly a year to get to the point where the rubber could even hit the road. But I don’t do sick anymore, or maybe I should say, sick doesn’t do me. And that is a damn fine place to start.
I could continue to mask symptoms with medication, and continue to allow my body to stagnate, allow things to go wrong, and submit to more surgical interventions as time goes on, and just not think deeply about it. But I don’t wanna. And I feel like those kinds of interventions are toxic to who I want to be. I deserve to get out of bed every morning feeling good, or even great. I deserve to revel in my aliveness. I deeply want all of that, and the more healthy I get, the more deserving I feel of it. The more I take care of myself, the more I begin to love this vessel that I have created and grown into over the decades. Taking radical responsibility for my own body is the most loving thing I can do for myself.
I deeply and passionately love who I am becoming, and yes, I do want to shower myself with healing gifts.
But these are not quick, easy magic bullets. I hope you had someone in your life who was willing to remind you that things that are worth doing are worth doing right. And that can mean taking time, so much time, to really learn about what you are doing, to hone your skills and become a master of things that maybe you never thought of before. We can keep eating the things we know are bad for us, keep masking symptoms with pills, and then treat the side-effects of those pills with other pills like a hall of mirrors in a funhouse gone mad. Sure. That’s what most people do. And it sorta works.
But are you willing to settle for that? I’m sure as hell not.
Our bodies live in time. To date, nobody has figured out how to transplant our memories into somebody else’s body and make that work. The opposite appears to be true, in fact. The body has memories stored in all kinds of places that we don’t know about. The heart has a huge memory bank all its own which can impact the loves, passions, tastes and preferences of transplant recipients. Our bodies are ours. When we move into a house, we fill it with furniture, things, dishes, cooking utensils, clothes, bedding, towels, pillows, books – with our passions and our loves and our tastes and our memories. We hang pictures and paintings and plaques on our walls, we choose curtains or mini-blinds, hardwood floors or carpeting; we paint, we arrange, we remodel and redecorate.
We do the same thing with our bodies, only on a much more intimate basis. Every day, we choose to get out of bed or not. To shower or not. To do our hair one way or another, or not. To get dressed or not. To wear this color or that, to wear jeans or dress up. Sometimes we feel the need for a bigger change, and cut off all our hair or color it something wildly different. We live in our bodies, we take them everywhere, we get up with them every morning and go to bed with them every night. Your body is the only physical, material thing in the entire world that is so completely yours that for someone to take it from you is to end your life.
Do not beat yourself up if you haven’t treated your body gently and lovingly to date. Forgive yourself, because if you live in America anyway, you are bombarded with misinformation about your body hundreds of times a day. Just make yourself a promise to love yourself better, care for yourself more, make one small change a week that can improve your health, and after a while maybe one big change that can heal something bigger. And then another tweak, and another shift, and gradually you see a pinpoint of light at the end of the long tunnel, and you know that’s your light, that’s your healthiest life, your most energetic life. Just keep taking small, easy steps, and enjoy the quantum leaps when they happen. You will get there. In time. Plenty of time.