2. Releasing Western Ways of Thinking, Starting With Medicine

It began last year. I thought I was going to die.  I could barely eat anything without a lot of pain and discomfort. I fit into my clothes from high school, which was ironic because I had finally outgrown caring about that. But I was starving. Being both hungry and in pain from eating is incredibly frustrating and scary.

But the kicker was the fatigue.  For months I had begun feeling more and more tired in my body and muscles, until finally I could barely move. It felt like a really terrible flu in my muscles… they just wouldn’t move and the thought of getting myself across the room or upstairs to change clothes was monumental.  At first I thought it was just from not eating enough but it went on for too long, and eventually it got so bad that I started to feel like I wouldn’t have enough energy to continue to beat my heart, and each night when I went to sleep I wondered if I’d even wake up.  I’d seen over a dozen doctors, who did numerous tests on me.  Every test would turn out to be in the “normal” range (just barely). I spent a lot of time crying and feeling very hopeless. I fell into a terrific depression. I didn’t know what to do.

One day in desperation I went to my acupuncturist.

I was always one of those “open minded” people who thought it was narcissistic of us to think that the only things that exist are those we can sense with our 5 human senses. Even if you believe the “if you can’t measure it it doesn’t exist” mantra you still have to admit that we will be able to discover and measure more in another 100 years than we can today. If everything we could currently measure was all that exists why continue doing any research at all?

However, I had never really gotten much out of acupuncture personally, and was more or less going out of desperation. So I took my “open minded” ass in for an appointment with my Taiwanese acupuncturist who used to work in a Chinese hospital (their hospitals actually have acupuncturists as real doctors!?)

She first took my pulse, then immediately gasped, looked at me wide-eyed, and told me that I was very, very sick.  Her face was more than worried. I think she couldn’t believe what she was feeling in my pulse as she kept feeling my wrist over and over and then looking at me bewildered.  I asked if my Qi was low. She responded with “it can’t get any lower than that or you’d be dead!”.

I teared up. I had spent the last several months trying desperately to convince doctors that I didn’t feel well. None of them believed me. Finally someone knew how badly I felt. I literally felt very close to death in this very strange way I’d been unable to explain.

She asked me what I was doing and who I was seeing. At the time it was a Naturopath and a number of MDs and I was on a limited diet and a huge array of supplements and medication for adrenal fatigue, gut, and thyroid issues.

She wanted me to completely stop taking EVERYTHING I was on.

But without realizing it I had become addicted to taking something. I realize now as I type this that this was based in fear. I was afraid I’d get even worse if I wasn’t doing what these doctors had told me. Despite myself I believed that taking pills and seeing “real” doctors would save me.

I didn’t want to release the regimen. I was faced with a giant conundrum; it was time to release my belief in the western medical system and trust her. That’s precisely what she wanted me to do. And my open-mindedness did not want to.

While laying there with needles all over my body I had this thought… … the thought was… if only I could get my doctors, who didn’t believe there was anything wrong with me, to join up with my Acupuncturist… if only she could convince them… … …and that’s when it struck me. Within this thought was residing a belief I didn’t even know I had held onto… I realized that I devalued her, that truthfully I held western medicine hierarchically above, as more valid, than Eastern, despite my open-minded attitude and despite the fact that I understood the inherent problems of a capitalist healing system for chronic disease. My doctor continued to seem more knowledgeable, more valid, in my mind. I’d be able to believe her more easily if her information was transferred through him. Here she was, a mere acupuncturist, who I’d be embarrassed to even tell my MD I’d seen, and yet she could tell me exactly how I felt while he could not. And I wanted to push her through a western loop in order to fully believe and trust her.

Truly I already knew that Western medicine doesn’t have all the answers. We think of it as advanced because we are looking backwards to the days before antibiotics or immunizations when we thought leeching people was a good idea. The history of western medicine includes giving people drinks of mercury and arsenic for syphilis and morphine for crying babies!

If we could look back to now from 500 years in the future we’d think the same things about just how primitive these days are. We are always existing at the leading edge of medicine, which gives us an illusion of greatness.

But even through my own experiences I knew this!!! In every case of problems I’ve had throughout my life I’ve been told I needed drugs or surgeries that when I researched them, would make my problem worse (steroids for arthritis, PPIs for Ulcers, Ambien for insomnia, etc). I’ve done A TON of research into everything… especially Sibo, finding huge discrepancies between the research and MD treatments.

Plus, My partner is a medical device sales rep… deals have to be profitable for both the hospital and the doctors performing the surgery in order to be made available. If a new drug or surgery isn’t profitable, it isn’t available. Socialist countries are more apt to go for the inexpensive, effective treatments because everybody has money to lose when people are sick, but in this country certain people have much to gain by our illnesses. It simply makes more economic sense in terms of profitability, to sell treatments rather than cures… And I already knew this… so why am I laying here wishing I could change my MD’s mind?

The major point, the life altering epiphany, was I hadn’t listened to my own knowledge and instead had held onto a system that was holding me back. I had to let go of the thought that western medicine would save me, or even help me, because in my reality it wasn’t doing either. Whatever was going on with me, western medicine couldn’t even measure it. She could measure something that nobody else could, that was very real to me, and not at all real to my western world of medicine…

Let me say this again…
she could measure something that nobody else could, that was very real to me, and not at all real to my western world of medicine…

Within this statement exists the dominoes of epiphanies and realizations that were next to come that have utterly changed who I am at my core. Beginning with the loss of my total faith in western science and medicine as the only, the most advanced, the best, way of thinking that exists. When we give up these beliefs, we become more free and expansive. Believing in one thing only, in a hierarchy of knowledge, is very limiting. The truth is, every modality has something of value, as well as some pitfalls, and to claim only one of these is true or valid is both insulting to the people those systems help, and limiting you to the ceiling and pitfalls of your own belief system.

I went home and put all of the supplements away in a cupboard. After a week of no supplements, I actually had a better day. Many months later when I was feeling better she told me that she had been very worried for my life.  Unfortunately this was not the complete answer to my health quest. But I did start to feel better overall. The bloating was less painful, I started sleeping better, and the fatigue began to fade.

This was the first time I was asked to trust in something that was foreign to me. It was hard, and I had to first acknowledge, or realize, the belief that was blocking me from doing that. So much of the time we are acting through the invisible force of our subconscious beliefs. We have to start to see these for what they are; illusions that hold us back. It was hard for me to realize that western medicine was making me sicker, because research shows that it should’ve helped. But the fact of my own experience was opposite of the research, and I had to accept that.

It also opened up a strange question for me. It revealed that what I think and what I believe can be different, and even oppositional. That your beliefs can work against you. The question for me now is, how do we change those deep inner beliefs that are controlling our lives despite our intentions? How can we live the truth of the things we know, rather than the illusions of the things we’ve subconsciously taken on?

For now, I know that we are here to expand and grow. And to do that we must first ask questions. What are the ideas, people, systems, or things that you are quick to judge and reject? Are you judging someone or something based on fear? Do you believe in a system or a regimen that is limiting?

I believe we can have ideas or things we believe are true for ourselves, while acknowledging that what is true for others may be different from what is true for ourself.

Acknowledge your biases, open your heart and mind, trust, and surrender to the learning experience that is life on planet earth. That’s the only advice I can really offer for now.

1. The Turning Point and a New Blog

I used to think this way.  I used to see the world as a living nightmare, where, powerless, we wander, not knowing what to do, while destruction of our planet goes on in every direction.  The world seemed to be seething with the most base and horrible forms of humanity.  Hierarchies, people worshiping money and empty material items with little to no compassion for the suffering below them, while striving towards empty friendships and  with people of any sort of status above them.

I couldn’t handle it.  I found it sickening, and it made me sick.  Really really sick.

I’m going to try to make this short, because the story of just how sick I got and how horrible that was doesn’t serve much purpose.  And so I’m keeping it to a minimum, but if you have questions leave them in the comments and I will try to answer them.

Yes I got really sick.  It began with insomnia.  Insomnia that got so bad I literally couldn’t get more than a few hours per night.  This went on for a couple of years, and believe me, I tried everything.  Well, everything except the major drugs because I like to do research, and the drugs are terrible for your brain and do nothing for chronic insomnia (they’re great for small bouts of insomnia caused by a trauma, but for chronic cases the effects eventually wear off and you get worse rebound insomnia, which is something I experienced with melatonin and over the counter remedies and was not willing to do again.)

I then began having terrible digestive problems that turned out to be Sibo (Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth).  After a year of massive research, over a dozen doctors and Naturopaths and every diet and supplement or drug regimen you could think of, I started experiencing the most debilitating fatigue I’ve ever experienced.  At one point last year I could barely eat anything, I was put on something called the “elemental diet”, which consists of a very easily digestible medical food powder.  This was a difficult regimen in which I ate no real food, only this gross powder mixed up in water for 3 weeks.  But it made me even more tired, and I became so fatigued  I could barely move my limbs or get up my stairs to get dressed or go to bed at night.  It was awful.

But no doctor could figure it out.  My blood work, all of the massive amounts that I had done at every different doctor’s office imaginable, showed that everything was borderline low… but nothing worth worrying about.

In the meantime I literally thought I was going to die.  I felt like my body was dying, like I wasn’t sure I’d have the energy to get up the stairs or to even continue to beat my heart.

And so I started to feel very hopeless.  I was living in a hopeless world, and a hopeless body, and there was just nothing left to live for.

One day I started sobbing and couldn’t stop.  This went on for hours, my head throbbing and spinning from all the crying.  It was that day, in the late afternoon, when these words came into my mind.  “You don’t want to exist here, so now you must make that final decision.  Do you want to live or not?  It’s your gift, you get to decide what you want”.

The feeling was that all I needed to do was say the words and the powers that be would just let me die.  I had been living with a secret death wish for a very long time.  I had had thoughts of wishing I would just die most of my adult life, because I hated everything.  I hate my civilization, I hate religion, I hate what we are doing on this planet, killing everything… if you’ve read some of these posts you know it.  I am full of hatred for our current situation and I feel stuck living here with these horrors, these monsters that rule our existence and this planet.

However, in that moment, I looked around, and saw that life was also quite nice.  I am living in a lot of luxury.  I can take a bath whenever I want, I have clean drinking water, I live in a beautiful home that we’ve made beautiful, I have my own studio, I garden and the plants are healthy, my yard is beautiful and there are many birds.  I can go hiking in nature within an hour drive.  I have a couple of good friends who care about me.  I have a love, a real love, that cares about me and is open and loving.  I am, … blessed.

And yet my hatred of my own civilization had caused me to feel guilty, to feel bad, about my blessings, instead of actually living them and feeling them and loving them.

The story of misery was mostly taking place outside of my immediate surroundings, and I had focused so much on it, that I had completely ignored everything that was good in my immediate life.  As a “privileged white person” I felt guilty and ashamed of the good things in my life and was subconsciously pushing them away.

I was also beginning to believe that my body would never feel better again.  I had lost hope of being healthy.  All of this began pouring through my mind when for some reason I decided to go outside and sit down in my yard.  I felt a patch of clover to my right and looked down, and started looking at the little clovers.  Within a few minutes I found a four leaf clover.

It felt like a sign.  I realized that truthfully we are never stuck, things are always moving and changing.  Between the insomnia, the Sibo, and the fatigue it had been many years since I felt well.  Up to that point my thoughts were that if I was going to continue feeling like this I’d rather bite the dust.  But the clover felt like something was trying to get a bigger point across.  What if thinking I was stuck was the main thing making me feel stuck?

I chose that day to continue, to keep living this life.  That decision was the beginning of a transformation.  I am hoping that maybe if enough of us transform too, we can change everything.  I no longer believe that we should be focusing so much on the terrible atrocities of our world, because this focus has a terrible outcome… it makes us feel powerless.   And what if we project these feelings out into the world?  What if we are how we feel?  What if feeling powerless makes us powerless?  Don’t get me wrong.  I do NOT believe in burying your head in the sand, I do think that we do need to learn and become aware of what is happening, and continue taking action.  But we need to do it with care.  Once we know what is happening we can’t allow ourselves to become addicted to the negativity of it, focused on only the bad, such that we make ourselves depressed, sick, and devoid of our own will to live, such that we bring the energy of our world down instead of up.

I know it sounds so damn cliche, but we must be the change we want to see in the world.  I used to deplore this mantra, because I believed it gave people the okay to ignore the atrocities of our civilization.  But the absolute truth is that I am the only thing that I can change.  You are the only thing you can change.  If we view this as a travesty, then it will be a travesty.  If we view it as a joyous ability, then that’s what it will be.  We are, in a sense, creating our own reality.  And collectively we are creating our reality.  There is a collective consciousness.  The more we immerse ourselves in the negative the more negative our life here on this planet will be.  I felt I couldn’t digest my world, and so it was that I couldn’t digest anything.

That choice wasn’t an end-all.  It wasn’t like I made that choice and then everything got better.  That choice was the harder choice.  Living on this earth is very difficult, and transformation is hard.  Since making this choice I’ve still been suicidal, I’ve been frightened, depressed, sick, messed up and upset, but I’ve also felt tremendous joy, been made aware of better ways of living, of other possibilities, and of a great amount of power we actually have within our own minds.  I am muddling through the downs to get to the highs, that’s where I’m at currently.  I believe that it will eventually settle out a bit.

So this is the beginning of my ongoing story of change and transformation, of what belief can do in our lives, of what happens when we let negativity and focus on the bad rule our minds, and how to release all of it to create a better world for ourselves and the planet we live on.  It is about seeking… seeking truth, seeking healing, seeking love, and I want to share it with anyone who seeks these things too.

It is time to dig ourselves out of the trenches of negativity and powerlessness.  It is time to move from a place of misery, heart break and negativity to a place of love and joy.  I really hope we can all do it together.  There is a collective consciousness.  What kind of energy are you contributing to it?

Until next time.