Lyme Disease, My Teacher
There is a different story of healing that you won’t likely find in abundance on your local bookstore shelves. If you have experience with Chronic Lyme Disease, you know the only thing worse then the actual Lyme disease is trying to kill it! It feels never-ending and leaves most of us desperate to be cured.
But, do you know the difference between being healed and cured?
I know, its semantics! Yet, the first always seems to involve some form of action connecting the mind, body and spirit while a cure almost always is about searching outside yourself for the answer. While an important first step is finding a good Lyme Literate Doctor (LLD) or Lyme Literate Herbalist, depending on someone else to cure you can leave you feeling powerless as you are putting all the power of possibility into someone else’s hands. Please know I am in no way belittling the importance of having a solid medical team in your corner. However, we are beginning to realize in a pretty large way that if you are not connecting mind, body and spirit into the healing process most “cures” may likely be temporary. We must actively and purposefully create wellness. I recommend a healing team to support you in learning all that this illness has to teach you about healing yourself. I was a victim to lyme disease but also a student in the process of healing.
Lyme Disease is baffling and intelligent. So your healing team needs to be both as well.
Lyme spirochetes morph left when you push right. They declare war just when you have been shot down. I have found the smartest and most helpful people on my “ healing team” understood that slow and steady wins the race. Declare war on Lyme and it creates bunkers (bio-film) and fights back. Slow, steady, persistent and sneaky are much better. Herximer reaction is no joke and your nervous system has to be cared for in this process. Finding people who honor this was crucial for me.
Consider alternative healing methods as part of the “sneaky” aspect of your plan. While many forms of energy healing can be subltle they can reap big rewards when done with some consistency. This can include but are not limited to Reiki, Full Spectrum Healing, Polarity, Cranial Sacral, Accupuncture, Tong Ren, EM, Biofeedback (I used OnDamed) EmotionCode/ Body Code, massage and many many more.
It is believed that Lyme Disease, like all invasive illnesses, penetrates the outer energy field more readily in individuals who's energetic boundaries are weak.
Understand that all physical illnesses have an emotional/ energetic root. So it is important to find a therapist you can really connect with and understands the emotional ties of your Lyme Disease. In addition, many energy medicine modalities release emotion from the body. Hands near/on healing has been shown to release emotional blocks and assist in healing. Dr William Bengston spent 35 years in research and has demonstrated time and again that hands on healing works even on difficult to treat conditions or conditions with no conventional treatment at all. If your curious, you can find more on his incredible research in his book, The Energy Cure: Unraveling The Mystery of Hands On Healing. Dr Bengston had incredible research results in his ability to cure breast cancer in mice with his hands on healing and then turned around and used the tissue of the energy healed mice to cure other mice infected with breast cancer. We are just starting to understand the incredible possibilities of energy based healing!
This is important!
It is also crucial that your healing team understand that healing is not just about being symptom free! It is about feeding, nurturing and empowering the part of you that has never been sick. It’s about remembering who you are and letting go of the beliefs, vows and expectations that were never you to begin with. Your Illness is information and whether it’ s nudging or screaming at you, it has a message. Most of these messages take time to clarify, as they are not found up in your head but rather a deeper internal knowing. This is where it is so important to begin a meditation practice. Even if you don’t think your capable- do it any way. Oh and find guided meditations that you can develop your practice with while you are learning.
Every time you meditate you provide your body with the perfect conditions for healing and repair.
It is also the path to learning about your true self and getting to experience this deeper knowing that exists with in you. As Deepak Chopra explains, “ Exploring who you are at a deeper level then your everyday thoughts is a true definition of meditation.”
But brace yourself, this inner work will likely illuminate the connection between your illness and the false story of yourself which you have created, attached to and sold yourself on for a long time! This is where you will be challenged on the next lesson; destination self love and acceptance. To some this is something stamped on a post card for others really doing this work- it’s tragically hard and will challenge you and your relationships. Guess what? There are perks; less self critical crap and more forgiveness of yourself and everyone else. You’ll hopefully begin to catch on that everything that drives you crazy about others is really a mirror of that which you don’t accept about yourself. It’s a not so fun little game… find someone that irritates you, look around as others tolerate and maybe even go so far as to like or love this person… yup its you. But again I digress.. that’s another post!
I do caution you! While the process of healing will ask you to be patient on this journey, the actual journey will ask you to somehow honor the despair and pain and loss that comes from this time of illness.
How do you honor despair and pain and loss? Ok, this sounds a bit absurd when you are fighting for your life. Having your health compromised over time can become soul-grieving work. It can leave you scared, hopeless and grieving the loss of being the parent, friend, spouse, child and personality you were before illness. Even post Lyme, can you imagine feeling free to walk barefoot in the grass again or lay around nature with out being creeped out and scared? These are the seemingly small take aways but they can be feel like a bigger loss for some of us! It signifies a loss of the life we knew. For those who have been fortunate to heal, there is a before and after Lyme Disease and the in between is likely full of crazy experiences.
But the space between being sick and regaining your health is also sacred.
Within this crisis there is opportunity to remember who you are on a sacred level. There is an opportunity to open yourself up to things you may never have tried before and this time certainly requires you to take a look at how you have been living and how present you are in your life. There are other equally important questions to ask yourself. Prior to illness, how often had you been nurturing joy, love and freedom into your life? How much had you been loving yourself and setting boundaries with others that honor your needs with out guilt? And I don’t mean setting boundaries out of anger and by the way what do you do with anger? Are you allowed to let it out in a way that provides release and healing? Has your heart open to true honest intimacy in your relationships?
Honoring the pain and despair of this time between stories is to learn from it. It means listening to its messages, caring for yourself enough to explore and receive all the ah ha moments which will light the way of your healing path and let it be life changing.
These challenging chronic illnesses are wake up calls and meant to change your life!
When you do this work of creating wellness and connecting with inner knowing there is a new awareness of becoming who you really are. The sun may likely shine and you may find yourself doing something productive with a bunch of energy in the reserve tank. You may likely ask yourself is this real? Will I pay for this later or am I really feeling better? It’s hard to believe in your health when you no longer trust it. But, there you are realizing you have not been vigilant of your symptoms and they seem to have lessoned or gotten better. It happened under the radar and suddenly it may seem that you have somehow disconnected for a moment from being sick. I believe this is where healing will test you.
It will test you to remember it’s lesson. It is all about nurturing and empowering and loving your true self. The minute you sell your self out by doing more then you know is good for you, or dishonoring your wellness to serve the false striving self you have created all those years before, is when you will see illness pay a visit again. I also know the mind games that occur when we notice feeling better but we sabotage it in some way to protect us from the expectations of others that we fear we will not be able to fulfill later. Trust me, I know it is hard work, getting honest and getting well. However, this time between stories can be a journey to creating wellness on purpose that is life changing, soul serving and self-becoming. Are you ready to open your heart?
If you have found yourself on the other side of this crazy disease please share your thoughts! Stories of hope and power are so crucial to those of us who might still be in the trenches!!!