Prof. George Jelinek

If you weren’t able to make it on the live call last Thursday (the first in the MS Voices Interview Series), below is an excerpt from my 1 hr and 27 minute interview with Prof. Jelinek. In the excerpt, he discusses the flaws in the scientific studies which “prove” the effectiveness of the interferon drugs. As is Jelinek’s style, he explains complex science in easy-to-follow layman’s terms, so that it’s accessible for everyone.

This excerpt is just a small portion of what was an information-PACKED and very inspirational interview. I personally learned a lot and found it incredibly valuable. But more than anything, what remains Jelinek’s unique and powerful position in this community is that he is absolutely a man of science and doesn’t believe or endorse anything that hasn’t been adequately proven in well-executed scientific study. And based on the science that has been done, he firmly believes that MS can be not just managed but overcome.

As he says, “For those just diagnosed with MS, there is every reason to hope for a long and healthy life. For those with disability, there is the real potential to slow or completely stop the progression of the illness.”

Listen here:

jelinek_excerpt

If you’d like to purchase Jelinek’s book, which I highly recommend, you can find the links to do so here:

http://www.overcomingmultiplesclerosis.org/Book/

The website is:

http://www.overcomingmultiplesclerosis.org

And if you missed the interview, want to hear it again, or you’re simply unable to attend at the time of the live interviews, the entire series is available for digital download. You can get more info on that here.

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George Jelinek, author of Overcoming Multiple Sclerosis, and the first guest in the MS Voices Interview Series

I’m mad as hell. Usually I go easy on doctors, because I truly believe they mean well. But this time, I need to rage. At least for the duration of this post.

A member of my extended family was just diagnosed with MS. His sister reached out to me, asking if I could speak with him. I wrote back and said of course and gave her my number so that he could call me. She replied, saying that he decided he didn’t want to call because he doesn’t think talking to anyone with MS will help.

Why? Because his doctor said he has a rare form. In other words, his case is worse. His case is more hopeless. What might help someone else with MS won’t help him, because for him, it’s different.

I don’t believe in taking hope away from people. Especially not in the name of wanting to protect someone from “getting their hopes up.” Upping your hope is one of the healthiest things you can do for yourself. It powers the engine of your will and it inspires you to operate from a position of possibility. Like this, you’re not looking for what won’t work. You’re looking for what could. Like this, you can begin the search for the information that will help you heal.

Tomorrow I am extremely excited to be contributing to your search for information with the launch of my nine-week interview series called MS Voices – my response to the doctor’s disempowering, hope-snatching doom and gloom. Every week for nine weeks I’ll be interviewing an expert in MS, health, and healing so that I can bring to you first-hand, expert opinions and cutting-edge information on Multiple Sclerosis and health directly to you, for free, so that you don’t have to spend years wasting your time on what doesn’t work and wading through the sea of voices to find the ones worth listening to.

I truly, deeply believe that there is always hope, and that no matter how “rare” or “severe” someone’s case is, there is never a time when one should stop searching for information that could help them get well. Last week I wrote about how my tip about the cheap and natural treatment for UTI’s, D-Mannose, saved my daughter’s friend from having to get a scalpel to her abdomen. Information is power. Information can change everything.

To get the detailed scoop about the MS Voices Interview Series and to sign up for FREE, click here. Tomorrow night we kick the series off at 9 PM EST with Professor George Jelinek, author of Overcoming Multiple Sclerosis (www.overcomingmultiplesclerosis.com). Will you be there? I hope so.

After that, check out Marc’s recent post on the PR problems of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, reprinted here with permission. It’s a very interesting piece which brings up a problem in the MS community that is addressed quite well here. You’ll find that Marc’s writing is fantastic and if you aren’t already reading his blog, go there now and bookmark it.

Some Unsolicited Advice for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society by Marc Stecker, Wheelchair Kamikaze

The fall issue of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society’s magazine Momentum includes an article entitled “Safe Travels through the Internet”, in which I’m quoted quite extensively (click here for article). I’m very thankful to be included in the article, along with fellow bloggers Lisa Emrich (click here) and Trevis Gleason (click here), and was quite surprised when I was approached and asked to be interviewed. I think the writer did a terrific job on the piece, which is extremely informative and should be very helpful, especially for those just getting introduced to the online MS universe. The entire magazine is a quite good, and is definitely recommended reading.

After Momentum came out last week, I received several e-mails expressing surprise that I would participate in a magazine put out by the NMSS, the inference being that since I’m a proponent of CCSVI, and have written extensively about my largely unenthusiastic views of Big Pharma and their MS products, that I should shun any association with a group that many perceive as the enemy, and one which numerous patients view as simply a shill for mainstream MS interests and the big pharmaceutical companies.

It struck me that this is a huge problem for the NMSS, and for the MS population. The fact that a significant percentage of MS patients view the largest and most visible nonprofit MS advocacy group as an adversary is a disconnect that both those struggling with the disease and the organization that is supposed to be dedicated to fighting the malady can ill afford.

The NMSS (and their sister Canadian organization) have long been targets for many in the MS online community. That enmity has reached new heights in the last six months, however, after the organizations’ admittedly slow, clumsy, and misguided initial handling of the CCSVI issue. Even after the Canadian and US MS societies dedicated $2.4 million to CCSVI research, dissatisfaction with the organizations grew, largely because the research that was funded is more academic than practical, as no treatment studies received vital financial grants. This brought online gripes against the societies to new levels, with accusations flying that the studies funded were at best simply delaying tactics, and at worst intentionally designed to disprove the CCSVI hypothesis for the benefit of the MS societies’ Big Pharma masters.

Of course, the NMSS does much more than fund MS research. The society runs a host of valuable programs that benefit the MS community on both the local and national level, among them support groups for both patients and caregivers, government advocacy, MS education, financial assistance, scholarships for those living with MS or their children, employment resources, and help with procuring assistive devices. As for the research the society does support, a quick perusal of the NMSS website reveals that the society funds many innovative and cutting-edge projects (click here), most of which would otherwise get no funding at all.

Still, a large portion of the MS population regards the society as a monolithic entity, an instrument only interested in maintaining the MS status quo, enriching the society itself, and pushing the use of the hugely profitable immunosuppressive and immunomodulating drugs currently offered by the big pharmaceutical companies.

Since I started this blog 18 months ago, I’ve gotten to know several employees of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. It may surprise some readers that these folks are not firebreathing ogres with glowing eyes, forked tongues, and pointy tails, but compassionate human beings who fervently care about ridding the world of Multiple Sclerosis and helping patients stricken with the disease.

With all of the above in mind, I thought I’d offer a few suggestions to the NMSS in an effort to help build a bridge between the organization and those who find it highly suspect.

My first suggestion is a radical one, but one that I think would almost instantly restore credibility to the NMSS as an organization wholly devoted to finding a cure for Multiple Sclerosis. The society should simply stop taking any funding from the pharmaceutical companies that market MS drugs. I’ve been told that donations from pharmaceutical companies represent less than 5% of the financial support received by the NMSS, and if this is true, rejecting this funding shouldn’t be a crippling blow to the society’s bottom line.

Additionally, I believe that if this audacious step was taken, much of the revenues lost would be made up by an increase in donations by patients and their loved ones who currently hold the society in complete disregard. Online, patients regularly talk about asking everyone they know not to make donations on their behalf to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. By making the bold move of rejecting pharmaceutical money, the society would quickly win back many of the patients who are, under current circumstances, now lost to it forever.

Thumbing through the most recent edition of Momentum, the quarterly NMSS magazine, I counted 13 pages of advertisements paid for by the pharmaceutical companies, in a magazine comprised of a total of 70 pages. In fact, Pharma ads were practically the only advertisements in the magazine (there were also a few from medical device manufacturers). Given these numbers, and the fact that for many individuals Momentum is their major point of contact with the NMSS, it isn’t difficult to see how the magazine’s readers might get the impression that the NMSS takes its marching orders from Big Pharma.

I’m sure that the higher-ups at the NMSS can’t be blind to the fact that taking money from companies that make billions annually marketing obscenely expensive drugs that ameliorate MS symptoms but do nothing to address the still unknown cause of the disease appears to be a conflict of interest for an organization whose stated vision is “A World Free of MS”. Such a world would send many of the companies that market MS drugs quickly into bankruptcy court. Multiple Sclerosis has become the goose that laid the golden egg for these corporations, entities whose mandate it is to constantly drive profit, and that by law are beholden to their stockholders, not to the patients who consume their products.

My second suggestion would be to let us see some of the real-life human beings that staff the organization’s national and local offices. Those that I’ve had contact with are empathetic, caring human beings, and many of them have had their lives impacted significantly by friends and family who suffer from MS. The society desperately needs to shed its monolithic image, to show the MS community in a very real way that it is not made up of faceless automatons, but by concerned people who, as one told me, would gladly give up their jobs if a cure for MS could be found.

The NMSS needs to humanize itself, and a strong dose of the personal touch is needed. A starting point might be to feature the profiles of select society employees on the NMSS website and in Momentum Magazine. Much more good would be served by devoting a few pages of the magazine to profiling real life, sympathetic NMSS employees than to advertisements for Avonex, Rebif, or Copaxone.

Lastly, I would ask the NMSS to play nicely with the other much smaller MS nonprofit organizations that dot the MS landscape. I understand that the competition for funding is fierce, especially given our current economic climate. But the NMSS has developed a somewhat cutthroat reputation among the nonprofits that compete with it, all of whom share the goal of ridding the world of MS. The NMSS is the de facto face of Multiple Sclerosis to the public at large; it’s the only MS organization most of the population has ever heard of. Certainly there is room for smaller, more specialized organizations to have a place at the funding trough. This isn’t a zero-sum game. As a matter of fact, it’s not a game at all. People’s lives are at stake, and by working with smaller organizations, rather than against them, a cure for this beast called MS will surely come about sooner. As was said during the civil rights movement, keep your eyes on the prize.

I hope these suggestions are taken in the spirit in which they are given. The lack of faith in the NMSS by the very population it advocates for is reaching the crisis stage in some corners. Direct action is needed, and despite the misgivings and suspicions held by some MSers about the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, the society can be at the forefront of affecting real change, by heartily rejecting the status qou and showing the community an energetic new face. The NMSS must redefine itself to the MS community, to the mutual benefit of both…

Check out this post on Marc’s blog to see the many comments in response.

D-mannose

A couple days ago I ran into an acquaintance at the pool club. Her name is Rebecca and her daughter Carly was in the same group as my daughter in camp last summer. One day when we were waiting for our kids to get out of camp, she told me about Carly’s chronic Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs) and how Carly’s doctor had prescribed antibiotics indefinitely to treat it, and said that if this course of action didn’t work, the next step would be to operate.

As a result of the long-term use of antibiotics, which kills the good bacteria in the gut that keeps the yeast and other bad guys in check, the bacterial balance in Carly’s stomach had gotten out of whack. With the mommy and daddy good bacteria out of the picture, the yeast were free to throw a wild house party, which resulted in Carly regularly getting yeast infections.

When Rebecca told me about this, I immediately suggested taking Carly off of sugar, gluten, and dairy, all of which feed the yeast. Kinda like adding lots of attractive teenage girls and alcohol to our metaphorical house party in her gut. But Carly was a four-year-old at the time, and if you don’t have kids or they’ve grown up and you’ve forgotten, I’ll just say that keeping a kid in modern America away from sugar is like keeping a mosquito away from a swamp in summer. So her mom didn’t find that to be a realistic option.

But I also remembered reading Suzanne Somers’ interview with Dr. Jonathan Wright in her book Breakthrough, where he talks about something called D-mannose as a natural way to heal bladder infections. I suggested this to Rebecca and told her she could pick it up cheaply at the health food store.

Apparently, 90 percent of bladder infections are caused by E. coli (not the killer mutant version, just the regular ol’ kind that’s found in everyone’s colon to help finish the digestion process).

But, when the bacteria gets into the bladder, it causes infection. The E. coli, it seems, have a Spiderman-like ability to cling to the inner lining of the bladder by sticking to the molecules of the simple sugar known as D-mannose. Here’s the story in Wright’s words:

Like any living thing, they love to reproduce, and they do, causing an E. coli population explosion, which from our point of view is an infection. The whole time, the E. coli cling like crazy to the D-mannose inside the bladder so they won’t get washed out or rinsed out with every urination.

But we can actually put E. coli’s love for D-mannose to good use! When a patient (usually a woman because women get more bladder infection than men) is given 3 to 5 grams of sweet powdery D-mannose (a safe, simple sugar that by now is found in virtually every health food store), only a small amount is metabolized. Most is “kicked out” through the kidneys into the ureters, then into the bladder, where the bacteria say “Party time! Look at all that delicious D-mannose!” They detach themselves from that little bit of D-mannose that is naturally in the walls of the bladder and they grab on to these great swirls of D-mannose coming into the bladder from the ureters. They float around enjoying all that D-mannose, and the next time the woman empties her bladder, the infection is literally rinsed away! She never had to go near an antibiotic, she’s better, and the E. coli are happy, too, wherever they go, surrounded by all that D-mannose. What could be better?

When Somers asked why everyone doesn’t know this, Dr. Wright said the following:

You know the answer, Suzanne…D-mannose isn’t patentable. You can get it at a compounding pharmacy or natural food store without any prescription. The patent medicine companies just aren’t interested. And antibiotics are such a great business. Just think of all the other drugs you need to take to combat the side effects and secondary infections created by the first antibiotic.

When we need them, we need them, but we only want to use them if we absolutely must. And in a case such as this, the alternative medicine (D-mannose) is a much better option.

When I saw Rebecca at the pool the other day, her face lit up and she exclaimed “Karen! D-mannose! It worked!” Apparently, after many more months on the antibiotics and several yeast infections later, Carly began to feel tingling and numbness in her hands and feet. Peripheral neuropathy – a side effect of the antibiotics. Rebecca called her doctor, who didn’t get back to her for two weeks and then suggested another medication to treat the neuropathy. It was then that Rebecca decided she’d had enough, remembered what I had suggested and gave it a shot. It worked immediately and Carly hasn’t been on antibiotics since. More importantly, she didn’t need the operation that her doctor had strongly encouraged by that time.

Doctors Don’t Know Everything

Why am I telling you this story? It’s not to pat myself on the back (though I did feel really awesome about having helped them so significantly with that little bit of information). It’s to illustrate that our doctors don’t know everything.

They are not magicians, they are detectives limited by the information they know and the information they choose to believe. They’re limited by the prejudices of the paradigm in which they operate. They’re limited by the political influence of Big Pharma and the health insurance companies. So although they may mean well, and I absolutely believe most doctors do, if you want to heal yourself, you can’t give all your power up to your doctors. You need to become your own detective, gather your own information, and go beyond the limitations of what your doctors are willing to believe to find the answers that will create dramatic shifts in your health.

Every ailment isn’t always as neatly and easily solved as the D-mannose-UTI secret, and MS is a very complex and often quite stubborn disease, as we all know. But little, pivotal pieces of information can add up to major improvements in your health. It’s for this reason that I’ve been busy putting together a free eight-week live interview telecall series with leading experts in the MS community. I’ll be telling you more about it in the coming weeks, but for now I’ll just say that I look forward to putting the wisdom of these experts in front of you so you don’t have to spend years wasting your time wading through the sea of voices to find the ones worth listening to.

One page in a book prevented Carly from being operated on. Maybe one sentence from someone with the right information can make a difference in your life.

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Kiela, just after getting her tattoo. Photo & tattoo by Zach Baker (tattoosbyzach.com)

A couple nights ago, after weeping ceaselessly for many hours, I called my very dear and wonderful friend Kiela. When she answered the phone, I half-cried the word “hi” and continued weeping. We sat silently on the phone like this for some time.

Then she said, “I think I like you better this way.”

Perhaps you think this is an odd and offensive thing for one friend to say to another in such a moment. But I knew exactly what she meant, and I agreed.

Here’s the thing – it isn’t possible to look such a deep ache in the face and maintain any pretense. My sadness had stripped me of everything except my self – the authentic, vulnerable, open, naked essence of me. And as caught up as I was in my own emoting, I was simultaneously reveling in the space that had opened up as everything else fell away. The space that I don’t always allow for myself. The space that sometimes I forget to be in. The space where I am completely authentic.

Do you remember the moment of your diagnosis? If it was anything like mine, you were dumbstruck.

I love the word dumbstruck. Struck dumb.

I think everyone could really benefit from being struck dumb. Because we trap ourselves in all the things we think we know, about the world, about who we are, how we are, and what we think we want. But the strike of a diagnosis like MS evaporates that knowing. And for a moment, in the surreality of the information we just received, the slate is cleaned.

We know nothing.

The person we thought we were is no longer. The future we thought was coming is no longer. With one sentence we are broken down. You have Multiple Sclerosis. And here, in this moment, we are more fertile, more ready to find out who we really are then we likely have been in a long, long time.

Kiela has a tattoo on her neck that says “Broke Down.” It’s the essence of the work she has been put on this earth to do.

When you are broke down, what’s left? When you have broken down all the expectations others have of you, all the expectations you have of yourself, all the ways you think you need to be to feel safe and get love, when all of that is gone, who are you?

A diagnosis like MS is a beautiful gift, if recognized. If utilized. It can be just another place to hide, or it can be the call to the adventure of your life. Because if the MS doesn’t wake you up, something else will, or at least it’ll try. As Kiela says to the clients she works with, “You can hold on for as long as you want, but it’s coming for you.”

(I love that.)

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Photo by alicepopkorn, Flickr

It’s occurred to me, in the time and space since my post yesterday, that it may appear as if I believe I am a victim of the relationship I was involved in, and that I blame this relationship for perpetuating my illness.

I do not. I am responsible for everything that occurs in my life, including my current heartache and my current health. If I’m going to get real with myself, if I’m going to be really, unflinchingly honest, then I need to admit that I knew everything I needed to know before I ever kissed this man. All the evidence was there, and I felt it. But I thought I could change it. I thought my love would make it different.

I am responsible for the past four years. I am responsible for choosing every day to override my suffering. I am responsible for not addressing the root cause. I am responsible for being ineffective in creating the circumstances I needed within that relationship to be okay. And I am responsible for remaining in that relationship despite all these things.

I am responsible for my MS. The fact that the disease process known as Multiple Sclerosis has developed in my body is not the result of lousy luck. I am not a victim of MS, nor am I a victim of a chaotic universe. I am responsible for the circumstances I have found myself in.

This is not the same as being to blame. What happens if I blame myself? Blame is just more self-attack. And self-attack – the body attacking itself – is the literal mechanism that is Multiple Sclerosis. Blaming myself equals MS. It’s more of the same. Blame is just drama.

Werner Erhard said it best: “Responsibility is not burden, fault, praise, blame, credit, shame or guilt. In responsibility, there is no evaluation of good or bad, right or wrong. There is simply what’s so, and your stand. Being responsible starts with the willingness to deal with a situation from the view of life that you are the generator of what you do, what you have and what you are. That is not the truth. It is a place to stand. No one can make you responsible, nor can you impose responsibility on another. It is a grace you give yourself – an empowering context that leaves you with a say in the matter of life.”

Where do you stand when it comes to your MS? Are you a victim? Or are your feet rooted in the firmament of the grace and power that comes from declaring “I am responsible?”

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Me walking barefoot to the river

I am walking to the river.

I am walking to the river because my heart is broken and it keeps demanding that I be out in nature. I suppose because it’s closer to God out there, and nothing short of being embraced by the entire Universe could ease this.

So I am walking to the river, barefoot because it feels better to have all that extra sensation and information coming from the bottom of my feet. The way to the river from my house is past one of the very wealthy sections of my town, where the mansions pepper the edge of the water and the properties have seven-foot-tall brick walls lining the sidewalk, so us common folk can’t see in.

When I was a little girl we used to spend summers in Israel and me and my sister and my cousins used to take long walks barefoot there too, and I remember these pale pink concrete walls lining the sidewalks in front of some of those houses, though I think those were built not for privacy but to protect against gunshots from Arabs. Of course I wasn’t aware of that then. I couldn’t have been more than six, and what I remember is how light and free I felt, how I would graze my fingertips across the surface of the concrete as I walked, feeling the bumps beneath my fingers and the hot pavement beneath my feet, inhaling the fullness of unhindered possibility and joyful presence with every breath.

I’m walking to the river, trying to take a full breath now but it’s not happening. Outside my awareness my arm reaches out and skims the brick wall, searching for something it can’t find.

Let it Be

My view of the river

A few minutes later I’m sitting by the river, on the concrete wall high above the water with my shoes beside me and my feet dangling in the air. I’m listening to this gorgeous, epic, gospel cover of The Beatles’ “Let it Be” by Carol Woods & Timothy T. Mitchum and that’s when I realize it.

For the past four years I’ve been living in resistance and fear that the man I loved would leave me for this other woman – a woman who’s been in his life for a very long time and with whom he still has some unfinished business (to put it as euphemistically as possible). For four years, I’ve been so absolutely terrified of this potential outcome that I’ve never allowed myself – not once – to imagine it all the way through. To picture him leaving me for her and to feel how that would feel. But as I am sitting here watching the water and letting the power of the phrase “Let it be” sing its way into me, I find myself opening to brave the unspeakable.

I dive into what will surely be my death, the worst possible scenario. I play it out. I imagine them together, cuddling at night, watching a movie before bed. I see them eating breakfast together. I see the love in his eyes as he looks at her. I see them walking down Main Street together, holding hands. All of it, I see all of it.

And I die.

I fucking die.

But then the realization comes. I’m finally on the other side of it and I finally get it. I get that the resistance and the fear is so much worse than if it actually came true. I get that the resistance and the fear is where the dis-ease is. And now, considering that for the first time in years I could be free of this resistance, the full-blown experience of FREE washes over me. I recall the sensation of my arm reaching out to touch the brick wall as I walked here. I get that for four years, my resistance to and fear of this dreadful possibility has been perpetuating Multiple Sclerosis in my body. I have been making myself sick.

In-flame-ation

Here, let me show you what I mean. Put your palms together. Now rub them together while pressing them into each other. Do you feel the heat that you’re creating? That’s what happens when we’re in a state of resistance. The resistance causes friction and the friction causes heat to build up. When there’s too much heat in the body, it goes up in flames. It becomes inflamed.

MS – if we’re to believe the prevailing theory – is an in-flamm-atory demyelinating condition. It is the literal, symptomatic manifestation of too much heat in the body. I’m hot as hell (and I don’t mean that in the much more pleasant interpretation of the phrase).

And the truth is, the last four years have just been a particularly acute version of what all of us experience on the daily. We’re all living in resistance because we’re unconditional beings living in a conditional world (as Michael Brown puts it in his book Alchemy of the Heart), and as a result, we’ve all had our hearts broken as children. We’re all in perpetual resistance to our authentic nature because we learned very early on that we needed to shut up and sit straight and behave ourselves for God’s sake if we were to be accepted and loved. So we do. Or we do the opposite and play the role of the rebel. But whichever role we choose, we’re in resistance to the free, uninhibited, authentic, magical beings we were when we arrived in this world, and as a result our bodies are boiling, which is why phrases like “lose my cool” and “blow my top” are so pervasive.

So I’m sitting by the river. And it’s a perfect day – 85 degrees and very little humidity. My skin is cool but there’s a fire raging inside me, and it has been for the last four years, and surely the charring started long before that.

But I don’t want to be in flames any more.

So I’m moving on.

I feel like I’m dying, but there is no rebirth without a death before it. And I understand now that my resistance and my MS are one and the same, so I have no choice but to just…let it be.

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The red pillow on my carpet where it all went down.

Monday around 9:30 p.m., if you had walked into my house you would have found me sitting cross-legged on the floor, rocking back and forth, sobbing, heaving, and thrusting out deep, guttural, staccato sounds of agony.

This is not what I typically do on a Monday evening.

But something serendipitous is happening. Not fun, no not fun at all. Not even a little bit. But definitely serendipitous. I have found myself in a moment of my life where I’m faced with an extremely challenging and painful emotional situation. And (finally) the universe has simultaneously presented me with the tools to address it. In fact, not just to address it but to use it and evolve through it. (“The only way out is through.”) The tools have appeared as the work of Michael Brown and his two books The Presence Process, which I spoke of a few days ago, and Alchemy of the Heart (Amazon Affiliate link), as well as his audios from his various seminars via Live365 radio on The Presence Process station, which you can access through his website The Presence Portal.

The essence of Brown’s work is this: Every time you get upset (set up) by a situation in your life, it is simply a trigger, a reflection of unintegrated emotional charges from your childhood. Every time. Without exception.

We spend our entire lives running from our deep pain and hurt. We drink, we eat, we fuck, we pray, we do this, we do that, anything to avoid really, really feeling anything. When an upsetting situation arises in our life, we attempt to fix it by changing our physical circumstance. We switch lovers, we move to a different town, we get a different job. Or we simply believe that the situation that’s upsetting us is the fault of whomever is involved, and we ask ourselves questions like “Why does this always happen to me?” But because we’re not addressing the causal point of our experience – the emotional signature from our childhood that hasn’t been processed and integrated – we just recreate the same circumstances in a “new” place.

Being With the Emotion

So Brown advises the following I’d-rather-stick-needles-under-my-fingernails exercise instead: He says to sit down and simply “be with” the emotion without condition. Do not tell yourself the story about what’s happening and why and who’s to blame. Do not try to suppress or criticize what you are feeling. Just sit your ass down and be with it. Feel the feeling. And in doing so, just as we don’t need to tell our body how to breathe, we don’t need to tell ourselves how to integrate these emotions. By allowing ourselves to have the experience, we’re finally allowing the innate wisdom of our body to do the work. We don’t have to know how. We just need to trust and know that it will integrate. And once it does, we have cleaned up the causal point of this anger, fear, and grief. (At least one of them anyway.)

Which brings us back to my grief-stricken spasms Monday night, sitting on my living room floor. Because what happened was this: Without the story to accompany this feeling, something opened up. As I sat there emoting all over myself, I felt very surely and deeply that what I was crying about did not in fact have a damn thing to do with what I thought I was crying about. I was grieving from a place much older and more expertly hidden. And when it was done, I felt a calm take over. I didn’t feel “good”, but I did feel…at rest.

Dis-ease

But what was really interesting for me was that as I sat there, still and centered in the aftermath, I understood from a place that didn’t involve thought that what I had just released healed a part of what Multiple Sclerosis is in my body. Because I know, as surely as I’ve ever known anything, that my illness was born of that pent up dis-ease. I know that I have just begun – I mean truly begun – the gritty, dirty, ugly, uncomfortable work of becoming exquisitely healthy (and it doesn’t have anything to do with prescription medication). And what I love about this particular model is that Michael Brown is not a guru and he doesn’t claim to have the answers. He has simply communicated a path that works. But the work, and the answers, that’s all us.

When I asked Bruce Lipton how to change my beliefs, this is the answer I was looking for. It’s not as pretty and clean as I would have liked, but it’s powerful, and I know as I’ve ever known anything that I’m on my way, and MS is on it’s way…out.

And as for the extremely challenging emotional situation I’m dealing with right now, I’m going to trust in one of Brown’s favorite statements, which is that we don’t get what we want or need, but we do get what we require. We always get what we require.

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Photo by Jason Nicholls, Flickr

I’m part of a mother’s circle. We meet once a week and talk about our lives. This week, one woman who I’ll call Rachel broke down in tears and began explaining that she was having a particularly difficult time. She feels unappreciated and overworked at her job and guilty because it prevents her from spending time with her husband and her two young children since she commutes to the city and doesn’t get home until 8pm or later, after the kids are asleep.

The stress of her situation has been manifesting as bouts of vertigo, chronic stomach upset, insomnia, lightheadedness, anxiety, and fatigue (some of the body’s greatest hits for communicating we’re in resistance not flow, we’re going against our instincts and intuition and doing something that’s not a fit.)

“But there’s no room for me not to feel well,” she declared. “My husband’s cornered the market on that. He owns that entire territory.”

Her husband, who she’s been with for eight years, was just recently diagnosed with Lyme Disease, but he’s been suffering mysterious chronic symptoms since before they met, and they’ve spent well over $20,000 on medical bills for him.

“He’s sick all the time,” she said, “and I find myself getting angry and impatient with him and wishing there was some space in our relationship for me to not always be the strong healthy one. I feel awful about it because I know he’s really sick, he has something real that’s wrong with him, but I just wish sometimes that I could take a break. I wish I could be the one to say, ‘I’m not feeling well I need to stay home today.’ Or ‘Honey can you make dinner tonight I need to rest?’ But that’s his role.”

Disease vs. Illness

I listened to her tell her story with great interest, thinking that here was the difference between disease and illness. Disease is the set of clinical symptoms a person has. Illness, however, is the entire constellation of issues and feelings surrounding our disease. Illness is what happens when that set of symptoms belongs to a real person, who is part of a family and a workplace and a community. Doctors address disease, but rarely approach the effects of illness in our life and relationships.

So today I want to know what the biggest, most pressing issues are that come up for you in your life, in your relationships, as a result of your illness? Have they changed since you’ve received an “official” diagnosis? I want to know where the major areas of disruption and dissatisfaction are for you so that I can bring these topics and conflicts into the foreground and hopefully provide some insight as to how to resolve or at least better manage them.

Here, I’ll start. Though my health has stabilized significantly in the past two years, I’ve had my fair share of relationship issues that sprung from my illness, most of which were during my ten years of mystery sickness, before my diagnosis:

1. My best friend was convinced I just needed to drink a few beers and I’d be fine. She thought I was just being “dramatic” and maintained that position for several years.
2. My sister used to come into the city to hang out with me and I’d have to bail out at the last minute because my fatigue was so intense I couldn’t leave the apartment. In response, she would feel I was being selfish and/or I had some secret phobia that was controlling my life.
3. My ex-boyfriend used to get furious with me when I’d need to leave a party early. He had little patience for the limitations my severe diet restrictions placed on where we ate. I once missed his birthday party because I was in his bedroom sleeping all night. He only just recently confessed that he was still sorta angry about that.
4. My ex-husband, while we were dating, believed that I was depressed because I would say in the morning that I’d want to go out and then by the evening I’d say I didn’t have the energy. Years later, when we had already married and divorced and I was finally diagnosed, he apologized for that.
5. Many photographers in the NYC area would never hire me to assist them again because of how many times I canceled or left early because I was “sick” though there was no outer manifestation that they could see, like a cough or sneeze.

These are just a few of the more surface issues that came up for me in my relationships, though all of them point to deeper attitudes and beliefs about my sickness that – if I had had the awareness and communication skills I have now – I could have worked through with each person and established a much deeper rapport and a much more authentic support system.

What about you? What are the issues around your illness that most impact you and your relationships?

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“As I experimented on myself with various physical, mental, and emotional techniques, I discovered that when I maintained what I then called ‘a high personal energy frequency,’ I lessened the intensity of my pain and the rate of its reoccurrence substantially. This was the first whisper of what I now call present moment awareness.”

Michael first encountered the “radiance of present moment awareness” in a Native American sweat lodge in Tucson, Arizona and then again a few months later, after ingesting a tea brewed from peyote cactus. “Although it was only fleeting, I experienced the undeniable sense of wholeness that comes from connecting intimately with Presence. I felt physically present, mentally clear, emotionally balanced, and vibrationally ‘in tune.’”

As with my initial sweat lodge experience, being able to feel and consciously commune with Presence throughout this peyote experience reunited me with the precious part of my authentic nature that had been obscured by the noise, busyness, and distractions of daily life. The peyote enabled me to step through a perceptual veil, on the other side of which life revealed itself as connected by a single intimate, intelligent, shared Presence. I saw how the breathtaking, luminous beauty of the natural world is hidden from us because of our preoccupation with unintegrated past trauma and fearful future projections.

In that moment, I became aware that my painful condition was no mere chance, but was purposeful. My painful neurological condition revealed itself not as my enemy, but as my friend and facilitator. It was Presence calling me back from a state in which I had unconsciously attached my attention to the mental web of time, causing my attention to become scattered.

During this encounter with “the medicine” [peyote] it became obvious that the most important quest I could undertake would be to discover a practical way to increase my experience of present moment awareness. Unless I discovered a means of accomplishing this for myself, my usefulness to others would remain limited because I was inauthentic.

It was also apparent that experiences such as sweat lodges and peyote aren’t for everyone. The mechanisms of a journey into present moment awareness have to be as natural as possible – a pathway anyone can follow, no matter what their circumstances. Hence one of the questions I asked Presence was: How can present moment awareness be achieved primarily through inner work, instead of having to rely on external conditions, substances, tools, ceremonies, rites, and rituals?

The Answer

The answer to that questions ultimately became The Presence Process: A Journey into Present Moment Awareness, the book that found its way to me via a new friend who suggested it during my recent magical weekend. Two months ago, after my interview with Bruce Lipton, I asked the universe (also known as Presence, the Divine Matrix, God, what have you) what the next thing was that I needed to know to guide myself and my clients to wellness. This book, I now know, is the universe’s answer.

Bil Gorakh Hayashi, Professor of Humanities and Psychology at Columbia University, Chicago, wrote the Foreword for the book and explained the essence of the process well:

Michael often tells us “Don’t kill the messenger. Receive the message.” The “messengers” are the people and situations that “upset” us, seem to thwart and diminish us. The “messages” are the unintegrated, not-yet-resolved emotional memories and wounds from early childhood that are being played out through these current “adult” experiences. Like neglected children, they won’t leave us alone but continue to “out-picture” in our daily life as the individuals, events, and circumstances that cause us pain and discomfort. Often they express through one of three core emotions: anger, fear, or grief. Our usual, habitual response is either mental or physical. We try to figure out with the mind or distract ourselves through physical activity and avoidance. We may eat, run, overachieve, or simply get into our head to avoid engaging. Yet, the scared, wounded kid place in us continues to suffer, desperately wanting and needing attention and acceptance. To approach these wounds, often our oldest and most tender, requires a method that’s both safe and effective. Fortunately, The Presence Process provides us with both.

Here’s a link to purchase the book, which I strongly encourage (this is an Amazon Affiliate link):

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