at 25 around six years or so ago i my body felt really ill in retrospect i had symptoms that
started about at age 16 and i was diagnosed with lyme disease and i walked down a can at that point
alternative path to healing the lyme disease i was told at the time you will get sicker before
you get better which is what happened and over the course of those three years i added symptom after
symptom diagnosis after diagnosis onto a long list today i no longer identify with diagnosis
not only because i'm not ill but also because at some point along the way i had to shed diagnoses
to heal as well some of the diagnosis that may have had some truth in them at the time included
lyme disease hashimoto's thyroiditis autoimmune disease persistent mono or chronic epstein barr
back to remembering them insomnia chronic fatigue syndrome fibromyalgia ibs with colonic spasms
eczema chronic conjunctivitis and though never officially diagnosed anxiety the thing that
saved my life is a belief i had from the moment i was diagnosed i believed for whatever reason
that i was going to heal i didn't know when i didn't know how but i knew someday and somehow
i was going to heal even as i got sicker even as more diagnoses got out of the list i never once
and i know it's kind of unbelievable i never once i have no singular memory of ever really trying
on for size the idea that i wouldn't heal and it wasn't that i was so stubborn or proud it just
didn't feel right it felt right that i would heal my body continued to decline and i had a moment
about three years in where my life had a pause and i had a chance to really assess and evaluate
my health and i could see that the truth was after all this time i was known better i was much much
worse and this was the true dark night of the soul i was incredibly lost i didn't know where to go
and some peace inside of me was called in that moment to a fast and so i said well i got nothing
so i'll do that and i felt drawn to do this long water fast i was open to fasting up to 30 days i
said i'd take it a week at a time i fasted a week all went fine i was into that second
week a few days in when things really started to change and i started feeling very ill extremely
disoriented and dizzy fatigued just bad and i started considering breaking it and the question
i asked myself in that moment is am i feeling this bad because i haven't eaten food in 10 days and
this is how you might feel but it is helping or am i feeling this bad because i'm killing myself
and the answer was i didn't know the answer and that question stirred around with me for
a half day or so when finally pushed to my breaking point literally on my knees
in the kitchen starved spent fatigued and lost i asked myself the question again am i helping
or am i killing myself and at that moment my answer blurted out of my mouth and i heard myself
shouting i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't
know i don't know i don't know and in that moment everything shifted down from my head to my heart
and i had a deep knowing that said you cannot think your way out of the dark you can only
feel your way out until that point i had spent my whole time trying to think my way out of illness
i had researched everything studied everything ran many self-experience experiments all in an effort
to understand and it was clear in that moment i wasn't going to be able to understand and the
wisdom was clear your heart's going to lead the way out and from that moment on i let my heart
lead the way out of illness now i got that second piece of the puzzle a clear intention i am going
to heal with an elevated emotion my heart's going to lead the way that path led me exactly where i
needed to go getting the right information at the right time and things feeling serendipitous and
starting to find out what i needed to find out and it led me right to meditation and i remember one
time sitting down in a meditation and i said i'm going to instruct my body on what i want it to do
and at that point there was a lot of disagreement around what my diagnoses even were some thought it
was an infectious disease like lyme disease where there was a foreign invader attacking
my body some thought it was an autoimmune disease where my immune system was reacting for no reason
and so i sat down in meditation and i said okay i'm going to talk to my body about what
i wanted to do and in that moment i burst into tears because i said i don't even know
what i wanted to do do i want to tell my immune system to rev up and fight this bad germ
and go get them like you got this or do i want to tell my immune system to calm down
there's nothing to fight here you're safe and i realized i didn't even know what to tell it
and i was so overwhelmed by that feeling that in that moment i could transcend it and said you know
i don't even need a diagnosis to heal i can get bigger than the diagnosis
my body doesn't speak in the language of diagnoses anyway all i have to do is heal what's going on
and i need no labels to do that so that was the moment when i shed all the labels of diagnoses
they weren't serving me and i got in deeper touch with the body and said this heart's going to lead
the way out during this time my parents were moving out of the house that i had grown up in
and they had called me to say would you come home and clear out your
childhood bedroom and so eventually i flew home and did that and as i was going through my things
i found among other things a paper a senior thesis that i had wrote when i was in high school
which was entirely about how to use the mind to heal the body from illness what the bleep had come
out when i was in high school and i had watched dr joe and i was fascinated by what he was saying
i read his book at the time and at the same time my mom had been diagnosed with lupus and she was
working to heal her body naturally from lupus when doctors said it wasn't possible
so for about my last year in high school we were around the dinner table talking about how we could
use the mind and other modalities to truly heal the body and i got so interested that i wrote
about it in school and studied it in school and then somehow filed it into the back of my memory
to where i hadn't even thought about it in years until i'm in my childhood bedroom holding this
paper an artifact from the past with a map to the future and could feel my past self writing this
for me i didn't know all that time in high school i was writing it for me but then i got it hold it
read the first page and said i have known this all along so then i took my map from my past
from my now out into a forest and this was really the climax of my healing journey i took a summer
off of work and i went out to a forest in oregon and i said i am not leaving here until i can be
different walking out than when i walked in and i stopped all the other modalities many of which
were working for that period of time and i said all i'm going to do is be here with this river
with these trees with good food and meditation and i'm not getting up until it's different
and i can't tell you what happened for sure out there in the forest but i can tell you i walked
out different than i walked in and when i got out big things started to happen now now that little
tiny spark of healing was bigger and now some of the big symptoms came off like the fatigue i
remember the first morning i woke up without the fatigue but still in pain and i had the shocking
realization that fatigue and pain weren't the same i had no memory that they weren't even the same
and i had such elation that i was like you can you can get rid of this fatigue and i remembered what
that even was and i just remember that morning so well of waking up with that and now i had all the
motivation i needed to keep going obviously i knew this was a matter of time i was on the path and
a point that dr joe talks about you know is that i ultimately decided to you know part of leading
by the heart letting the heart lead the way that elevated emotion was that i fell in love with the
experience i really loved this process it was really challenging i was in a lot of pain it
it was like this problem that you didn't know how to solve you know so it was
incredibly intellectually challenging and emotionally challenging all that was true
but i loved it i decided that i was on this adventure to save my life and what could be more
exciting or rewarding than that so then it was about a year in a year after that that
i went to my first advanced retreat with dr joe in niagara falls and i showed up there and
befriended a woman that was in my group and this beautiful woman who had been to six or
seven retreats and she was kind of showing me the ropes and i'd ask her some questions
and she'd tell me what was going on and she was probably in her late 30s she had very severe ms
and she had tremendous difficulty walking used assistance to walk
and had some difficulty talking and she knew about some of my experiences also
and a couple days in i said you know i applied to i know she had two we both applied to be
healeys for the coherence healing and i said do you know when we typically find out about
that i you know haven't heard anything yet when do you you know when you kind of find out and
she said oh it'll just be in the next day or two you should you should expect to hear and she said
but i want you to know that i have already decided that if i get picked and you don't get picked i'm
asking them to give you my spot and like cracking my heart wide open i burst into tears and i said
you can't give me that and she says oh but i've already healed
and it cracked me wide open and because the love you give gives you back of course we both were
selected and we didn't have to choose or i gave her mine and she gave me hers and i don't know
what was more therapeutic for me those days actually receiving the coherence healing or
receiving that gift from that woman who was willing to give absolutely anything for me
a stranger really and to feel loved so pure like that made that event the beginning of the end
of my dance with chronic illness and it was the months following that i had the first moment when
i no longer could even remember what the pain felt like people ask sometimes when do you know you
were healed and i say because one day for no real reason at all you begin speaking in the past tense
and the first time i noticed myself speaking in the past tense i was sick instead of i am
sick i felt all those emotions that i had been dreaming about for all that time the elation
the gratitude the mystery the miracle and ultimately how i felt and how i still feel is
like a walking miracle that i am walking as a miracle that's how it feels that's how it
feels still that moment even when i first started not feeling the pain was a year and a half ago
it still feels like a miracle i know what i did i can tell you what i did but somehow what i did was
greater than the sum of its parts and somehow it still feels like this extraordinary miracle
what is most interesting to me about my story is not how meditation the kind where you sit on
a pillow and close your eyes helped heal me though it did the most interesting part of my story to me
is how i turned my life into a meditation is about how i married an elevated emotion with a clear
intention with my eyes opened and i really walked like that at all times and yeah i had people
say things to me i remember this one woman i was talking to and i talked a lot about my situation i
didn't talk about the pain most people around me don't even really know what i was feeling but i
talked a lot about the mystery and the wonder and what i was trying and the whole adventure of it i
talked about that and it wasn't that i suppressed the pain or didn't feel it i did i just didn't
dwell on it or talk about it so it was one of these times i was talking to a friend from yoga
telling her about the what what new thing i was thinking through or trying and she said you know
wouldn't it be better if you just decided that maybe you would never heal
wouldn't it just be easier to think that way wouldn't that be better somehow
and i looked at her and i said you know i understand i understand what you're saying i just
happen to not believe that that's what will happen i happen to believe that i will heal i happen to
believe that you were wrong and i remember other people would say things like well at least you're
going to get good at managing this disease and i was like with all due respect i am not
managing this disease i am healing this disease and it wasn't with hubris or
pride it was with deep humility that said i can see that this is an impossible path
nobody has my answer not the conventional treatments not the alternative treatments
but i think there's a way to do the impossible anyway and i'm going to do the impossible