Monday, October 17, 2011

Healing Experience at Carp Ridge Healing House

Oh yeah, right, "just get over this ASAP." Healing symptoms of fatigue began to build, yet I was still in an active conflict of fear, anger. I felt like I couldn't muster up the energy to cook for myself, to walk outside of the apartment, things just seemed to bottom out for me. I was pushing on my sister to help me out, despite knowing she was already maxed out with her family, work, and the recent passing of her mother-in-law. My sense of abandonment was growing every day.

Chris gave me the name and number of Dr. Katherine Willow, ND, of Carp Ridge EcoWellness Center and Healing House, outside of Ottawa, a healing center which uses German New Medicine as its foundation. Luckily, it was only 5.5 hours away from my sister's home!! I called her the next day, and arranged what I thought would be "a nice convalescence in the country...' Well, let's have Dr. Willow tell her experience with my time there, as she wrote about it in her own blog....

From http://ecowellness.wordpress.com/2011/09/10/healing-house-stories/:


Mariah


When Mariah called me from New York state at the end of June saying she needed two months of rest and good food, I thought this was an easy healing house guest for the summer.

Wrong.

After three days with us, Mariah, an intelligent and sensitive 53 yr old woman, collapsed into bed and needed complete 24 hr care. So began an intense learning process which would deserve many pages to tell properly. It turns out that Mariah had been diagnosed with stage IV liver cancer after prior surgery for ovarian cancer, and unknown even to herself, was waiting for a safe environment to let down into deep healing. Luckily we understood through German New Medicine that it was a healing; from any other perspective it looked like she was dying.

We used every avenue available to us to support Mariah: buying or renting medical equipment, including a wheel chair, for the home; having a lab come to take blood to monitor her progress and our treatments; taking her to see Shannon Rampton, the wonderful chiropractor in Carp, to completely relieve debilitating back pain; having massage therapists Gwen and Amber give her massages and craniosacral therapy in her room when she couldn’t leave her bed; hiring extra help to give care and prevent bedsores; sending her off to a hospital in New York for blood transfusions twice for extreme anemia; having Dr Zhmurko prescribe constitutional homeopathic remedies and Ilsedora Laker consult on the core German New Medicine issues; calling several medical doctors for helpful insights and another perspective; boosting her spirits with various interesting visitors to the centre; letting three year old Felix share his unconditional love (“Are you fixed yet, Mariah?”); inviting Father Jack to offer his spiritual wisdom; using nourishing organic food, vitamins, minerals and medicinal wine to support her in rebuilding her exhausted body; listening with attention while she processed her fears; and most of all, offering constant encouragement that she can do this, pull through and go back into her life with meaning and purpose.

At this very moment, I am sitting in a U.S. hospital beside a sleeping Mariah as she is being given her third and final transfusion before she goes home this Saturday. We had waited with baited breath for the hemoglobin results, as we need her levels to stop dropping in order for her to move forward in her healing. With great exhilaration and high fives we heard that they hadn’t dropped at all in a whole week!! A moment of sheer joy. The gracious and respectful oncologist said Mariah could have a unit of blood, which was thankfully accepted, even though we were hoping for two units. Ten minutes later a nurse announced that two units had been previously set aside and that she could have both. THANK YOU!

So now we sit in a pleasant area with large windows and caring nurses while the life-giving blood drips slowly into Mariah’s veins. I get to write and she gets to relax, eat and watch the cooking shows on TV (she is an excellent cook herself). I will prepare a report on her process with suggestions for the next practitioners she will work with in New York to continue the healing and we’ll be a support from a distance. Mariah is welcome to come back in the future, maybe as a German New Medicine teacher herself, helping others pull through situations that might look hopeless to the medical community.

We have come through an extraordinary journey together and have learned much—both about the possibilities of a healing house in conjunction with all kinds of medicines as well as about ourselves. What Mariah has given us with her faith in the natural healing process will serve many others and help lay the template for how to work with extreme situations. We all thank her, hug her, wish her well on the next leg and hope to see her back.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

New Healing Symptoms

I began having symptoms of bloating last fall, around the time I was beginning to date again, despite actually feeling really good emotionally. It was not, however, the most pleasant feeling, not being able to fit into my blouses and pants normally reserved for school assistantship/internship, and going out and socializing. I thought it was bloating from how I was eating.....student food. Or, was it the chinese herbs being too cloying (sweet) and taxing to my Spleen energy? The woman I was dating was beginning to get both controlling and withholding. We saw each other most weekends, beginning in October, and by the end of that month, I was realizing I wasn't all that happy being with her........and, yet, I was trying to give the benefit of the doubt to her, cut her some slack. She was a very intelligent and congenial woman, but, wow, did she ever have intimacy issues.

November, she came out with her disappearing behavior, then re-connecting via tweets. It was actually a good thing we weren't in a tremendous amount of contact, because the trimester was beginning to heat up for the homestretch to finals. December, well, that was it. She was super-sensitive about everything I said or suggested for connection. After she returned from a scuba diving jaunt in Cozumel , she shut me off, cold turkey, nada contact or response to a phone call or email. It hurt for about a day, and then I was fine with it. Or, so I thought. I would catch myself thinking about how much I had cared for her, despite the disconnect between us. Or, I would ask my friend Janet if there were problems with my ability to be intimate, which she assured me was not the case, because she and I had a fabulous friendship.

The whole dating time re-triggered in me the abandonment I felt from D. It didn't take much, but it was there. The bloating seemed to get worse, my belly was now beginning to expand. I would try to hide it with looser-fitting clothing. I was also losing weight, my appetite seemed to be somewhat suppressed. I wasn't taking as much food with me to school. I was losing interest in school, and my fatigue was building. The Clinical Medicine prof unloaded on me in a very shameful way in front of my classmates when I made a mistake during the practical final. That really cut deep, but at the same time, there was a new and instantaneous awareness in me that this tirade was coming from her sexual issues, and that I didn't deserve to be treated the way she had.

By the end of March, I looked 5-6 months pregnant, April, more like 7 months. And, the leg swelling I was periodically having was now more resident. A classmate pulled me aside and, in a very frantic tone, begged me to go see a doctor, because she thought I looked very jaundiced. Others commented about my weight loss. I was in contact with GNM people, but, honestly, didn't feel like any of them were taking me seriously, or were they just expecting me to "work it out myself." My projection, perhaps. But, I knew this was ascites. One practitioner said to me "what, you don't like the feeling of having an expanded belly? It is in healing...." It felt uncaring to me. My main practitioner didn't seem to be as available. On the one hand, I knew this was a healing phase, on the other, it was kinda scary......

I applied for Social Security Disability. My sense was that I was going to need that support.

I was hating living by myself, by that time. I was hating living in a mildewy place. My sister's mother-in-law Mary was still in the nursing home (fractured pelvis day after Christmas, Parkinson's Disease, Degenerative Joint Disease in both knees), and she was beginning to look like she would not be on this earth much longer. I asked Nancy if I could move into the adjoining mother-in-law apartment, and, after discussing it with her husband and daughter, told me yes. Mid-April, Nancy and I drove down to Isle of Palms, SC for my niece's spring softball training week the middle of April. The ascites was quite obvious, and I looked gaunt, and jaundiced. She was alarmed, I could tell, but didn't want to admit it. It increases her anxiety when she has to directly deal with issues. I was beginning to get worried myself.

I went through the month May of the next trimester with one day per week of treating patients at the VA, hiding my belly behind expandable pants, new blouses, and my lab coat. The day we had to do our practical assessments (tested on our needling, moxa and cupping technique), I was wearing two gowns from the clinic, my left leg swollen to the knee. I could tell the faculty who were there, besides all my classmates, were alarmed. The next day, the dean of our program called me into his office. He was very concerned for me, that what I seemed to be exhibiting was ascites, and that was a sign of endstage. I explained to him the Kidney Collecting Tubule Syndrome, that it didn't mean endstage of life at all. He was willing to work with me, he said, whatever I needed, but that he would tell the professors I was not be needled, or receive Tui Na. He left it up to me to manage myself at that point. He did remark "there is such a thing as 'dirty chi' when someone is sick, and we need to consider that impact on our clients......"

My energy level was flagging, it was getting harder to bend over to needle patients when they were either sitting or on the table. My skills as an acupuncturist were very good and very evident, one patient had significant pain relief when I chose a very unique point combination that I had put together from an obscure remark made by one of my professors in class one day. But, I knew I couldn't keep going. Classes were hard to sit through, I barely studied assignments, I was hiding emotionally from my classmates, isolating myself by sitting way up in the back of the class. Social Security notified me that it had accepted my application.

Mary passed away mid-May. I felt a sense of relief for her, that she had let go, finally. I was also excited that I was moving into the apartment, and that I would have "the living situation I wanted, living with family, and all would be grand, finally, in my life!!" That night, I began to urinate....and urinate and urinate through the weekend.....to the point my Urinary Bladder channels were aching like crazy. I had urinated away 9# of fluid!! My belly girth had decreased by almost 50%! It felt so comfortable!

I moved into the apartment the following weekend......and began to encounter issues......the dog's constant barking, his jumping on me and urinating on anything new left on the floor, the dynamics of my sister and her family.........my ascites began to re-build after a week.

The beginning of June, I looked into my savings account, and there was a large sum of money deposited the day before.....my lump sum back pay from Social Security. I didn't go to classes that week, I called in sick the next day of internship. Later that week, I resigned from school. All I wanted to do was stay at home, rest, and "get through this as soon as possible."

Sunday, March 13, 2011

No need for anxiety

I do have to admit, not too many people are willing to listen to the truth about health and healthcare. I do experience a tremendous number of people who really are up in arms about our current medical paradigm, and espouse the use of "alternative medicine." Yet, what these people don't understand (and, I was one of these people earlier in my life....) is that they are still colluding with the system they eschew because they don't understand the biological laws. Their experience is a practice, a method based on fear, because deep down they believe the inaccuracies of western medical science, and let fear motivate their "treatments." They continue to fight against something that is actually working for them, is a biologically superior process, albeit a difficult one at times, but is designed to make the organism more able to survive conflict.

I went through a good patch of time without any heart palpitations and irregular rhythms, and was progressing along quite nicely with my energy and emotional level. Pushing myself a bit more over time. Then, I had a series of emotional overwhelms last month, which brought back the healing symptoms of an overwhelm conflict. This gave me a push to go deeper into why I get on this track of Overwhelm. In addition to gently stabilizing myself through coming to understand how I tend to piggyback stressors onto myself, I also continued with icing my head, receiving acupuncture and herbal formula, meditating, getting more sleep.

But there was this underlying anxiety all the time, and that was the subject for me in talking with my mentors Caroline, Chris and Altazar. A light bulb went on in my head "there really isn't anything wrong with me, my body is showing me just how quickly it heals" because everything I was experiencing WERE healing symptoms. It was this immediate "aha" or conversion experience almost.....I am perpetuating this condition by the low level of anxiety I have carried my ENTIRE life, as most people do. And, the energy I had been putting into anxiety was now directed at marveling at how much my body has responded in the healing of lifelong patterns of conflict, I was changing at another layer.

I was changed, especially after a real heart to heart with Chris. I kinda was in this mode of blinking my eyes, looking around, and realizing I was seeing practically everything in my mind and physical existence completely differently. My sleep that night was deep, relaxing and I woke up in the morning....no anxiety, no worry, no wondering what was going to transpire for me that day. That day was also anxiety free. Every night since that revelation last week (March 6 and 7th), my sleep has been sound with the following morning being.....fresh, new. I was communicating in ways which were honoring of myself, instead of anxiety-fueled self devaluation or not able to see my talents and intelligence.

This gave me the realization, also, that my quality of life was in my control. Meaning, how I looked at things. Admittedly, I did have two days the end of the week filled with anger, like a boomerang effect. But, I was also in the presence of people who do very little inner work with themselves, and I tend to be a sponge for people's emotional waves.... By Friday night, after getting away from classmates, it all settled down again to that calm hum, that feeling I was basically happy and healthy, even with living a very different life from what I used to think was "happiness."

A friend of mine and I went to a concert last night.....at one point, the duo sang a love song they had co-written. My friend, I could sense and see, was kinda depressed. She had broken up with someone a number of months ago, and was working through that one yet. The song for her was hard to hear, because she attached "other" to the experience of love. Me, I had a very different experience than what I would have had in the recent past. I heard that love song as a celebration of the love within me, for myself, and for all the love there is in this world. It was the most marvelous experience.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Evolutions within my understanding of German New Medicine

Our group of people who connect every week on the practitioner call (I am not deemed a practitioner yet, but have finished Seminars 1-4 with Caroline Markolin), are beginning to take a look within ourselves and in the changes occurring energetically with this world. We realized that the basic points we see from German New Medicine are that the individual is the self-healer, there is no disease, only biological programs run by the brain in response to conflicts, and GNM is not a "medicine" per se, ie, a pill or a technique. GNM is solely about empowering the individual to see the power of the design of the body in self-healing. It teaches the individual the confirmed science behind this paradigm, and it provides a pathway by which we take responsibility for our lives.....deal with our emotional conflicts before they get too big or too lost within ignorance.

I was saying to someone the other day....GNM teaches me to not be afraid, to understand what is going on in my body, and my study/treatment of TCM (traditional chinese medicine) is just one factor I use to stay on top of my issues by continually bringing my emotional life back towards a balance so that I can deal with conflicts, emotions.

I am currently taking a Pathophysiology class....it is based on the reductionist view of pathology/disease, microbes causing disease, the body going haywire. Yet, even though the prof is very knowledgeable, from my knowledge of GNM, it is entirely possible in every instance of a disease he talks about to see through the conventional interpretation of the science. In most cases, conventional medical research has taken a narrow view of what the facts are, a slice in time, and missing the big picture.

How can I support this? I see it happening all the time with the cases we discuss in our GNM talk...watching people go through a program of a glandular breast cancer/nest wory, a morsel conflict/tonsilar cancer, a myocardium/overwhelm program, etc. Success is the degree to which a person comes to a place of no fear, understanding that conflict active and healing phases are a corrective processes, former motivating us to resolve, the latter giving us the clues to complete the healing process. Understanding that both of these phases are approached with reverence, acceptance and without fear. Learning to eat well (especially protein), sleep, rest, come into Awareness by whatever means (I personally like Zen and Advaita-type philosophies), love your life....and if you don't...do what you can to change it, without creating more conflict in one's life. It is simple, and it is also one of the hardest trips in the world....that short distance from ignorance to being awake. I am getting to the point that when something comes up for me, I know pretty much what the conflict is, what I need to do to resolve/downgrade, and how to take care of myself....and approach the phases with empowerment and gratitude.

Our world is going to see a big change soon in how it views medicine.....too many people are waking up to the facts that our present day conventional medicine is NOT working, and that the Mind-Body connection is not just some woo woo thing to which to pay lip service. Mind-Body connection techniques, though, based on the old medicine paradigm will not assist the person, because of its basic underlying fear motivation. Energetic medicine, of which German New Medicine belongs, is growing, people are seeing the positive outcomes and are being empowered to drop the old paradigm of fear.

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Well, it certainly has been a while, yes?

OK, I am back....school definitely puts a crink into keeping up on this blog. It is my intention to spend more time with writing, especially since deciding to quit the outside work I was doing. Acupuncture, and GNM, my main focus now.

And, with that, it is time to go see a movie, relax before classes begin tomorrow.

Lots to tell you, stay tuned!!

Warmly,

Mariah

Monday, March 29, 2010

Human Design

This process, Human Design, is a combination of astrology, I Ching, Kabbalah, Chakra systems. It posits that our unconscious self, our "design" is embedded within the person 88 degrees of movement before birth (roughly 3 months). This is our innate way of being in the world..our "strategy and authority." We all know on a deeper level what that is, but many of us are largely unable to consistently access it, because there is the personality side to us....our conditioning (fits in there with Cheri Huber's work.....), which starts from the moment of our birth. Most astrology, I think...someone correct me if I am wrong....begins with our natal chart....the forces around us at birth. The originator is Ra Uru Hu.

My chart shows a couple of interesting things....I am a Triple Split Definition....I have 3 areas of defined chakras (head-ajna, throat-self center, and splenic-sacral), but NONE of the three are connected to each other.....so, for those folks who know me quite while, or those who scratch their heads over what I do....this is why I can be like 3 different people when it comes to making decisions. Often times, when I make decisions from the the top centers (head-ajna), those tend to not work out quite that well. The decisions I make from my gut (flashes of intuition and gut reactions....nonverbal uh huh, or unh unh) tend to be spot on, and draw me to better outcomes.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Winter Blues and Lessons in Upstate New York

So, I go through more grief once again. Just way down in the dumps, don't want to get out of the dark apartment or go anywhere kind of stuff for a good week. The adept acupuncture treatments by Darlene pull me through times when I think my own spirit is wanting to leave. My energy bottoms out. School starts up again. It is drab and dreary most of the time in Seneca Falls. My heart palpitations return.

A woman I had known from last trimester pops up in my life now and then. I find her to be very sweet, and I appreciate her idiosyncracies because I can feel she has a deep desire to live life as best as she can. I hadn't felt attraction beyond that appreciation. She and I talked one night, ever so briefly, very innocently, nothing intense, just fun. I walk away from the building happy, but more so from the totality of grace I had experienced that day...my acupuncture treatment focused on the sciatica/piriformis pain I had been having in the left leg....and realized afterwards that my leg felt "whole," there was more to its "beingness" perhaps a reconnection I hadn't felt in years (I originally injured my low back in Alaska, 1983....off and on problems with it). Classes were intriguing that day, Darlene was her usual nurturing and love-sharing self, and then it was topped off with a fun conversation.

Back home that night, I am sitting on my living room floor, it is the night before the New Moon (January 14th), and was aware that I wanted to write out my intentions for the month and meditate before going to bed. Before I do so, I am hit with this feeling of connection to life, feeling full and satisfied, I heard myself think "Hmm, love school. Love my warm apartment. Love how I have space to spread out and do what I want. Love that I am studying acupuncture. Love Seneca Falls' quietness. All that is missing is a significant relationship with a woman......sigh....oh well, in time. I can wait." I do my writing, and meditating, writing the intention that I will have a very good relationship with a special, compatible, loving, nurturing woman.

The New Moon was to occur at 2:15am or something like that......I woke up at 2am from a dream in which the woman with whom I talked earlier that day appeared to me, asking me to "be gentle with me." I am shaking and sweating, and get up, go to my journal and change the intention around to "I release my fears around being in an intimate relationship with another woman again." I am not ready to just jump in.

The end of January I wake up in a sweat, hearing my spirit say "if I want to move on, I need to let go of D." I break into sobs, it really is time to let go....this hanging on no longer serves me. I know it to my core that I have finally released my need to identify myself with D.

That morning, as I take a shower, both of my breasts are tender. I have a back treatment in acupuncture that afternoon, so I am prone for it.....wow...my breasts are really sore! The soreness abates over the week...I even needle myself for breast congestion....it helps! 5 days later, while taking a shower....I feel a lump in my right breast, and more of the fibrous feeling in my left. I know what it is....separation conflict in healing phase....I resolved the conflict of not being able to let go of D. for 2+ years! And, this is the healing response. I call Chris, and we have this great talk about the beauty of understanding the biological laws. No need to panic, and just ignore what is occurring.

I did go through an intense fatigue period about 3 weeks later...coupled with midterms and really overdoing the studying with my energy improving. I just let myself sleep as needed, I never skipped classes, but I didn't do much in the way of homework for about 1.5 weeks. Watched the Extended Version of "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. "Fellowship of the Ring" is SUCH a SPIRITUAl movie....blew my socks off!!!

Eventually, I did tell Darlene about the breast congestion and, sitting on the floor of her office, we talk quite a bit more in-depth about GNM. Planting seeds.

I am up to the present time.....mid-March...I can hear the March Madness basketball game on the computer in the cubicle next to me (I am at the school library).....Two months of dealing with my energy level fluctuating, my heart palpitating, stressful school and personal interactions. My energy is back to normal, the heart palpitations are gone, I have had alot of healing lately, I feel a strength building in me as I learn more about and accept myself. My friend Chris had been encouraging me to look deeper into Human Design, a system which explains the juxtaposition of your unconscious being versus the conditioning we call personality. It shows one how to understand your basic way of existing in the world, responding rather than reacting. I got a reading in January, and found a deeper explanation for why I am who I am, why I have done things in certain ways, and realized why loving myself is really natural.

Through these two months, I watch my monkey mind, my egoic conditioning fights me like CRAZY so as to not be let go of. I am focusing on my strategy and authority from Human Design, the daily tweets from Zen teacher Cheri Huber fit well with this, reading from her books when I can, meditating and doing qigong daily. Starting to exercise more as the weather and my energy improves. Wrassling with my conditioning of desire....holy cow, it is f***ing intense. Started counseling...wonderful to have the weekly time to just talk with John. Two weeks ago, he says to me "Hmm, I was wondering where to take this, but realize that I don't have to...you know what you need, and I am just here to witness." I feel it too....."it's all inside you...." as once told to me by Chi Ling, my spirit guide from the late 80's who propelled me into teaching Tai Chi in Portland. It's always been there. I just forgot to turn my attention to it.

The "it" is my old friend "ShenYi" or "God's Mind." The name I chose (or it chose me) for my tai chi school. Although, at the time, I didn't know it was "God's Mind." I just put Shen and Yi together, because the former means "spirit" and the latter is "consciousness"...I was looking for a name that would imply Body-Mind-Spirit. I had tshirts made up with the yinyang symbol developed by one of my students and on top of it was the chinese characters for Shen Yi School of Tai Chi." An older chinese acupuncturist in Portland took one look at my shirt at the start of my appointment one day in 1993 and asked me if I knew what the first two characters meant. "Sure! My school name!" "In my culture," he replied, "we read those together as 'God's mind.'" Goose bumps! I went back to my school studio in an altered state, feeling that something important was being presented to me.