style="font-size:15px;"> As my mom was trying to get me to rosin my bow and tune my nonexistent strings, my father was saying, “We’re both wind instruments, so just go oom-pah, oom-pah, and you’ll get along great.” And there I was, an oboe, filling the tube with phlegm and not knowing enough to shake it out. I was desperately trying to play the music of my soul on an instrument I never learned how to manage properly.
I careened through my early years with weight fluctuations, food obsessions, mild flu-like symptoms, and allergies, and I spent hours under the covers reading and ruining my eyesight. This led to hormone imbalances in adolescence, depression, and chronic dieting and bingeing. And my poor soggy oboe degenerated with bouts of compulsive exercise, rounds of fatigue that might last for months, and behavior that ranged between overanimation and depression. By the time I was nearing thirty, the situation had degenerated into daily migraines and a vulnerability to viruses, parasites, and other beasties that would disrupt my energies’ ability to communicate and function for months at a time. Not a pretty picture!
None of the many physicians I consulted ever found anything medically wrong with me. In fact, most of them implied that it was normal for hormones and moods to swing, or they labeled my issues a function of personality and therefore an emotional problem.
Then finally I ran into a doctor who woke me up with a simple truth. I went to see her with severe digestive discomfort and ongoing exhaustion. She conducted numerous tests, examined me thoroughly, and gave me a diagnosis of blinding clarity: I had “malaise.”
I was furious. Malaise is French for “discomfort.” She charged me eighty dollars to tell me I had discomfort! But like all truths, it wormed its way past my anger to stick in my brain. She said, “Medicine” — meaning allopathic, Western medicine — “has nothing to offer you. I’m going to give you the name and number of a complementary medicine practitioner who might be able to help.”
In retrospect, malaise was exactly what I had. I had no idea how to bring comfort, specific to my particular mind-body, moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day. And my body was registering its objections with louder and louder cries for help.
During all those years of pain and dysfunction, I wish I’d known that the body speaks its truth through symptoms — through sensations, through interruptions of functioning, through energetic blockages, through physical signals that say, Pay attention, I need something here. Those needs might be nourishment, safety, a different pace, compassion, help clearing or tuning the instrument, rest, release, connection, a different environment. And if we don’t get the communication, the body shouts louder.
The communication may start small: a dip in energy that keeps us home from a party, or a somewhat sore throat, or an allergic reaction, or an achy joint, or loss of focus, or a slight miscommunication, mishap, or moment of misbehavior. Yet these messages progress if we don’t really listen and respond. The symptoms get louder and more severe; processes and functioning are disrupted. Digestion, circulation, tissue repair, and/or hormonal communication can falter. And the instrument progresses from malaise to malady (sickness), which also snowballs — sometimes because of the pharmaceuticals we take in lieu of authentic communication; sometimes because the habit of not knowing how to care for our own particular, beautiful, amazing instrument just wears it down over time.
A PATH TO HEALING
Although illness can be extremely complex, a compounding of years of miscommunication, the path to healing can be much simpler and more direct. If you learn the language of energy, learn to let your body, mind, and spirit communicate to you in their wisdom about what your instrument needs, and then provide that moment by moment, you will heal.
In the past thirty-five years, I’ve worked with thousands of clients, some with extremely complex and serious life-threatening medical conditions, and others with less dramatic, life-interrupting chronic symptoms. All of them were seeking ways to find support for their instrument rather than mere management of their symptoms or disease. I have seen, again and again, how powerfully you can activate healing once you participate in the ongoing communications of your body, mind, and spirit.
My path into healing work evolved from necessity. It was also shaped by some outside-the-box experiences that were not in the violin-tuba culture on offer in my home when I was growing up.
In my early twenties, my world cracked open. My beloved, but dead, grandmother, a woman who had been massively obese in her life, showed up in my mind’s eye. She told me not to follow the path she had followed but instead to open to guidance. I was not sure what that meant. But within a day, I was seeing a ticker tape of letters scrolling through my head with a message from my inner teachers, group consciousnesses who called themselves my Councils.
Within a week, I was hearing that guidance in my mind, taking dictation on a rich curriculum of spiritual, perceptual energy training that continues to this day, forty-plus years later. You’d think that with all their wisdom, they could have kept me from getting sick! Instead, they predicted that I’d move to California, grow even sicker, and in the process of healing, become an energy healer.
They said, “We’re going to give you three initial tools.” I took dictation: “A golden sheaf of wheat, freshly cut. A solid earth stone. A pair of silver scissors.” It made me giggle. I had no idea what they were for, and they sounded like props in a fairy tale.
Later that same day, however, there was a knock on my door. It was an acquaintance from school, a woman I barely knew, who said, “Are you a healer? I need some help.”
Telling the story now, I’m not sure why I said, “Yes, come on in.” I had only three tools and no clue what to do with them. But at the time, it seemed natural.
She explained what was going on. Her digestion was off, and she was having shooting pains in her arms and legs. She was in enough discomfort that she couldn’t concentrate to do her schoolwork. She’d been to the doctor, who ran tests and told her nothing was wrong.
My memory of the actual session is a bit vague. I remember using the wheat to stir the air around her intestines and then to repeatedly pull energies out and shake them off. I remember placing the stone on her solar plexus, and she reported that it made her gut feel calm for the first time in months. I used the scissors to cut some lines that I then hooked up to other lines at the suggestion of my Councils. And I remember being on the brink of giggling the whole time. But step by step, my hands just proceeded, and in about thirty minutes, it was done.
She said, “Thank you, that did the trick. I feel much better.” We never discussed it, although she did mention about a month later that the symptoms had never returned.
Looking back, I wonder why the whole experience didn’t leave me shaken or confused. Maybe it was like my experiences of listening to foreign languages. I had the sense that I could almost understand it. And I was willing to listen and learn.
About eight months later, I did end up moving to California, as my Councils had predicted. I soaked up the sunshine and the go-with-theflow culture and thrived for a few months, until I had another energy and nutritional crash, this time so serious I found it difficult to do simple tasks. This led me to the momentous diagnosis of malaise.
The complementary practitioner my doctor (bless her heart) referred me to was a chiropractor, who had studied a newly developed form of healing called Applied Kinesiology.
This chiropractor diagnosed me with a complex of things that have since become almost clichés in the complementary medicine world: candida imbalance in my gut, leaky gut, blood sugar imbalance, adrenal crash, and for the headaches that were starting to show up more frequently, cranial jamming. I was delighted to have names and explanations.
