9 years ago

July 17th, 9 years ago, changed my life.

It was the day I had a spontaneous remission from Lyme disease after a 30 minute spiritual session.

It was the day I woke up and realized how powerful I am.

It was the day that initiated me onto my shamanic, healing, spiritual path.

Let me tell you about it:

If you’ve been in my sphere for a while, you may have heard this story before. If you’re new to me and my work, welcome to my origin story!

Let’s start at the beginning: I got sick with Lyme disease probably around the age of 10. That’s the first time I had a bout of long-lasting, unexplainable illness, and that’s also the age that my biomagnetic pair therapist was able to trace my pathogenic load back to.

I got really sick at 15, which was also the first time I was tested for Lyme. From 15 to almost 19, I was constantly sick off and on — I’d have a few good weeks and then fall very ill again. Finally, I had my worst bout of illness to date, and while undressing to take a shower, noticed a bulls-eye rash on my butt. Cue a trip to urgent care, blood tests, and rounds of doxycycline - I finally had a diagnosis.

I spent the next year-ish working with a LLMD (Lyme-literate MD) who put me through the wringer medically. I was so sick, and his protocols started pushing me even deeper into illness with no relief, so I fired him and started seeing a naturopath.

I worked with the naturopath for around a year, with similar results. Nothing felt better. If anything, I was getting worse, and my ND was throwing more and more antibiotics and herbs at me, almost like she didn’t know what to do anymore and was seeing what would finally stick. So I followed my intuition and fired her too.

At the same time, my mom had been introduced to a (new to us) therapy called biomagnetism or biomagnetic pair therapy (a therapy I am now trained in and offer myself). I started biomagnetism for Lyme and actually noticed that it was slowly helping. Finally, progress somewhere!

It’s also important to note that I was also doing multiple-times-per-week energetic sessions to help process the emotions, experiences, and trauma held in my body.

But none of this felt like it was giving enough progress to make me feel like I was any closer to health. Internally, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to survive this. The battle had been too long (a decade at least at this point), I was too tired, too sick. I had given up all my dreams because I was too sick to pursue them. I couldn’t imagine myself actually getting better. I was also young, this was the summer before my 21st birthday, and I didn’t have much perspective to draw on. I had spent half my life sick, so it was hard to imagine what it might be like for things to be different.

And with that perspective, I agreed to attend a spiritual weekend retreat with my mom. It was a last ditch effort to help my healing journey, and she wanted me to do it. So, why not? It couldn’t hurt, right?

Knowing now that I am a full time shamanic and spiritual practitioner, it makes me laugh to reflect on the fact that, at the time, I found anything spiritual quite uncomfortable. I had grown up around spiritual healing modalities, but at this point in my life, I was so sick and tired that I’d stopped using any of the tools I had learned when I was younger, and I felt uncomfortable with it all.

This weekend retreat was a wildly uncomfortable experience. I had so much resistance, and really didn’t want to be there. But I stayed, which taught me a really important lesson — often when we are on the brink of a major life shift, things get uncomfortable. Being able to stay present with the discomfort is key to unlocking our next level.

In the final hours of the retreat, each of the participants got a personal session with the facilitator. Every one else witnessed these sessions and held space for the healing that was happening. My mom was present, and she had her session before mine. It’s important to note that we were working with past life memories and imprints. As I listened to her past life memories coming up, she spoke about one in particular that immediately gave me a “ping” of recognition. When it was my turn, I told the facilitator this — that I was a part of my mom’s past life memory.

The past life that came up for us both, involved a sad/traumatic death. For me, this left behind an imprint of feeling like I couldn’t safely live my own life. (This is the abridged version. There have been a lot of details around this that I’ve discovered over the years, but not all need to be shared publicly).

The practitioner guided me through this fear of living my own life, the fear of dying, the fear of separating from my family and discovering my own path and how Lyme was intertwined with it all. Within this 30 minute session, we unwound the pattern of dis-ease in my body. After it ended, I was both exhausted and hyped. I ended up excusing myself from the final hour of the retreat, heading home and asking my brother to head to the lake and canoe with me.

As we canoed, all I could think was, “I’m healthy. I’m actually healthy.” My body felt healthy, and I just knew something had changed.

Again, I want to note that this experience did not happen in a vacuum. I had been doing work leading up to this retreat that (unintentionally) created the space for me to be able to CHOOSE this experience. Because that’s the other important thing to note here: during the session, I had a very clear realization that I had to choose to let this work. I had to choose to lean in, and I obviously made the choice to do so. If I hadn’t, it probably would have been a great session, but without the same extraordinary result.

Taken on July 17, 2016 as I was canoeing after the session that helped me heal.

A couple weeks later, I got confirmation — I was Lyme and co-infections free. It was the happiest day of my life.

It took me awhile to figure out what it meant to have life open to me. This was definitely not the end of my healing journey. From that day, through the next 9 years, I have spiraled deeper on my path, including going through one bout where I came out of remission with Lyme and had to figure out how to repeat this spiritual healing process on my own. That journey led to me developing the beginning stages of many of the protocols and techniques I use in my work today.
I also have spent the last 9 years compiling everything that made it possible for me to have this remission into the body of work that I do today. It wasn’t just one modality or teaching that helped me. It was many. Therefore, I have spent time learning as much as I can in order to combine everything that helped me and everything I discovered in my personal exploration following this event, so that I can help others as cohesively as possible.

As I write this I am struck by the fact that this is the 9th anniversary. Numerologically, 9 is associated with completion, endings, and the arrival of new beginnings.

As I have contemplated this anniversary, I’ve been playing with my relationship to my body and dis-ease. Three months ago, when my boyfriend and I left Colorado, I ended up in the hospital with a stomach infection three days before we left. Since then, I have found myself unable to eat gluten, a sensitivity I had for more than a decade, and healed 3.5 years ago. I succumbed to this resurgence, thinking that perhaps the celiac gene had finally been triggered for me (I have had extensive celiac testing done and while I have one of the genetic markers, it was not turned on in the past, confirmed by an endoscopy). And yet, as I sit with my body and listen to my digestive system, I remember that I have a choice.

Before I go further, I want to preface this by saying that I am writing about myself explicitly here. For me, and my growth, I’ve been playing with the idea that non-acute dis-ease or discomfort in my body is a choice. Or at least, at this point in my journey, with the healing awareness and techniques I have available to me, I have the ability to decide what I want to experience and what I don’t.

Let me lay myself bare here for you:
When something is wrong with my body, it makes me feel subconsciously safe. Uncomfortable but safe, because subconsciously, I have something that is an excuse. Something to lean back on. I have a reason to not be perfect, even sometimes a reason to complain or feel special. It also makes me feel able to be seen. This is the result of spending a vast part of my formative years sick. My “inner sick self”, as I call her, learned that if something’s wrong, she’ll get attention, she’ll be loved, and she’ll be protected. None of these are conscious, meaning these are not things I actively want to be true or spend time wanting. All of these are beliefs I am aware of and have worked with and on. They’re my “core wound” as it were, patterns that I may have to be aware of my whole life.

What this means is that, even after years of work, it is easy for me to slip into a story or identity about something being wrong with my body. A great example of this is the story that my body is very sensitive. I’ve been contemplating that story lately. Is that really true? Or have I just gotten used to believing that it’s true?

Anyway, I recently realized how this tendency is connected to me deciding to be okay with having a massive resurgence of gluten sensitivity. Because if I can’t eat gluten, then I have something that makes me special (or makes my ego self feel special or different). I also get to allow myself to cling to control, because I have to control what I eat and how it’s prepared and it strokes my ego control issues. It also gives me something to blame if I feel slow, tired, not great. “Well, I probably ate gluten then.”

And here’s the thing: for whatever reason, I have been gifted with studying, understanding and experiencing extraordinary healing in this lifetime. I have been guided to study energetics, shamanic medicine, the womb, the body and anatomy, biomagnetism, somatic healing, etc so that I can understand the mechanics of dis-ease and of healing. I’ve learned to identify what keeps us stuck, unable to get the kind of healing we want and deserve. I have had the immense privilege of working with many people on their own healing journeys, some from Lyme, some from other things. No one’s healing journey has looked the same. But everyone’s healing journey has involved us identifying and working with the underlying beliefs that keep dis-ease, trauma, pain, and/or discomfort as a “comfortable” option.

So I realized I was falling for the fallacy of comfort and control over true freedom and embodiment. I have been working to heal the underlying beliefs around gluten, including subconscious beliefs about safety, control, all of it. I have not yet tested my success by eating a piece of bread (I will let you know when I do), but I have played around with cross contamination, so far finding that what was causing me issues before is no longer doing so. Because I have been activating my power of choice: I have the choice to succumb to my ego and control issues. I have a choice to keep myself small and stay safe. And I have the choice to not do either of those things. I have the choice to instead digest my power, digest my healing, and refuse to allow anything to keep me in hiding or keep me small.

This may seem like a lot to attribute to gluten. And it would be! Because my point is that it’s not actually about the gluten — that’s just a symptom of a larger pattern of subconscious comfort with something being “wrong”. And that’s the point of this whole post — noticing and confronting the places where it’s easier to hide behind what is familiar instead of digesting and claiming what makes you stand out.

This is the message I want to leave you with: you too have choice in your life. Your choice may not look like mine (it’s taken me 9 years of consistent spiritual + energetic work to get to this level of choice, so please don’t expect your experience to look like mine), but you still have choice. You have the ability to choose what you give your energy or attention to. You have the freedom to decide what narratives or stories you want to perpetuate in your life. And, if you need or desire help with this, you have the choice to seek out the support you need!

So remember — we all have choice we can exercise in our lives. And our healing is always going to be multi-faceted and multi-layered, and is going to require us to look at the subconscious beliefs and programs that are keeping us experiencing the same patterns over and over (and over) again.

If you’re searching for support on your healing journey, I may be the right person to help you! I specialize in supporting you through the energetics of Lyme disease (or any chronic dis-ease or physical experience), through the energetics of trauma healing, and in connecting you back to the wisdom of your womb. In fact, I often combine all 3 of these topics together, because they are almost always interconnected and must all be addressed on any complete healing journey. If you’d like more information, reach out to me via my contact page.