Dearest Hive Family,
It is a bright and sunny day, all the windows and doors are wide open to the light, the gentle breezes, the birdsong and the quiet machinations of the valley going about its business. I’m back in bed, pacing myself as my Beloved suggested earlier, and resting into whatever this dark-at-times, mysterious process is of my health unfolding.
I’ve practised autonomy in my health from a very early age: though I also participated in various (self-sabotage-ing) dabblings in conventional medicine, for the most part I’ve said Thank You But No, to suppressing symptoms.
I Know the whole of the conventional medical perspective/ philosophy/ agenda to be based on very false premises – mostly importantly, it presumes that we are not Vital Force, and we are not Spirit. Everything following that lie, is a distortion out of Rightness, and out of our health-full vitality. Alongside the many other unscientific and unethical wrong-turns of modern medicine, the remaining wisdom is sparse and very much less useful than trusting our own mindbodyspirit in any lifetime because conventional medicine is fuelled by manipulation rather than by vital embodied wisdom - because it is rooted in our giving away THE VERY POWER-ATTENTION-VITALITY that would ACTUALLY CURE US (if we kept it)!!!!
Still, it can be excruciating to follow a path of truth in one’s own health: we can face – at best – unsupportive partners/ siblings/ colleagues/ friends, we might encounter ridicule and derision about our choices, or get lumped into a category close to conspiracy ‘theorists’. Finding better solutions might be difficult or even impossible in some cases, and learning and growing might be held back by the ongoing onslaught of toxicity, negativity and missing nutriment that the modern world offers.
My greatest challenges in my health have been in facing the marriage of our power and our responsibility: standing in Right, breathing in Rightly and discerning what Is Right – stepping away from the easy-to-reach anaesthetic of what-is-offered, and looking instead at the deeper workings of the mindbodyspiritcosmos…
I have found myself, in the end, outside even of any support network, far from any agent or knowledge that can guide us...
This means that ultimately I might not be artificially prolonging a (lessened) quality of life: entering the mystery, I may even be (naively or not) stepping off the edge of the world.
It is simply possible that, in seeking to heal without external intervention, we might lean too far out into discomfort... reaching further than we can endure – or survive.
This week I felt this straining at the edges, this impossibility of knowing, and a definite sense of being lost in the mystery. I couldn’t even comprehend what I was feeling, bar it relating to womb, gestation, liver, memory, grief, terror, and dying. I’m supported by dearest Vincent, by my faith in healing and in higher forces of good being available to us – and on the practical level, by homeopathy and pelvic steaming with potent hand-picked herbs.
My senses were full of raw pain and loss, my body unable to inform me of one single symptom that would anchor me into a homeopathic remedy or a miracle detoxing potion we could order quickly online. My mind was preparing for the worst, and this seemed a possibility, as I’ve been meeting in my dreams with departed friends and family – they seem to get closer and more in focus, as my symptoms have compounded.
A good night’s sleep, broken as it was by aching tossing and turning, and a bright morning – starting with my decluttering and cleaning up the bedroom balcony, progressing with my dearheart fussing around me lovingly, and ending with me back in repose mode, after a beautiful pelvic steaming session… Life feels an awful lot more welcoming, more probable: my potential stretches out in front of me, rather than being so blurry and unimaginable, dark and dangerous.
My being unwell is something that rises like an occasional storm does, and then settles again. It is natural, organic, elemental. The apparent devastation as it blows through me, is equilibrated by the cleansing, refreshing, righting perspective that the next day (or week or month) brings.
Just as in a natural storm, all broken and dead things are swept away in wind and rain and flood; all is rinsed and brightened, things are repositioned and brought into flow… it feels this way too in my bodymindspiritcosmos: I Am realigned, having been forced to surrender to what is, and to what will be.
In my long experience of not working with practitioners or agencies, I’ve had a couple of significant health crises which for the most part have brought riches, and have ‘paid off’ my investment in just listening, just allowing the thing to express, keeping myself present and focussed inward and expansively. The riches that come, are our Natural Being coming back to Nature. Often, the return to equilibrium of healthfullness comes through literally stepping into wild nature, but sometimes it is just stopping interacting with the artificial world, the constructed reality; slowing down, doing nothing, feeling all the feels.
When I think back to the long, dark helterskelter that I fell down in my teens and early twenties, from following modern medicine, I shiver with regret. The list of interventions, consultations, arguments with doctors, that I underwent, and how I came out of it. ...I remember a friend of our family’s commenting at the time, that I looked like I had been ‘wrung out’ – pale and grey-skinned. I felt like it: not just weak physically, as I have occasionally felt since, but a holistic suppression of my will, my vital force, and my very identity – never mind the impossible weight on me of economic pressures, social
hierarchies, limitations of options closing down around me. I did the right thing to seek refuge in nature, in my home village in Scotland, in familiar landscape and people. This was beginning of my refusing the offer of the systems that exist, and my looking at what actually was healing me to wholeness.
The theme of wholeness continues today, decades later: I question and surmise what is going on in my body, my mind and my spirit, but then I let go and allow a gentle overview to arrive in my conscious. I allow the current crisis or crises, to sit in a continuum of my evolving life. And I let go of the mental need to grasp at a label for it. In fact, much of the crisis of identity in ‘being ill’ is around not being able to ‘identify’ a ‘reason’ or ‘cause’ for ‘the thing’ – which, once broken down, leads very satisfyingly to a state of language-less healing.
The bodymindspirit does not speak in modern vernacular/ contemporary English or whatever we are used to talking in: it has its own language entirely, which is part of a larger and more complex language of nature and cosmos. It speaks The Truth, and it will only ever speak The Truth: it is allowed to express – or it isn’t – in this divine dialect, and if it is allowed to speak freely then the result will be a rewritten story.
So my recent health crisis, as with previous ones, is really about rewriting something that was ‘miswritten’: a bad dreamspell in an unsuccessful masterplan, let’s say. Our life masterplan and our health sovereignty cannot be rewritten by the same logic or design skills that first set them out of kilter; we have to defer to Great Spirit or to the Higher Vital Force to rewrite it for us. Letting go of the blueprint of reality that was stamped onto us from youth, and mastering communication with the greater force that runs through Life – is not small job, shall we say. It demands epic courage and discernment in the critical phase: to stay the course, and to keep listening humbly and focussedly.
Perhaps real healing demands our complete surrender and at the same time our absolute commitment to conscious change. It certainly should be universally available to all, direct from the Divine. It cannot be subscription only.
With these thoughts, I’m heading to the kitchen to brew up some therapeutic food for us today… All prayers and good vibes welcomely accepted. With much much love and reciprocal good juju,