The pandemic of keeping your mouth shut has “infected” me.
As time wears on, I notice that I “speak my truth,” not more and more, but less and less. Why? Because I am surrounded by dear, well-meaning friends and family whose cultural indoctrination into allopathic medicine remains intact. Which means that they also fell for the covid con. As a result, we live in parallel mental/emotional/spiritual worlds, and “never the twain shall meet.”
Furthermore my exit from the allopathic world involved a near-death experience wherein I was awakened to the spiritual life within — not just me, my body, but the entire body of the world. From that time on, I have intuitively known that the entire universe is a single pulsing organism, alive, conscious, and benevolent.
From a fearful child, I shifted into fearlessness, and from that time on, I have been free.
But: as usual, my transformation was a process. In fact, I had to undergo a powerful experience involving illness of the physical body three times, the same illness, though each time less and less life-threatening. Furthermore, each crisis in the physical signified a spiritual emergency. I had to correct my course, at more and more subtle levels, over that three year period. At the conclusion of the third crisis, I finally left the allopathic medical world for good (except for dental, orthopedics, and emergency medicine). That was in 1973, when I had fallen ill for the third time with peritonitis, caused originally, by an IUD that had punctured the uterus into my ovary, and from there infected the entire abdomen. The first two times, I was hospitalized, and put on antibiotics. The first time for a week, intravenously; the second time for a week, orally.
When the third time rolled around, I called my father, an allopathic doctor, and asked him what shall I do now? He told me that since the infection kept reoccurring, the only choice left was to have to have a hysterectomy. As he was telling me this, a woman with whom I then lived handed me a piece of paper with a name and phone number on it. “Call her,” she whispered.
So I did. I got off the phone with Dad and called Mildred, a healer in Oakland, not far from where I lived in San Rafael. Told her what was going on, and that it was the third time. Belly swelling, pain, fever. She instructed me, very matter of fact: “peel a clove of garlic and place in a cup of water heated to the boiling point. Drink it after it cools, while peeling another clove of garlic and doing the same thing. Do this until you go to sleep tonight, and call me in the morning.”
“What?!? But what about my pain, my symptoms?”
“Just do what I tell you,” she repeated, “and call me.”
So I did. And in the morning, my belly was flat, pain and fever gone.
I called Mildred and made an appointment for late that morning. And when I walked into her tiny home I entered a room with a large, ornately carved examining table (or was it an altar?), two chairs, and not much else. Mildred was tiny, and old, very matter of fact. “Take your clothes off, ” she instructed, “and climb up on the table.” Though feeling embarrassed that she had asked me to disrobe in front of her, I did as I was told.
Then, she placed her hands on the the sides of my naked body, and moved slowly around the table, covering every inch of my body’s edges, asking what I feared and what I felt guilty for.
Well, of course, both had to do with my children, whom I had left with their father in Boston the year before, in order to take a position in an experimental college in California, from which I had been subsequently fired, as “too experimental.”
Of course, this bacterial illness had presented itself for the third time at another painful crossroad in my life. The first occasion (and by far most serious, life-threatening, was when a supernatural voice had thundered, filling the hospital room, “LIVE OR DIE, IT’S YOUR CHOICE.” I chose to live, which meant I would choose, soon after, to leave my loveless marriage. The second time the infection presented itself was during the process of writing my PhD dissertation: I had completed the first part of it, and for some reason was stuck, could not write the second part. Bingo, peritonitis again. And that time, after four days in the hospital, I was able to return to the typewriter and the material I had sought to put into words poured out.
Each time, an illness presented through the second chakra, the sexual creative chakra. I had to allow my own creative self to shine, to grow, and to do so, on three successive occasions I had to give up what was no longer viable — first my marriage, next, a block within my thinking process, and finally, my career as a “college teacher.” On each occasion, with each turning point, the body was my teacher; she showed me the way.
As I lay there, with Mildred speaking to me in a low voice, my tears beginning to flow, the bacterial infection, which had been recurring over a three year period, disappeared for good.
What do I take from this extended experience? That the body knows; that it tells me, by its symptoms, in a symbolic manner, what is needed now, if I am to either correct, or to stay the course, on my own unique path as a human being.
Furthermore, I look at all the circumstances surrounding this tri-partite experience as uncanny, supernatural, touched by he divine. I was being led in the direction I was intended to go all along.
I tell this story to introduce the reader to the spiritual frisson that for me, lives in the juxtaposition of two videos that I listened to last night, during my insomniac hours: one of a woman who almost died in a plane crash and the uncanny circumstances surrounding the experience, and the other, the story of a primary doctor who does not practice allopathic medicine, who does not rely on pharmaceutical drugs or surgery, but instead, knows that the body wants to heal, that it is designed to heal, and that the entire plant world is here to support its healing process.
I found both videos utterly riveting.
Thank you Ann, beautifully told story. I have not had the dramatic experience as you but have been brought to the same place of trusting the body rather than blindly following allopathic medicine.
And though I didn’t mention it in this post, it all goes back to Descartes, in the 17th century, when he split the mind from the body: “I think, therefore I am.” (Therefore only my thinking is me.) If the body is viewed as something external to the self, and furthermore, viewed as a mechanism, why then, of course we call in experts to “fix it.”