Secrets of my self-healing – the first time

Because I will be taking you on my journey of healing with Parkinson’s, I think it’s a good idea to begin with a summary of how I healed myself the first time when I was dealing with both lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.  This will be an important backdrop to what I am doing this time around.

I believe I can heal myself

After having 20+ years to consider how I was able to heal myself I think it safe to say that my healing was based on a few basic beliefs.  First, I believed I could heal myself.  Because of my upbringing in childhood through Christian Science, I believed that people could heal themselves without doctors.  Although I had never had a major personal experience healing myself, I believed it was possible.  And I think that having hope or believing in the possibility of self-healing was fundamental to my recovery.

Even if you are not spiritual, there are other reasons for you to believe that you can heal yourself.  Take a look at the placebo effect – a phenomenon that we are all familiar with. 

I’m fairly sure you’ve heard of research done by pharmaceutical companies where people are given a look-alike substance or treatment to test the effectiveness of their new drug.  Scientists plan on the fact that a certain percentage of people will get better based entirely on their belief that they are getting the real cure, even if they are not.  Although it’s not well understood, western medicine and science are based on this knowledge that there is a mind-body link and the mind-body has the innate ability for self-repair if we believe it can happen.

Years after healing myself from my autoimmune diseases, I read a book by Lissa Rankin, M.D., “Mind Over Medicine.”  She spends a good amount of time exploring the placebo effect and uses it as a foundation for her exploration into self-healing.   Inspired by her book and agreeing with her philosophy years after healing myself I ended up becoming a trained provider at her Whole Health Medicine Institute.  If you are looking for more reasons to believe you have the power to heal yourself, this is a good book to read.

Individuals with multiple personalities also demonstrate the ability of the mind to affect the body.  There are well known cases where one personality might be completely healthy and another personality can be diseased.  When personalities change, the health of the body changes; diseases that existed suddenly disappear.  How is that possible except for the power of the mind?

I believe I got myself here

As I mentioned, my ability to heal myself the first time came down to a couple important beliefs.  In addition to firmly believing it’s possible, I also believed that I was sick at least in part because of the way I had been living my life. 

(Yes, there can be environmental factors for the reason you are sick. I am not going to take time to go into this now. But for the most part, I believe that the way we handle our life and the resultant stress we experience plays a major role.)

I believe that how we live our lives can lead to disease.  Disease happens when we don’t listen to the whispers in our ear that tell us we need to change; the whisper that our job is too taxing, we need more joy and down time in our lives, that our relationships aren’t working, etc.  When we don’t listen to the whisper in our ear our health will become affected.  By the time we are diagnosed with a major illness, our body has taken over and said, “No more!  You must stop and re-evaluate now.”

Disease is a red flag that we need to take a look at our lives and how we are living it

One of my favorite books that talks about this is Dr. Gabor Mate’s book, “When the Body Says No.”  In his book he describes how “negative emotions provide a major risk factor for the onset of disease.”  He even goes so far as to suggest that different diseases have patients with similar psychological traits.  Yet, “while we cannot say that any personality type causes cancer, certain personality features definitely increase the risk because they are more likely to generate physiological stress.”

So in addition to believing we can change, we need to do something about what got us here in the first place.  That necessitates a look at the past and our present situation to ask ourselves, “How did I get here?”

We can heal ourselves and we are at least partially responsible.  So then what?

In summary, what I did to heal included work in two areas:  1) deep self-examination to explore what was troubling me, and 2) prayer and meditation to get beyond the mental chatter or our everyday lives and listen to my inner healing intelligence, my Higher Self, or God.

During this time, I didn’t use any special vitamins and I wasn’t on any kind of restrictive diet.  I ate a balanced diet.  If I had a vice it was that I did enjoy drinking wine and I was drinking coffee at that time!  (I later chose to stop drinking caffeinated drinks, but not during this time.)  Furthermore, I didn’t do any special physical exercise.  If anything, my body wanted rest and so I tried to give it rest.

I did use medication daily given to me by my rheumatologist for arthritic pain.  And I did take anti-depressants which seemed tied to my autoimmune issues.  Also I did have one cortisone injection into my hip for hip pain.

1. Deep self-examination began with acceptance

The first hurdle I had to deal with was to learn how to accept the fact that I was sick.  I wanted to fight it.   I didn’t want to accept it!   In fact, acceptance felt weak to me.  I had never accepted something that I vehemently didn’t want.  Never!  So why now?

Well, the why of course is that there was nothing, NO THING, I could do to stop this disease.  It was perhaps the first time in my life that I had found myself up against a brick wall.  And there wasn’t any way around it.  So I HAD to learn how to do this thing called acceptance.

It was tough.  I had to take some time with it.  Sitting crossed legged as I prepared to meditate, I would try to feel this thing called acceptance.  It was a process that didn’t happen overnight or in one sitting and it’s not something that you can intellectualize.  It is something you must experience.  It took some time and it took some practice.  But I finally got there. Eventually I felt a shift.

What I learned is that you can’t heal if you are fighting the present.  The ability to accept actually opens the space for healing. 

The other thing I learned about acceptance was that it paves the way for accepting and forgiving others.  When we accept ourselves we become more human and aware that everyone is vulnerable and has weaknesses.  And by doing so we begin to forgive others.

Once I got past the first hurdle of accepting my disease, I took time to become more aware of my thoughts and my emotions.  I was going through a divorce and knew that I had some issues of anger, resentment and sadness that I was dealing with.  I was aware that I had repressed a lot of my emotions over the years and I needed to face them. 

As I became more aware of my thoughts and emotions, I targeted things that I wanted to change about myself.  These things became the focus of my meditation practice.

2. Commitment to a daily practice of prayer and meditation

I developed a daily practice of meditation.  Over time a process and ritual began to emerge.  First, I found a place in my home that was set up for my meditation.  I had a small alter with the things that I needed – like a journal and pen to write with.  I also had a couple written prayers, incense, and candles.  And to ensure I was comfortable when I meditated, I found a cushion I could sit on. 

The one thing I found I could firmly believe in was the fact that something good would come from this.  It was my life experience that no matter how bad something might be, I always found something of value later, after the experience.  Always. 

So I held to that.  I firmly trusted that there would be good that would come.  I didn’t know what it was yet.  I thanked God in advance for what I would learn.  I believed that the disease was there to teach me and I was thankful for the gift of my disease.  And . . . I truly meant it.

So my meditations always began with an expression of gratitude for what I would learn and a prayer – often the Lord’s Prayer.  Next I learned to leave a moment for an emotion to well up.  I gave this space for emotion because I often felt I needed to start my prayer with a good cry!  I didn’t try to analyze it too much.  I suspected I had a lot of repressed emotion, so I just let it out.

After my cry, I would use a technique or two to quiet my mind.  As in mindfulness meditations, I would pay attention to my breathing and notice thoughts as they came up.  I would notice and let them go.  Over time the mind would begin to quiet itself and I would feel that spaciousness that I grew to love in my meditations. 

After 20-30 minutes I would ask for guidance for that day and I would wait until I had received a message.  It may have been something simple, like ‘go outside and garden,’ or ‘love your kids’ today.  It didn’t matter.  I trusted my source and I was religious about following the message.

After coming out of the meditation, I would spend a few minutes journaling.  This was often where I took the time to further work on acceptance, surrender or forgiveness, or practice a little self-compassion.  And then I would stop.  I would gather myself and go off to implement the message I had received. 

Joy as the roadmap!

Over time I noticed that my messages were consistently about following joy.  Joy had become a roadmap!  As I progressed further on my journey, this would become an overarching theme.

I could write volumes about this process, but for the purposes of laying a foundation here as we further discuss my healing from Parkinson’s, I think it’s enough.  There will be more on all of this later.

But one final note about my healing.  When you begin to believe that things are going to change and you are going to be alright, your story needs to change.  I found I no longer wanted people to reinforce an image of me as sick and incurable.  I no longer wanted pity or to spend time talking about my symptoms because it wasn’t where I wanted my focus any longer. 

Stop the story

So one of the things that happened when I believed I would be healed is, I stopped telling my story!  We all have them.  We all have a story for important events in our lives.  And we have a story about our health – or lack of it.  At some point you will become aware that your story no longer matches your intentions and beliefs . . . and that’s when you need to craft a different one.  When I found I had faith and that rather radical self-trust that I could heal myself, my story needed to change.  I needed to stop the old story.

Before long, I was healed

In less than a year after I began meditating I was healed.  I don’t know exactly how long it took because after I got into the healing routine I had, my focus slowly switched over to one of following joy as I mentioned, rather than searching for a healing.  I paid less and less attention to my symptoms.  Then one day I checked in on my health and realized that I couldn’t recall the last time that I had experienced pain or fatigue!  I remember being actually startled by that revelation.

This kept occurring – this pattern of becoming aware of not experiencing symptoms, taking stock and then moving on.  Until one day I realized that many months had passed and I was still feeling well.  Months turned into years, years turned into decades, and somewhere around 5-10 years later I felt I could safely say that I was healed from lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.  Since I never went back to have my rheumatologist run another ANA blood panel, I guess I can’t technically say that I cured myself from lupus and RA, but I can certainly say that I have been in remission for 20+ years.  For me, it hasn’t made a difference.  I have not had any symptoms.