Month: March 2015

I’ve not blogged for a few days. After my feeling crap at the allotments I gapped out pretty much for the rest of the weekend. Saturday night I had a chat with my friend Shiatsu Clare about our proposed Shiatsu session for the following morning and my proposed trip to visit my aunt. Clare suggested that I was not well enough to buy and cook up a Sunday roast and then troll over to Manchester after my shiatsu. She felt I needed to be the one being looked after instead of doing the looking after. That made me cry a bit, as being in a family of three men if I get ill they don’t nurture me, they sort of panic and get mean with me. Perhaps a little scared, like if mums not taking care of us what will happen? so we must be mean to her until she gets her shit together and gets well again. Therefore, I’m not used to being looked after since my mum died and that was twenty four years ago.

So, I cancelled my trip. Auntie Pat’s sweet and loving response to my not going made me cry a bit more. I do love our visits. I’m sad not to be seeing her, but like me she doesn’t ‘hold’ with the flu vaccine and I don’t really want to pass on this vile virus either. I did, however, go for my Shiatsu. Clare and I are swapping healing with each other. I give her healing in return for Shiatsu. It’s a good deal as  holistic therapy is not a calling that makes you rich. so neither of us could afford each other if we had to pay.

When I got there Clare’s house felt like home to me. Our tastes are so similar. I felt really relaxed and comfortable. It was my first visit to her home and my first Shiatsu with her. It was FAB! I felt very light hearted and funny after the treatment. I don’t mean weird funny. I mean comedian funny. I nearly wet myself laughing giggling with her after the session. It was great. The rest of the day I rested, except for making dinner.

Here is what I’m taking now to treat myself. Aside from the Shiatsu, which showed up my overwrought immune system and a huge well of unexpressed grief. Which, by the way, my person centred art therapist and counsellor sister said, is one of the suggested roots of autoimmune disorders. Unexpressed grief? Causing illness? Who would have believed it? Well I, for one. It makes sense to me. I’ve an ocean of unshed tears in me. Every sad song I hear helps me release a bit more grief, but there is so much more to be healed.

I treid to run a deep grief healing retreat a couple of years ago called Wounded Woman, for women who needed to heal their grief from anything; miscarriage, bereavement, divorce, abuse, abortion, the wretched state of humanity, you name it. There’s a lot to cry about.

No one came. feeling grief isn’t popular. People don’t want to go there. but there’s a LOT of people, especially women, getting auto immune diseases. Perhaps we should go there a bit more and support each other in doing it.

If you want a Wounded Woman retreat to heal your unexpressed grief let me know. I’m still up for it. so, I’m taking….

Vitamin C – 1000mg three times a day with food.

Serrapeptase – 25000iu, one tablet three times a day on an empty stomach. I lowered my dose from six a day to three times a day this week. For two reasons. After the really high doses of the first three weeks To get control of the inflammation, I’ve lowered to a maintenance dose to keep on top of it. It seems to make sense. Also, it’s expensive. Expensive is a relative term and the second reason. It wouldn’t be expensive if we were both earning, but neither my hubby or I are employable at the moment and our business is in the toilet. People just aren’t buying retreats and I can’t manage healing clents at the moment. So, for us right now the supplements are expensive. I will work out the daily and weekly cost of this treatment and add it to the blog when I remember to do that.

Immunkomplex – 20ml in 200ml of Apple juice with my evening meal, as suggested on the bottle.

Lastly, the steroid eye drops. One drop four times a day. It’s made the inside of my eye turn from a healthy pink (like my other eye still is) to a sickly yellowy White. I’m not feeling happy about using these drops. Si is persuading me to continue with them until I next go to the Uveitis clinic on 17th April. I’m doing what he says. He’s a wise man.

This week I am now also taking cough medicine, as for two nights running I was up in the night coughing so hard, for so long and without any shift of mucus that I tore my throat, and my ribs and diaphragm feel as bruised and sore as if I’d been kicked down the street by a bunch of football hooligans. My chest was itchy and burning (I mean my lungs, not my tits) for days, with a constant annoying tickle. The spasms from coughing wore me out and were so violent I kept peeing myself and had to sit on the loo half the night as I coughed my lungs out. I coughed so hard I thought I was going to blow a gasket in my brain. it left me with a pounding headache each time. It has taken two days, or maybe three, certainly half a bottle of Robitussin, to finally looosen the mucus. Hooray! It’s finally coming out.

So, today, as an experiment in healing myself, I will be playing a lot it emotive music and letting some tears flow. Maybe that will help clear my eye. plus I will be back on the Fame workout. I really missed it not being well enough on Mondsy or yesterday, but now the cough is shifting and the pounding headache is gone I’m up for it.

Inner thirteen year old – here I come!

 

It has been a good few days. I’ve felt almost back to normal, just a bit spacey and tired. Until Wednesday. I worked Mother’s Day at the Botanic Garden of Wales running three sound healing workshops during the day. I had gone the day before to set up and so in the day I just had to do what comes naturally to me. Healing and facilitating. Nothing challenging or strenuous. A calm, peaceful, relaxing and rewarding day for all. Especially for the flu bug that hitched a ride in my nose!

Tuesday night I lay awake half the night with a throat so hot, raw and sore you could have filed your nails on it. I was shivery and sweating, headachey, in fact every joint ached , the worst being my neck, which felt as though it couldn’t hold my head up. In the morning, knackered as I was and still feeling rough as the foot file my hubby uses to shave his hard skin, I spent the day in bed. I watched 5 episodes of the Big C back to back.

The day before I had been feeling fine. We planted tons of veggie seeds including cabbage, broccoli, aubergines, 8 different kinds of beans from dwarf French to borlotti , runners to fine climbers. We planted beetroot, cauliflower, marigolds (medicinal) and cornflowers. We were getting on with things. But yesterday really took it out of me.

Today I’ve been guzzling organic cider vinegar with honey in salad dressing and in hot water as a drink. Both incredibly good for flu and colds. I awoke with a headache again, so I’ve taken it easy and not bounced. No way could I bounce the day before either. I’m pissed off about that, as I was really getting that Fame routine off pat. Never mind. It will still be there tomorrow. I’ve had a wander around the fields with the dogs, gone shopping, made a salad and planned a veggie curry for dinner, which I will do in a bit and I’ll wash the pots and clean the kitchen a bit.

Vision? I read outside in the sun today without my specs at all. so there’s an improvement! I blissed out in the sun, despite Si having one of his depression days. As he did his Eeyore impression I soaked up the sun and birdsong and reminded myself that I am the peaceful aware witness and that all the drama, the stuff of thought and feeling that disturb the inner mind peace in Si and myself are just the ramblings of the maniac ego, which I listen to at my peril.

The wind in the trees and the birds make much more sense.

11/03/15

We’ve been away back to the Wirral for a couple of days. Mainly to do our PHEW group; the Personal Holistic Emotional Wellbeing group, where we offer various tools for holistic wellbeing, focussing largely on harmonising spiritual and psychological energy patterns. These tools include chanting, meditation, visualisation, shamanic journeying and healing, drumming, toning, the use of singing bowls and tuning forks and these meetings provide a confidential space for healing, sharing, support and personal growth.

I’ve stopped all work except this group for now. I don’t need much energy or mental acuity to run these twice monthly events, and they are as much a healing experience for me as for the rest of the group.

Mental acuity, or lack of is my issue at the moment. Things are changing with some rapidity. One of the symptoms described on the Uveitis website is cognitive impairment. No kidding! I had previously put this all down to the menopause…. The forgetfulness, the terrible memory all round, the word salad, the weird stuttering, the confusion, double bookings, overwhelm, inability to multi task. Inability to make decisions. Inability to think!

But now there is not only one reason for COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT there are three!

1. Enough said here really… I don’t use meds for this. Obviously. If you have read this far, it is clear to you that I prefer other methods of working through life’s changes and challenges than a pharmaceutical approach.
2. Uveitis/Autoimmune issues. What can I say?
3. ASCENCION/Consciousness raising/Vibrational uploading…

Well here’s the RUB so to speak. I believe, (as do many other people who I consider to be wiser and more intelligent than I) that the menopause, and perhaps also autoimmune disorders, have more to do with vibrational frequencies of CONSCIOUSNESS changing on the planet and within our species than ‘illness’.

My ‘sense of knowing’ about this journey to health that I’m on told me that the purpose of this experience was an inner shift that needed to happen. Many of us healer types are recognising this at this time. Many of us are ‘getting ill’, experiencing times in our lives when we need a time out to upgrade the software, so to speak.

 

Here’s an analogy of what’s going on – I think.

My inner experience of this shift, occurring as it is during the menopause, as my children are becoming independent adults and an autoimmune issue messes with my system is one akin to putting a new operating system into a computer.

People’s computers and their heads got really messed up when they installed the new operating system that followed Windows 8, or whatever it was. I can’t remember it right now – not my fault – I have cognitive impairment! People wanted to go back to the old operating system, where they knew how things worked and where everything went. Suddenly it was all different, confusing and messed up. It took some time to readjust to the new system. No doubt faults occurred and things were lost, discovered and new opportunities turned up too, I’m sure.

I understand that this upgrading of software may be what it occurring here on earth RIGHT NOW! Our consciousness is upgrading. The thing is, that this is not mainstream thinking. This is not the zeitgeist! We are not all on the same page, running on the same hardware, never mind on the same operating system. We are not all running Leopard on apple macs. Some of us are still on Windows 94 on our Dells. Many people are clinging on to the old model and are completely closed to the new software available. So much so that they are medicating themselves up to the max in order to keep in control, keep working, running on that little hamster wheel round and round, not getting to anywhere special because we’ve all forgotten where we were supposed to be going in the first place.

There are so many ways to resist this change. Just as there are many ways to surrender to it.

We surrender to the change through letting go; relaxing; feeling our emotions; following our hearts; opening up to our intuition; listening to the wisdom of our bodies; listening to the wisdom of the elders, through their mystical and wisdom traditions.

We resist the change by tightening up our muscles; suppressing our emotions; ignoring our intuition; keeping our minds busy busy busy; stressing ourselves out; watching tv; constant noise and music and DISTRACTIONS…

We resist the change by shutting ourselves off from our INNER TRUTH and guidance by drinking too much alcohol; taking illegal drugs; work addiction; porn addiction; retail therapy, that is actually consumer addiction; taking proscribed ‘legal’ drugs, or medication: we are becoming addicted to sleeping pills, porn, anti depressants, booze, sex.

So, eventually a dis-ease will manifest, and if we are paying attention we can take this opportunity to GO INSIDE and GO DEEP into the quiet, into the stillness, the peace, the wisdom and silence in order to find what we need to heal.

And, because we are all different. Because we all vibrate at different frequencies, play different tunes, we need different medicine.

I also believe that this process should be SUPPORTED and ENCOURAGED with assistance from anyone around us who is compassionate, loving, and knows us well. But mostly it is a journey we must take alone.

The most important thing is that if we wish to be WHOLE, HEALTHY, BALANCED, HARMONIOUS and at PEACE with ourselves and our world, we need to take the first step and GET ON THE HEALING JOURNEY PATH.

 

So, here I am on the path. The PHEW group evening was beautiful. There was some deep healing work done. Some of us released some old pain energy and we all bathed in beautiful, balanced healing energy. We chanted together, I drummed for everyone, we meditated together, breathed together, shared our feelings, opened our hearts, trusted one another and co-created a compassionate community space. As I said, it was beautiful.

I drove back to Wales the next morning. There on the doorstep waiting for me was the Immunkomplex. Yey! I drank diluted it in the nearest thing to apple juice I could find (it needs to be diluted in juice in a ratio of 1:10), which was cider. Close enough. You drink it once a day with or after a meal. 20ml in 200ml of juice or a drink of your choice. Don’t panic, it wasn’t a strong cider. I only drank 200ml of it. Si drank the rest. It tasted ok. A bit like I’d just licked out the inside of a health food store, so not gorgeous, but ok.

Over the last few weeks I am feeling ever more spacey, elated, light headed, and a bit mental to be honest. I’m just surrendering to it. One reason for this is that today, for the first time in months I could actually read the ‘use by’ date on the voucher from the Coop. I found that I could recognise people’s faces on the telly last night too. So, my vision is improving.

I’m still a bit achey – in the joints, my fingers are swolled and my rings are tight and my lungs are still hurting. I’m still snotty and stuffed up, so that would be a cold virus then.

I am back to regular dance workouts again after a few days off. Not exercising due to headaches and aching joints was ok for a few days, but after that the muscle pains started returning with a vengeance. So, back to a morning dance-athon then. I am back on the FAME workout. I totally love it. It brings out my inner 13 year old. I probably look like shite when I dance. I’m an overweight, middle aged, weak ankled, graceless and clumsy woman. But when I dance I feel like a sexy goddess and I couldn’t give a shit what I look like to anyone else. I LOVE IT!

Music, dance, drumming, singing, shared with others and also alone combined with stillness and silence to let the work do its thing, are, I think, (at least to me) essential elements to a truly authentic, beautiful, deep and sensual, well lived life. Dancing and music, as well as the more spiritual elements of chanting and drumming for raising consciousness are so important to me I can’t tell you. I find them SO HEALING and therapeutic.

I believe that at least 40 minutes a day of movement, music, stillness and silence are enough to transform any illness.

We can all find that time for ourselves. If we truly want to live well.

 

 

12/03/15

Last night, with dinner, I took my immunkomplex with Ribena, as I’d forgotten the apple juice and didn’t want more cider. It tasted better with Ribena. I felt that it was doing me good as I sat there watching an episode of Call the Midwife I’d recorded. It may be my imagination (well what isn’t really happening in our imagination, imagination is definitely underestimated in my book), but I could feel a sense of wellbeing infusing my body. Similar to the effects of exercise. All those happy hormones soothing and relaxing the system.

Anyway, this morning I wanted to really master the fourth and last section of the FAME workout video, so I put it on. I started with the warm up. It lasts about 7 minutes. Then straight to section four – the funkiest dance routine I’ve ever seen. I love it. Clumsy and graceless as I may be, I enjoyed the hell out of it and was working up a good sweat, my heart rate was up and after the 17 or so minutes of repeating the section I went on to the bar and floor section (the ballet moves that I apparently messed up so badly as a small child, where I supposedly was told I have the grace of a baby elephant) and then to the ‘dance stretches’ – which are classis yoga poses, cat, dog, downward dog, cobra, child and side stretches. I was sweating more and more during all this. I felt good, just hot.

Then I settled down for a meditate, when after only five minutes or so someone arrived, so I ran upstairs to wash and dress. Then I began to realise that I had a headache and felt pretty nauseous. I drank some water and had my breakfast, a little oatmeal with almond milk on it and a spoonful of maple syrup. Took my vitamin C and put in my eye drops – the steroid drops – the only concession to pharmaceuticals that I’m prepared to make at this point.

Getting the balance of rest and exercise is crucial to this journey. Too little exercise and I get sluggish, my brain shuts down even more and my energy drops. Also, the pain begins in my muscles again.

Too much exercise and nausea and headache.

Decision: I’d rather a few minutes of nausea and headache than a night of sleeplessness due to muscle pain.

Although, its now 3.20pm and since lunch (home made pea soup and spelt toast) I’m nauseous again.

 

This dancing, music, sound healing practice is AMAZING!

I went to dance this morning. I call this morning practice my ‘bounce’ – it usually includes 30 to 50 minutes of dancing and then yoga, followed by meditation. I put on the usual “mixed tape” – a playlist on my ipod of 115 songs ‘I can’t live without’ – and started to let myself move to the music. It was a fast beat, and despite not being well I just let my body move. My arms, shoulders, waist and hips were gyrating to the fast, chaotic beat and I began to warm up quickly. After just a few minutes, still during this first track, I could feel my right lung begin to tighten and hurt, like lightning across my chest. It was powerful and restrictive and I slowed down and began to feel into the pain. Almost straight away I could sense this was old wound to do with mum. Being hurt, being NO LOVE, feeling unloved, experiencing unlove instead of feeling love.

As I felt the agony of the physical pain I sensed that I needed to ground the pain, to give it to our universal mother and so I lay on the floor and asked mother earth to receive my pain, to compost it and turn it into honey, into love, into flowers and growth and creativity. As I lay on the earth’s body, on the floor of my living room I felt almost as if I was lying on my mother’s breast. I yearned and longed for my mum and allowing myself to feel whatever came up, without question or comment, I sensed memories arise as I moved my body, opening up the heart chakra and letting the old, unbalanced energy flow through and out of me.

I saw myself playing out the torment that mum perpetrated upon Jo and I as youngsters. It was her torment, her agony and pain and unlove that was pouring out onto me and through me and onto the dog, who was the tiny being that I perpetrated the torment on to. I saw it flowing from her to me to the dog, slowly killing my mum, slowly killing me, slowly killing the dog and burning us all up in a torrent of pain, agony, unlove…..

My mum had smacked and shouted and slapped and yelled and furied her pain, frustration, rage, powerlessness onto me and in turn I had smacked and yelled and shouted and slapped that pain onto our little sausage dog. Afterwards mum would pick me up and rock me, crying, sobbing her sorrow, shame and grief out and later, after hitting and yelling at the dog I would pick him up crying, sobbing my sorrow, shame and grief out.

All this I could feel again… my heart almost exploding with the sadness of the whole sorry pattern, the family dynamic that played out over and over again from my mother to myself and my sister, and from myself and my sister to our little tiny miniature daschund, who was the runt of the litter and died when he was just four years old from a heart condition. I now believe that my sister and I unknowingly caused that heart condition with our acting out of the broken love pattern.

Still crying I stood up and began to dance to the next track that came up, allowing my body to express itself through my movements, not thinking, just feeling into my body. Letting go of my mind, my thoughts, my sense of anyone or anything other than the energy within. This time it was the sacral chakra that needed to let go of its pain… I let my hips and pelvis move, I bent my knees more to feel closer to the earth and then found myself on my knees. Immediately, as tears poured down my face I began to do the back stretches that I do every day to keep my spine supple. They open the sacral chakra. I moved from cat to dog, to cobra, to downward facing dog, to child to cobra to dog, over and over until I felt ready to stand and dance again. All the time tears running, my heart releasing its hurt, my pelvis opening, softening, my sacral chakra rebalancing and my body wholing and healing itself.

I had the most incredible visceral experience that mirrored the teachings I have learned about us being a spirit having a material existence. This was a deep and beautiful sensation of my body really being this wonderful vessel, a vehicle for my soul’s expression. All the emotions, the movements of energy within my system as being fluid, flowing, my whole body, mind, emotions and soul being transparent, being currents, being one amazing light and sound show, being a constellation of particles of energy held together simply by my consciousness.

Once I felt the session was complete I sat in meditation for another 20 minutes or so. I worked my way around the medicine wheel, invoking the directions and asking help to move through this process.

 

 

04/03/15

Not such a great day today. Woke with a headache. Sore eye. Stayed in bed late and didn’t ‘bounce’. I made a vegan roasted veggie soup and veg and fish cakes with last night’s left over salmon – a good anti inflammatory food! Then I went shopping to get some ‘alternative medicine’ – PYCNOGENOL a natural anti oxidant from pine tree bark.

I had done a shamanic journey to ask what I needed for my eye and I received an image like this…

I wondered if it was a sun.

Si thought I needed vitamin D.

Di thought it was my sacral chakra.

I thought it looked like an egg yolk.

When I was in the healthfood shop the Mulberry Bush in Lampeter, where I went to get some alternative medicines I mentioned Zell Immuno Complex to Andy the owner there and he googled it. The box had on it this image…

Here is the image I saw – the one that looks like an egg yolk. And the images of medicine below is where I saw the ‘sun’  about a week later….

I ordered it on the internet as soon as I got home. 2 boxes.

The website that sells this product is called REGENTERATIVE NUTRITION and this product is especially recommended for auto immune issues. My friend Val had recommended this to me a few days earlier and I hadn’t yet managed to find it. Because it didn’t occur to me to just google it. Silly me.

 

So, now I am awaiting a LARGE order of Serrapepase from Vitacure.co.uk in Liverpool to arrive, and the Immunkomplex from Switzerland (should take about a week) and I have bought more Pycnogenol from Mulberry Bush. The first lot came from our Hoylake Healthfood shop Honest to Goodness. I like to share my shop between the two – I’m a loyal customer to both small, local businesses in my two home towns.

Roasted loads of leeks, peppers, onions, carrots, celery and a few tomatoes and made a soup with them. Enough to last 3 days for both of us.

05/03/15

NO BOUNCE today.

Oh dear. As I was doing some research I came across information about Pycnogenol – and discovered that it is the WORST thing for auto immune issues – it makes them worse. I immediately stopped taking it and wondered if that was why I had started getting worse again. I had a headache again all day yesterday and its here again and my ankle is feeling weak and achey again.

I know when things are getting worse – symptoms, head ache, weak aching neck (hardly hold head up) wrists, ankles, painful hip joints. Tired. Nausea.

After a rest day with just a little cleaning I realised it was full moon. I rang my Sound Healing teacher (I’m doing a diploma in sound healing as there are lots of things I don’t know about yet, such as using tuning forks and harmonics to heal) to ask for an extension on my case studies, as I’m not well enough to work. He said no problem.

We talked about using the power of the full moon and the energies on the earth from Sirius at the moment, and I decided to work with these for my healing and the highest good for all tonight during the full moon.

At 8.00pm on the full moon we always do transfiguration a healing practice, joining in with others around the earth and we did that. It was really deep and peaceful. Si lit a fire and we smudged ourselves, the space and our drums with copal, sage and palo santo. We did our transfiguration by the light of 3 candles and the fire. Then we drummed and journeyed for healing for ourselves and for all of life.

It was a beautiful, peaceful and healing evening.

 

 

06/03/15

I feel so much better today. I’ve typed up this blog and will put it up in a minute when I’m done typing. Then lunch.

Veggie day today. Veggie day yesterday too. Si cooked up some lentils to add to the soup to make it a bit different. Had it with wholemeal spelt sourdough bread yesterday. Despite feeling crap, I managed to make a lovely sabji – spicy Indian cauliflower, potato and paneer cheese dish with rice and peas for dinner.

The Serrapeptase arrived in the post and I upped my dose of these, plus remembered what Di had said about 1000mg of vitamin C three times a day with food, to increase antioxidant action. I drank water every time I passed a tap.

Today I am feeling much better. Did a long dance this morning – the FAME workout, most of it. Then 40 minutes of meditation and prayer.

Today we are having the last of the roasted veggie soup and then aubergine curry with the last of the sabji for dinner.

Do I feel better because of the healing/drumming, the Serrapeptase, the water the vitamin C? I think all of it. HOLISTIC thinking. ENERGY VIBRATION physical, mental, emotional and spiritual aspects must be attended to.

 

So, no stress. MENTAL Calm, peaceful, do only what needs to be done, think Peace and quiet.

PHYSICAL Food, water, supplements. Exercise, dance and chant and sing, JOY and endorphins.

EMOTIONAL Love, peace, meditation, calm, breathing

SPIRITUAL meditation, joy, journeying, prayer, GRATITUDE, LOVE, APPRECIATION all bring healing and balance.

 

My Healing Journey

 

I’m sharing this journey in a blog in case it turns out to be useful for anyone else suffering with any auto immune disorders or diseases. Plus, I need to keep a record for the Hospital that is monitoring me and for my own records.

 

#autoimmune #uveitis #fibromyalgia #rheumatoidarthritis #autoimmunedisease #autoimmunedisorder #selfhealing #alternativemedicine #complementarymedicine

 

I thought that this physical healing journey began with a ride on the back of my hubby Si’s Harley over the moors of south west Wales, when I discovered floaters in my right eye as I leant back against the sissy bar and gazed up into the deep blue summer sky. But really it was earlier than that.

 

I think I began to get ill around 2010 as my boys were leaving school. I can’t remember if I was still working at their school sharing tools for life in the ‘Amazing Lyfe Project’, or if I was just there for a teacher meeting for one of my sons. Either way, I was talking to a teacher, who shared my interest in meditation, who told me that she had been diagnosed with Fibromyalgia and she described to me symptoms that almost exactly matched my own. I had not long finished my master’s degree in Consciousness Studies and Transpersonal Psychology and was embarking on a PhD in that subject. I had teenage twin sons, was just getting back with my husband after years of difficulties and life was quite full on.

 

Then, at the age of 45, my muscles had become so weak that I was barely able to lift a pan off the stove. I started to wake up in the night to terrible muscle pains that were like torture, I had cognitive issues, memory and thought processes all messed up and I had no energy at all. Also, I was in the process of rebuilding my marriage after having recently got back together after several years of major stress and disfunction.

 

As a very well trained and experienced healer, counselor, yoga teacher, authentic power practitioner and shamanic practitioner etc. I had many tools to use and they had already helped me through many years of challenges. I had knowledge about diet and nutrition, the importance of hydration, exercise, blocked emotional and mental energy, patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that were useful and not, rooted in love and trust and rooted in fear and doubt. I had all the tools and I needed to use them.

 

I gave up the idea of the PhD and decided to go back to our farm in West Wales thinking that it would be less stressful and would enable myself and my lovely hubby, handicapped as he is by the fallout of a brain tumour, to do the work we are most capable of and love. We could run a spiritual retreat business. Si would cook and take care of the land. I would create the retreats and run them, offering healing, chanting, chakra work, poetry and creative retreats, shamanic work, all sorts of wonderful health inducing, holistic events to nourish and nurture people. We could restore ourselves and offer the tools for healing to others as well.

 

What I hadn’t counted on was that running a business is SUPER STRESSFUL for people like us. We are just not designed that way.

 

By October 2011 I had set up a regime to get that fibromyalgia sorted out. And it worked. I wasn’t willing to ‘buy into’ the disease and become a victim of it. Friends gave me books on this illness, links to support groups, websites etc. but I didn’t want to go that route, do I never looked at them. Nor did it feel right to me to go the allopathic route, i.e. via doctors, medicines etc. I think they are wonderful when necessary, but we rely too much on them and I want to take responsibility for my own health and wellbeing.

 

So, since October 2011 I have a daily holistic wellbeing practice from Monday to Friday, which includes 30 to 60 minutes of exercise and however long of meditation I need. The exercise is a mix of dance and yoga. I use many different home video dance routines from ‘Salsacise’ to Yoga Boxing, the FAME workout to the Hotpants workout. Other days I just put on my playlist for dancing on ‘shuffle’ and just let it take me where the randomness takes me.

 

I dance until I am sweaty, my heart’s racing and I’ve had enough and then I cool down and chill out with yoga, making sure I always stretch my spine to keep it flexible at least several repetitions of cat, dog, downward facing dog, cobra, child and tree poses.

 

I drink more water, haven’t done dairy for over 20 years – I eat goat and sheep’s cheese (not too often) and take goat milk in my tea, nut milks for everything else, have cut out wheat (it stopped my hot flushes too!) and eat even less red meat than I did before. I eat lots of vegetarian and vegan meals, but also I eat chicken, fish, turkey and I still have a thing for good quality sausages and bacon as a treat. Vegetable soups and a variety of salads are the mainstay of my diet now.

 

Within months all the symptoms of Fibromyalgia were gone. The pain had stopped, my muscle strength returned and I had more energy. The more I moved the better I felt. The more time I spent out in nature the better I felt. The more I meditated and spent time relaxing in a deep peaceful state the better I felt.

 

I also had a hip issue – solved with ‘Solemate’ insoles – turns out I have flat feet and some arthritis in my hips. One day I woke up and found that I could hardly climb the stairs. Serrapeptase, a natural anti inflammatory from silk worm protein, along with MSM (methylsulfonylmethane – a plant based sulfur often used for arthritis, inflammation). The health food store told me that it would take a few days to see any difference if it worked for me. Within 24 hours I could run up and the stairs. It was amazing!

 

But there was one real issue that I hadn’t changed in my life. I was still focused on sharing healing tools with the world, supporting others, working to alleviate suffering in the world and bringing more love, balance, healing, peace and compassion. I worked really hard all the time to find ways to give that to others, as I had seen and been around so much suffering in my own life. The one place I never really tried to give love, peace, healing, compassion, balance and attention to was myself.

 

Although I was doing most things right, I was still working too hard and not giving to myself enough of what I needed. So, another issue came along to get my attention.

 

Rheumatoid Arthritis is something that runs in my family. My granny and mum had it. My sister has had it and I have it too. Most of the time there are no symptoms, stress makes it flare up. RA is an auto immune illness. So is Fibromyalgia. So is Uveitis. I see a pattern here…

 

In October 2014 I went to an optician to get my eyes checked. They ripped me off for loads of money, more than Si and I earn in a month between us, selling me glasses for reading and distance work. The reading glasses I need. The long distance were the rip off – and the whole package, including eye tests cost me more than I wanted to pay. Still there you go. The vision in my right eye had been getting bad – with white flashes, the odd dark spot or shadow and lots of floaty things in my eye, like bits of hair on my eyeball that never went away.

 

These are called flashes and floaters and need to be checked out incase they are precursors to retinal detachment, when the retina comes away at the back of the eye. So, when the optician said this was all just aging I left with four pairs of glasses (by one get one free) and an empty purse.

 

Then, about 3 weeks ago, on Monday 16th February Si, my lovely hubby persuaded me to get a second opinion on my eye. I was reading in bright sunlight and with my right I couldn’t read a single word with my glasses on. I got an appointment that afternoon and the optician wanted me to go to A&E asap. I got an appointment the next morning. The doctor in the eye clinic was young and lovely and spent ages doing tons of horrible tests concluding that there was inflammation in my eye and he couldn’t even see the retina to see if there was any damage. I needed to see a consultant. He was on holiday. So I went to my GP and asked for a referral to the specialist eye clinic in Liverpool at St Paul’s. I got an appointment a day or so later.

 

After doing some research on the Uveitis.org website, which was recommended to my by the consultant I saw at A&E in Wirral I sat on the sofa and cried and cried. I was really scared. You will get an idea why when you read the post I shared on facebook, which is below.

 

First I must say this. After sobbing on the sofa and feeling very sorry for myself I went to bed. I woke up in the middle of the night at 4.00am and remembered that my close friend Prema reminded me that this time of night is the most powerful to meditate, get in touch with spirit, do healing work. So, I meditated. I did a shamanic journey for my eye, asking what it needed to heal. I connected to my inner wisdom and my body’s intinct and my emotional understanding. I listened to my heart, my soul, my body. I paid attention.

I found peace. I knew that this was a powerful healing journey for me and that I would grow in love and wisdom from taking this path. I saw a symbol for what my eye needed – like a warm, bright sun and I understood that this was a time for doing deep healing work for myself, in order for me to move forward in sharing healing work again with the world.

 

I decided to get off the computer, get lots of rest, stop all the work I was doing and focus, FINALLY, on MYSELF. I shared on facebook what was happening and then buggered off into my girl cave for some DEEP HEALING WORK.

 

Here is what I put on facebook….

This is what is on my mind today… I’ve had various hospital appointments at the local Hospital and at the specialist eye clinic at St Paul’s in Liverpool during the last two weeks and have now got a diagnosis for my 80% loss of vision in my right eye and the flashes and floaters that make it like looking through a greasy window with a lacy curtain over it.

I have unilateral intermediate ocular inflammatory disease. That means I have inflammation in one eye. WOW can they come up with a dramatic name for swelling! The doctors all believe that this is an auto immune disorder and at this present time their treatment of this problem is still a bit hit and miss. Because really they don’t know what it is.

Mine is not as bad as some. It often leads to blindness, if there is an area of liquid in the centre. At this point they have said my scans show that mine is not that bad, there’s no liquid.

I was offered two treatment paths. One by each hospital. I had been warned that the two options would be very different, quite contradictory and that neither would be good.

My choices were one to three years of chemotherapy, in the form of immune suppressant, like you would give someone after a kidney or heart transplant to stop the immune system attacking the eye. Followed by a vitrectomy, which is sucking out the vitreous fluid from the eye with a needle and replacing it with synthetic vitreous jelly. This should solve the issue if all goes to plan – they said.

I DON’T FUCKING THINK SO MATE!

The other option was to put me on a very high level of steroids for a few months, which they said may lead to osteoporosis in the future. This option may need repeating again if the disease were to flare up again, which is common.

I do not feel at all comfortable about either option. NOT AT ALL!

I decided to begin to treat myself with natural anti inflammatories, which so far they are very pleased to say are working. I am also going to take a natural immune balancer. My friend Val found me these ages ago, well, the Serrapeptase anyway, which managed to get rid of the inflammation of my arthritis really fast a few years ago. The hospital being brilliant and have agreed to monitoring my progress, as they are aware that their own treatment paths are not ideal and would have some unpleasant side effects. They are supporting my choice and we hope that if it works as well as I hope, then it would be another option that they could also offer.

If the situation does not continue to improve I will, of course reconsider their pharmaceutical approaches. This disease is quite rare and they have no idea what causes it in many cases, including mine. They are really shooting in the dark here, so my plan is as good as any. At least there are no side effects and the anti inflammatories that I am taking work well for my arthritis too, so I am familiar with them.

I will let you all know how it goes.

I thought I would share this as people keep asking where I am and why I appear to have disappeared! So that’s where I am – I’m in Wales, working on healing myself.

So, here is my blog carrying on from the facebook entry.

A few weeks ago I was diagnosed with Uveitis and told that it was a serious auto immune disorder that can lead to blindness.

As a healer I decided that I wasn’t going to accept the terrible treatments offered and with the support and assistance of the local Uveitis clinic at my nearest big hospital I have begun my self-healing journey.

I am sharing it because I feel that it may benefit others who suffer from an auto immune disorder who wish to take personal responsibility for how they manage their own health.