The Gift of Illness

There are certain defining moments in the history of a long-term illness that stand out from the steady stream of trials that becomes one’s new life. The first such event is the recognition that all is not well.

For me this occurred on a spring evening in Victoria, British Columbia. Lucy and I were taking a course offered by our friend, Samantha in Jin Shin Do, a comprehensive form of acupressure body treatment. We were staying in her apartment and having dinner together. A bottle of red wine was opened and we each filled up a glass. The food was good, the companionship was better, I was having fun and feeling relaxed, but within a short order of time, I developed a raging headache that lasted more than 24 hours.

Over the past two years I had progressively been getting more headaches to the point where I was suffering from them several times a week. At the same time, I was becoming more sensitive to a host of foods and alcohol. Until that evening, however, if I limited myself to a couple of glasses of wine, I had not had a problem.

Until then, I had explained away my headaches and food sensitivities as the outcome of too much stress, resulting from a recent separation of a long-term marriage, becoming involved in a new relationship with Lucy (wonderful though it was), financial pressures and operating a full-time counselling practice. That evening, however, I came to the conclusion that this was more than just stress. Something was physically wrong, and I didn’t know what it was.

Over the next several months I made various decisions about how to lower my stress level. Regardless of what I did, however, my headaches kept increasing. It wasn’t long before I was having headaches every day.

For someone who had always been physically active, healthy and thrived on an active life, it was not easy defining myself as being ill. The diminishing definition of who I was in this world changed from being a healer, a father, a son, a partner, a friend, a hiker, etc., to being an ill person. Looking back on this period, I realized what a shock this was for me. I believe now that this changing concept of who I was in this world had as much of an impact on me as the physical symptoms themselves.

Another defining moment, a couple of years later coincided with an event so powerful that most of the world sat up and took notice. By the time the horrors of September 11th occurred, I had been through the full gamut of medical intervention to no avail. My symptoms continued to increase, compounded by the addition of various pharmaceutical substances that were destroying my body and mind. Being a believer in natural healing, I tried every approach I could think of, but nothing made a difference. Continuing my career, supporting ourselves and paying off the mortgage on a house and property on the beautiful west coast Quadra Island were important to me, but I was becoming more and more desperate. I was worn down, and didn’t know how to continue.

Beyond the similar reactions that everybody else had that awful day abut the people who were senselessly killed, I went through a very personal set of questioning. While I had huge political qualms with the hegemonious American military-industrial complex, that the Pentagon and the World Trade Center symbolized, I recognized that I must have bought into it on another level. If nothing else, they at least had represented what was secure and impenetrable. If they weren’t secure, who and what was, I wondered.

In the days that followed, Lucy and I finally came to the decision that had been brewing for several months. With my illness, we could no longer count on building a secure life in the normal fashion. It was time to focus on healing. For both of us, this must take the form of giving up home and careers, parting with family, friends and pets for a while, and travelling to Asia to look for other approaches to healing.

Two months before, I had been listening to one of my favourite folk singers, Utah Phillips, at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival talk and sing about wandering. In one of those rare moments of life, it triggered a powerful yet unexplainable calling that had been with me ever since I was a child. (For a more detailed account of this, click onto the story ‘I Wish I Was a Wanderer’.) For many years I had known and embraced the calling to be a healer. To pursue the mythology of being a wanderer, however, was far more threatening to the values of a middle class lifestyle, and had been suppressed. In ways that I couldn’t explain then, I knew on a visceral level that healing and wandering were deeply connected for me, and that I simply had to follow upon a journey that I didn’t have a clue as to its
outcome or destination.

Many amazing and profound experiences presented themselves to me in our time in India and Thailand that I now embrace as gifts of ‘divine love’, although for the life of me I can’t even begin to define what I mean by that term. (I am presently in the process of writing a book on this whole journey.) One moment stands out for me, which occurred not more than a couple of kilometres from where I am writing today in Chaingmai, Thailand.

We were still new enough to Asia that simply being on the street was an adventure in itself. You have to understand that in Asia urban areas life is centred on the street. People are buying or selling their wares on the street, on the sidewalks, bulging out of small shops or carts, they are moving in what appears to be chaotic directions, they are rushing, they are loitering, they are gabbing, they are napping, they are watching, their vehicles are making noise and spewing pollution as they weave in and out of a stream of maddening traffic, some are smiling from so deep in their bellies that it lights up the entire street, day or night, while others are scowling, pulling in the darkness, some are begging, others simply want to meet you, while others want to take advantage of you for their own profit. There are colours and smells and sounds and visceral connections waking up all the senses, whether you want them to or not.

We were passengers in a tuk-tuk, a mythological beast that has the head of a bike and the back of an open carriage, usually big enough to hold two people, although here any number of passengers is possible. In the old days the driver was peddling a bicycle, and there are some old timers around still doing this. The vast majority of tuk-tuks have motorcycle engines that sputter and roar and spew out exhaust onto the street. Being two cylinder engines, they burn oil with gasoline, and sometimes even propane (so much for going green), resulting in noxious fumes. It doesn’t really matter, however, because when you are a passenger in this open-air vehicle, you are riding at the level of all the other exhaust pipes, which are also spewing out their guts which are fast tracked right into your lungs. The drivers are usually quite the characters and if you get one who speaks a few words of English you can have quite the intriguing conversation, once you get the point across that you really don’t want to hire him for the full day at inflated prices to take you to all the boring and expensive tourist sites.

Anyway, here we were in the back of one of these beasts going down Thaphae Road outside the old city. Everything was exciting, and even through the fog of a migraine headache, I felt fully alive. Although I didn’t know where our lives were headed at that point in time, I had been coming to the realization that my illness and the life I had been living were more deeply connected that I had previously thought. I heard myself saying to Lucy “I no longer want a life in which I go against my grain!” It sounds corny, I’ll grant you that, but for an instant, silence and stillness descended upon the cacophony of the street. ‘My grain’ – ‘migraine’. Sure, these words are spelled differently, but the metaphor was clear enough.
I had, in a sense, come full circle. I was no stranger to the essential truth that my illness was not just of the body that was separated from my life. I had known for some time already that it was a pretty bizarre notion that we could blindly drag our bodies along a conflictual path in life, and somehow expect it to take care of itself. And when it started screaming out in pain and discomfort, we could assume it had nothing to do with us. Likewise, it had been obvious to me that we couldn’t just bring our bodies to a healer, natural or allopathic, and once it was fixed and returned to us, carry along in the same old way.

I had begun, several years before, by challenging the stress level that I had put myself under. Fair enough, but the term ‘stress’ has become such a euphemism for dealing with things on a surface level. The truth that was whispered in this moment of silence was that my journey had to be about challenging the core issues of how I had been going about living my life, and that this discovery had to become part of my healing process.

Yes, there was something physically wrong at this point in time, that was deeply imbedded in my body. Emotional healing, on its own, would not be enough. I also knew that I couldn’t do it alone. I needed a gifted healer to diagnose and offer solutions. But I had to be part of this healing with some pretty fundamental challenges to myself. I didn’t have the answers yet. In fact, I still wasn’t even sure what questions to ask. But from that defining moment on, I knew that it had to be a collaborative venture in which I was fully involved in a different way.
It wasn’t until more than two years later that I was finally diagnosed properly. In this period I had been through an endless cascade of hope and despair. With some healers I found temporary relief from my symptoms, but they always returned. In my personal journey I discovered new ways of being in this world that forced me to appreciate my headaches as a difficult but profound teacher. At other times I reached such despair, that I seriously began to contemplate suicide on one occassion.

Through a string of serendipitous events I wound up in the office of Dr. Greg Blaney in Vancouver. Within several moments of talking with him, I intuitively knew that this was the person who would help me through my difficult struggle, although it took another few months until he recognized that I had Lyme’s Disease. In a nutshell, this illness is caused by small bacteria that live in the saliva of a biting insect, such as a tick. Sneaking into the body like a terrorist attack, it moves into the white blood cells, causing havoc within the immune system itself. It is an autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks the body in a futile effort to defeat this intelligent invader. Sounds a bit like some reactionary politicians we all know. My case was so severe, according to Greg, that I was lucky to be alive. (If you want more information on Lyme’s Disease – not reactionary politicians, go to: www.marshallprotocol.com).

There is a very difficult and prolonged treatment protocol, which can take two years or more to succeed. It is a constant and escalating process of detoxification in which many symptoms are elevated. I was fortunate, however, that my headaches stopped immediately, even though I have had to deal with many other unpleasant conditions. I am now within 6 months of finishing this treatment, and questioning how I will once again re-enter the world.

What I now know is that I had unconsciously laid the groundwork for these nasty bacteria to thrive in my body. By living a life of conflict and confusion, by making many decisions on many different levels over years and decades that went against my true grain, I created a body/mind in conflict, thus weakening and confusing my immune system enough that the bacteria found this a haven for settlement. There is an interesting theory that the immune system is our only true identity. The immune system is the only biological system that distinguishes the difference between ‘me’ and all else in the universe, and then decides what is safe and useful to allow into the biological community that is me, and what is threatening that needs to be excluded or defeated. It is really not a big jump to the recognition that a confused or conflicted mind eventually filters down to an equally confused and conflicted immune system.

But what I have also been learning on a deep visceral level is how to work together with the medical treatment by creating a different climate within my body/mind that is creating fertile ground for becoming healthy once again. This is not something that can be done once and then finished with. It is an ongoing process of becoming more self-aware or awake, involving every day of my life. Every step along the way I come upon fascinating tests, such as learning how to lovingly challenge myself to be the person that I am meant to be. Through many moments of confusion, doubt and conflict, I eventually find clarity, and in these special moments I feel strong and balanced.

I still don’t know what the answers are yet. Maybe I never will. But the questions that I need to challenge myself with are becoming clearer. And one of these questions is how to fully give gratitude to these little ‘nasties’, who have given me the opportunity to open up to learning some of the most profound lessons that life has to offer. In essence, they have forced me, on a daily basis, to bear witness to who I am and what I am doing. Maybe these are the messages of divine love which I so strongly need to listen to.

Life works in mysterious ways. Stranger things have happened.