The "slot" canyon near Red Hills Desert Garden
(St. George, Utah)
The picture was taken just before my brother and his friends persuaded me to follow them into the "slot canyon." I guess "slot canyon" is a euphemism for a tiny crevice between two cliff faces in St. George, Utah. Needless to say, I got stuck several times and regretted the moment I abandoned my better judgment and caved under peer pressure.
This update is about an amazing experience I had recently, working with a patient stuck in the slot canyon of life. We've all experienced what it's like to feel stuck, and fear that we're going to just wither and die between a rock and a hard place. If nothing else, these experiences leave a profound impression, highlight our Achilles heel, and deliver intense lessons.
The Slot Canyons of Life
An amazing story about one patient’s efforts to get unstuck
"Oh, I don't feel very well. I feel dizzy," Ben moaned unhappily over the phone.
He was shaking violently and began wretching and vomiting repeatedly by the side of his parked car.
"My hair is falling out!" He cried in alarm. One of Ben's symptoms is a burning sensation in his scalp and severe, sudden hair loss where his hair practically "jumps off his [sic] head."
Ben is in his 40's and has intense hypersensitivity to electromagnetic frequencies. He gets headaches and feels awful around cell phones, TVs, and light bulbs, etc. Other holistic treatments he's tried before, including supplements, had failed to help, and his medications have "stopped working." Alcohol and Xanax provide temporary relief even though he doesn't want to use them. A lot of times, he ends up sitting in the dark, ruminating about his situation and feeling very, very stuck.
I started working with Ben by phone at the beginning of May, and we had just started our fourth session. He woke up that morning free of anxiety "feeling like himself [sic]." He had not felt that good in years.
"Great," I thought. "Energy medicine seems to be making a positive difference for him (although he felt dizzy, nauseous, and sad in the midst of doing energy work each time)."
So, for our fourth session, I decided to do a guided visualization, using intention to connect to Life Energy (the idea of an infinite source of perfect energy) and to visualize love and peace filling each cell of his body with light. About five minutes into the meditation, Ben began to experience dizziness, nausea, shaking, vomiting, hair loss, and anxiety. I'm sure we were both thinking, "What the heck?! It's love and peace, not fear and violence!"
It was the clearest example of the connection between energy and biology that I had ever witnessed, though not quite the reaction I was hoping for.
My assumption was that Ben was experiencing an intense detoxification process triggered by, well, love and peace. Whatever "it" was that was making Ben sick obviously fled when love and peace entered his cells. For Ben, that translated into vomiting, hair loss, and diarrhea.
After wretching several times, Ben joked about feeling like Han Solo right after he got unfrozen from carbonite--his first joke in years. I started to laugh and Ben soon followed, laughing and crying at the same time.
I did my best to reassure him. "It's the energies of love and peace. Love and peace won't kill you." I hope.
Ben worried that this horrible reaction to love and peace would never go away. He had similar experiences in the past when he was trying out different holistic approaches. Each time, he would quit out of fear that the treatment was harming him.
From my experiences, however, stressful reactions from energy work (if they occur), tend to dissipate after three days. Afterward, the patients would experience a significant improvement in their health. I shared this with Ben and told him that if his reaction didn't stop in three days, we could always set another intention to try to stop the process. He agreed to hang in there and endure whatever comes.
Over the next few days, I tried to help him as best as I could, suggesting lots of water, cruciferous vegetables, kudzu root, an essential oil called Peace and Calming (by Young Living), and Energy Breaths. Just being over the phone with him seemed to help as well.
By the second day, all the initial symptoms had disappeared except for "intense lethargy." After the fifth day, he was able to go out with his parents to a restaurant and was smiling during his visit with them. Hopefully, he will continue to get stronger, and I will find gentler ways to apply energy to help him feel better.
This is not the first time that I had worked with someone who was stuck in their illness with no way out. Years ago, I worked with a young woman in her 30's who was bedbound. Her hair was falling out and her teeth coming loose. Like Ben, she could not tolerate any supplements. She used energy medicine to heal herself and get off Phenobarbitol in four months. I couldn't believe what she was able to accomplish.
She told me that during the first week of intense energy work, where she did Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) for several hours a day (her idea, not mine), she felt extremely thirsty and drank a lot of water (about a gallon a day) to help her with the detoxification process. The next week, she noticed that she yawned a lot when she did energy work. Perhaps yawning was a subtler form of detoxification or release of negative energy. (Once, when I was in a Reiki class, a group of students assigned to send me healing energy from another room caused me to yawn repeatedly. I lost count after the tenth yawn.)
When doing energy work, many don't realize the connection between energy and biology. It's easy to think of the two as separate despite an intellectual understanding that they are one. Ben dispelled any remaining misperception I had about that forever.
When shifts in energy show up biologically, it then follows biological channels of function. In this situation and in many others, replacing harmful energies with helpful energies requires physical housecleaning. How does one sweep out the trash? Well, anyway one can, apparently. It may feel awful and appear alarming, but if understood as a temporary detoxification process, it might not seem quite as sinister.
From a spiritual perspective, I learned the hard way that I'd underestimated the power of love and peace. Rather than fair maidens floating into cells bestowing goodwill wherever they land, they charged in, like no-nonsense soldiers with semi-automatic weapons, forcing the riffraff out of town. I've gained a newfound respect for these two energies and will be using them with a little more caution from now on.
Sometimes when we are stuck in the slot canyons of life and have run out of options, it might surprise us how our thoughts and intentions can immediately shift us from our predicament. Love and peace. Never underestimate the amount of power these energies hold when we need a helping hand.