Recently, the notification of the suicide by a patient with Lyme came across on a Lyme group I’m a member of. Unfortunately, this is not a rare occurrence. Lyme may not kill directly the way a disease like cancer does, but the hell it causes for the patients and their families makes suicide a common form of death for Lyme patients. Early in my battle with Lyme, I read this speech made by Joseph G. Jemsek, MD, FACP, AAHIVS made before the North Carolina Medical Board on July 20, 2006. It became deeply seared into my brain, and I have unfortunately found out firsthand how true it is:

I was in high school when HIV and AIDS were finally starting to be understood. One of my youth group leaders said to us at one point, “You kids don’t understand how big of a deal AIDS is going to be.” (We’ve all suspected that he died from AIDS-related cancer a few years after that, but for religious reasons, his true medical history was not given to the public.) AIDS was the most terrible disease anyone could imagine at that point. Yet only 20 years later with the rapid innovations in HIV treatment, a doctor who works with both HIV/AIDS and Lyme patients clearly states that the Lyme patients are the ones with the inferior quality of life.

Unfortunately, suicide is not uncommon among those with Lyme because the quality of life that Lyme and accompanying tick-borne diseases leave people with is so low. There are a variety of reasons that can lead to patients taking their own lives. First and foremost, Lyme causes horrible physical pain that leaves them living in a hellish existence. Many have difficulties finding doctors to prescribe adequate pain relief as they’re seen as drug seekers and/or because of restrictions due to the “war on drugs.” For many pain doctors who don’t understand late disseminated or chronic Lyme disease, they can’t tell nor do they believe how bad the pain really is.

Getting treatment for Lyme disease itself is also difficult due to medical politics around Lyme disease. The nearest medical practitioner to Austin who openly treats Lyme is in a suburb outside Dallas; the second nearest doctor is in Louisiana and is over a six hour drive away. (There are others who practice covertly within Texas, but one won't find them on an internet search.) When I was first diagnosed with Lyme, my chemical sensitivities were too severe for me to be able to travel out of Austin to find treatment which greatly limited my options. For others, their difficult financial situations prevent travel and seeing doctors who are out-of-network. Many years ago, there was a nurse practitioner who used to openly treat Lyme in Austin, but she now practices in Washington, D.C. due to Texas Medical Board politics. Both the doctors who treat Lyme and the patients with Lyme suffer greatly due to these political issues when treatment is difficult to administer and receive.

The fatigue that accompanies Lyme is debilitating for many. At the worst of the illness, I wanted to end my marriage, but I could not because I literally could not take care of myself. I required a caregiver to buy me food and prepare it for me quite often. I couldn’t drive myself to the doctor. I couldn’t walk to the mailbox to get my Netflix discs (before the days of streaming) to keep me entertained. If I’d left my husband, I would have lost custody of my children because I couldn't have taken care of them in any meaningful way. Without my children, I would have lost everything that was important to me at that point and I would have had no reason to keep living.

Many Lyme patients are put on drug such as antipsychotics and antidepressants which carry suicide risk warnings. When I first began having severe Lyme related symptoms, my caring but misguided primary care provider decided I was suffering from postpartum depression and tried to convince me I needed an antidepressant. That is a fairly typical for most people who are dealing with the overwhelming symptoms of Lyme: Their doctors decide that this bizarre and long list of symptoms they are reporting must all be in their heads. Rather than pursuing testing and realistic solutions, the patients are put on drugs that have a potential to do more harm than good. The antidepressant that most doctors chose as a first line of defense is one that subsequent genetic testing has shown that my body cannot detoxify. Thus, taking that drug could have made me very ill or even suicidal.

Lyme can also cause mineral imbalances that cause emotional instability: I've experienced this personally when a sudden zinc deficiency cause a severe round of depression and crying. Imbalances in brain chemistry can happen with Lyme patients as well. Unfortunately, most practitioners aren't looking to find these simple-to-treat causes of depression and so patients don’t get the supplements they need to remain stable. 

Likewise, the extreme lack of quality sleep that can accompany Lyme disease can lead to suicidal thoughts. During the worst years of the Lyme battle, I was only getting one hour stretches of sleep even though I was sleeping 12-16 hours a day. Continuous sleep deprivation can destroy one’s body and mind, creating all kinds of dysfunction. There's a good reason sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture.

Soon after I was diagnosed with Lyme, a friend with Lyme warned me of a severe depression that can accompany Lyme dying off. Another patient with Lyme also talked to me about it at a later date. The toxins released during a Lyme die off create a depression which makes the entire universe seem blacker than black. It is dark and awful; it defies description in ways that are unspeakable because of how horrid it is. It in no way resembles situational depression or minor depression that most of us have experienced at some point in our lives. During the Lyme induced depression, nothing in one's thoughts is accurate. I always knew that the hellish blackness would only last 48-72 hours, but there were times when I wasn't sure I would be able to make it through those few days of complete darkness.

It's not uncommon for friends and family to disappear into the woodwork over the course of a patient's Lyme struggles. When I first began having symptoms and had no diagnosis, many of my friends and family members didn't understand. Some did things that were physically harmful to me even though my ex-husband and I asked them to stop: They thought my chemical sensitivities were just delusions. Others thought the whole thing was delusional because surely no one could have as many symptoms as I was having and still have a normal CBC. They also falsely assumed that doctors can easily diagnose everything in this modern day. One of the default responses of people is that when they don't know what to do or don't know how to cope, they abandon the person in need. This happens all too often to Lyme patients who after years of suffering find themselves down to only a core group of friends who really care, and in some cases, they might not even have that.

Financial ruin is not unusual for those with late disseminated Lyme disease. I was blessed to be married to a man who earns a very successful salary. He was able to keep supporting me when I was no longer contributing to the family economy. His job provided decent health insurance, and while it doesn’t cover anywhere near half of my medical expenses, it does still pay on some of them. I applied for and upon appeal received SSDI, but the cost of my Lyme-related treatment has been over twice what I receive from SSDI in most years, and that doesn't even include needing money to pay a mortgage or eating or any of those other pesky living experiences. Were it not for my ex-husband, I would not have been able to afford the treatments that got me well. Healthcare and wellness are still a privilege of the wealthy in this nation, not a universal right.

When watching an ILADS conference video a few years, one of the keynote speakers, a doctor who was one of the best known in the field, told those attending something similar to the following: “If your patients didn’t have PTSD before they got Lyme, they will have it by the time they reach your office. They will have spent years and thousands of dollars going to doctors who don’t believe them and who can’t help them despite the fact that they have very real health problems.” The emotional distress of PTSD from health-related problems cannot be undervalued: It alone is enough to cause depression and suicidal idealization. This doesn't have to be, though, and it shouldn't be. If doctors were educated on Lyme treatment and insurance companies were willing to pay for it, the quality of the lives of patients with Lyme would increase rapidly. Instead, however, many Lyme patients are left broken, broke, and alone at the end of their battle. Is it any wonder that they choose suicide over a life of continuing struggle and pain?

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

(As always, I am not a medical doctor. This information is based on my personal experiences and should not be substituted for medical diagnosis or treatment. Please speak to your health care providers about your personal situation.)

Everyone knows that when you exercise, you might feel tired initially, but all those endorphins you get pumping through your body will help you feel better in the long run. Soon exercising will increase your energy. Right? Wrong! This may be true for the majority of the population, but for those fighting chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS, also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis and systemic exertion intolerance disease) or Lyme disease,* the exact opposite may be true. Exercise has the potential to make these groups of people VERY sick for several days after they attempt to exercise.

This negative response of the body to exercise in the CFS population is known as post-exertional malaise (PEM). Studies have shown that PEM is not an exercise phobia: It is a physical response in those with CFS that does not exist in the healthy but sedentary control populations. While there are contradictory studies regarding fatigue related to CFS, they are problematic in their methodology because they aren’t evaluating patients the day after the testing to follow through: A study by Keller et al has demonstrated how the contradictory studies that aren’t evaluating the correct information on people with CFS and exercise impairment may overestimate the patients’ functionality by 50%. Thus, some patients with CFS can do well on a cardio test, but the next day, they won’t be able to move. Another study by Van Ness et al showed that 85% of the general control population had recovered from testing exercise 24 hours later, but ZERO percent of the CFS population had. That’s a huge difference in the world of statistical validity.

In addition, these studies that have patients doing 15+ minutes of cardio exercise are studies on the best coping patients in the CFS population. These are the people who complain that their CFS limits them to less than eight hours of activity a day as opposed to the people who, like I was previous for two years, are bedbound and unable to do more than take a shower and sit up for an hour daily. The worst of the worst in the CFS population are too sick to even consider participating in studies like these! They are the people who are counting their spoons very carefully, and they can’t spare energy for anything beyond basic bodily needs.

PEM is a hallmark of mitochondrial dysfunction for those in the CFS population. Dr. Amy Myhill was one of the first to develop a protocol to address the role of mitochondria in CFS, a protocol I tried in 2007 or so with limited success. As Myhill describes it:

In short, this means that the body’s batteries can’t get enough juice to power the rest of the body. If your batteries can’t recharge quickly and efficiently, then your ability to function is impaired. Anyone who has had a slow-to-charge cell phone or a laptop battery which couldn't hold a charge for long can get a rough impression of what is going on in a body with mitochondrial dysfunction. It becomes very frustrating and very limiting very quickly.

So how do those with PEM rectify this issue? Aside from protocols like the Myhill one, the best advice is to limit one’s activity on any given day to what one can tolerate. As Myhill phrases it, “Pace - do not use up energy faster than your mitos can supply it.” It’s a simple formula of supply and demand that also involves intuition and listening to one’s body. It also means understanding that while you may be able to walk a mile one day, for the next week you might not be able to walk 50 feet, and then in another week you can walk two miles. It’s an unpredictable roller coaster. I have learned the very hard way that when I start feeling certain pains in my body, I've overdone it, draining my mitochondria almost to their limits, and I need to stop whatever I’m doing immediately or the fallout will be terrible. Pushing myself to expand my limits, like I would have done with exercise when I was healthy, will only have terrible consequences. Thus, when my body says stop, I do it or I pay a very heavy price: I will experience what I call a crash or what many people would call a relapse. This crash will involve extreme fatigue that prevents me from doing anything but laying perfectly still on a horizontal surface while trying to endure the accompanying pain. It’s just not worth having to pay for an activity on the ensuing days. In previous years, my fallout rate would involve days or weeks of being crashed. Since beginning Lyme treatment, instead of paying for days or weeks, the fallout usually lasts no more than 24 hours, but it’s still too high of a price to pay for just a little more physical activity. I still have to strictly obey my body’s limits.

The issue of PEM contributed to the dysfunction in my previous marriage. My ex-husband was the one who had to take over when I crashed, intensely caring both for me and our young children instead of just caring for the children most of the time. Thus, he became incredibly fearful of my crashes and tried to limit my activity. He would tell me, “You can’t do that,” as a statement of fear-based control rather than love-based concern. He could not believe that I could discern when my body was going to crash once I learned to listen to it. Instead, he tried to hold me back from functioning at all rather than having to deal with the aftermath of the crash. While his concerns were understandable, the result was that it was miserable to try and do anything remotely social with him such as a walk in the park on one of my good days because he spent the entire time worrying about what the future might hold rather than enjoying the present moment. Even before we separated, I began avoiding activities with him for this very reason: I didn't want someone along who was going to make the activity miserable and anxiety filled, even if he was doing it from a justifiable place.

Researchers have recognized that post-exertional malaise is so conclusive of a symptom of CFS that it can be used to validly differentiate between the healthy and the CFS populations. However, that acceptance of PEM has not trickled down to most health practitioners or the general population. Most people still blindly believe that exercise is the cure for all that ails you. While exercise has been proven to help those with depression and a wide assortment of other health issues, those with CFS need to be very careful in how they use their limited energy in order not to cause further suffering. If you know people with CFS, please understand that they are not being obstinate or lazy in refusing to push their limits. Rather, they are protecting their own well-being by doing what their bodies tell them is best and that research has supported.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

*I suspect a very large portion of the patients with CFS actually have late disseminated Lyme disease but have not been tested using the proper procedures. This was the case for me as I lived under a CFS diagnosis for six years before being diagnosed with Lyme. CFS and fibromyalgia remain my legal diagnoses because the CDC does not recognize late disseminated Lyme disease.

(As always, I am not a medical doctor. This information is based on my personal experiences and should not be substituted for medical diagnosis or treatment. Please speak to your health care providers about your personal situation.)

May all who are sick and ill
Quickly be freed from their illness,
And may every disease in the world
Never occur again.
As long as space endures,
As long as there are being to be found,
May I continue likewise to remain
To soothe the sufferings of those who live.
~The Dalai Lama

For many people, pain is pain. They have been blessed never to experience the amazingly wide variety of pain that the human body can endure. In the case of many women, natural childbirth or recovering from a c-section is their gauge of the highest level of pain they can imagine. For men, there isn't quite the same standard of comparison. I have heard many people of different sexes say that passing kidney stones was the worst pain of their life; for others, the pain of shingles is the ultimate misery.  Having endured shingles in my neck and having successfully completed natural childbirth many times, I would say that shingles were worse than my second and third labors for the births of my second thru fourth children. My first labor and birth, however, were far worse than any of them.

Yet when it comes to late disseminated Lyme disease, the levels of pain I have experienced are nowhere near the levels of pain in these other comparisons. In part, that is due to the unrelenting nature of Lyme pain. Childbirth labor will end within 24-48 hours in our modern culture. C-section recovery time is 2-6 weeks in many cases. But for Lyme, there is no definite time table. It just goes on and on. I tell many people that if I were able to put their spirits into my body, they would immediately pass out from the level of constant and unrelenting physical pain I live with. I have built up a tolerance to the pain, and I have learned how to function somewhat well with it. Most people, though, simply don’t have that tolerance. Yet no matter how long I have lived with it, the pain is still miserable. It doesn't make it any better just because you’re used to it. 

Despite the fact that I am a holistic life coach and intuitive energy healer who focuses on helping others heal through natural solutions, I frequently have people tell me how they cured their non-Lyme pain naturally. Based on their limited experience, they feel I should be doing what they did and I will magically be healed. They talk about how turmeric did amazing things for their pain or how other natural anti-inflammatories were miracle workers. However, that level of relief is not appropriate for Lyme pain. A comparable comparison would be like telling someone with a compound bone fracture that s/he/ze should just put a bandage on it, and everything will feel so much better. In that case, the person needs a skilled surgeon or doctor to put his/her/hir bone back into the body, to seal the broken skin, to apply a cast of some sort, and to monitor for infection or complications. The situation is far too complicated to just use a bandage. Likewise, no one in their right minds would tell women who are in labor or just had c-sections that the only methods of pain relief they should use is turmeric. Even if a woman is attempting natural childbirth, she will be using other pain relief techniques such as walking, acupressure, hypnosis, meditation, breathing, massage, and more in order to manage the pain of labor.

That’s not to say that natural pain relief methods aren't helpful. I do take fish oil, a natural anti-inflammatory, and get some relief from it. I’m pretty sure that if one sliced open my veins, they would be dyed the beautiful yellow-orange color of turmeric from how much I have taken it over the years. I use other herbal formulas to help lessen the pain by addressing other issues besides inflammation that cause pain for me. Yet alone, the natural methods are like putting a shovelful of dirt into a grave: It’s nowhere enough to fill the hole. Even in combination, these methods can’t get the pit even half full.

Why is Lyme pain so bad? That’s a million dollar question, and the researcher who is able to understand and cure it will win a special place in heaven if I had anything to do with it!  Lyme creates pain on many different levels: On any given day, I am dealing with muscle, bone, joint, ligament, organ, and neural pain. Each feels very different, and each requires different approaches for relief. But why is there all of this pain, especially when one is going through treatment for Lyme? The best analogy is a comparison to a bee sting.  When a bee stings a human, it releases a toxic venom into the human’s body which makes the human miserable, fatally so in cases of extreme allergy. In other cases, the bee toxin “just” creates severe inflammation, itching and pain. Regardless, it’s a successful evolutionary method of teaching predators like humans to stay away from bees lest they have to face the consequences of a sting.

Likewise, Lyme has evolved into an amazingly sophisticated bacteria, far moreso than most bacteria we are used to dealing with. The way it adapts and impairs the human body is mind-boggling to me.  One of these protective features of the evolved Lyme bacteria is that when it dies, it releases toxins into the body of its human host causing extreme pain. The Lyme doesn't want to die; thus, it tries to make it difficult and undesirable for the human host to kill it.  Survival of the fittest reigns again. Many patients who have fought late disseminated Lyme will tell you that the cure is almost worse than the disease when it comes to Lyme because of the extreme pain that happens during the process of Lyme die off, also known as a Herxheimer reaction or herxing.

So what can one do for Lyme pain? There’s a variety of approaches to take, and many people find they need more than one. Like I mentioned above, fish oil, turmeric, and other anti-inflammatories can be useful in contributing to the overall picture, but they will not be enough on their own for most people.  A strict diet is absolutely necessary: Sugar, refined foods, gluten, and other items can make the pain much, much worse. There are other herbs and natural substances that can also help bind to and absorb some of the toxins that the Lyme releases as it dies including chlorella and l-ornithine.  Because the buildup of these toxins in one’s system can create even more pain, it’s important to make sure that detoxification and elimination processes in the body are working well. This includes taking herbal and vitamin liver and kidney support, having frequent bowel movements, drinking lots of water and sweating such as in a FIR sauna. Massage, manual lymph drainage, chiropractic, and acupuncture as well as other bodywork modalities can also greatly facilitate the detoxification process.

The neuropathic pain I suffer from is also an indirect result of the Lyme die off. When many people are sick, their blood sugar levels will rise as part of the hormonal process that is helping them heal. When blood sugar levels get high enough for long enough, such as during a chronic illness, they can cause neuropathic pain that is hellish in ways that can’t be expressed in words. The burning and tingling sensation of my entire skin surface hurting is unlike any other; it makes me want to peel off all my skin with a potato peeler because that sounds less painful.

The obvious solution to this is to keep one’s blood sugar low through strict diet and herbs.  Despite devout adherence these methods, my body is stubbornly unwilling to lower my blood sugar levels; this is not uncommon among patients with Lyme. Since I am consistently short of being diabetic by lab testing because of a rigorous diet, my doctors cannot prescribe insulin to control my blood sugar; one of the other most popular blood sugar drugs for those who are pre-diabetic sent me into lactic acidosis, an uncommon but known side effect. (I’m not in the high risk group for it happening, either!) While I absolute detest medicating symptoms rather than dealing with the actual cause, the neuropathy I endure is one situation where the only realistic option has come down to medicating the symptom of pain rather than curing the actual problem in order to get through the pain of the battle in order to win the war. It’s a quandary because killing Lyme is raising my blood sugar, but in order to get rid of the Lyme to lower my blood sugar, we have to kill it. There’s no easy solution on this one. So in order to get me through the process of the Lyme dying, we have to mask the miserable side effects with drugs.

For someone who lives a very holistic life and does not partake in alcohol or recreational drugs, I am unbelievably grateful that there are western drugs to provide pain relief when all of the above is not enough. I have only met one person with severe late disseminated Lyme Disease who did not have to take narcotics at some point to get through the pain; it was a matter of principle for him and he chose to be in hellish pain rather than take the drugs. Most who have walked this path, though, will have no judgment of others who turn to high power drugs to help during the most painful parts of the journey.

I think many in the natural healing community, both patients and practitioners, forget that Western medicine does have a place of importance in our lives. While diet is crucial to successful management of diabetes, those who have diabetes, especially those with Type 1, rely on insulin to survive. Up until insulin was understood and used to help those with diabetes in the 1920s (winning a Nobel Prize), being diagnosed with diabetes was a death sentence. Likewise, I had a great aunt who died as a toddler early in the last century from “lockjaw” which we now know as tetanus. It’s a bacterial infection that can now be prevented through vaccination or in milder cases, treated with antibiotics after infection. These are health conditions that require Western intervention; most people don’t deny that.  What most people haven’t accepted is that late disseminated Lyme is a condition that also requires complicated treatments that involve both holistic and Western medicine.

Lyme pain is truly different than most other pain we experience as humans. It’s a pain that I hope that most people never have to endure. I also hope and pray that someday there will be better solutions for killing Lyme without creating so much pain as part of the cure.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

(As always, I am not a medical doctor. This information is based on my personal experiences and should not be substituted for medical diagnosis or treatment. Please speak to your health care providers about your personal situation.)

I use both mainstream Western and complementary medicine. Both have areas in which they are superior. For cases of violent physical trauma and of extreme physical pain relief, Western medicine has complementary medicine beat without question. In most other cases, I prefer to start my healing with complementary medicine.

One of my major issues with Western medicine is that most doctors are looking to provide symptom relief. If you have high cholesterol, they want to medicate the symptom rather than finding the source of the elevation. Diet changes may be suggested, but often there are other issues at hand that are ignored. If you are depressed, the Western doctors want to give a pill rather than looking at what might be causing the depression. If your thyroid is low functioning, they only want to put you on a thyroid medication rather than asking what is causing the thyroid to malfunction. In contrast, complementary medicine often (but not always) looks to find the underlying cause behind the pain and treat that. It’s about looking for the root of the issue to eliminate it long term rather than just finding immediate relief.

I see so many cases where people are being misdiagnosed by doctors who don’t dig deep enough for the true cause of issues. Using the example of severe anxiety, most doctors go straight to psychiatric medicines to control it without looking at the causes of the anxiety itself. While most people will have life stresses going on that are contributing causes, many others may have chemical imbalances in the brain that can be corrected through supplements and diets rather than just numbing the anxiety with drugs. For me, anxiety is usually a sign of parasites. A psychiatric medicine is not going to kill parasites; I would only be masking symptoms rather than treating the cause. I know of women whose anxiety is cause by hormonal imbalances due to hormonal birth control, but rather than change birth control methods, they choose to take another pill to medicate the symptoms of the first pill. For others, including me, anxiety may be a sign of spiritual or emotional issue that requires a type of healing that just isn't available within mainstream western medicine.

If you are struggling with a symptom that you feel that your doctors have not found the true cause of, please consider working with an intuitive such as myself. I will *never* ask you to stop taking your medications without your doctor’s consent, nor will I judge you for taking them: I understand from personal experience that Western drugs very much have their place in healing. What I will do is give you healing paths to explore with your doctor or with others whom I can recommend. If you don’t feel like you are getting better, then I can help you find changes to make that can change your quality of life radically, and in some cases, eliminate medications you feared you were going to have to take the rest of your life.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

(As always, I am not a medical doctor. This information is based on my personal experiences and should not be substituted for medical diagnosis or treatment. Please speak to your health care providers about your personal situation.)

Health issues go through popular fads just like foods do. The latest food cure-all at one point was açai; goji berries got prime billing for some time, too. Kale and chia have been the health food darlings for a while now, so it’s about time for a new “miracle” food to be marketed. With regards to healing trends, vitamin D deficiency was all the rage for several years. It truly exists, and solving it helps many people. However, just because it gives some people relief doesn't necessarily mean it is the root of the problem. It’s often just a symptom of other larger issue.  

The most recent health “fad” that I've seen in this regard is the MTHFR genetic defect.  There are actually multiple genes that relate to this detoxification process, and I have two of the most common defects involved. I can’t tell you how many people have approached me absolutely certain that they've discovered the root cause of my health issues and how I would be miraculously better just by switching my B vitamins.  This is not news to me, and no, it was not a miracle cure.  It actually didn't make any impact at all upon my health in the grand perspective of things.

Any good holistic professional will already be aware of MTHFR defects, and most will be able to recommend B vitamins that are in the correct form for those who have MTHFR defects. In my case, we actually didn't do the genetic testing until about a year ago; we just correctly presumed based on my symptoms that I had the defects and treated me appropriately. The only reason we ran the tests when we did was because they were included in another genetic profile that my pain specialist wanted to run.

While many people believe that MTHFR defects are the cause of health problems, I believe they are often a symptom of a larger issue. I suspect (but cannot prove) that this is an epigenetic situation: Until an insult to the body occurs, the methylation problems don’t manifest for many individuals. In my case, it was Lyme disease that activated the problematic genes and left me with major detoxification issues.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

 (As always, I am not a medical doctor. This information is based on my personal experiences and should not be substituted for medical diagnosis or treatment.  Please speak to your health care providers about your personal situation.)

A few nights ago, a friend messaged me saying she had hives that she couldn't pinpoint the cause of. I have already done a full healing message for this friend, and once I have established a connection with a person’s spirit guides, it’s usually pretty quick and easy for me to answer shorter questions like, “What’s the source of these hives?” The process is more like a conversation with the other side than when I am doing an initial healing message; there’s a lot of back and forth with me asking questions and them providing answers.

As the friend and I messaged while I simultaneously talked to the other side, we were able to pinpoint an emotional stress that was triggering the response; it tied into some deep emotional issues that she now knows she needs to work through. I also was able to give her some book references to help her explore those issues further. Along the way, I began seeing my deceased grandmother’s hive triggers which weren't the same as this friend’s triggers. However, the process of helping my friend helped me gain some additional insight into why my grandmother would sometimes get hives. For my grandmother’s situation, there was always a physical trigger (new dish soap, working in the yard, etc.) but this message also helped me understand some of her emotional issues that may have been part of why the hives manifested.

Synchronicity being what it is, later that evening I was watching Hart of Dixie (season 2, episode 16) on Netflix wherein one of the characters was having hives for a very similar reason! It’s always nice to get wild and random confirmation from the Universe.

As we concluded our messaging, the friend wrote, “I knew you would help. Nothing was making sense so....” That made me laugh because it’s so true. When things don’t make sense, I can often figure out the reason behind what’s going on. That’s one of my superpowers. I’m grateful for that gift because it’s what helped me heal when my health care providers were out of ideas.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

As I continue my search for resources for the spiritual singles meetup that I am about to start, I stumbled upon a book that actually will be one that I recommend to many future clients, not just those in my group. Guided Imagery for Self-Healing by Martin L. Rossman, MD, turns out to be one of the best books I've read on metaphysics, and yet it's a book that specifically avoids spirituality and discussion of energy work for most of the book. Like most medical doctors, Rossman was educated in a system that puts a great deal of skepticism on the “hocus pocus” of faith based healing despite studies proving over and over again that prayer, meditation, and other aspects of spirituality can significantly increase speed and success of healing. As a result of his years of work as an integrative practitioner who understand the many aspects of healing, Rossman wrote a fabulous book that could appeal to those who are highly spiritual and those who are atheists alike.

Rossman and I use very different terms to discuss the same phenomenon; his are more neutral and mine are more explicitly based in spirituality. What Rossman is essentially describing in this book about “imagery” is using one’s intuition to tune in to one’s body to listen to what it has to say. This is the premise of most of the healing work I do:  Helping others learn to listen to what is going on in their bodies so that they can find the connections that Western medicine is missing. For Rossman’s perspective, individuals turn to their “internal advisor” or what I refer to as a spirit guide. He uses the term “imagery” for what I would describe as meditation.

Because he is grounded in science, Rossman integrates medical studies throughout the book. He talks about how visualization stimulates the brain in ways we don’t understand in order to help the body heal. As a method of comparison, he discusses how thinking about certain foods may make us literally salivate. This same phenomenon is at work, in his opinion, when we use imagery to help heal what ails us both physically and emotionally. We are able to gain insight into the issues behind our pain and then heal them by using imagery. In the case of someone fighting cancer, this might involve visualizing T-cells attacking a tumor. Rossman describes this (in what he admits are oversimplified terms) as using our right brain to heal instead of our left.

Citing studies, Rossman states that 50-75% of illness may have emotional roots. I’d say that the number is actually much higher and nears 100%. Regardless of how many people are impacted, Rossman cites the widespread emotional repression in our culture as a big part of that problem. He sees imagery as a way to get in touch with those things we've learned to repress as we avoid difficult emotional issues. The imagery he teaches people to use works to heal the people, not their illnesses. This is an amazing view not often found in Western medicine, though as Rossman notes repeatedly throughout the text, it’s important to seek medical treatment in addition to doing imagery work. The book contains chapters that deal with self-confidence, stress relief, healing and inner advisors; Rossman also adeptly deals with potential problems that may come up along the way. Some of the guided imagery sessions he creates in the text are also available on CD for use during meditation sessions.

For me, there were only a few issues with the book. What Rossman is describing is metaphysical work, yet he’s adapted it in a way to make it scientifically more acceptable to the mainstream. In doing so, he neglects the idea of spiritual protection. What he describes as critical inner advisors can sometimes be negative entities or deceased individuals who do not wish us well. The approach Rossman suggests of standing one’s ground is very effective for dealing with most deceased individuals, but for entities, one often needs more help than that to banish them. However, to acknowledge these issues would make Rossman’s book inaccessible to those who are turned off by ideas of the metaphysical realm and/or are atheists.

I found it very hard to stomach the idea of spirit guides as “inner advisors,” though the way Rossman presents the ideas is one done with respect to those of all belief systems. By taking this route, he limits what individuals can do with those "advisors" they make contact with.  I can clearly see the advantages to this, but when I recommend this book to most of my clients, I will be making sure they know how much further they can develop these ideas with an understanding that spirit guides are not creatures of our imagination. They are real, just as you and I are real. Spirit guides just live on a different plane of existence than we do. It says a lot that it’s more acceptable to a science-minded population for us to create an imaginary friend to help us heal rather than accepting that higher powers may be interacting in our lives.

Rossman is also very conservative in encouraging people to change their lives radically. I don’t have that fear. Sometimes people need to turn their lives upside down in order to find healing. Rossman also assures readers that most people don’t have to deal with the horribly deep and dark issues they've repressed; I’d disagree with that as well. I think that for true healing to happen, those issues will eventually have to be confronted. However, if one follows one’s inner guidance and works in slow steps to heal as the body and soul need to, once it comes time for confronting the major issues, most people will have done the pre-work necessary to make the confrontation far less painful than it would originally have been.

In the updated version of this book that I read, chapter 15 is a dry history of body-mind healing, and chapter 16 is a summary of the science behind body-mind healing. For most readers, these chapters will not add to their experience and I’d recommend skipping them. I suspect they are at the end of the book for this very reason. Many readers would quit reading if they were introductory chapters.

Overall, Guided Imagery for Self-Healing is one of the better books I've read on meditation and healing from a mind-body(-spirit) perspective. I've already recommended it to one person, and I plan to recommend it to several others after this review publishes and I can send them the link. I’ll also be using most of the guided meditations with my spiritual singles group as they are wonderful resources for everyone who wants to heal on multiple levels.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

(spoiler alert and trigger alert regarding the death of a child)

My kids and I continue to work our way through Star Trek: The Next Generation. We’re now watching season 7. In episode 7, Counselor Deanna Troi’s mother Lwaxana Troi is aboard the Enterprise as a diplomat assisting with communications with a telepathic race. In the process of working with this new species, Lwaxana begins to have debilitating fatigue and headaches. The medical doctors and others on the crew suspect that her overuse of her telepathic abilities with this new species has drained her. Eventually, Lwaxana collapses and enters what we would describe as a coma.

However, the truth about Lwaxana’s collapse was far more dastardly than just exhaustion. One of the members of the telepathic species, Maques, believes that there is a part of Lwaxana’s mind that she has shut down. As Deanna and Commander Will Riker investigate the past to see what Lwaxana might be repressing, they find a great number of missing years in Lwaxana’s journals, supporting Maques’ theory that there is something major that Lwaxana is hiding. Eventually through a mind meld of sorts, Deanna is able to help her mother’s subconscious process the truth about a situation that was so painful that she’d had to deeply repress it until it festered and caused her body to collapse. The trauma involved was that Lwaxana’s oldest daughter Kestra (Deanna’s older sister whom she’d never previously known about) died in a tragic accident when Deanna was only a baby.  Lwaxana blamed herself for the death of her elder daughter. The pain of losing her child was so excruciating that Lwaxana tried to block it all out so that she could avoid and forget the pain.  Eventually that mental and emotional pain caught up with her and shut down her body.

This isn't science fiction. While the details of the case are very much fictional, the reality of how the body, mind and spirit interact is true.  It is entirely possible for us to store our pain in our mind and our body eventually leading to our body’s collapse. For most of us this process doesn't result in a spontaneous coma. Instead, we have unexplained back pain, fibromyalgia, the flu or cancer among many other health issues. I am in no way denying that all of these conditions have physical, biological roots as well. The flu, for instance, is a virus. However, why is it that with two people in the same family with the same diet one might get the flu every year while the other never gets sick? Clearly genetics may play a role, but stress and other life experiences also condition our bodies to be predisposed to illness or health.

As someone who has experienced the unexpected and tragic death of a child, I know firsthand that it is something that is so traumatic that it could eventually destroy our health if we do not thoroughly process our grief about the situation. The pain that a child dying causes is unlike any other pain in the world.  It’s excruciating. Every day the bereaved parents wake up to feeling that part of their future has been stolen from them. Their empty arms may literally ache from the absence of their child, and they almost certainly will feel the pain of heartache in their chests. In my case, it took thirteen years of work in order to fully process the pain that came from my daughter’s death, in part because I thought I had already processed it all. I didn't realize that there were subconscious memories stored in my body that I still needed to release. Once I finally released those traumatic emotions, I finally found true peace around my daughter’s death.

When we face health challenges, it is important that we work not just to eliminate the pathogens or the pain but that we also relieve and release the emotional pain that is often behind our poor health. This is not always something straightforward and easy. It sometimes takes time to find the roots of our pain or illness and work through them. This process is entirely possible, but oftentimes it requires the assistance of a professional such as me to clarify the issues behind the problems. Lwaxana needed the assistance of Maques and Deanna to go into her mind and find her issues. While I definitely can’t meld with anyone’s mind, I can speak with higher powers who help me find issues stored within the bodies of clients so that they can release whatever is making them ill. I've gone through this process myself; it is what helped me to regain my health after many medical professionals had given up on me. Working with the mind-body-spirit connection can provide incredible healing for us in the real world just as it did for Lwaxana Troi in the fiction of the 24th century.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

This past week I was battling strain B of influenza.  It was not much of a battle though: I succumbed to hanging out on the couch reading and watching tv for the most part.  My one son was also home sick with it for the first two days so he guided the Netflix viewing on those days.

On my own on Wednesday evening, I watched Stonehearst Asylum which I had put into my queue some time ago.  Netflix has it categorized with a lot of horror movies, but I would describe it more as a mild psychological thriller.  I don't do horror movies, and I don't handle movies with a lot of violence or suspense, but I had no issues with most of this movie.

The movie begins in 1899 with a male Oxford University medical school lecturer presenting cases of medical illnesses to his students. The attitudes presented towards women and “hysteria,” a now-extinct description of emotional issues arising from the uterus, are horrifying but unfortunately accurate for beliefs of the time.  At the end of the scene, the doctor proclaims, "Thus, I caution you all, gentlemen, as you embark on your careers as alienists [psychiatrists], believe nothing that you hear and only one half of what you see."  Sadly, that’s not a 19th century attitude.  It’s one that many doctors, not just psychiatrists, still hold today.

As the movie unfolds, the main character of Dr. Edward Newgate meets a woman in the Stonehearst Asylum who is clearly suffering from what we would call PTSD but who is not mentally ill at a level that requires institutionalization.  One of their first discussions brought a great laugh to me:

Lady Eliza Graves:  Are you quite certain you're a doctor?
Edward Newgate, MD: Yeah, well, of course I am.
Graves:  Because I've never known one to apologize. Or, for that matter, give a damn who he offended.
Newgate: Well, I'm not like other doctors.

Again, it’s a sad truth that still applies to many doctors and healers today.  

As the movie progresses, we see what horrifying treatments of the period looked like; some are still in practice today including drugging patients into a manageable stupor.  We also get a glimpse into what it might be like if patients ran the asylum.  The difference in care is amazing.  During a concluding scene in the movie, the lead character Dr. Newgate tells another character in all sincerity and disgust, “You're mad.”  The other character retorts, “We're all mad, Dr. Newgate. Some are simply not mad enough to admit it.”  Again, it’s a statement that echoes with truth.

Stonehearst Asylum contains several surprising twists that kept me captivated all of the way to the end of the movie.  The themes of who is sane and who is mad continue to run through my head. The engaging characters also seem to have possessed my mind.  I really enjoy movies like this one that leave me with great thoughts for many days after.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Back on March 9th, I was jolted awake during the night to receive a message from higher powers.  I saw a symbol that I think was representative of a car battery not working.  I knew when I saw the symbol that my car battery or alternator would be going out soon. This alone is not shocking. My car burns through 60 month batteries every 12-18 months.  It’s the first time I've gotten notice about it, though. So I began parking my car facing out in the driveway so that it would be easier to jump or tow. Usually my car won’t start first thing in the morning if this is going to be an issue.

Jumping forward to this week, my oldest son came back from a spring break trip with influenza B.  Within 24 hours, I had succumbed as well.  Any time my kids or I get sick, I check in with higher powers as to what would be the best treatment path for us.  For my son, it was a goldenseal blend plus vitamin C.  For me, I got told I needed vitamin D plus other things that I am already on because of my Lyme treatment.

Two days into the illness, I went to see my chiropractor.  We’d texted beforehand, so he knew I was coming in with the flu; he knew as I do that chiropractic work makes it much easier for my body to fight whatever it is up against.  The session went well and was not unexpected for me:  My body was more interested in talking about the Lyme that was rapidly dying off because of the fever the flu is inducing.  

On the way home, I ran into a local establishment where I had called in an order for several salads so that I wouldn't have to prepare foods over the next few days.  I was in the store for less than two minutes (and I took germ spreading precautions), but when I went back out to the car, it would not start.  I was feeling terrible and wasn't at home; this was not where I wanted to be stuck.  Mercifully, one of the employees was able to jump my car and chatted with me from a safe distance while we waited for enough juice to start my car.  

Five minutes later, the car died while I was going 55 mph on a major road coming home.  Thankfully, I was at the top of a hill, and when I got to the bottom of the hill, I was able to pull over next to an inlet area.  There wasn't enough power in the car for my flashers to even work.  The temperature was only in the 70s, but it was 100% full sun.  I grabbed my Kindle and went to sit over on the blacktop inlet.  Between my fever, the sun, and the blacktop, I was sweating up a storm for the half-hour until my ex-husband could get there and get my car going again.

I’m sure if outsiders were to listen in to my conversations with my spirit guides, many would think me a madwoman.  Most of us talk to ourselves, though not all of us get answers back from unseen others!  Once I got home from the whole ordeal, I complained to my spirit guides about how hot and sweaty I was.  Someone responded to me, “That was the point!”  Clearly they hadn't meant that I needed Vitamin D in a bottle:  They wanted me to get it straight from the source with a good deal of sweating included.  

What’s amazing is that after I napped when I got home, I woke up feeling WAY better than I had in the previous 48 hours.  All of that sun and sweat had done me good.  In addition, my body had been able to tolerate all the chemical exposures to the engine and exhaust toxins along this adventure.  Not so long ago, an event like this would have given me a fibro flare at a minimum and most likely a bonus migraine, too.  My liver is in better shape and is handling chemical exposures better.  

When crazy things happen around me, I trust that higher powers are involved and there is a reason for it all even if I can’t understand it all.  I now have a translation for that symbol I saw in my vision, plus I know that I can handle more than I previously could with regards to exhaust.  Moreover, this flu is serving a major purpose in my life of helping my immune system fight off the Lyme at a faster rate than it could previously.  Never would I have thought that I would be grateful for the flu or car trouble, but here I am, seeing these challenges as unexpected blessings in my life!

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

In recent months, my kids and I have been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I watched a bunch of the episodes back in the 1990s in reruns, but this is the first time around for my kids.  It’s been fun seeing their reactions to the series, especially to “‘80s hair” which they love to ridicule.  For me, I’m seeing totally different things this time around than I saw twenty years ago.

In season six, many of the episodes at the beginning of the season were appealing to me for how insightful they actually are.  One episode in particular, “Realm of Fear,” deals with psychological phobias.  As a clear parody to fear of flying in our time, Lieutenant Barclay has a severe fear of transporting.  Ship’s counselor and empath Deanna Troi teaches Barclay a Betazoid relaxation technique known as plexing.  To engage in plexing, the person who is experiencing fear taps on a point on the neck behind the ear.  This point corresponds with gallbladder 12 in Chinese acupuncture; one of its uses is actually for regulating and calming the spirit.

As I watched this episode and as Troi began teaching Barclay about flexing, I immediately thought, “That’s basically EFT!”  EFT is short for Emotional Freedom Technique, and it’s an increasingly popular method of conquering psychological, emotional, and physical issues.   I've known people who have used it for releasing stored trauma, for controlling stress and anxiety, and for weight loss among many other issues.  While it is always great to learn a method like this from an experienced practitioner who is also able to assist with issues that might arise along the way, there are videos on the internet to teach it to oneself.

In EFT, which is sometimes just called “tapping,” an individual taps on a series of acupuncture points while reciting a formulaic mantra that s/he/ze adapts to the specific situation at hand.  So, for example, if I were dealing with stage fright, I would tap on the designated series of points while reciting to myself, “I deeply love and accept myself, and I am an amazing actress who feels completely comfortable on the stage.”  I would recite this mantra as I worked my way through all of the EFT tapping points.

I was first introduced to EFT about eight years ago.  To be honest, I absolutely hated it when I was introduced to it.  It made me feel awkward.  The formulaic mantra did not work for me.  Nothing about it felt right.  However, I was open to trying it because I had several friends who absolutely loved it.  Despite my efforts, it just didn’t seem like the right approach to me, so I gave up on it.  

A couple of years later, I began working with a group of chiropractors who use a different set of tapping points across the entire body without a mantra as they help process stored trauma.  They tap on the patients using the points that show up during an applied kinesiology chiropractic session.  This set of points actually rings far more true for me, and I will often notice that some of those points are the ones that hurt when I am in emotional distress.

As I developed my intuitive abilities, I began pulling up emotional traumas from this life and past lives that I needed to work through.  As the deep painful emotions came to the surface, I began tapping on my own.  I listened to my intuition, and I tapped where I was being told.  Most of the points are the ones that the chiropractors I see use, some are EFT points, but others are acupuncture points that aren't commonly used for processing emotional pain.  They are ones that I need to use, though.  I then formulate my own mantra that works for me for that particular situation.  For example, sometimes the mantra is, “The past is the past; I am safe now.”  Other times it might be, “I am alive and healthy.”  Whatever the necessary mantra is, it quickly comes to mind for me and I am certain it is what I need to work through that issue.  On my own, I have used tapping to help clear various stored traumas.  I couldn’t imagine not having that skill to help me in my healing.

As I began talking to my youngest child after we watched the show, I told him that plexing was a version of a technique that therapists use to help people with stress.  His response was, “That’s real?”  It was a surprise to him that there a similar successful method for handling stress; he had assumed it was totally science fiction.  Plexing may be a science fiction, but EFT is definitely not.  It helps many people to release stored emotions in their bodies and to find a greater peace than talk therapy alone can provide.  If you are searching for a new therapist or life coach, I highly recommend working with one who uses EFT or one of the many other techniques out there for processing the traumas that might be holding you back.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

I am dying from the treatment of too many physicians.  ~Alexander the Great

Over almost 12 years of dealing with chronic illness plus another 28 years of living, I’ve worked with many health practitioners.  One of the harder things for me to face is when I have to fire a practitioner.  In the case of general practitioners whom I only saw a few times a year, it wasn’t as big of a deal.  I doubt they even noticed when I switched to another doctor.  But when one is working with practitioners on a weekly basis, if not more frequently, intimate relationships develop that are harder to walk away from.  Still, it’s important to move on if one’s health care providers are not meeting one’s needs.

In the past, I often felt guilt when I have left a practitioner, especially when it is someone who has a great reputation in the healing community.  The guilt was because I felt like a failure because I couldn’t make the relationship with that practitioner work; that was an issue I had to work through to understand that there was no need for guilt. The truly best practitioners will not hold anger against you for moving on.  They will know that you are now meant to work with someone else.  Not every practitioner is right for every client or patient, and even if one practitioner is right for you at a certain point in your life, he/she/ze may not be right for you after a few years.  We all grow and change.

Psychotherapists are one type of provider with whom it can be very hard to find the right person to work with.  Sometimes you know right away that the match is good or bad, and sometimes it’s not as easy to figure out whether you should move on.  When I was looking for a therapist in recent years, it took five therapists before I found the right one for me.  The first woman I was with for five weeks, but she would just let me babble and stare at me before asking me generic questions like, “How do you feel about that?”  I prefer my therapists to interact more with me and guide me in my healing.  The second therapist was a wonderful woman whom I think will develop into an amazing practitioner, but she simply didn’t have the experience to work with someone dealing with my issues.  Another therapist I saw lasted eight weeks, though I knew after four that I should leave.  I was at a very stressful juncture in my life when I thought any therapist was better than no therapist.  Unfortunately, that’s not true.  This therapist was very patronizing and too emotionally detached from her clients.  While she has a great reputation among other therapists in the area, she was not the right therapist for an intuitive empath for me.  The fourth therapist I was with for four months; she was fabulous, and I still recommend her to others.  However, we hit a juncture where her personal issues interfered with my treatment, and I knew it was time to move on because she was not going to be able to meet my needs.  The final therapist who didn’t work out was one who immediately began to dump her issues on me, wanting me to heal her rather than her assisting me in my healing.  It took only two weeks for me to see that she was far too toxic of a person for me to work with.  After such a long road, the therapist I finally ended up with is an amazing woman whom I’ve worked with for three years.  She’s helped me to grow and change in amazing ways.  I’m grateful for all she’s taught me.  The journey to find her was long, but it was worth it in the end.

One of the other lessons I’ve had to learn is that reputation not everything.  Just because a person is supposedly “the best” in your area, that person may not be the best for you.  When my twins were born, I saw a lactation consultant who is often considered the best (probably because she tells people she is).  Unfortunately, she gave me a great deal of bad advice which created further problems with breastfeeding.  It was actually the lactation consultants at Mom’s Place, a WIC center to support breastfeeding mothers, who helped repair and save my breastfeeding relationship with my twins. I will always be grateful for how much they helped me.  Likewise, I spent many years seeing a local bodyworker who has an amazing reputation in the Austin healing community.  However, she was just not the right person for me and my body.  I’ve found others who have been able to make more progress in less time using the same modalities that she did.

The more frustrating situations for me to leave are ones wherein the practitioners are really talented and amazing people whose work I love but whose personalities become unbearable for me.  I saw one bodyworker who did great work, but by the time I quit seeing her, I was leaving her office feeling judged and criticized every single time.  I was resenting the time I was spending with her rather than benefitting from it.  While she was well-meaning, it was time for me to set boundaries to protect my emotional self while still getting the physical care I needed. Likewise, another practitioner I saw was amazingly gifted but his ego began getting in the way of our work.  He was unable to wrap his mind around the realities of my life, including my gluten sensitivities, and was issuing too much judgment about my personal life for me to continue seeing him.  He’s someone whom I really miss seeing, but the emotional toxicity was just not supportive of healing for me.  A third bodyworker I previously saw has narcissist personality disorder; she was suffocating to work with.  After leaving all of these practitioners, I talked with other people who had the same experiences with them which helped me to understand it wasn’t my issues causing the difficulties in these situations.

I’ve also learned the hard way that when a practitioner physically hurts me, it’s absolutely time to leave. Second chances just end up causing me more trauma.  In one case, I left my first appointment at a chiropractor’s office feeling emotionally and physically drained.  By the time I got home, I was in awful physical pain.  I had to get a massage therapist to fix what the chiropractor had done to me.  So many others had sworn to me about this man’s healing ability, but I didn’t experience it.  Fortunately, I had enough sense not to go back to him again.  In other cases, it took me more than once to learn the lesson.  There’s a local holistic dentist whom I saw for many years.  I struggle with anesthetics not working properly for me which means dental work can be hellish at best if I don’t have a compassionate practitioner who is willing to listen to me and re-medicate frequently.  This dentist was not patient, and he didn’t care if I was in pain.  The first time when he was doing work, it hurt, but it wasn’t bad.  The second time landed me in a PTSD state because the pain was so horrendous but yet he wouldn’t stop working on me because he told me that I was fine.  Had I heeded the lesson the first time, I wouldn’t have put myself through the awful pain I endured the second.

Beyond physical and emotional pain, practitioners can also cause spiritual or metaphysical problems.  It is VERY important never to let someone who is in an unhealthy altered state due to drugs and/or alcohol do metaphysical work involving contact on your body.  I unfortunately learned this one the hard way as a practitioner I had been seeing for a while attempted to work on me while intoxicated by cold medicine.  The result created an energetic mess that left me in physical pain and required a visit to another practitioner to clean up the damage.

It’s important to remember that if a licensed practitioner hurts you, there is recourse for reporting them to state boards. Psychotherapists, dentists, doctors, medical assistants, and acupuncturists, massage therapists, licensed midwives, nurses, chiropractors, and other practitioners all can be investigated for malpractice.  Please remember that filing a complaint will have serious personal and professional impacts on the person whom you are reporting.  While you should never hesitate to report an unethical or dangerous practitioner, the complaint process is not a way to air vendettas or deal with personality differences.  I have never filed a complaint against a practitioner, though I regret not filing one against the dentist who harmed me four years ago.  I also would have filed a complaint against the doctor who sexually harassed me when I was in college if I’d known that I could.  However, at that time I was uneducated about such things, and those were the days before the internet was what it is today.

When I have left one practitioner, the new one whom I switch to usually ends up being far more talented than the previous one.  The transition to a new practitioner can be stressful, yet I have always ended up in very productive and beneficial healing relationships when I follow my gut about moving on.

© 2015 Green Heart Guidance

The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz is a very popular book in spiritual circles, so much so that I could list all of the four agreements long before I read the book.  However, I felt that I should actually read this seminal work so that I could truly understand its meaning.

Ruiz presents the Toltec belief system around suffering and happiness in the world.  It argues that from the moment we are born, we begin making agreements with other people whether we actually want to or not. Our language is one of the first agreements: We have to share belief in the definitions of words in order to communicate.  We have to agree on social behaviors in order for society to function.  However, not all of the agreements we sign up for are healthy.  These are the agreements we make that shatter our self-esteem and our happiness.  They are the ones that teach us to judge ourselves and others harshly.

In order to break away from those beliefs, Ruiz presents four agreements which he argues will change one’s life if one is able to follow them.  The four agreements are:

Following these four agreements, one is able to slowly change one’s visions and beliefs.  One can break away from judgment, hatred, lies, and fear.  Instead, one can be reborn into a life based in love.

By being impeccable with one’s word, Ruiz is not just asking us to be truthful or to avoid lies.  Instead, Ruiz believes that our words create our entire world.  They are how we manifest positivity and negativity.  By being impeccable with our word, one will be able to “take responsibility for your actions, but you do not judge or blame yourself” (31).  Being impeccable means that we no longer call others derogatory terms because those words only reflect on who we are:  We will express ourselves in love instead of hate.  This is a challenge for most of us because the world we live in promotes both gossip against others and self-hatred. 

Not taking anything personally is a clear idea though one that is hard to put into practice for many.  When someone yells at us, we judge ourselves and believe we have done something wrong.  Instead, we should believe that they are yelling at us because of their issues and their upbringing.  The way they treat us reflects more on them than us.  Thus, we should not take their actions personally.  This agreement can help heal old wounds by helping us to rewrite history under a new lens.  By understand that people’s insults are based on their own insecurities, such as someone insecure in their own appearance attacking our appearance, then we can understand that the pain we took on actually belonged to someone else.  Enacting this agreement can eliminate a huge amount of suffering that we create for ourselves.

Assumptions are a part of our lives, and unfortunately, they undermine communication and relationships.  As Ruiz argues, if we have the confidence to stop making assumptions and to ask questions, our world will change.  Even if we are dealing with someone we have known for twenty years, we should never assume that they know what we want.  We need to be clear in our desires so that no one has a chance to make faulty assumptions.  Likewise, we need to ask others what they need so that we don’t make faulty assumptions either.  The saying “to assume just makes an ass out of u and me” holds true in this agreement.

Finally, Ruiz states that we should always do our best, though he is clear that our best will always be changing.  On the days we are sick or weak, our best won’t be as strong as it is on our healthy days.  That doesn’t mean that we should give anything less than our all, though.  However, it also does not mean that we should overdo it.  Furthermore, Ruiz believes that once we begin to do our best, we will be happier because we are no longer working for rewards.  We are working to do what makes us happy instead.

Ruiz states, “[The four agreements are] so simple and logical that even a child can understand them” (88).  He’s right, and that is one of my complaints about this book.  It is very simply written in many places.  It can also be unnecessarily repetitive.  The English teacher in me wanted to pull out a red pen to edit it down; this short pocket book of only 140 pages could have been far less than 100 and still been as successful. 

I also found Ruiz’s views a bit narrow at times.  His concepts about childhood presume that a child is not raised in an abusive home and that every child is loved and cared for properly.  That’s unfortunately not true.  Even by the tender age of two, some children have already taken on emotional, spiritual, and physical responsibilities in dysfunctional homes in order to protect themselves.  Furthermore, I think that Ruiz’s beliefs that positive visions can create anything are overly idealized.  While we can create our own happiness, we cannot visualize anything into being.  No matter how hard I try and how much I visualize it, I will never be a six foot tall runway model in this lifetime.  However, I can find happiness in my body as it is.  I just will have to find another career to enjoy. I also strongly disagree with Ruiz’s perspective on mental illness; I could fill an entire post just on that topic.

Despite the weak editing and its differences in view from my own beliefs, The Four Agreements is a book that has changed many lives and has the potential to change many more.  If you are looking to find a way to be happier in your life, especially if you are in a situation that seems impossible, this book could provide the foundation for you to work from.  I also think it could provide a great platform for couple’s counseling for partners who find that communication and compatibility have disappeared from their relationship.

© 2015 Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.  ~M. Scott Peck

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways. ~Sigmund Freud

Walking away from your feelings won’t prevent them from catching up with you.  ~Tina Donovan
 
Like many bloggers, I will check the keywords that people use to find my posts.  Mostly I do it out of curiosity and sometimes amusement, though occasionally a search term can be provocative.  One such recent search was on “eliminating emotions.”  I laughed that Google took someone to my site in search of that answer since my work is very much about dealing with emotions rather than repressing or eliminating them.

In short, it is not possible to eliminate emotions even though that concept might seem incredibly convenient.  We are all born with a mind, body, and spirit connection.  All aspects of us are integrally linked, and there is no way to separate them.    
We store our emotions in our body.  In recent years, organ transplants have become more common and have helped give us a very clear example of stored emotions.  Many of us have heard stories where recipients of organ donations might suddenly find themselves loving baseball when they previously hated sports or craving fried chicken when they were previously a vegan.  This results from the stored emotions of the organ donors.  When the recipients eventually meet the donors’ families, they usually find that their new likes and dislikes are the same as the donors'.

We especially store emotions in times of trauma when we can’t or won’t face them.  I once attended a spiritually oriented Meetup where a man proudly announced that emotions weren’t an issue for him.  He declared that he just stored his emotions in a box and shoved them away.  There was a palpable emotional cringe in the room when he made this pronouncement as so many of the other attendees recognized how unhealthy this man’s solution to emotions actually was.  When we store emotions in a metaphorical box, we are actually shoving them into our body.  There, the emotions fester until eventually they erupt into pain.  In some cases, that pain is actually part of a disease.  As Gabor Maté explains in When the Body Says No: The Hidden Cost of Stress,

We may think that by ignoring our emotions we are solving our problems in a quick and easy way, but in the long run, we will pay the price.

How these emotions manifest as illness varies widely by the person’s genetics, situation, and spiritual resolve.  There are multiple studies on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome demonstrating a much higher proportion of CFS patients have a history of childhood abuse.   Unfortunately, the media and many health practitioners have misinterpreted that this means that sufferers of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome have simply made up their symptoms as part of a mental illness.  However, CFS is definitely not at all “in one’s head.”  CFS is a result of infections and an adrenal system that has been blown out by years of constant intense stress due to that long-lasting abuse.

Some who have studied the impact of emotions upon the body have found patterns in how emotions manifest into pain and illness.  Heal Your Body by Louise Hay provides a list of the patterns she has seen over the years in how pain presents in many individuals.  This website gives a summary of many of the symptoms and illnesses contained in the book.  In my experience, I find that the book’s contents are often true or very close to the truth for most individuals.  Heal Your Body is a great place to start in trying to determine what emotional and spiritual issues might lie behind your physical pain.

So what do we do about these stored emotions in our body that can cause us pain and illness?  It’s important to clear those stored emotions.  In my personal experience, I find pain relief when I process something that I’ve stored in my body.  It frees me and leaves me happier in the long run.  It can also decrease the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and general stress.

There are many ways to do clear stored emotions; the best way for one person may not be the best way for another.  Talk therapy is a great way to start, but I’ve found that one usually needs to do something to actively involve the body with the psychotherapy process in order to clear those stored emotions.  Emotional Freedom Technique, EMDR, massage, acupuncture, yoga, craniosacral therapy, and energy work (like I do for my clients) are all great ways to help relieve the stored and festering emotional pain in our bodies.

Emotions may seem pesky.  In my own life, I’ve seen people around me who want to eliminate emotions.  Whenever my ex-husband and I would have a fight, I would experience fibromyalgia flares that would last at least 24 hours.  My ex-husband asked me to get my chiropractor to help me find a way to detach my emotions from my body so that I wouldn’t have to pay a physical price for our marital conflict.  Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that way.  Our bodies, our minds, and our spirits are intimately linked, and in order to fully heal, we must address all parts of ourselves as an integral unit.

© 2015 Green Heart Guidance

(As always, I am not a medical doctor.  This information is based on my personal experiences and should not be substituted for medical diagnosis or treatment.  Please speak to your health care providers about your personal situation.)

Sorry, guys.  I know it’s not a topic you find fascinating for the most part.

Like most women, menstrual cramps have been very bothersome for me at various points of my life.  I do not have endometriosis, so my suggestions may not be of use for those with more severe pain.  However, I have found a few things that help make life a little less painful in this regard.

When I was having problems with cramping in college, I was advised to change my diet:  No chocolate and less sugar.  Those are not recommendations that a woman with PMS wants to hear, and at that point, I didn’t have the willpower or desire to follow them.  I wanted an “easy” magic solution.  However, as I’ve aged and I’ve had to make far more severe changes to my diet, I’ve found that it does affect cramping greatly.  The most important thing for me is eating organic.  It really does reduce the cramping. 

What I’ve discovered overall is that the more I’m detoxing, the worse the cramps can get.  Our bodies have to detox all the chemicals we are exposed to, including pesticides on conventional foods.  Menstruation is one of our bodies’ ways of detoxing:  It is a means of elimination just like mucus, sweat, urine, feces, and vomit. Thus, eating organic is helping reduce my cramps by reducing the amount of toxins I’m exposed to.  However, I also find that the more chemical exposures from being out in public in scented places, the more intense and painful my cramps are in a given month.

At some point along the line I read somewhere that orgasm can help relieve menstrual cramps.  I’ve found that sometimes it helps for a very short while, but sex is not usually on the top of one’s list of things to try when cramps are bad.  (However, this is the part of the article that I’m sure many guys would find interesting!)

Cramp bark is an herbal option to help reduce menstrual cramps.  I learned about it during my last pregnancy at the recommendation of my midwife when it really helped with intense Braxton Hicks contractions.  It also can help reduce the cramping pain during menstruation.  In tincture form, it’s pretty strong tasting, but if you follow it with a chaser of a strong tasting beverage (like orange juice), you can get the taste out of your mouth fairly quickly.

One other correlation that I’ve found is that when Lyme is dying off intensely in my body at the same time as my period, the pain from both gets worse.  I’m not sure what the exact mechanism of this is, but I suspect that it has to do with the total load of pain my body is dealing with creating an exponential rather than linear increase in pain.  I’m not alone in dealing with this phenomenon:  Many women end up with menstrual cycles and Lyme cycles happening at the same time, and it can create a great deal of misery.

© 2015 Green Heart Guidance

Many therapists and life coaches are fond of journaling or writing as a way to release emotions.  Occasionally, I find it very helpful to use writing to bring issues to consciousness.  However, I have found for me personally, the act of writing about something doesn’t actually release the stored trauma.  For that, I need to do metaphysical or physical work after the journaling has begun the process.  

On the many occasions when I have used journaling or freewriting in order to help me get all my ideas out on paper, I find it helps me to see patterns in the issues I was dealing with.  I have also written many unsent letters to people to help me get closure when getting true closure wasn’t possible.  I use both the old fashioned pen and paper method as well as composing on a computer.  It depends on what I am processing as to which method feels better for me. For me, prose is the best way of voicing my thoughts and emotions.  For others, though, writing poetry and song lyrics can be more helpful.  Regardless of what specific approach works for you, getting things on paper can be a great way to understand your emotions. 

So where to start?  Many people suffer from a brain freeze when faced with a blank piece of paper and a writing device.  If you are working with a therapist or life coach, that person may be able to help guide you in selecting topics that would be great for you to write about.  If you’d like to do some emotional exploring on your own, I have created some general prompts below.  Some of these are easy prompts that may not stir up much for you; others have the potential to trigger a great deal of pain.  In those cases, I highly recommend you work with a life coach or therapist to help you process the pain that will surface in the process.  Working with a practitioner who facilitates holistic healing using processes such as energy work, EFT, EMDR, or other methods can help to fully release the issues after you’ve brought them to the surface through writing.  This can bring about healing that is not otherwise possible for many.

Prompts:

• What is my happiest memory (or memories) of childhood?  Why did this event or situation bring me such joy?  How can I find similar joy in my life today?
• What is my worst memory of childhood?  Who was involved with it? How did that event make me feel then?  How does it make me feel now?  What emotions do I have towards the person or people involved in that situation?  Do I feel like this situation still impacts me today?  How and why?  Do I need to do more work to help clear this trauma from my system?
• Who was my closest friend(s) in childhood?  What did we do together?  Why did I enjoy the company of this person?
  
• Who was the person who brought me the most pain in childhood?  Why was that person able to hurt me so much?  What do I feel toward that person now?  Have I forgiven them for their actions?  What do I need to do to find a way to forgive them?  
  
• Who is the person whom I have felt the most love from as an adult?  What does this person do to make me feel loved? How do I respond to this person? How can I deepen or strengthen my relationship with this person?
  
• What situation in my life currently brings me the most stress?  Why does this situation stir up such strong issues for me?  Are there underlying issues from my past that relate to this situation?  How do I help support myself during this stressful situation?  Can I be doing more to reduce my stress?  What is my perspective or role in this situation and the issues that it causes me?
  
• In five years, what do I want to be different in my life?  What will need to change for that to happen?  What can I be doing every day to help bring about that change?
  
• Why do I seem to have the same romantic relationship with people over and over again?  What is the pattern that is there?  Why does this pattern occur?  Is there a parallel to any of my relationships in childhood or in a past life?  What can I do to break free of this pattern?
  
• Why did I choose my current job or profession?  Does it bring me happiness?  How can I make my employment situation better for myself?
  
• What do I feel my purpose is in this life?  Am I working towards that purpose?  What can I do to change my life to be in line with that purpose?  Is there anything else I can I do that will support me in my life journey?
  
• What is my financial situation like?  How do I want it to change?  What can I do to make it change?  Do I have emotional issues around money?  Where do those issues come from? What can I do to release those issues?  
  
• What is the most spiritual experience I’ve ever had?  Why was that particular experience so powerful for me?  Do I attempt to recreate that experience for myself on a regular basis?  Do I seek out other amazing spiritual experiences?  How could I work towards such a goal?
  

© 2015 Green Heart Guidance

(As always, I am not a medical doctor.  This information is based on my personal experiences and should not be substituted for medical diagnosis or treatment.  Please speak to your health care providers about your personal situation.)

The client whom this post refers to has read and approved the information.  He wants to share this information anonymously but for obvious reasons would prefer not to blog about it himself.  Please be assured I will not share personal information about you unless under a legal obligation to do so!

American society is obsessed with sex:  It’s everywhere in advertising, music, movies, and television.  Yet at the same time, our society doesn’t like to talk about problems around sex including sexually transmitted infections and sexual dysfunction.  It’s a bitter irony that can be quite frustrating when one is caught in the problems and can’t find help.  Even medical practitioners are sometimes very uncomfortable talking about sex, sexuality, and hormonal issues: I’ve run into this issue myself.  It’s problematic when one is desperate for help but can’t find it.

One of my male clients was having problems with premature ejaculation, a condition that occurs when a man ejaculates much sooner than desired during sexual activities.  This client had seen several doctors and alternative practitioners, but none offered solutions he hadn’t already tried.  The standard advice from them and from the internet was to use condoms to slow things down and to think non-sexy thoughts.  Neither helped at all.

As my client pursued remedies for the adrenal fatigue causing some of his other health problems, he actually found the solution to his premature ejaculation issues.  Correcting his very low cortisol levels ended up being the solution to the sexual problems as well.  However, this information is not readily available on the web and even the doctor treating him for adrenal fatigue didn’t realize that this would help rectify the sexual problem.  

This is a situation where a medical intuitive like myself may be able to help you find solutions to problems that aren’t obvious to Western doctors.  Someone like me can also direct you towards health care providers who are good at working with non-standard solutions to problems that Western medicine isn’t sure how to handle.  The solutions that an intuitive can come up with under the guidance of higher powers can be truly life changing.  

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

Up until several years ago, my sensitivities were so severe that I had difficulty tolerating even airborne unadulterated essential oils (EOs).  Since then, my body has healed enough that I am sometimes able to use EOs for spiritual and healing purposes, but I still don’t use them often and I don’t use them like perfume.  On those occasions when I do use them, I follow safety protocols to protect my health.

When I first was exposed to some of the multi-level marketing (MLM) essential oils such that are now flooding our society, I was instinctively repulsed by them.  I wasn’t sure exactly why, but I knew that the energy that was coming across was completely wrong.  In the years that followed, I’ve been able to discern and pinpoint more specific reasons why I had that initial and correct repulsion.

The first and foremost reason is that the sales tactics used by many agents of MLM essential oils are little more than fear mongering.  This shows up frequently in their sales pitches be it on Facebook, on their websites, or in Meetup groups.   Many of the sales agents bring up the horrific dangers of life in our world and then inaccurately argue that EOs are the solution to all of these problems.  While essential oils are extremely powerful healing agents, they are not the new miracle solution to everything.  Anyone who promises you a magic cure to everything should be held a distance.

Beyond the fear based tactics, I am dismayed by the poor education of many of the sales people for MLM EOs.  Most of these people have only had minimal training with essential oils and are trying to work well beyond their educational limits.  Essential oils can be incredibly dangerous when not administered properly.  While one can argue that these people are well-intended and want to help people heal, that argument is undercut by the fact that the more oils the salespeople sell, the more money they make.  Healing is only part of their goal in most cases.

From the lack of education stems more serious health related issues involving essential oils.  EOs need to be diluted properly.  If they are not, long term dangerous effects can result including permanent sensitization.  Techniques such as the Raindrop Therapy actually expose skin to unsafe levels of many essential oils, and the redness that many practitioners claim is detoxification is actually a reaction.  Likewise, inappropriately ingesting EOs can cause severe organ damage and even death.  Essential oils aren’t water flavorings!  (If you do suffer from an injury or illness due to essential oils, please report your problems here.)

Furthermore, most essential oils have not been approved by the FDA for use as drugs.  Thus, MLM essential oil sales agents claiming healing properties are actually in violation of national laws through some of their advertising techniques.  Recently the FDA warned two of the major MLM essential oil companies that they were in violation of these laws.

Finally, one of the most disturbing things to me is the deceit practiced by some of the companies and their founders.  This includes scientific proof of adulteration of theoretically pure essential oils with synthetic ingredients and the subsequent cover up of those findings.  A video of the deposition of one of the scientists uncovering the deception can currently be found here, but as threats of lawsuits abound, this video keeps being removed from the internet though the courts have already given permission for it to be published from what I understand.

As a result, I do not use or advocate the use of multi-level marketing EOs.  However, I do still support using essential oils, especially for spiritual healing practices.  So how does one go about doing this safely?  First of all, it’s always best to use a highly educated aromatherapist who has extensive hours of training.  In addition, one should look for objective scientific research on the safety of whatever oil one chooses to use just as one should investigate any new drug before taking it.  A great resource on essential oils is the safety manual written by Robert Tisserand.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

(As always, I am not a medical doctor.  This information is based on my personal experiences and should not be substituted for medical diagnosis or treatment.  Please speak to your health care providers about your personal situation.)

A recent article on Forbes describes the most outlandish reasons for calling in sick that it could find.  The article states, “For the last 10 years, job listing site CareerBuilder has put out a list it calls ‘The Most Unbelievable Excuses for Calling in Sick.’ … Nearly one in five employers (18%) says they have fired an employee for calling in sick with a fake excuse.”

I completely get firing an employee for bad excuses.  In one of my previous jobs, I inherited an employee who had gotten very used to doing what he wanted when he wanted if he wanted, including showing up for work.  One of his favorite excuses was that his old car wouldn’t start.  That is a legitimate excuse, and any of us who have owned a car, especially an older model car, have been there.  However, this employee lived on a bus route that would have taken him 15 minutes to get to work when combined with walking about four blocks.  It wasn’t that he’d be late while he put the car in the shop:  He just flat out wouldn’t show.  In contrast, when my only car died, I hitched a ride with a neighbor to her work, walked a mile, and then took two busses to get to the office.  My car being in the shop wasn’t enough to stop me from going in.

However, three of the ten excuses on the Forbes list seem legitimate to me.  That either shows that my perspective on life is very different than others' or that this list is really weak.  So my responses to these three reasons for absences are as follows.

“3. I was sitting in the bathroom and my feet and legs fell asleep. When I stood up, I fell and broke my ankle.”

Um, yeah.  Been there, done that, sort of.  Three years ago, I was talking with my ex-husband about an intense topic.  While I was sitting in a hard kitchen chair, I had my leg tucked under me as I often do.  When we finished talking, I realized my foot was asleep.  I stood up and tried to put pressure on it to wake it up.  As I stood up, my foot gave way, twisting my ankle.  I collapsed onto the hardwood floors, landing with my body on top of my left foot.  I knew immediately I had done damage and was at my chiropractor’s office within an hour.  Mercifully, I only caused a bad sprain, but it took about a month of adjustments before it got somewhat back to normal.  Had I landed slightly differently, I am sure I could have broken a bone.  This reason seems plausible to me.

“8. I had a gall stone I wanted to heal holistically.”

This definitely is a legitimate reason for absence, and the fact it’s included on this list mainly reflects a prejudice in our society against natural healing.  Gall stones are incredibly painful as anyone who has had them or witnessed someone with them can tell you.  They can make one sick enough to need to skip work; they often land people in the emergency room, though aside from surgery, Western medicine doesn’t offer a lot of help with the gall stones.  Thus, natural medicine is the only real option if one can’t or won’t have surgery.  There are various holistic ways to go about dealing with gallstones, and some of them involve a lot of bathroom time.  One definitely wouldn’t want to leave home.  This reason is completely plausible, and it’s one that might cut down on future absences of the employee.

“9. I caught my uniform on fire by putting it in the microwave to dry.”

While this does reflect a certain level of ignorance in the employee, it’s also realistic.  When I worked at a fast food restaurant, we were only given one uniform.  Eventually after I had been there for quite a while I was able to get a second.  However, having only one uniform meant that employees had to wash our uniforms nightly because they reeked of grease after only one shift.  If one doesn’t have laundry machines that they own, then one is having to either hand wash the uniform or pay for using a washer daily which adds up.  Line drying is a way to save money when you are making minimum wage.  However, if you work an afternoon shift, go out, and get home late, your uniform may not be able to dry overnight before you need to be back early in the morning.  Out of desperation, an employee could resort to drastic measures to try and dry it. 

I’ve also had situations where I’ve spilled food or leaked breastmilk on clothes right before I needed to go somewhere.  If that is the only outfit you can wear to the place you are going (such as a work uniform), then you must quickly try to get it cleaned and dried in order to go.  This could also result in an act of desperation of shoving an outfit in a microwave to dry.

When I was in growing up, my mother used to do a lot of crafty stuff.  One of the things she would make was pinecone wreaths. To prepare the pinecones, one puts them on low heat in the oven in order to kill any creatures that might be growing in them.  One day, she decided to microwave the pinecones instead.  The result was that the pinecones caught on fire and in turn caught the microwave on fire.  The lesson I learned at a very young age is that you don’t put anything but food in the microwave, and even then, you keep an eye on it!

So the possibility of an employee catching a uniform on fire in the microwave is realistic.  Having more than one uniform would help solve this problem, but many fast food employers are unfortunately not willing to spend that extra money on their employees.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

My business card says I’m a holistic life coach and intuitive energy healer.  So what does being “an intuitive energy healer” mean?  To start with, it’s a term I made up.  I was trying to find a good way to describe the work I do because no other term I’d seen really encompassed it all for me. 

An energy healer is someone who works to heal people on an energy level.  Some healers use Reiki; others work with crystals; others use essential oils.  There are many other energy healing methods, some of which are becoming fairly mainstream such as acupuncture.  Most energy healers are hands-on healers. 

I am an intuitive:  I work with energy from a distance most of the time rather than being in the same room as my clients.  Because of this, I didn’t simply want to list myself as an energy healer because for many people, that connotes an in-person experience.  However, unlike many other intuitives or psychics who receive messages from the other side, the messages I receive very often have to do with healing especially through energetic means.  The work I do isn’t just for fun to try and peak into the future.  It creates an avenue for people to work on deep personal healing.

So an intuitive energy healer, in my opinion and creation, is one who works with metaphysical energy by accessing information from higher powers.  I help my clients find solutions for their problems, especially surrounding health issues, that aren’t always easily solved through physical means such as prescription drugs and herbs. 

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

(As always, I am not a medical doctor.  This information is based on my personal experiences and should not be substituted for medical diagnosis or treatment.  Please speak to your health care providers about your personal situation.)

Recently on a Lyme related list that I read, one of the new members asked what detoxing was.  For me, that’s detoxification is something that is such a part of my vocabulary and life that it’s almost like asking me what breathing is.  I actually had to stop and think about it.

Detoxification is a natural process we do all the time.  It’s our bodies’ way of getting rid of anything we take in that is toxic.  In our modern world, we absorb a lot of synthetic chemicals that our bodies don’t need or want through the food we eat (pesticides, synthetic ingredients, artificial colors and flavoring, and more), the air we breathe (air “fresheners,” paints, cleaners, gas fumes, and more), and the products we wear (shampoos, deodorants, detergents, makeup, and more). 

In a healthy human, detoxification happens naturally through any excreted bodily fluid:  Urine, feces, sweat, tears, mucus, breastmilk, even semen.  Anything that our body puts out has the ability to contain the toxins we have absorbed.  Most commonly our liver and kidneys do this filtering and send the waste products out through our urine and bowel movements.  However, with the high synthetic chemical load in our bodies, we dump unnecessary chemicals through our other fluids as well.  This is how you end up with studies showing high levels of toxic chemicals in breastmilk.

For some of us with impaired detoxification systems due to various issues, detoxing is rough. My Lyme has combined with genetic issues to make my liver my weakest organ in my body, and so I struggle to get toxic chemicals out.  This in turn is part of what creates my multiple chemical sensitivities. I am not alone in this:  Many with autoimmune issues struggle with impaired detoxification.

So then how does one intentionally detox to force more of the chemicals we are exposed to out of our bodies rather than storing them in our body fat?  There are many natural ways to do it.  One of the easiest is sweating.  Exercising, saunas, or anything that makes you sweat will help reduce your toxic chemical load.

Another way is through diet.  Eating an organic whole foods diet of any type assists the body in detoxifying.  First, the less garbage you put in, the less garbage you have to get out.  Second, natural food has many healing properties.  Eating well can help undo previous damage to your body and can assist in detoxing any harsh chemicals your body is storing.

Many people like to try popular cleanses that they find on the internet including the Master Cleanse.  The Master Cleanse involves fasting for a designated amount of time (3-10+ days depending on which plan you follow) and during that time only drinking a mixture of lemon juice, water, cayenne pepper, and maple syrup.  There is some truth to this helping with detoxification:  Lemon juice does assist in liver cleansing.  However, cleanses like this can also be dangerous.  Because you stop eating solids, the body no longer has the means to have abundant bowel movements.  That means many of the toxins you are releasing are getting stuck in your body rather than being sent out through the stools.  Cleanses like this can be made safer by adding in organic low carbohydrate vegetables to assist with the detoxification.  However, all cleanses really should be done under the guidance of an appropriate practitioner.  (See below.)

Cleanses are NOT healthy when one uses them in order to regularly binge.  I know individuals who will fast during weekdays in order to consumer large amounts of sugar, gluten, and alcohol on the weekends.  This is really not good for one’s body.  Many of us will cheat on our healthy diets occasionally to have a piece of wedding cake or such, but treating one’s body with flagrant disrespect by binge eating and fasting is really not a good idea.  A slow but steady diet of healthy organic foods is the far better approach to healthy eating.

There are also many supplements that can cause or support detoxification.  Because of the detoxification impairment I battle, I am constantly on supplements that can support my body’s natural means, though I rarely take supplements to encourage additional detoxification.  These supplements that I take help my liver process the chemicals which it struggles with otherwise.  I can tell when I am taking them and when I stop.

If you are considering doing a cleanse or using supplements to assist with detoxification, I very strongly recommend you use a reputable local practitioner to help you.  In particular, chiropractors and naturopaths have training in this area; some integrative doctors do as well.  If you use an experienced practitioner who uses muscle testing, they can help you in finding what your body actually needs to detox from and what will best assist in this process rather than randomly trying things to see what works.  This increases efficiency and saves time and money in the long run.  These practitioners can also help you when unexpected issues surface.  Detoxification is not always straightforward or easy:  It can sometimes cause miserable flu-like symptoms.  It may also bring up serious emotional reactions as the body purges all that it does not need to store.  Thus, having a practitioner to assist you can ease your misery in the process and keep you from going into a serious state of crisis.  You want your net result to be a healthier body, not just a miserable experience with no lasting positive health benefits.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people. ~Carl Jung 

Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough. ~Charles Dudley Warner

If at first you don't succeed, you'll get a lot of free advice from other folks who didn't succeed either.  ~Author Unknown

By the time one is an adult, 99.9% of us have emotional baggage.  Some have more than others, and some are more aware of what their baggage is.  The further we progress in life, the more baggage we can pick up.  It’s possible for that baggage to merely become a part of our emotional past, but it takes active work in order to make that transformation happen.  “Just forgetting about it” doesn’t really work.  Our bodies store traumas and emotional pain even when we emotionally repress our issues.  All of that crud that we pack away will eventually come to the surface in one way or another.

Healers are people, too.  They have their own baggage and problems that they face outside of work hours.  Many therapists, life coaches, and physical healers enter their fields because of the struggles they’ve faced previously.  In my opinion, one of the differences between great practitioners and not-so-great practitioners is that the great practitioners acknowledge their personal issues.  They realize they are human.  And most importantly, they spend their entire lives working on continuing to improve themselves.

Continuing education is required in many healing professions in order to keep one’s licensing or certification up-to-date, so whether they want to or not, practitioners complete courses to meet those requirements.  Beyond that, though, great healers read on their own, exploring books in their fields and others.  They go to classes and conferences not because they have to but because they want to.  Education and healing is part of their personal journey, and their work on themselves benefits their clients and patients, too.

Healing practitioners who present themselves as knowing everything should be trusted very warily.  They are human.  They don’t know everything.  They may know a great deal about a sub-speciality of their field, but they won’t know everything.  If they claim to have a perfect life, be concerned as well.  None of us are without difficulties; our burdens just vary from person to person.  Seek out practitioners who see education and healing as a life-long journey, one that they include in their own personal lives, too.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

 (As always, I am not a medical doctor.  This information is based on my personal experiences and should not be substituted for medical diagnosis or treatment.  Please speak to your health care providers about your personal situation.)

Food is our common ground, a universal experience. ~James Beard

I follow George Takei’s highly amusing Facebook page which is actually staffed by others besides just him.  I enjoy its humorous take as well as its vocal support of those less privileged in our nation.  However, recently someone on the staff felt it was ok to poke fun of those with food allergies and sensitivities.  They shared a post that was far from funny.  Most open-minded people wouldn’t consider putting up a post that made fun of braille signs or wheelchair ramp signs, but our society is unfortunately still at a point where food intolerances of any kind are seen as a joke, not a potentially life-threatening problem. As the poster on the left states, food allergies are not a punchline.

My children and I have all dealt with food sensitivities; they are fall out from “leaky gut syndrome” and Lyme Disease.  While not true IgE allergies, food sensitivities still have the potential to make someone feel horrendous.  They can cause migraines, reflux, digestive woes, fibromyalgia flares, eczema, rashes, and more; for some people it’s so serious that even skin contact will cause a major reaction (as indicated by the gluten free soap sign).  Yet as my kids and I dealt with these issues, many people including family members chose not to believe that our food sensitivities are real. 

My kids and I observed (and one child and I still observe) strict diets so that none of us would be miserable from the side effects of foods that bothered us, but we would occasionally find people who wanted us to have “just one bite” of whatever was being served.  They were trying to force food on others for reasons that didn’t make sense.  We were not starving.  We were politely opting not to eat what was served, and in many cases we brought our own food so that the host/ess did not have to worry about accommodating our eating needs.  However, many took it personally that we wouldn’t eat their food even if it would have made us sick.  Why?  I think Cesar Chavez had it one of our culture’s notions around food correct when he stated, “If you really want to make a friend, go to someone's house and eat with him... the people who give you their food give you their heart.”  By refusing other people's food, they were taking it personally that we were also refusing them.  Unfortunately, that’s a maligned perspective.  Those who love you unconditionally wouldn’t ask you to cause yourself bodily harm just to feed their egos. 

So why is there so much animosity about food sensitivities?  There are many possible reasons.  Quite a few people believe that IgG food sensitivities don’t exist.  Part of this comes from the fact that Western medicine doesn’t have an approved and statistically reliable test to diagnose them nor are there any treatments for food sensitivities that can be billed to insurance.  Until there is a drug or insurance covered treatment to help with the food sensitivities, most mainstream allergists will see no reason to deal with them.  Money unfortunately drives our health care system more than patient welfare.

Others see food sensitivities as part of the current gluten-free fad diet.  They think people are making a choice not to eat gluten, when for many, it’s not a choice.  For those with celiac disease who can’t even have trace exposures to gluten or for those with anaphylaxis to other allergens, abstaining from certain food items is a hassle and a frequent struggle, but it’s what they must do to live safely.

Some people object to food sensitivities from a very narrow-minded and selfish point of view because they feel the dietary needs of others inconvenience them.  When sensitive friends won’t go to the restaurants they prefer because there are no food options that those with allergies can safely eat, those without allergies can feel put upon.  When sensitive friends don’t eat the food that is provided at social events, the same people may see it as an insult.  Rarely have I heard of those with food sensitivities or allergies who ask their hosts to cater to their needs:  It’s too much work to ask of someone, plus it’s too easy for someone who isn’t familiar with cross-contamination and hidden ingredients to accidentally put something into food that will cause a reaction.  It’s easiest and safest for those with food issues to just bring their own food.  Likewise, many parents bitterly lament nut-free policies in schools or classrooms because they see it as an inconvenience when packing their picky-eating children’s lunch.  However, it’s much more inconvenient for the kids with anaphylaxis to nuts to stop breathing.

Some naysayers see it as attention seeking behavior.  I had some very mean things said to me while my kids were little, and I was accused of Münchausen syndrome by proxy by one family member.  Really, if someone wants attention, food sensitivities and food allergies are not a great way to get it.  They make one’s life much more complicated, and they create a situation in which you are excluded things which you might normally enjoy, such as having a slice of delicious looking birthday cake at a party.

This brings up another major reason for some of the resistance:  Our culture is definitely built on food.  Until you face food sensitivities or food allergies, you don’t truly realize how obsessed our society is with certain foods being served at certain events or how most holidays are centered on food.  Once you have to change how you participate in those events, your view changes as well.  Elsa Schiaparelli has noted that, “Eating is not merely a material pleasure. Eating well gives a spectacular joy to life and contributes immensely to goodwill and happy companionship. It is of great importance to the morale.”  Suddenly, you aren’t participating in that pleasure in the same way others are.

There’s also the possibility that people who are resisting against the concept of food sensitivities and allergies and how they impact others is merely hiding behind their own fear.  To quote William Shakespeare, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks."  These people are afraid of the truth and the reality that foods they love can truly be dangerous for others.  However, their own fear is not a good enough reason to degrade or humiliate others who are limited in their food choices by their sensitivities and allergies.  Perhaps some are also fearing that their own health issues might be caused by food, and they are terrified by the possibility of losing some of their favorite things to eat.

Some people will rudely and dangerously “test” a friend’s food sensitivities or allergies by putting the offending item in the person’s food to see if they notice or if this is all just a psychological problem.  This is not ok.  It can result in violent vomiting, migraines, or even death.  Even if the person doing the “testing” doesn’t see the results, that doesn’t mean that the person with the sensitivities didn’t go home and spend the next two days in agonizing abdominal pain with horrible diarrhea but was too polite or embarrassed to mention it to the host.  Please don’t “test” the allergies and sensitivities of those who have them.  Just trust that they know what is best for their bodies.

Regardless of naysayers' opinions, food allergies, food sensitivities, and other conditions such as celiac disease are true health problems.  They can cause a great deal of misery and even death for those who must deal with them.  These issues are not a lifestyle choice.  They’re not a desire to make everyone’s life a little more confusing or difficult.  They’re not an attempt to be rude. They’re a harsh reality that the sufferers and those they live with must cope with every day whether it’s convenient or not.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

(This is another really long post.  Apologies in advance!  As always, I am not a medical doctor.  This information is based on my personal experiences and should not be substituted for medical diagnosis or treatment.  Please speak to your health care providers about your personal situation.)

I have had lifetime IgE mediated allergies to pretty much any non-food item that I get tested for.  I was first skin prick tested at age four, and then again at age 21.  Trees, grasses, weeds, dander, dust, molds… all of it makes me miserable.  Lyme has increased the severity of my allergies as well due to the impact on my immune system.  Once again, this is one of those areas where my situation is severe enough that natural medicine can help, but it alone is not enough.

The best way to think about allergies is using a glass of water.  Pretend that glass is your immune system.  If you are someone who is genetically prone to allergies as I am, our glass is always half-full.  If you live with pets whom you are allergic to and/or aren’t diligent about dusting, add some more water to the glass.  Then add in a dose of seasonal pollen, and your cup will begin overflowing, as will your sinuses.  Austin is a particularly miserable place for allergens as we don’t have  a single month all year where something isn’t high in the counts.

So what can be done aside from OTC and prescription allergy medicines and nasal sprays?  There are quite a few other things to try that fall under the categories of Western medicine, natural options, lifestyle changes and adaptions, and dietary changes.

Western Medicine

I've found that most over the counter allergy medicines don't have enough oomph in them for me.  Claritin worked for a while, but then stopped.  Benedryl works well for me and doesn't make me drowsy, but it's not very long lasting. I have switched to long acting prescription medications.  I'm on an older prescription medicine that has a generic and which seems to work quite well for my body.

Many years ago I did allergy shots; they too were incredibly helpful until my immune system went completely wonky.  Then they made things much worse, probably because of preservatives.  It is possible to get preservative free allergy shots if you work with an allergist who is aware of chemical sensitivities (which unfortunately, is not most of them).  Allergy shots take a while to kick in so they don't provide immediate relief.

Natural Options

There are various herbal compounds that can help.  Many of them contain nettles which, ironically, I am allergic to.  Most of my practitioners recommend D-Hist.  This supplement requires that one does a higher loading dose for several weeks and then drops down to a regular daily dosage which may then need to be increased again during times of seasonal attack.  

Another herbal remedy I have successfully used is Bi Yan Pian which is for the lung meridian and helps with allergies and asthma.  They are very tiny, easy to swallow pills, and they helped my oak induced asthma quite a bit until I started reacting to them. Check with your acupuncturist or Chinese medical practitioner before taking them, though. 

Body work can help many with allergies, especially acupuncture and chiropractic adjustments.  Unfortunately, they don’t give me much relief. 

The Allergena homeopathic drops that are available locally at People's and Whole Foods are amazing.  They work in the same mechanism as allergy shots.  They helped me greatly for a while, but my immune system also freaked out about those eventually.  These would be easy to give a young child with a health care provider’s supervision and approval.  Because of how they work with the immune system, it is recommended you begin these before seasonal allergies get bad.  That means if you have trouble with cedar fever, now is the time to start the drops before the pollen begins in about six weeks.

One group of local chiropractors will make an energetic homeopathic for allergens. They muscle test using local allergens to figure out what you are allergic to and then create the homeopathic.  Then, you take several drops of the homeopathic daily.  This helped so much when it was working. Then it just flat out stopped working as my immune system figured out how to defeat it, but for the year of relief I got, it was really helpful.  

if your allergies suddenly become much worse, you may want to talk to your alternative health care provider about adrenal fatigue.  Extreme amounts of emotional or physical stress put a great deal of pressure on the adrenal glands which in turn can make allergies worse.  Lyme has done this to my body as well.

I know many who swear by lavender essential oil for allergy, but this is not something I have experienced success with. 

Neti pots are popular with many people who have allergies.  They allow one to use salt water to rinse out the sinuses.  Getting the right angle is crucial to making sure you don't choke on the solution, but once you figure it out, the process is really easy and can be quite soothing.  Keeping eye contact with yourself in the mirror is part of what helps get the angle correct.  I recommend NOT using tap water not because of the very rare risk of bacteria that can kill you but because the chlorine in the water can be very irritating to the nasal passages in someone who is sensitive.  Unfortunately, I'm one of the people who finds that using a neti pot makes things worse for me in the long run:  I hypothesize that the water in my sinuses actually promotes fungal growth which creates additional pain and misery.  As a result, I've given up on using one.  Neti pots are available at Whole Foods and People's Pharmacy locally as well as at many other health stores and online.

Lifestyle Adaptions and Changes

For some people, including me, spontaneous nosebleeds are a side effect of allergies.  It’s not a lot of fun to wake up in the middle of the night with blood dripping out of your nose.  Mine are always caused by mold, but for others, different allergens can be the culprit. Some people find that using a humidifier helps reduce their nosebleeds.  If you take this approach, be sure that you are cleaning the humidifier frequently and well so that it doesn't contribute to the mold and allergy problems.

When it comes to dust, it’s a neverending battle.  Dust allergies are pretty common amongst those with allergies and asthma.  Vacuuming well with a high powered vacuum should happen weekly in any area with carpeting in order to minimize dust.  Getting rid of the carpet is best in the long run if you own your home.  

Line drying laundry is actually not good for those with allergies because it means all your linens and clothes are picking up more pollen. Use a dryer with heat to kill the dust mites.  Bed linens need to be washed weekly if you have dust allergies.  If I don't wash my linens weekly, I pay for it. At my worst of my illness, I had to wash the linens every 3-4 days.  Any stuffed animals that a child with allergies sleeps with also need to be washed on a regular basis.  The dust covers that you can get for pillowcases and mattresses really do help, too.  I avoid the vinyl ones because they off-gas some nasty chemicals which is not good for the immune system or the body in general.

I also find it necessary to wash my hair any time I’ve been outside to minimize pollen on my body and allergic reactions.  Opening the windows, even on gorgeous days, is unfortunately not an option for me as it just makes my allergies much worse.

I am allergic to pet dander.  I love cats, but I cannot be around them without being miserable within 30 minutes even on antihistimines.  I’d love to have a cat as a pet, but as I’ve told my kids, if we get a cat, we’d have to get rid of me.  I am also allergic to dogs, but I can tolerate some breeds better than others.  I had beagles and beagle mixes all my life as they are one breed I do better with; long-haired dogs like golden retrievers are miserable for me.  If you have pets and someone in the household is allergic to them, the pets should stay out of the bedroom of the allergic person.  This can be accomplished in several ways.  We put a baby gate up in our bedroom door to keep the dogs out but to allow us to keep the door open at night; we had to get a taller baby gate after our one beagle rapidly demonstrated his hurdling ability.  If you have cats, a screen door on the bedroom door can help keep them out.

Higher end HEPA filters such as those made by Austin Air and AllerAir can help with dust and pollen.  Some of the lower end brands have formaldehyde in the filters which doesn't help with allergies especially in the chemically sensitive. However, at my worst, I was still reacting to even the high end brand filters. 

Going completely fragrance free can reduce the stress on the immune system and help decrease the impact of allergies, asthma and eczema.  Synthetic fragrances can really mess with the lungs, skin and sinuses.  Be aware that "unscented" actually doesn't mean fragrance free:  It can mean that masking fragrances are added to cover up any odor.  (This is also true with "low odor" paints which are not low VOC paints by definition: They just have something in them to make them stink less.)  For me, I have to use all natural products in addition to using fragrance free products as my body can’t tolerate petroleum based products.  All major brands of conventional detergents, for example, are petroleum based.

Dietary Changes

In order to reduce the overall stress on your immune system, eating organic can help greatly.  When I began eating organic, I was able to drastically reduce the amount of antihistimines I was taking for several years.  The change in diet also stopped the frequent sinus infections I used to battle. 

Removing foods which you are sensitive or allergic to can also help reduce the stress on the immune system and minimize the impact of airborne allergens on your body.  Dairy and gluten are common allergy and asthma triggers for many people.  

There are also foods that can "cross-react."  This essentially means that the immune system sees these foods as close to the pollens that you react to, and thus, eating those foods increases one's reaction to that pollen.  There are many lists of these foods around the internet such as this one and  this one.  You may find that eliminating certain foods while related seasonal allergies are peaking may help your overall health.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

(As always, I am not a medical doctor.  This information is based on my personal experiences and should not be substituted for medical diagnosis or treatment.  Please speak to your health care providers about your personal situation.)

Flu and cold season is already upon us.  My youngest brought home a generic virus from school recently complete with fever, nasal drainage, headache, body aches and gastrointestinal issues.  Schools are great petri dishes for sharing such things, and this particular virus seems to be racing through the schools in our district.

When I first got sick with Lyme, I worked with a nutritionist in another state.   At one point, I got a cold.  The nutritionist suggested I put a tablespoon or so of powdered ginger in a very hot bath.  She argued in an unscientific premise that the ginger and the steam would help pull the virus out through my pores.  While her logic may not have been accurate, ginger is a healing herb.  It is most often used in natural healing for digestive complaints, especially nausea, colic, and gassiness.  However, ginger is also believed to reduce inflammation and to induce healthy sweating which can help in fighting viruses.  Ginger may interact with some medications, so be sure to check with your health care providers before using it in any substantial amounts.

I find ginger baths to be very comforting, and they’ve become a part of my virus routine.  When I am sick, I fill a bath with water as hot as I can humanly tolerate and then liberally sprinkle in powdered organic ginger.  The ginger has a warming and stimulating effect on the skin, and I really like how it feels.  However, someone else I know tried it and complained strongly about the burning sensation it caused on his genitals, so be aware that is a potential side effect.  The bathroom (and most of the house for that matter!) end up filled with the appealing smell of ginger, adding in the benefits of aromatherapy.  Even if the ginger doesn’t doing much for me medicinally, the routine has become one that relaxes me and brings me a bit of solace when I feel unusually miserable.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance