Dear Reader,
I’m writing this month’s article in the form of a letter because it’s a real ‘from me, to you’ kind of message, a personal success story that I want to share.
If you’ve had hay fever this year, I feel your pain.
Summer’s Shadow: Navigating Allergies
I dread summer, having suffered with allergies since I was small. In fact, looking back, it’s almost fifty summers – the brightest, warmest, happiest months of the year – ruined by a pathetic sounding affliction, but one which has the power to pour misery over an entire season.
I’m affected from the end of May to the end of July. I sneeze until I get goosebumps. My nose itches and runs all day. However, at dusk, my sinuses block up preventing me from breathing – other than through my mouth – all night. These are the months when I sleep on the sofa so I don’t disturb my wife with all the snuffling, snorting and snoring. My eyes itch and water constantly. If I make the mistake of rubbing them, the itch becomes maddening. On high pollen days, my chest is tight and wheezy. Over the course of those two months, the symptoms deplete my mood and energy.
I’ve tried most medicines and remedies over the years but nothing worked. This pattern, therefore, has characterised every summer of the last forty-eight years.
Exploring Healing Paradigms: Reflecting on German New Medicine
If you’re a regular PHA newsletter reader, you may remember an article on German New Medicine in the June issue. GNM prompted me to reconsider the mechanisms that drive disease processes. In the simplest terms, psychic wounds or scars cause reactions in the body that look or feel like illness. In reality, however, the time during which you feel unwell is actually the healing phase of the original emotional upset.
I haven’t studied GNM, however, I’ve intuited enough about it to understand that annual hay fever is a healing phase that repeats because it is incomplete. It occurred to me that, if I could resolve the emotional crisis that prompts the allergy to recur each year, perhaps I could heal myself.
As it happens, I do recall the moment when I first experienced hay fever. I was around six at the time, visiting my grandparents’ farm in Ohio, and had wandered into a huge cornfield. When I returned from the rows of green stalks that towered over me, my nose was streaming, my breathing was restricted and my eyes were so swollen that I was looking out through slits.
What I don’t remember is the emotions around the event but I narrowed it down to two possibilities. Either I’d got lost in the cornfield and become frightened or I’d landed in trouble for going in there at all; possibly both. With only this to guide me, I began to make contact with my six-year-old self during the weeks before the end of May.
I did this ‘work’ – it’s more like fun, really – either in bed before falling asleep, in meditation or by drumming, which helped me to enter a light trance state in which visualisation was easier.
Spending time with my inner child in that cornfield allowed me to render more detail around my memories. Based on the kinds of feelings I suspected myself of having at the time, I set out to give comfort to the little boy. I explained to him how loved he is in that moment, how protected he is, how worthy he is, how secure and safe he is.
My grasp of GNM is tenuous but I do understand the principle that resolving trauma allows healing. The body wants to heal and has the power to do so but it needs to be given the opportunity.
I have, until quite recently, believed that healing comes from outside the faulty meat suit. It might be in the form of bodywork, energy therapies, medicines/remedies or some kind of counselling. The last three or so years have gradually revealed to me, in part through the hardships and pressures we’ve all endured during this time, that this is not the true nature of healing.
Like sovereignty, healing arises within. And, as with sovereignty, there must first be a realisation that such inner healing is both real and possible.
Embracing Transformation: A Journey Through Hay Fever Seasons
Across the eight weeks of this year’s hay fever season, I marked only three days of symptoms in my diary. Not one of those days was as severe as I usually experience. I did, however, have many moments when it felt as though hay fever was about to begin. On those occasions, I reminded myself that symptoms are part of the healing phase and not something to be afraid of. Mentally, I would then go back in time to the cornfield and to my six-year-old self. I would remind him that whatever feelings he was experiencing that day, they no longer represented a threat – were no longer even relevant.
Each time I did this, the oncoming symptoms receded until I forgot about them. Sometimes just saying to myself, “it’s not the pollen, it’s your feelings.” was enough to offset the hay fever before it really started.
I have spent my summer outdoors, appreciating everything – even the rain.
This kind of healing could be considered miraculous. It certainly feels like a miracle to me. But what if self-healing isn’t a miracle at all? What if it is perfectly normal and natural? And if that’s true, think of all the other things we might do with our lives, knowing we don’t have to live in discomfort or pain.
My knowledge of GNM will remain sketchy until I do some proper studying. Not knowing exactly what happened inside me that enabled my return to health makes it difficult to compose a granular, well-informed account. And yet, I share this experience with you for the sake of inspiration and encouragement; so that you know now that it is real and possible. If I can do something like this, based on minimal information, anyone can.
We of Mankind are capable of amazing things. We have great power within ourselves that we are only just beginning to understand. All we need is knowledge, combined with the desire and confidence to use it.
Let’s begin by realising that miracles can happen to any of us, any day, and that we can choose to make them part of our reality.
Yours sneezelessly,
José Lacey