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f r e e s o u l
_____________________________________________________________THE JOURNEY NEWSLETTER
a newsletter dedicated to educating, informing and inspiring people
to apply new possibilities in healing and inner growth
VOLUME.8
4/30/09
This may actually be the fist real "news"letter I am writing, as it contains some personal news many of you don't yet know about.
Since January 24th I have been on my own intense, surprising and exhilaration healing journey.
On that day I took myself into the emergency room, thinking I had an inflamed appendix. By the end of the day, with maximum amounts of delauded in my bloodstream, after the morphine had ceased to be strong enough, I was diagnosed with two grapefruit size cysts, one on each ovary.
Surgery, initially the only solution to my situation, ended up being postponed several times, always for good reasons, which gave my body time to recuperate and after 3 days created the opportunity for me to go home and give my body the chance to heal naturally.
For one month I withdrew from all possible obligations and focused on listening to my belly. To sit and breathe. I used all the tools I believe in: Journeywork, bodywork, energywork, hypnosis, nutrition, chiropractic adjustments, and hydrogen peroxide treatments... my days were filled.
A flood of issues were revealed and released, surprising and painful discoveries made, and over the weeks my body became lighter and lighter. In spite of how good I felt, the cysts were not changing much.
In early March a second pain attack sent me straight back to the emergency room. I didn't leave the hospital for 8 days. The surgery removed both cysts, together with tubes and ovaries, and on March 15th I finally returned home. There had been no cancer.
I want to tell you that these last months have been one of the most expansive, transformational and fascinating experiences of my life.
I have kept a journal, initially to keep my friends and family informed and connected... later to gain more clarity about what I was experiencing... still later to collect everything that might be of interest and value to others.
You are welcome to browse through it. http://tommashealingjourney.blogspot.com
This is what happened last Monday.
In the car on my way to the city.
It feels important to share it with you.
I don't recall what triggered this succession of thoughts, but I will try to recreate them here. There are several experiences that fell together like a mosaic, allowing me to arrive at a new realization. A big one.
The first reflection was on the news that one of my German clients had died. Rose had still been young, in her thirties, mother of a small child and she was suffering from a recurring form of colon cancer. When she came to me a year and a half ago, the medical world had told her that she should put her things into order, because there was nothing much they could do for her. Yet she had felt this surge of conviction that she could make it through this third bout of cancer. I had only been able to work with her twice, in between I had been wondering whether I should have given her firmer assignments, whether I should have been more demanding in her using the Journeywork more often during the months while I could not be in Germany. Would it have made a difference? Who knows.
I was convinced, because I knew by example, that it was possible for one Journey to turn around any health situation - IF it hit the target. And over the years I had been waiting for an opportunity to show off with such a case of my own. Humbly and a little embarrassed I need to confess this here: ultimately I was looking to "show off" - with the best intention of course, because I believed that if I had only one spectacular case under my belt, of somebody who got healed when there had been no hope, or of some condition that got turned around when nothing else had helped, that that would finally start to spread the word in our area faster and farther than I had been able to on my own.
So, somewhat unconsciously, I had been looking for a situation with some public attention to show the power of the effect of the Journey, I was really still trying to demonstrate the power of healing, by delivering an undeniable proof of the result of doing this work. And the result to me was health returned, an illness conquered, a condition relieved. And while I did have lots of "smaller" successes in that way, while some of them had even been stunning in some way, I was never led to a situation where I had been able deliver the Journey as the cause for a major impressive victory. Victory. That was what success looked like to me.
So, in that way I had failed
with Rose, even though the Journey brought her something she valued, though it may have even extended her life. I had failed too with William Ward, even though I only saw him once and much too briefly, because he was already pretty weak. I had failed even with Alex Ballinger, because I hadn't been persistent enough to get in touch with her, and so I hadn't succeeded in at least creating a chance for myself to help her. Not all of that was there as a conscious thought in my head, but the taste of that feeling was present when I thought about Rose as I was driving down the Taconic Parkway.
And then yesterday... I had gotten a letter from another client in Germany, who I have worked with three times over the past years. She wrote that she had been diagnosed with tumors in her lymph tissue. That she wanted to work with me on this issue and was looking forward to seeing me again. She had decided against a medical path and, yes, she was scared. Translucent light green clouds of budding trees were streaming by outside my car window, as I remembered what I responded to her. It is a response I would not have given in the past. I wrote back saying that my first suggestion would be to examine if it really has to be an either or decision, if it might not be possible to include mainstream medicine in her healing process. That more than anything I believed this was about listening to her body, to ask her body who and where she could feel safe with, and if there were difficult decisions to be made she could imagine an image of each of the possible decisions and then merge each one of them into her body and check what that felt like.
Listening to our body.
I had in fact just reminded Jimmy of that two days ago. He is down in Florida again for the big air show "Sun and Fun" - working really hard, running around on the airstrip during the day, sun beating down on the crowds, making connections and lining up photo shoots and then getting up at 6:00 every day to be in the air with the soft morning light, and often again in the evening. After a couple of days he is worn out, his voice so tired at night... but he wants to take every opportunity to schedule more work, and be able to deliver the written stories right away to the magazine too. So I had to remind him to stop. To say NO. To listen to his body. To not wear himself out... for what? To take a nap when his body is calling out like this. Wasn't that what we both had learned during the past months? Sure enough, yesterday he gave in and slept 4 hours straight in the middle of the day. Thank God!
Listening to our body. Maybe that was a major ability I needed to teach my clients from now on? Just as important as doing the Journey itself? It was, wasn't it? That's how I had learned what I needed to learn on my healing path. That's how I had made many of the major decisions.
Listening to our body and being open to discovering something new. Yes. That was the other big thing hat had happened to me. In the beginning I thought I knew where this path was going to lead me. I had expected to heal my body with the Journey and maybe other natural healing tools and to deliver my own proof of the power of this work. And then I had to experience that that's not what it was about. Not at all. Had the Journey healed my body? No. But had it been the very tool to help me understand what this passage was really about? Yes! And... had my body healed in the end? Yes, absolutely.
Discovering something new.
Yes, that was the second piece. And this too should be an essential part of everybody's healing process. It makes sense doesn't it? After all if what we know and do and believe and understand so far contained the ingredients to help our body heal, it would have done that already. Just as Brandon discovered something totally new when she found the Journey, we too need to expect that there is something different out there for us to integrate into our lives, something we had not known before, not in it's fullness.
Our body is nothing but the messenger. Our illness is nothing but the doorbell ringing to let this messenger talk to us...
This is somewhat how the new awareness arrived in my thinking consciousness. And by the time I was crossing the bridge over the Croton Reservoir, the rosy sunset sky reflecting like liquid gold in the still water, filling the air like a soft haze that made you want to stop and touch it... this realization was there with utter clarity:
"As a healer I am not here to help your body heal.
That can not be our primary goal. And it is not our job to conquer your illness either.
Rather I am here to help you welcome this messenger and find out what your body and your life is trying to tell you. Your illness or your physical condition is not here trying to defeat you, it is not an error, a punishment or a failure that it has arrived in your life; on the contrary: It is here to help you discover something you have not be able to notice on your own, a different way of seeing, of understanding and living life.
The measure of success of any interaction between us therefore is not that the illness will disappear, but that you will reach an expanded, liberated and truer way of living your life. And whether your body repairs itself or lets itself be repaired in that process does not make a big difference in the end."
My own life has been and continues to be more profoundly changed than I can put into words right here. The gifts I have received I could not even have imagined. The way the events were orchestrated to carry me through this experience I could have never thought up in my most brilliant moments.
More than ever I am convinced that life never makes a mistake. It is up to us to unravel the mystery that will allow us to welcome it as the loving gesture it always is.
