The Paradox of healing – for you and your loved ones

I vividly remember my  reaction to my first kinesiology teacher making some casual reference in our class to fixing arthritis.  “You can’t fix arthritis” I scoffed.  (Nobody would ever accuse me of not expressing my opinions! lol!)

“Yes you can.” she ever so gently replied.  “No you CAN’T!” I dug my heels in. “Everybody knows it’s incurable.”   Still gently (she’s ever such a sweetheart), she replied “I spend every week of my working life helping people to fix arthritis, we do it all the time.”

“Well can you fix my horse?” I demanded.

Read on from the email:  She replied (how she kept her cool in the face of that aggro I was chucking around, I’ll never know) “I don’t know anything about horses, but if you do, we could give it a good try.”

And THAT was the start of a healing journey for me that spans three decades, hundreds of people and horses and stories of supposedly impossible miracles that happened over and over again, that are clearly NOT impossible and NOT miracles, but just what happens when you work WITH the whole of the mind, body and spirit instead of working ON it or doing something TO IT, or inadvertently working AGAINST it.

The first was my beloved horse Carlos.  Big, black, beautiful, sensitive and ever so generous Carlos.  Gosh I wish I knew then what I know now about the paradox of healing, let alone horsemanship.  Even without that knowledge, we clawed back his crippling arthritis stage by stage until 13 months after my demanding, opinionated exchange with my teacher, he came out of retirement and was the first horse I ever danced with.

Generally speaking, arthritis has what we call stages of degeneration.  There’s 9 stages in the degenerative process.  It’s usually at the 4th stage where it starts to get painful and by the fifth stage it’s REALLY painful.  Carlos had been in the fifth, pretty close to the sixth.  He had swelling on both knees, was chronically lame with it and had pain in his eyes that had me thinking about putting him down.

Then there was the opposite kind of case to Carlos – one example was a returned servicewoman from World War 2, who had sudden onset arthritis.  The shock of it for her was enormous.  Here she was strong and active in her seventies and suddenly struck down and crippled, barely able to move.  Two sessions and some homeopathics and she cheerfully marched in the long ANZAC Day march the following week. I’ve always thought the speed of her recovery was due to the sudden onset, but now I understand the Paradox of Healing, we may well have stumbled onto that.

Another one sticks out in my memory because the healing of the arthritis in her swollen, bent and clawed hands happened in front of our eyes on my healing table.  That recovery came at the tail end of gradually pulling back the stages of degeneration.  I remember most of all her anger and despair – every session we’d had, her relationship with her daughter in law would come up – the crazy horrible things her son’s wife did, the estrangement of her son, the devastating loss of her grandkids.  Then on this particular day she had an ahhaa moment about the situation, which instantly released the bitterness and grief and bam… the hands released and her fingers opened.  After years of claws getting worse and worse, she walked out that day with perfectly normal hands.  THAT was a classic example of what’s possible when you get at what’s BEHIND the symptoms.

Our beloved working student / second daughter Kristina is another story that brings a smile to my face. There’s a whole blog about her here somewhere.  I’ll put a link in.  Her situation was different again.  In her  early thirties when she arrived here, she had been suffering from rheumatoid arthritis from childhood.  Because she was studying with me, my role in her recovery was quite limited as she was learning to do it herself.  And learn she did – spectacularly.  At the end of her year with us, she did a 19 km hike down the coast at Wilson’s Prom.  Not that she needed it, but later on her doctor in Germany confirmed that the arthritis and its markers were all gone.

My dear husband will be very pleased that there’s so many arthritis stories, that I don’t need to use his.  He rolls his eyes at being the poster boy for alternative therapy yet again lol!  But here’s just a tiny story for a different perspective of the incredible things our bodies are capable of.  Five years ago he wrenched his knee very badly by stepping one leg into a narrow hole and had to have xrays on his knee that had been crushed in a truck accident 20 something years earlier.  The xrays showed this thin, even line of what they called arthritis in the knee joint.  His body had grown this cushion to protect the joint – and protect it, is EXACTLY what it had been doing.  His knee hadn’t given him a minutes worry or discomfort in many many years, even though he’d been doing everything from cross country skiing on it, to scrambling over slippery mountains looking for lost little old ladies with the State Rescue Service – thanks to that little line of bone growth that supposedly shouldn’t have been there.

The last story we have time for, is me.  I’ve been supremely pissed off at struggling with arthritis off and on since a really nasty high speed, miss cranky pants accident off the farm 4 wheeler about 3 years ago.  What upset me most of all, was how come I could fix other people’s arthritis but wasn’t fixing my own?  By last week, I’d had bone grinding on bone for months and a terrible clunking feeling in the joint that had me wondering if I too was going to need a knee replacement.  I had to work out a lot of pain and stiffness when I got out of bed in the morning just so I could stand up straight.  I couldn’t rely on my knee supporting me sometimes. I was like a freaking old lady getting out of the armchair carefully. (Oh wait, I AM an old lady!  Or at least what I considered an old lady when I was younger! lol!)

In the middle of all this, I was guided very strongly and very clearly to do this healing clinic called The Paradox of Healing that starts on the 1st Feb and as it so often does, the preparation for that clinic has unleashed a whole heap of stuff for me personally.

I had my very own Paradox of Healing moment, with its monumental cascade of ahhaa moments, that started a few days ago, thanks to a horse, a snake and a bunch of beautiful women – I’ll tell the story in the clinic, it’s too big for here.

But here’s the outcome – my knee is no longer painful and grinding – no clunking either.  I’m getting out of bed the best I have in years and years AND it’s getting even better every day.  I get up from a chair no longer wondering whether my leg is going to choose to hold me up properly this time or not.  There’s an ease in my posture and my movement that hasn’t been there for quite awhile.  And even as I was writing this blog, I wanted to raise my stand up desk and it needed resetting which means I … just … crawled on my knees under the desk to pull the plug out to re-set it AND stood up afterwards, with no pain and drama.  I’ll share the HOW in the clinic – the healing not the desk lol!

Whether you too have an illness or discomfort of your own going on and you’d like to understand how to use the incredibly powerful process of natural healing for yourself, OR if you have someone that you’re worried about that you’d like to learn how to support, OR if you work with others yourself – then Paradox of Healing, because we’re going to be doing some rocking stuff…

Today’s photo: I call this “Someone’s trying to tell us something”  I adapted it to make my point, from one of New Zealander Marie Richards lovely photos.