In 2001 I lived in Marin County, a rural area north of San Francisco Bay, where I worked as a field biologist. While taking a shower, I found a tick embedded in my armpit. Two weeks later, I noticed a rash on my stomach. Maybe it’s poison oak, I thought? But it didn’t itch. I let it go.
A month later, I noticed creeping, itchy arthritis in my right hip. Then not long after, I was playing guitar, and my arm would not move as commanded. My friend said, “Dude, there’s something wrong with you!”
I went to a doctor friend and flipped through his book of diseases. When I got to L, I knew what it was. I got tested for Lyme (Borrelia). It came back positive. The treatment was 30 days of the antibiotic doxycycline, which cleared out all my symptoms. Cured, I thought.
Little did I know it was just the beginning of a near 10-year nightmare.
Lyme worms its way in
Lyme lays “eggs” or encysts. The cysts can be dormant for months, then hatch and mutate. The tick can dump other bacteria and parasites into your body that need different kinds of treatment. Long-term sufferers will tell you the illness can be interminable if Lyme isn’t eradicated early. It transforms into “persister” cells and can create an autoimmune situation where your immune system is trying to play catch up.
A few months later, all the symptoms and much more came raging back. I was hospitalized, receiving intravenous antibiotics because Lyme had developed into a kind of meningitis ravaging my brain. As I lay in the hospital bed, I began to cry. I was in a state of utter despair. What was going on? Why was I sick again?
I focused on my breathing and prayed. Lyme was jumbling my brain, I couldn’t think, but I could feel. If I can still feel and breathe, then I can love and exist, I thought. I felt into my brain and asked, What’s the matter?, as if my brain were a baby. With all of the love and tender feelings I could muster, I cradled my brain and asked again: What’s the matter? I love you, brain. What’s wrong?
Trusting my inner wisdom
A miracle happened. I had a vision. I saw a beautiful large oak tree in the woods, and up the side of the trunk, shelf mushrooms were spiraling up the tree toward the sky. I need these, I thought.
I recognized two kinds of mushrooms from my work as a field biologist. One was reishi mushrooms, another was turkey tail mushroom, and there was a third kind, but I would have to wait till I got out of the hospital to look it up. It was chaga.
I researched the mushrooms and discovered reishi mushrooms have been used in Chinese medicine as an immune booster for thousands of years. Turkey tail mushrooms are also immune boosters and are part of an anticancer drug currently being developed and tested called PSK. Chaga turned out to be another incredible immune booster, according to research by world-renowned mushroom expert Paul Stamets. While these mushrooms are now quite popular, in 2002 they were unheard of.
I began to hone my intuitive skills and practice the art of intuitive sensory perception inside my body. I noted what I was seeing, tasting, smelling, and hearing during my motherly loving meditations with my brain.
Then I had another breakthrough. While inward viewing, I saw cysts inside my body. Lyme can lie dormant for up to a year or more, and those cysts — nasty little eggs — were inside my brain. I saw rows of them like peas in a peapod. They were coated with a biofilm and with what looked like a pencil on top. I couldn’t understand what this image was. I worked with my sensory perception and realized my body was speaking to me symbolically.
Deep healing begins
About a week after this vision, I wandered into the supplement section of the market. In the homeopathic aisle, I saw a little blue tube labeled Graphites. That’s in pencils, I thought. What do graphites do exactly? According to the homeopathic pamphlet, “Graphites can dissolve toughened skin, scars, boils, and cysts.” Holy Moses! Pencils over eggs! My intuition told me that graphites and similar homeopathic remedies could dissolve Lyme cysts. Graphites became a crucial component of my healing. It was a huge breakthrough.
After this, I started trusting the more profound wisdom that came through the senses from a place deeper than my mind. I wrote down a multitude of foods, herbs, and antibiotics my body identified for me. I also started seeing stuck feelings and other things that were dampening my immunity.
I used the intuitive information I received along with the science I researched to affirm what I was intuiting, and worked closely with a few Lyme specialists to liberate myself from Lyme. I used both sets of knowing to collect information and facts. I would often be shown a remedy and then find the medical research that confirmed what I had intuited. This method helped me validate what I was seeing and sensing. In addition to many common antibiotics and herbs, I discovered several unusual medicines and techniques for Lyme that I had never heard of.
Loving the messenger
However, the most profound healing came late in my near 10-year journey. I went to the Mono Basin in the eastern Sierras in California on a vision quest. Any Lyme suffer knows there is a tremendous amount of fear and anxiety with Lyme. I would often wake with panic attacks, not being able to sleep.
On the 8th day in the desert, I went into a massive panic attack. I thought I was going to die and lose my mind. Why was I so terrified of this bacterium, I asked myself. How could a little piece of life devastate my life? Anger and fear swirled around me. Then I had the thought that changed me forever.
What if I love Lyme? What if I love the monster?
It was like a million light bulbs went off.
With all the love I could muster, I cradled an imaginary worm-like bacteria; I blessed it. Although at the bottom of the karmic totem pole of life, Lyme is still alive. I thought, what if I were Lyme? A lowly, evil little creature, just trying to survive. I had a sense of compassion for the Lyme, sadness for its life. At that moment, it lost its power over me. By blessing the enemy, it no longer had control. I had weakened it, and this moment was the real healing. The Lyme became my teacher, showing me how to reclaim my power and remain symptom-free.
About the Author:
Vir McCoy works as a healer and a field biologist and botanist, focusing on endangered species, and is the co-author with Kara Zahl of Liberating Yourself from Lyme (Healing Arts Press, 2020).
Source: Spirit of Change
I have been focusing lately on some issues that may seem somewhat uncomfortable or seemingly out of character for me. If you have been triggered by some of the subject matter, please rest assured that that is never my intent. That said, someone once said our job here in these times is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
In 2013 I encountered two interviews with a fellow named John Lash. He wrote a book entitled “Not In His Image”. Turns out he is a Gnostic scholar and his translation of the Gnostic Gospels, the Nag Hammadi Codices, contained a fantastical tale of entities that the ancients called the Archons. Created accidentally, and comprised of artificial intelligence, these beings were confined to our solar system. In a weird twist, they are related to us, but that is another story. However, because of this kinship, they have access to our subconscious and conscious mind. In other cultures, they have other names. The Yaqui Indian sorcerers of northern Mexico called them the “flyers” or the “alien installation. In ancient Arabic cultures, they were known as the “djinn”. In Native American, “wetiko”, or mind parasites, and in the Sumerian cultures, the Annunaki or Watchers.
When Pluto enters Aquarius in 2023, the real struggle for a human future will begin. We will all be faced with the choice of organic or non-organic…compliant, or free…human, or transhuman.
Isaac George
During this lockdown time when going out for a walk, I have observed that we participate in some sort of “avoiding dance”. Waiting for people to pass, crossing the street, walking on the street, lining up on the sidewalk, is a way of walking that we never experience before. However, this dance has an energetic feeling, it feels a little bit out of place, but at the same time it feels good to know that people actually care about others, although there is a bit of sadness and fear in the air. I try to smile at people from the distance and say thank you when someone stops to allow us to pass. Smiling and gratitude are high vibration feelings that take us far.
This is a portal, and opening, an opportunity. Time to reboot, look again, question, reflect, and prepare to act over the next few weeks and months. The breakups and breakdowns will accelerate us out of the seeming prison planet of our old structures, beginning with this lunation. With the Moon in Libra, it is helpful to remember the concept of “both/and”, rather than “either/or” or bad/good, black/white. Holding the balance is essential. What will not be helpful is playing it safe for the sake of personal peace at all costs. That would be and could be very costly.
Who would have guessed that refrigerant management would be in the top ten? Or that educating girls and family planning would be the second most important things we could do to reduce carbon emissions? It turns out that hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs, the primary current refrigerant) have 1,000 to 9,000 times greater capacity to warm the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. As for making the means of family planning more accessible and educating girls, these two rights-based solutions are projected to reduce the future global population by about a billion people, with commensurate savings in greenhouse gas emissions.
Project Drawdown has produced a framework to guide us on a new pathway of ecological recovery and sustainability, but to act, we need to be able to touch, see, and feel the existing solutions at hand. In “Drawdown 2020 — The Time is Now,” the virtual event that introduced Climate Week in New York City in September, 2020, we experience the sight, sound, and feel of just a few of those solutions, and watching it for free on the website is electrifying.
One spring I volunteered at a botanical garden, spending many days uprooting what to my untrained eye looked like lovely flowers and plants, because they were “non-native.” This particular garden cultivates only indigenous plants, so any errant seeds that have the misfortune to blow in and bloom are routinely removed
As we move ever deeper into our collective rebirth process, we’ll be releasing people and places that no longer resonate with our lives now, and preparing to welcome in the new. Doing this with lovingkindness is our mandate. It’s a ripe moment to ask, who or what in my life seems like an outsider? Am I willing to look again, to enlarge the lens, to see beyond imaginary borders, to become inclusive rather than exclusive?
This month, approximately 75 countries worldwide will create an annual illusion: saving time. We move the hands of our clocks ahead, and think we’ve harnessed the sun. In the U.S., our participation begins at 2 am on Sunday, March 14th.
Holding the both/and
Our brain is always active and it is certainly a good idea to nourish it. We can maximise its potential with simple practices.