I was early enough in my process of healing not to understand what was happening, but deep enough into it to recognize not to interfere. A few weeks after having taken a remedy at the direction of my homeopath, I developed an ezcema-like rash on my left earlobe. At first it was just scaly and itchy, but then it started to crack and weep, and spread onto my face along the cheekbone. At one point, a friend’s child asked what had happened to my ear, and her mother hushed her; embarrassed to call attention to the oozing wound. I began covering it with a bandage, which only added to the effect, but also served to keep the raw skin from making blood spots on the pillows.
In short, it was painful, and ugly. Well-meaning friends and family made suggestions of treatments, and I smiled uncomfortably, because I knew that something was coming OUT that wasn’t supposed to be IN, and if it looked like that on the surface, I did NOT want to send it back inside. It was during the summer; once I put some zinc-containing sunscreen on that suppressed it almost instantly, and my sense was of a sheet of plate armor being welded over a culvert. I felt like my whole body couldn’t breathe.
The old leeches against whom Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, railed, were always burning their patients with chemicals or cutting them open to create “vents,” because they recognized that the body moved things out during disease, but mistook the physical corruption for the cure. The vital force that inspires the human organism endeavors to prolong life; healing vectors allow it to find the proper focus for its power, and to overcome distractions and limitations. With gentleness, not violence, we open the way.
Back to my ear. While it would be lovely to have my memories organized, cross-referenced, and footnoted, the truth is that is not how I roll and thus, whatever eloquent explorations I have from that time, they are buried in illegible script in some forgotten journal. So I don’t remember when or how it resolved, but only that one day it was gone, without a trace, without a scar.
My body has been subjected to much corruption, to vile poisoning, to hideous abuse. I chose it and am not a victim of it, but I acknowledge it. And so, over time, if I am to heal, all of that must find a pathway out. But what of the burdens on my mind, my psyche, my spirit, and the thread of ancient agreements passed down through generations? Must not those, too, find expression, and release?
Indeed, yes, and there is always a moment, after an arc of healing has occurred, that I discover I have shed some unrealized weight and found new ease. Life gets simpler, better, lighter. But during that arc, where am I? Before it begins, I am in a disease state. The vital force cannot identify a path forward, and I’m stuck in a holding pattern of repeating dysfunction. What is asking to be healed? There is no mirror, no reflection, no recognition; my whole being is deep in the murk.
Then the catalyst, the breath, the pause; this is when it becomes healing. When what has been pushed down below the surface for ages begins the struggle of emergence, when the fragile sprout winds upwards through the soil, when the open wires of your self shake off the corrosion and draw the magnetic forces of what is needed to you, and you accept the frisson of contact; this is when the healing begins.
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We are facing times that feel more fraught than any I remember. Like waves of toxic sludge, the technocratic horror rolls down, white-coated and masked, dead-eyed grinning and unfettered by human feeling. It is the long fetch of disease that has been growing bloated on the accumulated travesties of the modern past, metastasizing beyond nightmare proportions. How easy it would be to despair in this moment!
But is it disease, or is it healing?
If I had a wand to wave, a magic plaster to silence the mouths and pens from which this darkness flows, would I use it? Would I stop this process of monstrous revelation?
I would not. All of these impulses of control and destruction that we are seeing are not new. They are buried deep in the psyches of all of us; any of us who have ever had a moment of wishing that the world could be remade to our specifications contains the seeds of this. Seeing it revealed in its hideous march wakes us up and reminds us that what we are facing is within as well as without.
When I was lying in my hospital bed in terrible pain, I remember asking of my illness (for it was mine, custom made for me, specially designed to call forth the dragon and demand my courage in its face), “What are you asking of me? How can I help you so that we both get what we need before you kill me?”
I find myself asking that question again, except, instead of a physical hurt that I can hold in my hands, it is an existential pain that threatens to drown me. And I know, more deeply than I’ve known anything since those dark moments in that hospital bed, that it is here to help me heal, to demand that I heal. Its face is deceit and a maniacal, anti-human world where people are considered a liability, a cancer, something to render miserable and subordinate.
If that is the mirror, then my deepest imperatives are truth and love. How honest can I be with myself, with others? How open can I be to the humanity with which I am surrounded? How surrendered can I be to the great current, that I trust enough to act when I am shown right action?
The portal is open. The moment of healing is here.
Healing is not easy. It can sometimes feel like disease. But if I have seen, and been seen by, the catalyst, and taken the breath, and the pause, then I can enter the path through the underworld, with the promise that there is a way through.
What a time to be alive! Thank you, Divine Light, for the creation of this moment, and me in it, that the shattered mirrors of illusion and delusion are revealed, and I enter the dark path dappled by the scattered light of the ten thousand shards.
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How do you navigate the challenge of these days?