I had allowed the shadow of death to knock me from my perch. It happened as a gradual accretion, a belief based on coincidental symptoms that had emerged over the last two years that I might be sick and that I might die from what the symptoms were suggesting that I had. I have spent weeks trying to feel out if it even feels right to write about this. There was, I realize some unrecognized silliness involved, too. This is not something that I have mentioned to but a few people in my life.

It’s true. I began having symptoms for what I thought was for a type of intestinal cancer. Normally very healthy, I didn’t carry health insurance. It was tricky to sign up for: you can only sign up November through December. Those are the two busiest months in my studio business, and for as lame as it sounds, I missed the signup dates two years running. I knew the clock was ticking and yet I was also being pulled into a feeling of inevitability.

I knew that the only way I was ever going to see a doctor was with the right insurance. The importance of this was driven home by something I learned about first-hand about cancer diagnosis and treatment. A family had come to me this past year to ask that I put the ashes of their loved one into molten glass, something I do with something called Journey Glass. I saw during a visit to the studio how they had tried to keep their loved one alive with chemo treatments. When she finally passed, her husband was 1.2 million dollars in debt. It was startlingly easy to do with the cost of a single dose of IV administered chemo at nineteen thousand dollars. They went into receivership just trying to keep her alive. I knew the only way I would see a doctor was with insurance. I also knew every case was unique, and I knew the clock was ticking. The back story on this was that I could feel a block in a region of my body corresponding to the LV 12 meridian point and I had had several therapists work in and around that energy line as early as 2013 onward. I could FEEL the energetic block for a while before it manifested into a physical malady. Being me, I assumed the worst instead of staying open and receptive.

The symptoms were all consistent with cancer, though. When I would research the symptoms, this was all that ever came up with. How could it be anything but that? After two years of this dogging me, I finally was able to see a doctor who ordered a battery of tests. The abdominal pain had gotten so bad that I was having difficulty using bliss states to ameliorate the pain. This tossed a few more pints of gas on the fire of my fears. It turned out, though, that it was just that; an unfounded concern based on symptoms that sounded nearly identical to the “big C.”

One big reason why I fell for this was that in years past, as I worked through blocked energy with kundalini assisting, I could feel the presence of the blocked energy in what I identified was the LV 12 region of the meridian system. I had been to an acupuncturist, which did result in some releases, and then later I was guided to a Kahuna healer whose therapy room was within walking distance of my home. Of all the people out there, I had a therapist who knew and understood energy work using a modality that focused on the balance between yin and yang energies, which was exactly what I had been hoping to find. She had lived in New Zealand where she first learned her craft. Here she was, within walking distance of my home. She too helped me when a group of Reiki healers could only go so far. I wrote a few years ago about how one of these healers admonished me to not “go trying to find problems where problems didn’t exist” because she could not feel the presence of the block herself. I thanked her and the rest of the crew. A month later I found Violet, my Kahuna healer, who felt the block and went straight to work letting a portion of it go. There was still something there that I could feel vividly, that remained. About a year later, another energy healer worked on this area of my body, revealing still more material stored there. That, too, was a welcome relief. I said that I was concerned about moving this block because I was afraid it could wind up turning into disease and kill me. Because of some cancer in my family, my mind went to that as the potential invisible culprit. It was there that things stayed and after a few more years, I had the uneasy sense that the energy was turning into a physical symptom of illness. I was ready for the worst, which has been one of the Achilles heels in my life. Why had I fallen for the negative instead of remaining open to the possibilities?

Somewhere along the line I allowed this niggling fear to eat away at my bliss, the same kind of bliss that I felt when an angelic presence entered my room one early morning at four a.m. and did to me the same thing that I would later read had happened to St Theresa of Avilla. An arrow had been thrust into her heart, which set her ablaze with bliss and a love for God. Her insides felt as though they were being drawn out of her. I had the same experience, except that my angelic presence pulled something that felt like my insides out of me, leaving me emptied of something I knew was old past material. It was this experience with that angelic being that I was able to taste a bliss that was beyond all bliss. It was that one experience that forever changed me from that moment forward, leaving me to reach for some semblance of that bliss felt on the morning of Good Friday in 2008, about a year after kundalini first rose in me. It showed me that I didn’t need to be a believer, much like Paul wasn’t a believer either, but was nonetheless struck by a blinding light which changed his life forever. I am not suggesting that I am a Paul, no, but rather to underscore that belief is not a prerequisite (like it was with Paul). It is something that is in all of us, a potential which is revealed in each of us just as Paul described it as the Christ that was revealed in him in that moment. We don’t get it by looking outside of ourselves, but by always looking within to find the “architecture,” the structure in our own consciousness that makes such a state possible. The reward is this brilliant bliss that heals and transforms. It humbles, too, while opened the mind to our greater potential. It’s as though we often suffer at the hands of our limitations, of feeling cut off somehow from a quality that we in truth have but do not realize that we have. I had allowed myself to drift from that perch that I had found. I am reminded that this is a daily challenge to always attune myself to this quality and to do so in silence and in thanksgiving.

So finally, I was able to go to a doctor. Tests were ordered up, a whole battery of them. One by one, the results came in: negative for cancer. I was happy to have been wrong! I had reached a place in life where the world just seemed like it was going off the rails. It was like the world was going mad to me, and it was disheartening to witness it all. I saw how terrible people were being to one another in the midst of a pandemic, I saw how those who questioned the mainstream narrative were being treated much like any group in our past has been treated: they were the enemy. Why? Why was one narrative being pushed so hard? Why was early treatment being treated as though it was the worst possible thing a person could do to themselves or to others? Doctors lost their ability to practice medicine. People were deplatformed from social media sites for speaking up about alternatives. I read meta studies that showed the efficacy of other methods. And why not? How had so many seemed to have lost their minds? Fear. That’s what happened. In fact, I had also fallen for the power of fear myself with the concern that I had cancer, so I wasn’t immune from this. My condition all seemed to fit a given illness trajectory, except fear kept me from considering other alternatives that could have led me to different conclusions or the possibility of them. It took tests to show that my fear was unfounded. All of this left me feeling like maybe leaving this life might not be such a bad thing.

I know how that sounds, but if you know me, you know that working with kundalini left me largely free from the fear of death. I knew what waited for me on the other side of all of this. And yet, I was not completely immune from fear about something else. So? It was for me a big lesson, an important one, and it had more to do with not giving up so fast, to stay with the challenge that this life offered me. The lesson was one of having a better attitude. The rest, I have come to learn involves availing myself of how to help my body heal from a couple of issues that created the symptoms that I thought might be cancer related.

Despite this, I had already begun to have big shifts in my life, with an ex who finally came to apologize to me for her treatment, something I never thought could or would happen. This had happened in part as a result of what power truth has in our lives. We can run from the truth, but it gets harder and harder to hide. Eventually it eats away at your peace, which was predicated on something that was false. I am not suggesting that karma is something that is some righteousness coming to take anyone down, but rather that when we hide from the truth, the truth stalks us since that truth is so important for our happiness and wellbeing. My ex’s life had been whittled away because of living an untruth and seeking to promulgate untruths about me. I wrote about this recently, just as it caused me to consider the effect the same acts others have perpetrated in my life which involved being dishonest. Would it stalk them too? Of course, but that wasn’t my story and they were out of my orbit, thankfully. I too wasn’t being honest about my truer nature and had allowed the worst of my fears to grip me. Luckily, I was able to dispel those fears once and for all. I mention this recent event with my ex because in that moment I felt this great weight lift, and when that happens, many more other things often tend to have a way of happening, too. But as for my condition, this swirl of concern over my health and mortality? It showed me that there is something beyond the pinched view I had in regards to what my ex had done and I read this event as my soul finally being heard before I might kick the bucket. But there was another possibility beyond my thinking that this was a presage to some kind of transition. Silly me.

I had so much to do, I thought, so much left to do that my soul came here in physical form to work through. I had several writing projects hanging over my head and I really needed to finish those so I could tick them off my soul contract. I had not spoken to anyone about these concerns except for just a few people, and none of them in my family. I didn’t want anyone to worry, least of all my daughter who was getting ready to finish up her last semester at college. I figured if it was bad like I feared, then I would have to look at chemo and surgery perhaps, and that would be a bridge I would have to cross once I got there. No use in setting off alarms and distracting people. On the other hand, I still considered this could be something else, so I stayed quiet. I am glad that I did. I am also glad I was able to get the question cleared up.

This experience has helped to also underline the importance of taking care of my gut health because my gut has felt like it has been zapped with electricity since the rise of kundalini 15 years ago. Those who practice Chi Gung claim that chi resides in the gut, and it may be that it exists as a kind of biological battery of sorts. I had developed symptoms of nausea after awakening (kundalini flue they call it), as well as a five month period where my body stopped feeling hunger, a period of time that led to the shedding of loads of blocked energy and also helping my system adjust to this new normal. The zapping of my gut though was always an issue, one that came and went, and now as I write this I find that the many notes that I wrote in my journal about way of supporting good gut health are now coming in handy. While I am not a doctor, I can feel how food effects my system and how I need to change my diet a little more. Some of this involves getting rid of wheat as a possible culprit for one aspect of my symptoms, another involves supporting healthy gut bacteria. There is more work to do, and my hope is that I can heal a very cranky system that has led me to a great deal of discomfort at times.

I remain concerned about the state of the world, one that feels like it is somehow running off the rails emotionally. I see groups seeking to seize control of the narrative in order to direct policy in a global way that I frankly find beyond worrisome. When I see leaders embracing a green ideology while at the same time banning the use of fossil fuels while they themselves are opening up new markets for their own liquified natural gas in Europe, I see hypocricy. When I see passports for tracking our carbon footprint and whether someone has had a vaccine, I see another form of control and the loss of freedom in the process. Freedom is messy, but the ability to speak freely even though it means listening to voices we do not agree with is the cornerstone of our form of government here in the U.S. and in other democratic societies. Without dialog we lose the means of thrashing through our challenges in a broader way, imperfect though it may be, and even if it inconveniences our own personal values. We have so much promise as a species and yet, if we are not free to work through our challenges in an open way, we lose the very thing that will help us to find new solutions to old problems. We have so much potential and I hate to think that we as a species might squander it. Only through freedom do I sense that we will open up the lanes of possibility which could lead us to a brighter tomorrow.

My big lesson in all of this is not to shrink from controversy, nor to allow my own inner fear get the best of me. Only by being neutral and open will I be able to see with clearer eyes. I am glad that I was wrong, at least on this one thing. There is a bliss that exists at the center of our being. So many have been cut off from this fundamental nature, and so often fear is the killer of this bliss. But even death does not stop it, as this too is part of the natural order of our existence. For myself, I am getting back to the pass of bliss again as the way through, but not around my own challenges. It is in the bliss state that I find my own mind is expanded and curiously, my own intuitive powers strengthened. It is as it has always been, this new mind birthed from the union of opposites in our consciousness. This bliss represents the fullest expression of the synthesis that takes hold of those who “wake up” and find their consciousness changed in a twinkling. I think this is the way through for many of us, and hopefully it will be the way for many more to follow.

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