My Personal Healing Journey

"Aho Mitakye Oyasin!  Grandmothers and Grandfathers. Great Spirit, I give many thanks and praises for all the beauty that is my life.  I am grateful for the opportunity to sit in this Tipi tonight and in front of this Fireplace and honor all those who have sacrificed for me to be here.  I lay down this prayer for the highest good of all people and ask that it be taken care of in a gentle way.  Creator, I pray for my health.  I understand that I cannot fully integrate the beauty of my life if I do have my health and I commit to the healing journey that is required for me to fully participate in this beautiful life.  Please lead me, with ease, to the Medicines and the people who can assist me on this journey.  Please take care of me and my family along the way.  Ananchayki! Ananchayki! Ananchayki!  This is my prayer.” 

MY BODY SAID "HELL NO!"

On January 4th, 2020 I entered the Tipi fully understanding the prayer that I needed to make during our annual Native American Church Ceremony.  In the previous year and some, my life had really taken off.  I had the wife, the land, my own thriving business, the dog, and the truck. But as my life seemed to be going in one direction, my body seemed to be going in the other and I increasingly knew that if I didn’t have my health, the rest of my answered prayers would not be sustainable.   I was pushing through a lot of pain and fatigue on a regular basis at this point and this was creating a chronic stress response in my nervous system, thus creating more pain and fatigue as well as impacting my brain functioning.  When I started meeting with healing practitioners and doing inventory, I began to understand how this dis-ease has been existing for quite some time now and building throughout most of my life.  I began to see that there was always something underlying that created this feeling of being “out of shape” and created so much tension in my body that made me more susceptible to injury during my college basketball career, despite the rigorous workout programs, dedication, and stretching for hours and hours every day.  I began to see how my nervous system was just off enough and then became more and more wired into a chronic stress response throughout my years of working in highly toxic work environments.  Over the years, the physical pain grew and even though I thought I had a great tolerance for stress, I now understand just how dysregulated my nervous system was at the core.  Had it not been for a pretty healthy life design that kept me connected to nature, eating healthy foods, rooted in indigenous spiritual practices, and an extremely high level of stubborn optimism, I would have crashed and burned a long time ago.

So, if I had all of those things going for me, why so sick?!  Well, we are still figuring that all out, but here is what I know as much as one can know about these complex and complicated things. Here’s the short version of it all.

It seems as if I was born with a compromised detox system, which is likely a genetic trait.  Therefore, instead of my body being able to filter toxins like a strainer, it’s more like a solid bucket.   In the early 90s is when food changed and we saw an increase in toxic chemicals being added.  I was in high school and this is when I remember my body having subtle struggles to perform.  When a practitioner asked me where I was in the mid-90’s when glyphosate really came onto the scene, I shared with her that I was in college, in the middle of corn fields.  It was during my collegiate basketball years that I really started to experience limitations with my body.  I started to notice that my muscles would tense uncontrollably in a fight-flight response.  I always felt like I was out of shape, even though I probably was the most dedicated to our team workouts and went above and beyond every off-season.  However, it was easy to blame injuries that I sustained or the way I sacrificed and beat my body up day in and day out.  But, in reflection, there was something going on at a deeper level.  

During the years following college, I sustained myself on processed foods and lived in a suburban environment close to a large city.  It appears that the chemicals in the food, the air, the water continued to fill up my bucket.  Then I moved to Oak Ridge, TN and lived just down the road from the nuclear plant for a little over a year before moving to western North Carolina and working and playing in the shadows of a paper mill that was releasing billions of pounds of highly toxic chemicals on a daily basis in the air and the water.  During this time, my physical symptoms seemed to hold steady at a low grade arthritis that I could push through and dissociate from, but I remember that my emotional and mental well being seemed to be more of a struggle during these years.  It seemed easy to blame this all on the emotionally toxic work environments that were a reality, but again, there was something else underneath that lowered my stress tolerance and ability to deal with things considering all the ways I supported my emotional and mental health.  

My move to Tennessee and then on to North Carolina reconnected me to nature and I spent the majority of my time in a wilderness setting, eventually becoming a wilderness guide for three years.  During this time, it seems like I added Lyme, other bacteria, and parasites into the bucket.  And the big kicker was that, when I wasn’t living in the woods, I was living in a tiny house filled with mold.  It was in my final year as a wilderness guide where the physical pain became too much to ignore and this created an even more highly charged nervous system that impacted my responses to the emotional stressors.  

I lived in the moldy tiny house for 5 years and never realized how much it was killing me. My physical abilities began declining and my system was always in a stress response.  I required more and more caffeine to get through my days and this only fed to the downward spiral. I kept chasing dietary answers, emotions to be processed, and energetic healing.  However, my body continued to scream louder and I continued to push on until I made the conscious choice to turn around and face it.  

It only took a few months following that New Year’s Ceremony for the prayer to be answered.  By May of 2020 my body didn’t just “say no” (in the terms of Gabor Mate), it had much stronger language with its defiance.  I was mostly out of commission for anything other than staying alive.  I was grateful that the entire world shut down because I was mostly bedridden and began experiencing panic attacks and periods where my body went into shock and I truly felt as if I could die.  Honestly, a part of me wanted to die because I couldn’t see any other way to escape the extreme physical, emotional, and mental pain. I am grateful my guides and guardians had other plans for me and began to lead me to the people and the Medicines that could at least get me out of this crisis. 

It’s a lonely and painful journey to endure when you experience chronic illness that is complicated, complex, and lacks a great deal of understanding.  Even when those around you try to understand, they just simply can’t.   It’s a great initiation that places you face to face with all your shit and I don’t think it’s something you can grow and heal through without people willing to walk with you (even if you try to walk alone), a deep spiritual connection, and in my opinion….horses.

OUT TO PASTURE

They could be anywhere in the giant pasture that was filled with luscious summer grass, but they chose to graze near my outstretched body that lay flat on the ground with my heart to the sky.  Each of the “Fab Four” (as I affectionately named them) subtly let me know they were there for me as they went about their number one business of grazing, and I had the ultimate trust in all of them that they would not step on me as they would move in and touch different parts of my body with their muzzles and even connect their foot to mine.  They were my friends (the only ones showing up for me) and they were the only ones I felt I could just “be” with.  At this time in my life there wasn’t much else I could do but drag myself out to pasture on a good day.  They always met me there.

I started to notice that my pain levels would drop significantly (sometimes completely) and my energy levels would rise whenever I was out to pasture.  I kept searching for logical answers about this within myself.  Is it adrenaline?  Is it because I’m enjoying myself? Am I just making all of it up…the pain and the no pain?  I was sharing this with another person who receives disability support because of chronic pain and fatigue related to fibromyalgia and other factors and she shared the same experience.  So, that’s when I realized that it’s probably a thing and came across the various (budding) research, including a major study by the Heart Math Institute

that shows the biochemical effect that the heart of the horse has on our nervous system and thus our overall health and wellbeing.  With the fact that the heart of the horse is five times the size of a human’s, combined with the way that their heart vibrations stimulate the various chemicals in our brain, simply being in the presence of a horse can reduce pain levels significantly.  While I appreciate all the thinking behind how and why this happens, as I have mentioned, my brain is inflamed most of the time and my physical body has made itself clear that it is at the forefront of processing these days.  So, research or no research, I felt different.

During the past 4+ years I have been on quite the initiation and healing journey and, honestly, without horses, I don’t think I would be much more than a walking carcass.  Many people don’t realize how sick I have been (because I “look and sound just fine”) and for those who do (mostly my small circle of amazing healthcare professionals and my wife)...they often wonder how it is that I have kept such a mostly positive and faithful approach.  While part of this is just my nature and I refuse to let dis-ease take away my stubborn optimism and unwavering faith that The Great Mystery is always conspiring for me, I believe the support I have received from horses has been the core in helping me to not completely lose myself.  Being cared for by them physically, spiritually, and emotionally has allowed me to have breaks in the pain and the fatigue (in all forms).  Our limbic region of the brain needs a break and we need to have different experiences in order to keep it from going completely and totally apeshit.  The nervous system must experience reprieve from being in full-on sympathetic warrior mode in order to prevent the limbic system from wiring for survival and arming our immune system with fire guns.  So, yes, horses saved my life and they continue to do so while pulling me deeper and deeper into myself and my purpose during this leg of my Earthwalk.