Long-Awaited (and Long-Winded) Update:

 Welp, it's been most of a month since my last post, and I still don't really know what to write here. I have been investigating a few avenues for treatment -- all of which are outside my comfort zone, but I'm still unsure what I'm supposed to do.  Because some of you are wondering, I guess I'll just start writing, and see what comes out.  Warning:  There will likely be rambling.

I mentioned a book in one of my earlier posts -- "The Journey" by a woman named Brandon Bays.  She healed a basketball-sized tumor in her abdomen by seeking out the emotions that were the root cause of it.  Twelve years ago, I learned about the connection between disease and emotional/mental trauma.  Since then, in my massage therapy work, I have come to understand that emotions are at least 90% of disease and chronic pain. Read that again. Emotions are the root cause of at least 90% of our pain and disease. It doesn't have to be anything horrific like the Holocaust or parental abuse; it can be little things that our young minds didn't know how to handle, so they stuffed it down inside and pretended to move on.  The problem is that we think we're leaving it behind, but we're actually carrying it along with us like a backpack. It's out-of-sight, out-of-mind, so we fool ourselves into thinking it's gone, but at some point down the road, these little pockets of experiences try to head out like a pimple -- trying to get us to acknowledge and deal with them so the pocket can heal up.  Our family is pretty stubborn against this because it comes across as being weak, but what we haven't realized is that carrying around this extra baggage is sapping our strength and making day-to-day life more difficult than it would have to be. If you think about it, that's just stupid reasoning built on pride, isn't it?

Maybe some of you have a dash cam in your car. It records what's going on in front of (and, in some cases, behind) you. If your car gets hit, the dash cam "experiences" the shock and locks that part of the video so it can't be erased. Do you see the allegory? We may be going along just fine, but then someone says or does something that shocks or hurts us in some way, and that little event gets locked down in our memory for the rest of our lives. It may eventually get buried under many other memories, to the point that we've forgotten it. But our subconscious mind still remembers, and helps us avoid similar experiences in the future. We find ourselves living in patterns that we don't understand, with no idea of why -- or how to change them. This is why we really can't search our own hearts -- why we need God to do it for us: we look right past the things that need to be dealt with most. (Hymns #379 and #380 mention the "secret springs", the "motives that control", the "chambers where polluted things hold empire o'er the soul".)

I have felt for many years that my ability to love and be loved is broken. I don't know why. Or how to fix it. I've prayed about it a lot. I mean, really a lot, because God is Love, and if the part of me that loves Him back is broken, well, can a person who can't love God be in heaven?  He deserves my deepest love, but if my ability to love Him is stunted, and if I'm carrying around a 200-pound backpack full of emotional baggage, that limits how useful I can be to Him.  I'm speaking in the first person here because this is very personal. However, this sort of thing is epidemic in mankind, so you may recognize some of it in yourself.

All that said, one of the avenues I've been exploring is this matter of emotions and trauma. I haven't felt like I have any trauma to speak of. I mean, my parents did the best they knew how at the time, and my childhood was good.  I can see the effort they put into raising us kids, and the expense of it (i.e. horses), and I appreciate it very much. So what's with the emotional baggage? I don't know. Maybe it stems from some other source completely. Maybe it's just childish misunderstandings that need to be brought to light and dumped overboard. I really don't know. And I wouldn't follow up on this line of thinking if I didn't feel that God is pointing me down this path. I have been praying about it, after all, so who am I to determine the way He answers? 

Thru her website, I found that Brandon Bays has been teaching others how to take these emotional journeys for two decades, and in many different languages. I also found that she isn't trying to get rich from it. She offers a three-day "journey intensive" for $197 (I'm used to paying $900 for a four-day massage class), but then gives a 50%-off code to use! So for $97, I was able to attend a Zoom meeting in which I dipped a toe into the waters of her teachings. The first day was intense -- to the point that I didn't attend the second or third day -- but after mulling it over for a few days, I think I'm supposed to go back. There isn't another class in North America until after the first of the year, but there is a person in Portland that is trained to teach it, so I will be contacting her to see about getting together in-person while I'm there in December.  I'll try to let you know how that goes.

Another avenue I'm investigating is the role that massage therapy may have played in my cancer. I spoke with a medical intuitive a week or so ago. If you're not familiar with that term, it's a person that has the gift of being able to "see" into a person's body intuitively, and describe what's going on. Several years ago, I read a book by a man who apparently had these gifts as a child. He "saw" his grandmother's lung cancer before she even knew there was anything wrong. At the time I read his book, I couldn't explain how it could be possible, but I kind of settled on the idea that it must have been some other spirit -- not of God -- that was in him. That reasoning didn't make much sense, even then, but that's where I left it.  More recently, the verses Paul wrote in I Cor 12:28-30 have come to mind. Each person has been given one or more gifts, and each one is important to the body of Christ. Who am I to say this man is not of God, just because I don't understand his abilities? 

Fast forward to present day: I was recently given the name of a female medical intuitive by someone I trust, and when I spoke with her this past week, she told me that my cancer is just negative energy that I've picked up from my massage clients. Yes, it needs to go, but it isn't impossible.  Well, this pricks my pride a little because I thought I was taking the necessary precautions to protect myself against others' energy. But it would make sense. Looking back 12 years ago, I had been doing massage full time for four years. The cancer was small and quite easily removed by doing all the things I did back then. But I've been doing massage 12 more years since then -- the last year and a half of it working with military veterans -- and the cancer is not only back, but it's much bigger than before. So if I've been picking up and hanging on to negative energy all these years, well, it makes sense, doesn't it? But why am I hanging on to other people's stuff? Do I somehow feel that I can't help them without doing that? Or that I have to help people in order to justify my existence? Figuring all that out leads me back to the avenue of emotions and trauma. I feel like that is going to be the key to going forward. 

I realize this is completely outside the thinking of most of you, and that your take-away may be that I've gone off the deep end. If so, I ask you to just suspend your judgment for the time being, and see how this all plays out. It's well outside my comfort zone too, but so was massage school. I remember praying my way thru all of those classes because there were other spirits there that I wanted nothing to do with, but I needed the skills I could get there, so I asked God to be my protection. I am asking Him to be my guide and protector through this time too, because I need to rid myself of the crud that's weighing me down (think Depression, anyone?). And even if I am going down a rabbit hole that's not of His choosing, He sees my desire to do what He wants, and He is well able to turn any evil into good -- and to nudge me back onto the path of His choosing. So please just pray that God will be my guide.

Some of you have asked about the regimen I did last time.  I don't know if it's just a lack of energy, but all the stuff I did last time is not calling to me this time around. I am trying to eat cleaner; trying to cut out sugar; trying to move more; but there isn't the soul-deep drive to do it this time. It feels like the cancer came back because I didn't get to the root cause of it last time, and that is the soul-deep drive I have this time.  Yes, I need to eat better and bring balance to my life again, but those things won't fix me this time. This time, I have to go deeper. 

Aside from all of that, I have been using bee venom cream on both breasts. I found it on Amazon after reading about how being stung helps the arthritis in beekeepers' hands. Apparently it helps the inflammation. It's only been a week or so, but I think it's making a difference. How might that translate? I don't know. It's just an observation, at this point.

From a work standpoint, I shut off the VA referral pipeline the beginning of August, and I'm just now noticing a difference in my workload. At the peak, I was juggling 43 referrals (plus my own clients), but now I'm down to 18, all of which will be wrapped up by the end of January. I don't know what the path ahead looks like. A big part of me wants to close up shop and do something entirely different (20 years is long enough, right?), but I have some very dear clients that would miss me (and I would miss and worry about them), so I may just cut back to a couple days per week, and do something else the rest of the time. There are several options open at this point, but I guess I'm not ready to talk about them yet. I will be taking three weeks off mid-December to spend some time at the ocean and visit my kids. When I get back in January, I hope to have some clarity as to the next step or two. I'm guessing I won't be posting here until then, but you never know.

---------

P.S. The Follow button is apparently not working -- maybe because this blog is 12 years old, so probably the links are obsolete.  The best solution would be to start a new blog, but frankly, I don't have the time, energy, or motivation to do that. So I leave it to you, my dear friends and family, to check back every so often. 

(P.P.S. I love your comments.)  I thank you ever so much for your love and support. 💖

P.P.P.S. - The herbs I ordered for my root vegetable juice fast did arrive -- a week or so after I'd given up on the fast. I will be making the teas I bought them for, and at some point, I'll let you know how that goes. I may also circle back to the fast at some point. I'm thinking that my liver was already overloaded with toxins from eating poorly, so maybe after I've been eating clean for a few months, a fast might not overload it so badly. We'll see.