KEEPING THE FAITH

It is all about hope, isn’t it? I mean, the reason I even invest myself in these remedies and, believe me, I have tried most of them (no bee stings). A few years ago, my son Lu’s friend Oliver, around seven at the time, just said to me, “You should be able to walk. You can stand, and if you can stand that means you can walk some day.” I just wanted to give him a hug.  How wonderfully naïve and, yet, so simply optimistic.

If you’re looking for a remedy, as though it could be in the dumpster in the alley next to your building or in one of the offices in the Empire State Building or buried in Central Park somewhere, it’s just a matter of finding it. You become anxious. It might be a result of desperation, hope, whatever you want to call it. You just get tired of the damn disease doing its business, progressing.

So, when someone comes to you and says they are a healer, maybe you listen. More than you might have when you were a young healthy buck. Now, you take the remedy more seriously than you might otherwise, say, if you did not have a progressive disease. A healer, wow! Another example of an approach I would never have dignified in a previous life, before MS. But since life as I currently know it has become so challenging, I need to give healing more credibility than I might have pre-diagnosis.

What I do know is this: As far as my understanding of them, in our culture, healers are often Native Americans, mystics who possess a power, almost magical to “heal” people’s usually physical ailments. I like the concept, though I’ve never felt comfortable abiding by it myself. The other image of healers, right or wrong, is that of the charlatans, con men usually associated with organized religion who would claim to have special God-given powers that enable paralyzed people to walk or cancer patients to go into remission.

Let’s face it, though, “healing” is appealing conceptually. Seriously, who would not want to let someone run their hands over your body, not even touching you in order to make you feel better?  No drugs, no needles, no visits to cramped doctors’ offices. As someone who does not believe in God or any organized religion, however, this was going to be a challenge. I knew it. The healer, an acquaintance of my mom’s and closer to her age, believed in her skills and, further, she was altogether into astrology, the stars, the moons, their alignment and impact on our lives. This was an approach I had always been skeptical about, to say the least.

And so for several months, I invested myself in the power of the healer. I met her in person and she sincerely believed she could help me. Subsequently, we talked over the phone and she told me to set aside a specific time each day when she would be concentrating on me in order to feel her energy. I viewed this as a major step in my personal development

When my time with healer drew to a close I had learned to relax more and breath better, concentrating on healing and ridding myself of the disease: the experience was not unlike meditation, which I have also tried. And I really wanted the process to work, the healer wanted her skills to work. But, alas, for all of our effort, I never felt myself getting better. Which isn’t to say it wouldn’t work for someone else; it just didn’t work for me.

So I keep plugging away, taking the newest best medicines, exercising as much as I can and planning for the day when I will walk again.  Because if I can stand, shouldn’t I be able to walk?

This all made me think of an old Billy Joel song, "Keeping the Faith": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2pU0QJkMck

 Have a great week!

 Peace,

 Marc

 marc@empirelifecoaching.com

 914.715.9496