In part one of this essay, I wrote about the foundational things that I had to learn and employ to help my body heal from chronic illness. Here I’ll write about some of the other things I did including more details around supplements, herbs, clothing and environment, and how I approached adding in each of these. Some of these things seemed to have more of an effect than others. Some seemed like they were doing little initially, but over the long run delivered profound benefits in my life. Other things here are things I was already doing when I got sick and continue to do to this day because they’re essential to health. In case you aren’t doing them, and you aren’t well, I will include them.
Water: I can’t emphasize enough the importance of good, clean water. How do you know if you have good, clean water? If you’re in the city drinking tap water, you don’t. If you’re in the country and you don’t get your water tested, you don’t know. When we lived in the city, we vacillated between water sources. We got our water from friends’ wells, from springs, and from distilling our own. In the early 2000s, we bought a water distiller and then remineralized and structured it because one of the military bases we lived on had no water sources around it and the water we had was awful. Distilled water has its own problems, but there are times when it’s called for. You probably don’t have to go that far. Our daughters were both gifted Berkeys (from us) with the fluoride filter when they left home. They put their water through there and then structure it in large glass vessels. What is structured water? I will put a few links in with extra reading of all sorts at the bottom of this essay.
Ozone therapy: Ozone was a big benefit to me when I was ill. I used to drive three hours each way to go and get my ozone treatment in a clandestine office in Quebec. It’s illegal here and hard to find a practitioner that believes in it enough to put their neck on the line. I’m amazed by the effects of ozone and its myriad applications. There are different ways to administer ozone with different opinions on the effectiveness of each. My physician used an I.V. to withdraw my blood then mixed it with ozone and returned it to my body. I used to leave that office feeling like a million bucks. And when you’re sick for a long time, feeling like a million bucks is really quite miraculous. I’m looking into getting a home unit in the future.
Supplements/herbs/medications: I was already taking some supplements when I got ill. Then I started taking more. And more. And more. It got silly after awhile. I had the sense that all the things I was taking were more of a burden on my already burdened body. There are all sorts of programs and kits and packages in the supplement world that promise to address what ails you. After I was diagnosed with Lyme, I was put on this guy’s “protocol” and then that gal’s “protocol” - all of them brought great hope followed by disappointment.
At one point, having already spent thousands of dollars on “the protocols” and on the Lyme physician I was under the care of in the U.S. at that time, I was told, by the good doctor, that I was at the point where herbs weren’t going to help. I needed to go with the big guns, the antibiotics. I was very resistant. I initially said no. It was urged again and again on subsequent appointments when I continued to show little improvement. I finally relented. At that time, it seemed like the thing to do. We had our first farm. I had young kids. I needed to be able to show up in my life.
Here I could write about how I regret that decision. While I wouldn’t make that decision again, that’s only because I did it then. I’m not a believer in regretting any decision. I am here now writing this having learned and experienced what I was meant to. Was it a good experience? No. It was an awful experience. Those antibiotics ravaged what was left of my guts. I developed a hiatal hernia. I was weakened and exhausted and depressed. I stopped taking them after a couple of months. I realized that remaining a patient of that physician was no longer where I needed to be. As much as I wanted to find the doctor to fix me, there wasn’t going to be one. I needed to listen to myself and the God within my soul to heal. That’s when the real healing began (as I wrote more about in part one of this essay). And for that, I am grateful to those dastardly pills.
From that point forward, I focused on what should have been focused on initially - my ability to detoxify. I researched and implemented the right herbs, practices, and supports to assist my wilted eliminatory organs to properly detoxify what was in my body. What was the point of taking herbs and supplements to help clear the body if my liver and kidneys, my skin, and my lymph couldn’t get rid of it? So instead of slash and burn I moved into supporting my body to heal. I did healing baths with clays and balneotherapy. I dry brushed regularly. I moved every day in the sun. I took off my shoes and grounded. I started meditating. I took herbs and homeopathics to assist with drainage. We bought a sauna and I used it regularly. We bought a full spectrum, full body light panel for the long, cold winters when I didn’t get enough of the sun’s healing rays that my body needed. I put castor oil packs on my liver and kidneys. I went to acupuncture to open up blocked meridians in my body. My whole focus shifted from one of “kill those buggers” to listening to my body.
Our bodies want to heal. If they’re not healing, there is something blocking them from doing so. Some toxin or parasite or hunk of trauma mutating away. Never do our bodies want to take us out. I think that’s one of the most malicious, vile lies that western medicine tells us. We have autoimmune diseases where “the body turns on itself”. We have cancer where “rogue cells try to kill us”. They would have us believe, and indeed did a great job of it over the whole plandemic, that the body is this fragile sack that is unpredictable and can turn on us in an instant. The body, our bodies, are us. They are a miraculous invention from a miraculous God that hold us, nourish us, allow us to discover and learn and explore. Our bodies want life as much as we do. Imagine the endless processes your body is doing right now, right this very second, just so you can quietly fill your brain with these words. And they want us to believe our bodies just all of a sudden decide that they’re going to take us out? Pffft… What nonsense. A body that turns on itself is a body that has been struggling for a very long time and is calling for help.
Back to the supplements that I employed to assist with my body’s natural tendency to heal. There are all sorts of herbs and supplements that fall into different categories. There are herbs that you would take in acute situations, things like echinacea when you feel a scratch in the back of your throat. But there are also herbs that are taken as part of an approach to assist with longer time healing, detoxifying, and building of the body. These would be unique to each person. I also found medicinal mushrooms to be a powerful adjunct to how I was crafting my health reclamation.
Integrating plant medicines was integral to me and I continue to make herbs and wild, foraged mushrooms a part of my daily life. I think every one should know herbal medicines. It doesn’t mean we have to be herbalists, but understanding the plants and their healing gifts, especially the plants native to the areas we live in, is important. I believe we have entered a time when even basic knowledge of these important allies is critical. It’s important to know how to use the gifts we have been given. Reliance on corporations of any sort to keep us well is folly.
Once my body was working better by detoxifying with the therapies I have just mentioned, I again returned to a specific Lyme protocol. I used Stephen Buhner’s Lyme protocol as outlined in his book. I continued doing all of the other therapies. Within nine months or so, I started feeling better. By a year I was feeling significantly better.
At the same time that I was taking these supplements and herbs, I was taking binders. I continue to take binders. It’s important to make sure that as our bodies are breaking down and ridding us of pathogens, that those pathogens actually make it out of our bodies and don’t get recirculated back in. I tried all sorts of binders at different times until I found what worked for me. There are clays and charcoals and all sorts of binders out there. If you go with charcoal, know that there are very different qualities out there. I prefer the Takesumi activated bamboo charcoal. I always have it on hand.
Teeth: Oh boy, this is a big one for me. By the time I was 12 years old almost every molar I had was plugged with a giant mercury filling. When I joined the military, the dentists there would just give root canals like they were candy. I left the military with three root canals. Unfortunately, in my early twenties, I had all of the metal fillings in my mouth removed with absolutely no precautions. Nobody talked about those things then. My dentist drilled out the mercury fillings without any precautions and that mercury was swallowed and inhaled. I am certain this is part of my current issues with essential tremor which I am addressing by removing heavy metals. I had already worked on removing certain heavy metals from my body when I was ill. But it’s slow and ongoing and now I need to make my way to the mercury.
But back to the teeth. I have had all of those root canals removed. I had all of those military dentist root canals replaced by materials I was tested for by my holistic, “biological” dentist. Unfortunately, I came to understand that there’s no such thing as a healthy dead thing right under one’s brain. Which means I had three back teeth pulled. I just left the spaces initially but now I am feeling well enough to tackle the next stage of this adventure (ha). I’m going to an experienced dentist to have the cavitations cleaned out. The ongoing infection, even though I don’t notice a thing, is there to be sure. I think that might also be a contributor to my developing essential tremor. We’ll see.
If you have mercury amalgam fillings or root canals and you’re not well, I recommend digging into the resources listed below. If you have them and are well, I would still recommend researching what’s going on in your mouth.
Diet: At the time I became ill, I had already been eating a solely organic, traditional foods diet for decades. I didn’t eat processed foods or sugars or grains. I was eating very well, better than most. It didn’t matter. Food is only a piece of a much bigger whole. I continued to eat well throughout my healing journey, but it was when I went on a solely animal based diet (“carnivore”, if you will) that things just blew open for me. My mind was clearer than it had been in years. There was quite literally NO inflammation in my body. I was able to lift weights again. It’s was marvellous!
My approach to my animal based diet was to eat nose to tail. I relied heavily on organ meats like kidneys, heart, liver, and included things like tails and brains and eyes. My body was not absorbing the food I was eating so I needed concentrated forms of nutrients. I consumed bone broths regularly. I kept taking my plant and mushroom medicines at this time but dropped all of my other supplements. I have tried all sorts of elimination diets, but in my opinion, a solely animal based diet was exactly what my body needed to be able to do the work to turn things around.
Fasting: Fasting was another thing that really moved the needle on my health. I found that longer duration fasts were more helpful with my lyme symptoms. For a time I was doing five day fasts every month with 48 hour fasts every week. I lost far too much muscle but it did really help me with my symptoms. It was extreme though and not something I would recommend to anyone else. Today, I fast for five days about twice a year, at the change of winter to spring and fall to winter. I no longer think that regular fasting is a good idea. I need to keep my lean muscle mass as I age, not speed up its demise.
Mold: I’m now certain that I had Lyme a long time before I got ill. It’s often the case that our bodies are struggling with something and there’s another factor that pulls the trigger of that loaded gun. In my case, that was a heavy duty exposure to mold. We had an old barn with a hay loft at our first farm. I would go up in there everyday and fork down mounds of hay to the cattle, being ever so diligent to avoid the black mold clouds lifting into the air. Sure… Yikes! I also used to just go up there to lie in the hay and daydream. I know, I know…
That house had some mold issues as well. We pulled everything back to the studs, but by that time, the damage was done. The mold took up residence in me. Mold is diabolical. Everything from cancer to lethargy, chronic illnesses of all sort, and poor immunity can be a result of mold in the home. It’s serious and needs to be addressed. All of the protocols I did for drainage, including the support for my eliminatory organs greatly helped my issues with mold. It was at this time that I also started adding in some food grade, hydrogen peroxide to my water in the morning. That was very helpful as well. I continue that practice to this day. I also take molecular hydrogen which has also been very effective.
Next to skin: I had serious skin issues with my mold exposure. I was constantly itchy and had a crawling sensation on my skin. It kept me up at night. I couldn’t go anywhere near a computer because the static and EMFs would intensify that crawling sensation. Through a lot of insane-inducing days and nights of feeling like there were bugs eating me alive, I started to figure out things that would make me feel better. One of those things was clothes.
I figured out that cotton clothes were awful for me. They would really intensify the skin issues. I fell into a nightmarish rabbit hole of researching morgellons, wondering if that’s where I was headed. What I found on those forums were that many people noticed a worsening of their skin conditions with cotton clothes. I knew that cotton was mostly GMO (Bt - a bacteria that is inserted in the gene) by that time and I knew that it was grown saturated in chemicals, but surely those issues were resolved by the time that it made its way into a pair of pants or a t-shirt? Turns out not to be the case.
I got rid of all of my cotton clothes. I also got rid of anything I had that was synthetic (although truth be told, there wasn’t much of that). We also got rid of our bed sheets and towels and even our organic mattress (I was convinced it had mold in it). That was tough. And miserable. But things started to change. To this day, I won’t wear non-organic cotton. There’s all sorts of videos of how GMO cotton actually reacts to magnetic and EMF signals. Believe it or not, I’ve experienced it and choose to stay away. Why take the risk of being the sponge for those chemicals seeping into your body every day. Our eldest daughter won’t put any synthetic or GMO cotton on our granddaughter. I’m so relieved by her many wonderful decisions as a mama.
The clothes I wear now include old cotton if I find some vintage number I can’t resist (like pre-70s), linen, silk, wool, hemp, and leather on my feet. Mostly, I wear linen which has incredible health properties including being protective against radiation, fungus, and actually elevates the frequency of the human wearing it. Every material we put on our bodies carries a measurable resonance - just as our bodies do. A study done about a decade ago now shows that not only is linen the most healing material we can wear, but it actually raises our own body’s frequency. Take it or leave it. I can feel the vibration of clothes on my body. You can, too, if you just take some time to notice
Surely I’m missing many things. It was years and years, with many starts and stops for me to get well. It was sunbathing and gardening naked. It was sitting in the screened in porch with my husband, admiring the ancient apple tree encircling us, drooping under the weight of her apples. It was the freezing winter nights in our wood fired hot tub watching the stars while we tumbled around each other, slippery as fish. It was my good dog, loyal and joyful - the one that just licked my big toe. It’s a hint I can’t ignore. And that’s my biggest tip - do not ignore the small things. Get into a rhythm with your body so that when it whispers, you can hear. Then it need not shout to get your attention.
It’s always your choice to be overwhelmed with the enormity of it all. Or you can remind yourself that nothing is linear here. It’s a bit of this, a sprinkle of that. It’s intention and loving oneself enough to know when you need a good kick in the pants and when you need some soft care. You can see it all as a burden or you can accept your path as one you were built for and get on with it. Break it down, move with what resonates the strongest, learn the language of your body. We are meant to be a unified being - body, mind, soul. Everything in our world sets us up to be cleaved off from that natural relationship, but our Creator calls us back. How we answer is up to us.
Lastly, I leave thee with this - an eloquent, impassioned plea for the changing of one’s ways. It was written in 1845 and addresses the scourge of the times - people unwilling to take a bath. Hard to believe, huh? And yet, somehow, they make poetry out of their argument. Maybe, one day, the people of the future will look back on our reliance and devotion to our modern day salesmen pitching their modern day snake oil in the form of pills and injections, as archaic and ignorant. We can only hope. In the meantime, that’s the momentum I’m rolling with. That’s the world I’m working to create.
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