Healing Energy

by Maggie McCarey

Three Lessons in Alternative Healing

My first experience of being healed with energy medicine transformed my thinking about healing and started me on a path of study that continues today.  In the mid 1990’s, I studied massage therapy in Vermont because weekly massages helped to keep me out of a full-force inflammatory episode. The medical profession might describe this as lipedema going in and out of remission.

I learned about a particular energy medicine modality, Cranial Sacral Therapy, during my course work in massage therapy school. Dr. John Upledger, who discovered that a cranial pulse exists, pioneered cranial Sacral Therapy.  It is referred to sometimes as the Breath of Life, or the center of our breathing.

     

The students in my class watched a 20-minute video on CS and were then partnered in twos.  I partnered with a 19 yr old who was not particularly engaged in our studies.  She went first.  She closed her eyes, held my arm and followed along my upper arm searching for something that might appear…a knowing, a hunch, a feeling.  When she got to a certain part, I burst into tears but felt nothing.  In the old stiff upper lip manner of my Brit heritage, I never showed emotion and yet here I was weeping.  

She dropped my arm and the minute she did, the tears stopped.  She picked my arm up again and tears streamed down my cheeks.  She dropped my arm a second time and magically the tears stopped.  I had experienced pain and, at times, limited motion in that exact spot of my upper arm for years but so what?  I was a tomboy paying for an adventurous childhood as my grandmother predicted.  I twisted my neck the third time she picked my arm and gentle held it slightly above the “spot.”  

I felt like a cork was being sucked out of my arm and then I saw a flash of light, like the old blue camera bulbs, blast against the inside of my partner’s hand.  She yelped and jumped back as my brain swiftly and accurately played back a complete memory of the death and funeral of my best friend who was struck by lightening 27 years earlier.  The tears stopped; that pain in my arm left forever.  In CS, this is called an energy cyst, which occurs when we experience any kind of trauma, physical or emotionally. 

I was hooked. I had to learn everything I could about healing.  I took several courses in cranial therapy, a personal internship with a brilliant Upledger structuralist, John, in Montreal, course work in reiki, sound vibration, bio-sonic repatterning, and polarity.  If that seems like a lot of energy study, let me tell you over 160 kinds of energy medicine are being studied and practiced all over the world.

So what does this have to do with lipedema?  So many of our lipese complain of having no energy, years even of intense fatigue.  I have had those bouts with fatigue as well, and I know of no way to move through that fatigue without energy work. Energy medicine moves to release the blocks that underlie and govern patterns of chronic pain, disease, trauma, and even accidents.  During the years that I faithfully received cranial sacral treatments, my body changed from a painful, stiff drag-a-long to a body that could hike and climb mountains for hours painlessly and with ease.  I parked far away from stores just so I could walk.  I walked for hours and ran up down escalators in airports while waiting for delayed planes. Amazingly, I was the most fit and the least pained I had ever been, even in childhood.  I was 48 and in charge of my body for the first time.

CS has been a way of survival when conventional methods failed.  A decade ago, my Woody dog took off after a squirrel just as I stepped onto a curb and I felt my ankle snap.  My sister, thankfully, was visiting with me in Vermont. She had become a CS therapist after years of physical pain was lifted when, during a session, her long held childhood memory of her dog’s death left her body.  She quickly bent over where I lay on the ground wailing and thrashing.  She did something called “unwinding.”  When a person falls, his or her energy field immediately fights that motion, and tangles up like twisted wire.  A good therapist can actually get a body to unwind like a clock and in ways you have never seen a body shaped.

I literally felt the energy unwind as she worked.  Heat and pain left my body.  I walked home with no trouble.   I was terrified to have a broken ankle because of what that would mean to me, as I got older so I went to ER the next day.  Indeed, my ankle was broken but, and I will never forget the look of disgust on the ER doctor’s face when he told me, there was no orthopedic devise big enough to reach around my calf and it couldn't be set any other way because of my leg size and the fat around my ankles.  I was then a 12 on top.  I walked to my car by myself, without crutches, drove to a shoe store, and purchased a leather mountain boot that went well above the ankle.  I laced it up and tightened it around my ankle like an orthopedic walking cast, and went on my way.  I have never had a twinge of pain in that ankle.

  

Lesson Two. I am sure you have heard when a student is ready, a teacher will come. Traditionally, in healing studies people intern from masters who most often are very spiritual rather then theoretical.  When I needed to know about herbs, the Amish woman came. She helped me to stop the inflammation cascade I described previously, but I was still chronically inflamed, in pain, and afraid of my body.  It was hard to walk and to breathe.  I was tired.  Even so, the student in me never stopped believing there was a way out of my illness, and so another teacher came.   She was the Grandmother of the Abenaki Nation.  In native way, she had expected me to arrive at her door one day and I did.  The three years I was her student she began each session with the following words.  “Never give your power away to anyone or anything.”

Perhaps, her words would have had less effect on me had I known her before she became ill many years before.  When I met her, she had contracted a virus in her lungs that caused her to almost drown in her own mucous many times a day.  She lay most days in a hospital bed while people from all over the world, and from every walk of life, came to visit her, to be healed, and to pay homage to this great teacher.  Grandmother never charged anyone for her instruction or her healing.  She lived only on the gifts she received from students. Her lesson learned: Never give your power over to lipedema.

Finally, the third teacher who came to heal me, was the Upledger structuralist John who lives in Montreal.  He literally rebuilt my energy field, and restored my life force,  but more importantly, he mended my wounded soul by speaking to it rather than me about how to facilitate healing in my body.

     

Everyone suffers.  Everyone either sooner or later gets a disease or a tragic and sudden death.  This final chapter has never been a surprise ending to any of us but John made me understand the power I have over my physical body in the meantime.  Not that I will ever dance again—even so, I must believe it is possible.  That is finally the last lesson in healing:  If you believe yet will you see. To see ourselves healed we must live ultimately in perpetual hope that our lives are exactly as they are meant to be each moment or as the composer wrote: Let this blessed assurance control…It is Well with My Soul.