This is my experience after what, at this point, amounts to thousands of hours of mindful presence with the chaos in my body. ~~ Chronic illness, pharmaceutical injury ~~ One learns when one focuses attention. One learns a whole lot. That is meditation. Focused attention.
So, my experience of chronic illness:
Chronic illness is the body saying no to the toxic societal structures that we have internalized…healing from chronic illness is healing the whole human shebang.
~~ To be clear healing does not mean curing. There is no cure to this being human. ~~
This is also not to suggest that there are not real physical correlates to these societal structures.
Pharmaceutical injury is a violent intrusion of societal structure into the brain and nervous system. The structure becomes a real mirror of destruction within the body.
Detox is the breaking down of these internalized societal structures.
They can become extremely complex if there’s a lot of microorganisms and heavy metals as well as neurotoxic substances involved…the pharmaceuticals set up opportunities for multiple infections, in fact.
People sometimes appear possessed because, frankly, they are. Microorganisms can profoundly affect our consciousness. (our microbiome…our gut…the balance of microorganisms matter…healing, from this perspective, is in some sense is about internal ecosystem management).
Detox can take the form of energetic, psychological, emotional and physical processes.
Some folks need to concentrate on one more than others — other people need to focus on just about everything in their life to bring it into balance especially if we’ve been chronically ill.
My body had to construct alternative detoxification routes because of the damage that happened to the brain. In Western Medicine they call this tardive dyskinesia which is an obfuscation as TD as it stands now really means nothing at all.
The level of interoception I experience when feeling all of this is a bit much. I’d rather not have this capacity if there was an option in which I might still be able to heal.
It restructured pathways — while I followed it’s lead (direction) with all my healing practices. It totally needs active, focused, conscious cooperation. That was done by learning to listen to the body and shutting out what society (and pretty much everyone) said. It was critical to do that.
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We equate health with peak physical condition ignoring the fact that a person can have a perfect body yet a fragmented being, or conversely a sense of wholeness within what might appear to be a broken body. The real barometer of health is spiritual rather than physical.
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Healing/transformation is not always a graceful process. Sometimes it’s exceedingly ungraceful/unskillful. In fact we bump up against every edge and frequently look the idiot if we’re actually doing the work.
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Healing is about accepting and being completely who we are with whatever limitations we have. Sensing wholeness, even with a broken body because nature always holds us in wholeness. When we listen we learn flow in whatever condition we find ourselves in.
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The times when we say we feel most alive are when we feel most deeply connected to life itself — not our own life, but life in its totality. We are always that.
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I live in surrender which i also call living ritual. Trance is a regular part of it…the ancestors then, via the microbiome and DNA come through loud and clear.
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my experience having now chronic illness from the psych drug damage is that it’s just as bad with physical illnesses. they gaslight you and tell you it’s not real and then it just gets worse from there. everyone in chronic health circles have experienced this … I’ve left all diagnosis behind. none of them have been helpful.
I do use Lyme Disease as a shorthand for multiple systemic infections … which is also shorthand for microbiome chaos…I don’t really find any of the current frameworks dealing with the microbiome particularly accurate… I like terrain theory but when grossly out of balance the only way to talk about it and make any sense at all to most other modern, western medicine indoctrinated people is to use the language of infection and germ theory.
In fact I think that those two constructs (germ and terrain theories) at this point in our understanding of the body need to be used side by side even though they are more often used in contradiction to each other.
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Neither Ayurveda or Chinese medicine use diagnosis like Western medicine does. That’s not to say they don’t do their share of dogmatic crap too. They do, but it’s a wee bit easier to find practitioners that are willing to do as I do and stand back a bit and watch and let the body lead.
I will use the language of diagnosis for communicating with others.
It’s a challenge to have a life threatening condition and not be able to name it. People want to think they understand and a simple word (called diagnosis) gives them the mistaken impression that they do. The body is far more mysterious than any name we can give pieces of what it’s up to.
Intro to Ayurveda (for chronic illness, psych drug withdrawal, TD)
- Much more on chronic illness here
- Healing as opposed to curing
- Much more on protracted psych drug withdrawal syndrome here
- Much more on meditation here

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