Читать книгу The Journey: A Practical Guide to Healing Your life and Setting Yourself Free - Brandon Bays, Kevin Billett Brandon Bays - Страница 16

Chapter 8

It was now only ten days until I was due back at the doctor’s office. Daily, my stomach was growing flatter, although as I got close to the due date I could see it was not yet completely flat.

By this time I was already back in Malibu, and I decided to see if I could accelerate my healing. I asked a few of my closest friends to help me go through the memory processing two more times, although this time, instead of massaging my body, they held acupressure points relating to my internal organs.

Once again, I surrendered deeply into the silence, and spontaneously the inner knowing brought up a few more memories—different ones from the first, but all centered on the same theme. I found I was forgiving myself, as well as the other people involved, but I could see I was just learning different aspects of the same lesson.

It was as if there was one core issue and I had spent a lifetime repeating the same pattern, making the same painful mistakes, but with different people. It was as if I had a string of memories that was like a pearl necklace—even though each memory or each pearl had a slightly different shape, size and hue, they were all essentially the same. And it felt to me that on that day with Surja, we had broken the string, and now all the pearls were just sliding off—all the memories were just finishing themselves and leaving. When we were done with each process I felt profound shifts and movement that continued for several hours.

Two days before my doctor’s appointment, I kept feeling my tummy. It had gone down in size dramatically, but it still didn’t feel completely flat. So, when I sat in the doctor’s office, waiting for my examination, my heart began to pound. I felt a mixture of excitement, anticipation, and fear washing through me; my knees felt weak and my hands sticky. Once again I sat there fearing the worst, waiting for the doctor to lower the boom.

Once again, we went through a thorough examination, only this time the doctor talked to me as it was progressing. She mentioned that she had sent the previous test samples in to discover whether the mass was malignant or benign, but they had been contaminated with all the blood, so she was going to have to redo the tests. I kept thinking, “I don’t want to hear about the previous tests. Just tell me what’s going on now.”

As she was speaking, I suddenly remembered that a year earlier I had Pap smear results that had come up as precancerous. On a scale of one to five, with five being cancerous, I was a three. At the time I didn’t really give it any thought, as my alternative healthcare practitioner had dismissed the result, saying that many things could contribute to a precancerous smear result—even a vaginal infection. So, I had just let it go. I realized now that I ought to have investigated it further.

Finally, the doctor said, “Well, there’s been a big improvement. The pelvic mass seems to have gone down ­significantly—from the size of a basketball to the size of a six-inch cantaloupe melon.”

The words fell on my ears with a dull thud.

“A six-inch cantaloupe—are you sure it’s still that big?” I said. Disappointment filled me.

“That’s a dramatic change, Brandon—it’s gone all the way down from pushing against your diaphragm, three inches above your waistline, to right here, two inches below your waistline. I can cup my hand right around the top of it. Here, touch it with your own hand—can you feel it?”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to fight back tears.

“Think of a basketball.” (She showed me with her hands.) “Now think of a six-inch cantaloupe melon. (She showed me again.) That’s a significant change.” Long pause. “But it’s not significant enough, Brandon. You still need to have it surgically removed.”

I turned my face away so she couldn’t see me as I wiped my eyes, and quietly asked if we could talk about it in her consultation room. I thought it had gone down a lot more than that. As I sat with her, her words seemed to come through a haze. She clearly could see I was upset and was trying to assuage me while remaining firm in outlining the direction I should take.

“It’s a huge improvement, Brandon. There’s nothing to be disappointed about. Clearly you’ve been doing something to heal yourself. But I feel I must let you know tumors are known to be volatile, and it is possible for them to vacillate radically in size—that’s why your tummy blew up in size in the six weeks before your first visit. There’s nothing to say it won’t blow up in size again. You need to get real about this, Brandon. You need to get the tests done to determine its nature, and once they are complete, have it surgically removed. That’s my strong advice to you. This is not something to take lightly—a cantaloupe-sized mass means it’s already quite advanced.”

Everything she said made sense from a logical point of view. But everything inside me was still saying NO! I sat there quietly as she spoke, not offering any outward resistance—just trying to take on board her words, and truly weigh their validity. There was no doubt she made sense. But that inner knowing of “you’ll get it handled” was still strongly in the background.

At one point, in a mildly disinterested voice, she asked what I had done over the last month for such a dramatic change to take place. I piped up, hoping that she might actually want to hear about the intense emotional healing journey I’d undergone. Innocently, with great enthusiasm I began to launch into my story. She stopped me short.

“No, no! I just want the facts. What have you been doing physically? What foods have you been eating? What herbs, if any, have you been taking? Has your diet changed significantly? What about your physical activity? I just want the facts for my file.”

So I began listing out all the herbs, enzymes, colloidal minerals, colonics and massages, and ended by saying that I was on 100 percent fresh and raw fruits and vegetables, combined with fresh squeezed juices.

She noted it all down, closed the file, and said dryly, “Well, you may have to remain a raw food-ist for the rest of your life, if you think that’s what created the change”—with a wry, sardonic smile that looked unbecoming on her otherwise pretty face.

Inwardly, a door slammed. I stopped feeling like a helpless wimp and got it: this was not a doctor who wanted the whole picture, the real facts, which included the emotional side of things. She wanted her idea of what the facts were! I realized there was no further basis for discussion, and something inside said ENOUGH.

Simply, and somewhat curtly, I thanked her for her time, and said that my belief was not that the tumor would blow up and down and up again, but that I was on a healing journey. I was determined to honor my body, and would give it whatever time it needed to complete the healing process.

She looked dumbfounded. She became very unattractive as she attempted to persuade me that I was in dreamland, and reiterated that my only option was surgery. I looked at her as I left, and felt a strange combination of compassion and disgust—is healing only about the food we eat, and the medicine we take? I realized that that was simply her model of the world, and that it wasn’t her fault—her training was necessarily narrow. Doctors are trained to work on ­bodies—in the same way that mechanics are trained to work on cars. They go into the healing field ostensibly to help people heal, but somewhere along the way they forget that people aren’t just their bodies. We have bodies, minds, and emotions, but most importantly what we are is soul—something that can’t be touched, tested, or surgically removed.

As I drove home, I was very glad for the wake-up call her lack of understanding had given me. Her arguments had been very seductive, and I had begun to fall into a doctor’s idea of how to heal someone—you fix them by taking out the parts. It took her total lack of interest in the rest of my healing journey to make me realize once again that I must follow my own truth no matter how foolish it appeared from the outside. It was a hard choice, because unlike attacking the tumor from a purely physical level, you couldn’t see, touch, or even “test” the emotional shifts that had taken place inside me; and yet, for me, they were every bit as real as the physical shifts that seemed to follow from them as a direct result.

At that moment I felt very alone. Logically, I knew it wasn’t true, as I had devoted, supportive friends and family, yet somehow I still felt lonely. I realized that there is a way in which everyone must follow their own, unique healing path, and it is an experience that no one else can have for you. Spiritual transformation is an inner journey—it’s the soul’s personal path of learning and letting go, and it’s something that must be experienced on your own.