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My Success Story
It’s only when caterpillarness is done that one becomes a butterfly … You cannot rip away the caterpillarness. The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process of which we have no control.
—ram dass, be here now
I wasn’t doing anything noble at age twenty-five, like changing the world, but I was totally content making people smile with “Live To Ride” Harley-Davidson paraphernalia and meditating to the sound of rumbling bikes on my lunch break. In July of 2005, I had no idea that my dream life as a marketing director for Harley-Davidson was suddenly about to fold, although I see now that I had ignored many warnings of deteriorating health that came in the years before. At first I began having trouble walking up the gentle ramp from my office at Harley to the community kitchen. I had pain and tingling in my legs. Shortly after that I started to lose function of my arms. My dexterity slipped away, I couldn’t lift my arms above my head to wash my own hair, and I tripped and fell more times than I could count. Doctors were puzzled, I was terrified, and my neurologist ordered me not to return to work.
I was in pain twenty-four-hours a day, with relief only when I was in a drug-induced sound sleep. Fierce, full-fledged body pain engulfed my being. There was not one inch of me saved; everything from my feet to the top of my head was screaming in agony. Because the disease was misdiagnosed and untreated for so long, the damage to my body was ravenous. Exposed nerves in all my limbs created firing pain with no rhythmic pattern to warn me when the worst was to come. Full-blown arthritis in my major joints left me unable to lift my leg high enough to step over the bathtub and into the shower. I often could not even sit on the toilet without assistance because my hips could not handle the pressure of lowering my body weight to the seat. I couldn’t use my shoulders to push myself up on the bed to get out of it when I wanted. The lining of my heart became inflamed, leaving it constantly racing as if I had just run a marathon. I was so fatigued that I could not move my lips to speak at times, and I had cognitive impairment so compromising that I couldn’t form words to get them to my lips anyway. A severely weakened immune system made me a host for recurring shingles so severe that they scarred and hurt for years afterward. My white blood cell counts plummeted so much that I was unable to leave the house at my immunologist’s insistence. No organ or system in my body was spared. My life as I knew it was swallowed away and replaced by a monstrous disease that any doctor had yet to understand. I was almost more terrified of living than dying.
Trying to Heal
Several years after a string of misdiagnoses and treatments that nearly killed me, I was finally accurately diagnosed. This is the jackpot moment in a chronically ill person’s life. Apparently, a tiny tick bit me, doctors explained—a tick that I had never even known about. It transferred to me bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi, the causative agent of Lyme disease. Lyme disease is a bacterial infection transmitted from a tick bite that can cause serious health problems if left untreated. And it did. The diagnosis of Lyme disease carried with it a string of further diagnoses, including autoimmune thyroid disease, kidney dysfunction, connective tissue disease, fibromyalgia, neuropathy, and more. I never had a visible bite, rash, or anything of the sort. I had been tested for Lyme disease before, but the testing for Lyme is so flawed and did not deliver a positive result until many years too late, when my blood was sent to a specialty lab. I took my late-stage Lyme disease diagnosis like an oversized bag of groceries at the checkout stand; I wrapped my arms around it as best I could, and I moved on to find a cure.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that approximately 300,000 cases of Lyme disease are contracted in the United States annually—with a mere 10 percent being properly diagnosed.1 That estimate makes Lyme disease twice as common as breast cancer and six times more common than HIV/AIDS. Some cases are never even reported. This leaves many with misdiagnoses such as fibromyalgia, lupus, chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, migraines, learning disabilities, bipolar disorders, Parkinson’s disease, heart arrhythmias, and more.
Despite heavy-duty antibiotic therapy to try to eradicate the Lyme bacteria and other co-infections that were transmitted by the tick, I was still in a constant state of suffering. Alongside my very intensive protocol of forty-four pills and intramuscular antibiotic shots every day, I had exhausted the gamut of alternative possibilities. While I was functional enough to be without constant care by the time I found out about Dr. Geeta Shroff, the founder of a stem cell clinic in Delhi, India, I still had a slightly less severe form of all of my symptoms. My Internet research on Dr. Shroff revealed very mixed opinions about her, from “hero” to “con artist.” But after talks on the phone with Dr. Shroff and following other embryonic stem cell patient’s stories, I knew the stem cells had the potential not only to boost my immune system but also to regenerate damaged organs, nerves, and cells in my body. It felt like this was precisely the dose of kick-ass that could save my life.
On December 9, 2007, just nine short months after the Lyme disease diagnosis, I boarded a plane for New Delhi, not knowing if the treatment would save my life or kill me. Catapulted into a country that swept me off my feet in love and constantly tested my sanity at the same time, I knew my heart needed both of those things equally. With as much grace as I could muster, I aimed to embrace it all, including copious amounts of curry, rambunctious monkeys everywhere, and fear that flooded every inch of me.
While my die-hard optimism had always served me well, it quickly became apparent that it would not satisfy the requirements of a culture that promotes “mind over matter,” “think positive,” and other concepts that caused me to blame myself for my illness. “The stem cells can do their part, but you have the power to heal yourself,” Dr. Shroff repeated almost daily, like a broken record I was trying desperately to stop.
After nine weeks of daily stem cell injections and enough personal growth opportunities for a lifetime, I left the clinic walking on my own. The success did not come easy, but it came. With a struggle that I can only compare to wrestling an elephant to the ground, I was cured. Or so it seemed.
The Return of Symptoms
It was a couple of years later when I experienced the initial ripples of a healthquake on what had felt like stable ground for some time. During a two-month trip to London, I found myself with disturbing pain and tingling in my feet that seemed to appear out of nowhere. Weeks went by and it persisted. By the time I sought medical help, things had gotten so bad that I was admitted to the hospital for two days of testing. MRI and other diagnostics came back negative and I was released. The familiarity was haunting though—these were the exact symptoms that had appeared in 2005 at the beginning of my career as a full-time sick person. While I did test positive for the Epstein-Barr virus, food allergies, and a host of other items pointing to immune dysfunction (again), there were no positive indications of Lyme disease.
It seemed that all at once, unruly forces inside of me were colliding, culminating in an all-too-familiar “here we go again” storm. But as suddenly and mysteriously as the symptoms appeared, they faded just as fast, with no treatment whatsoever. However, my near-lifetime struggle with endometriosis, fibroids, polyps, and intensely painful menstruation became increasingly worse. Each month brought days on the couch with prescription narcotics in an attempt to dull the pain. Many times, though, the medications wouldn’t even take the edge off and I would end up in the hospital. None of the four surgeries prior to my stem cell treatment, or the one after, provided relief for longer than a few months’ time.
Overwhelmed by being in London and trying to find a doctor familiar with Lyme disease, menstrual issues, and the cocktail of other diagnoses from my past, I decided to follow a new lead. During one of my marathon Internet searches, I stumbled upon a Traditional Chinese Medicine doctor who, I read, had seen Princess Diana as a patient. During my first appointment with the sweet but not overly chatty doctor, I stared at Princess Di’s picture on her bookcase. Anyone who could help the princess could surely help me, I determined, immediately feeling a new sense of security.
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is an ancient medical system that is thousands of years old. It is built on the foundation that symptoms arise from blocked energy in the body’s subtle energy system. When those imbalances are corrected using different modalities, a healthy flow of the body’s energy is restored.
Every couple of weeks, I went for acupuncture and was sent home to drink offensively bitter tea that made my kitchen in London smell like a rotting tree. In time, I did in fact see some marked improvement in my pain, energy levels, and particularly my premenstrual symptoms. Sadly, though, when I became lackadaisical about my ritual of boiling, sifting, and hesitantly choking the tea down my throat, my improvement slowed drastically. I suspected I needed more time to see the long-term benefit, but the costly and physically nauseating treatment plan soon became too much to manage.
By the end of the year, I was back home in California, feeling like all of my options had slowly drained away, like water from a cracked bucket. I began again the process of reaching out to specialists and getting lost in the chaos of medical decision-making. Then, from somewhere in my brain (probably stored in a folder labeled “Come Back to One Day”), Dr. Shroff’s words bubbled back to the surface of my consciousness: “You have the power to heal yourself.” And just like that, I decided I would try.
How could a radical treatment like embryonic stem cell therapy save my life but not my uterus? Why were my menstrual cycles getting worse? Why were some of the food allergies and other ailments from before stem cell therapy resurfacing? What in the world was the cause of that episodic pain and tingling in my legs, and would it be back?
I was not sure yet why all of this was happening, but I knew I was getting closer to something—and I threw my faith toward the idea that the very something I needed was just around the corner.
Discovering Energy Work
Perhaps I was headed in the right direction with addressing my body’s energy system, but had not quite arrived at a solution yet. I longed for a process that didn’t include dependency on long-term appointments or boiling, sifting, draining, and plugging my nose as part of the treatment protocol. I started to research other types of therapy that addressed the body’s subtle energy system.
When I eventually came across the term energy medicine, I was drawn to it immediately. Energy medicine is a process of balancing and enhancing the energies of your body for well-being. I read everything I could about it, being particularly glued to the works of Donna Eden, a pioneer in the field. I bought all of Donna’s books, starting with Energy Medicine, and began to practice several energy medicine techniques each day. Eventually I started to see some improvement. I noticed the painkillers I had been taking for fifteen years during my menstrual cycle were actually helping now. Before, they did little if anything. Something intangible felt different, too. I felt sturdier, perhaps even a tiny bit happier. I sensed that I was solidly on the right track.
I thought this was it—the thing I’d been waiting for—until I realized my oh-so-limited attention span was not conducive to “babying” my energy flow. In between menstrual cycles, I’d spend an hour or more each day making sure my energy wasn’t getting stuck. During menstruation, I had to be attentive to it at all times, doing exercise after exercise to lessen the pain. My new job of constantly monitoring this natural womanly process (that I despised so much) was counterintuitive.
Despite feeling like I hadn’t quite figured it all out yet, I continued to follow some of Donna’s energy medicine protocols but made a decision to deepen my healing approach. I wanted to learn why or how my energy was getting stuck in the first place.
Why do some people heal permanently and completely while others don’t? I had met several people during my journey who were cured from their ailments by what seemed to me like a stab of simplicity in my back—vitamin B shots, quinine supplements, eliminating gluten, or similar easy fixes. Why not me?
I quickly came to an epiphany: If treating the body alone doesn’t resolve the problem, then maybe the body alone isn’t what caused it.
The Missing Pieces to Positive Thinking
While I had always considered myself to be an eternal optimist, I had started to think I was a school-of-positive-thinking failure. Or maybe it was just a bit more complicated and I hadn’t gone quite far enough yet. What if the profound effect of thoughts and emotions was so massive that it was the entire basis of my failed health?
That’s when I began gently looking at my life—not with fault or blame, but from this heart-shaped hole inside of me that felt like it was waiting for just this moment, a knowing that I had some filling up to do. I became open to the possibility that my life, and myself, had contributed to where I was, even if it didn’t make complete sense yet. After all, I was the common denominator in a pattern that seemed to manifest in different illnesses at several different times in my life.
Clearer than I’d ever seen anything, I suddenly became aware of my deficiency in the art of letting go, in being vulnerable, and in trusting life. I always tried to control everything in life, for I was convinced my world would be safer that way. I have always had to remind myself to breathe during times of stress; otherwise I would naturally hold my breath. I often fought back tears when they wanted to flow, wanting to be the type of person affected by nothing. My emotions felt safer in the confines of my body, and I never considered the cost.
My mind is logical, calm, and collected, and I often treated my heart as if it should be the same. I have always been “the rock,” as many of my friends call me. I instinctively felt that taking on everyone’s problems was my plight in life, and I accepted that plight without thought.
I thought I had flawed intuition, but I began to realize that I ignored it when it whispered to me. I was uncomfortable with making decisions based on anything but justifiable data—I am a Virgo to the core. I allowed myself to need logic and legitimate reasons to free myself from relationships that weren’t good for me, career paths that didn’t fit me, and more. And, I was run by fear—not the kind of fear that shows up in phobias, but the kind of fear that made me feel unsafe every day, in every way.
I read. I researched. I sat. I absorbed the works of Dr. Bernie Siegel, Louise Hay, Dr. Bruce Lipton, Caroline Myss, Wayne Dyer, Gary E. Schwartz, Candace Pert, Masaru Emoto, and other experts. I became cognizant of the possible implications of what I was discovering—that unprocessed emotional energy, unresolved experiences, limiting beliefs about how the world should work, fear, negativity, and generally allowing yourself to be separated from what was in line with your heart … could make you not only miserable but sick. It was the missing piece of the positive-thinking puzzle for me. While “think positive!” had gotten me far, it fell short of turning the tides of my life toward complete healing.
All of these newly realized pieces contributed to burdening stresses that I now believe were weighing just too heavy, even for a body virtually reborn after stem cell therapy. Looking back, I am absolutely sure that the fear of a Lyme relapse was so imminent that it itself contributed to the degradation of my health again. I believe the “all clear” from my doctors in London was enough to coax my body out of internal panic mode and back into healing mode. But I knew that having an awareness of this fear mode was just not enough. I needed to find a way to transform the pattern if I wanted to be, and stay, well.
You Have the Power to Heal Yourself
I think it was clear to Dr. Shroff that I may not have had the capacity to believe her words at the time, but she knew I was close.
I finally stopped. I just stopped. I stopped pointing to symptoms and syndromes, and the perceived external causes of those. I turned within instead. There is a saying that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. How true it is. The information that I discovered was not brand-new, just like many of our “realizations” or “epiphanies” do not often come from information we’ve never encountered or that isn’t already held within us. The key is readiness. You can see or hear the same thing a hundred times, but not until you are ready will your whole self receive it. I needed to get to a point of being so finished with the disease, the burden, and the struggle that I just refused to participate in it anymore—not in a way that caused me to fight it or be angry at it, but in a way where my spirit was truly done. I was ready to take a deep breath, surrender to a new starting point, and complete the experience I had been going through.
Suddenly, I was able to recognize the times in my life when I had been complacent about being sick, perhaps believing at a subconscious level that it was my way out of carrying everyone else’s weight. Giving myself permission to take care of me first was an unfamiliar ability, but one that came easily with illness. Maybe I even believed at some level that being sick afforded me a level of safety I couldn’t conceive of otherwise. It sheltered me from a world in which I found it too hard simply to be comfortable with being myself. With all of this, I separated from my own inner being and strayed off course, apparently so far that my body was talking to me in the only way it knew how—through symptoms.
The process of self-discovery and releasing all that no longer served the life I so desperately wanted was not dramatic or earth-shattering, but it was life-or-death important. Using a three-part approach that I’m going to share with you in this book, I did what doctors couldn’t do for me, what stem cells couldn’t do for me, and what many said would never happen: I healed completely and permanently. There is one thing I became absolutely sure of in the process of it all. It was not the bacteria alone that caused the Lyme disease and it was not solely a hormonal imbalance that caused my menstrual issues. I believe that the stem cell therapy ignited the physical repair of my body. This was undoubtedly supported by personal growth during my time in India. But eventually the impact of going back to life as usual caused the subtle erosion of my health again. I changed my physical body, but I did not change my life and my relationship with it. Not only do I know that emotional imbalance dramatically affected my immune system, but I believe my body was trying desperately to get my attention too. It was trying to tell me that the way I was living my life wasn’t in line with the me I was meant to be. I learned about the possibility of remanifesting illness if one fails to address the origin of it.
Playwright Katori Hall described it best when she said, “It was like God was holding a bag of blessings and I was holding a bag of shit, and when I let go of my bag, God was like, ‘Here you go.’”
I was just ready and it was just time. I didn’t care about excuses anymore or the details of how I got where I was. I was not attached to my story or blaming the bacteria, virus, or hormones that were taking me down. I was simply willing to see that if I was part of this challenge, I, too, was part of the solution.
To this day, people still ask me, “How did you know how to heal?” And the truth of the matter is that I didn’t. But I was ready to do my part to try. Being sick was not my fault, but if I wanted to get better, it had to be my responsibility.
I squeezed my eyes tight and let things unfold instead of forcing my way through. It took a colossal amount of bravery to turn in this direction, but it is possible for anyone to do. I decided I had no choice left but to trust so deeply in where I was being led that if I were to fail, I could still be nothing but proud of myself. I both embraced the journey and let it go from my hands, a balance that perhaps tops my list of life’s greatest achievements. I participated in my life’s path while still allowing it to unfold in its own way and time. When I made this mental shift, everything became easier. I slowly opened myself up to exactly what I needed to do, at just the right time it needed to be done. I allowed something to come through me and trust a process that was greater than myself.
Your path, too, will unfold in its own perfect timing, revealing pieces of the puzzle only as they are ready to be healed. It will not always be in your time, but it will happen. The challenge is to show up and do the work, knowing that what you want is already making its way to you.
In each moment that I was overcome by fear and doubt, I focused on those simple words of Ram Dass: Be here now. And when I got through that moment, I did it again. I sometimes stumbled along, but I continued to learn new ways to access my energy system, and if it resonated with me, I applied it.
Whatever did not resonate, I left behind. I ventured far beyond positive thinking and aimed for something even higher: positive feeling. I did this by diving right into the deep dark unknown of myself, uncovering things that no longer worked for me—beliefs, energies, emotions, and patterns. And through much trial and error, tears and triumphs, I healed myself to my very core using nothing but my own internal guide. I wasn’t perfect, not by a long shot, but I did what I could, as often as I could do it. And it was enough. Little by little, I dropped my bag of shit, and as I did, the blessings came. The allergies faded, the Epstein-Barr virus retreated, and my immune system built itself back up as a strong and abundant force that cannot be easily shaken.
Becoming the True You
Everything about well-being sits firmly on this very simple rule I’ve learned: You must become who you really are. You must be the real you. That means to love, accept, and be yourself no matter what. You can’t contract your energy for others, or for fear, or for anything else. No light-dimming or living small allowed. This journey of healing is to be yourself. In fact, true healing is not measured by reaching a place where you are free of negative emotions or have even attained a physical healing. I truly believe that straying from and separating from your inner being, or who you really are, is the root of discontent in the mind and body. You are not broken and do not need fixing. You are not wrong and do not need righting. You are not in need of self-help; you are in need of self-love. The only thing you need to do is find yourself, and stay there.
There are many ways in which we diminish our true selves. It is easy for me to say, “Be the true you,” or “Become who you really are,” but it can be difficult to recognize how we are not doing or being that. As we grow into adults, we can drift so far from our true nature that we lose our reference point for who that person inside really is. In an effort to conceptualize this idea for you, I am offering you my own very personal list as an example. These are the things that I now see caused me to suppress my truest, deepest light—and, subsequently, contributed to illness. I suggest you make a similar list of all the ways you think you are doing the same. You might be as scared making your list as I am sharing mine, but we are all born brave.
• Fear—I called it “anxiety” my whole life and never resonated with feeling “scared,” but I was fearful deep down in my bones. Here are some of the things I was scared of: fear of sharing and expressing emotion, fear of failing at anything, fear of people being upset with me, fear of trusting myself, fear of my parents dying, fear of getting in an accident or being hurt, fear of getting injured in sports, fear of making a mistake, fear of travel and small spaces, fear of crowds, fear of germs, fear of not being in control of everything, fear of not having money, fear of people disapproving of me, and the list goes on. We are most definitely not meant to live dominated by fear.
• Relationships—I found myself in relationships I knew weren’t right for me. The relationships themselves created situations where I would avoid speaking up and would incessantly worry about upsetting my partner, feel as if I wasn’t interesting or fun enough, and hold myself responsible for fixing my partner’s insecurities. Perhaps even more damaging, I wasn’t honest with myself about these relationships. I talked myself out of what my intuition was saying—that the relationship wasn’t healthy for me. Talking ourselves into anything that’s not true in our gut causes inner conflict and is harmful to our being. All of this tailoring and filtering of myself prevented me from being me.
• Challenging Myself—While in some ways I took too much responsibility for things, in other ways I copped out. From the time I started working, I rarely had jobs that felt good. I never enjoyed school or felt good at it, so I shut myself off from pursuing education that could have helped me find something enjoyable. I was so full of self-doubt about school and didn’t even try to go to a four-year college because I was terrified to take the required testing. I essentially limited the choices for my life because I was scared of a test. This is the silly stuff we do. I do not in any way believe that someone must have a college education to be successful (I still don’t have a degree and am totally content with that), but I do believe we must call ourselves to our greatness. We need to hold ourselves accountable to do hard things. We can’t shy away from scary things that would help us move forward.
• Self-Criticism—I was terribly hard on myself. In fact, if it had been someone else, it would have been considered abuse. I beat myself up over every little mistake and imperfection and always expected more of myself than was humanly possible. I had difficulty being able to just let go and have fun without constant monitoring of my behavior. Joy is part of our true nature, and suppressing it is extremely counterintuitive to well-being. Learning to be easier on myself was not only beneficial, but absolutely necessary.
• Self-Sacrifice—I had an intense opposition to hurting people’s feelings, even if it was unintentional. Because of that, I avoided it at all costs and I paid the price, emotionally and physically. I did things that I didn’t want to do, I put myself last, I never said no to others and yes to myself, I made sure I suffered for someone if I could spare them, and I was far too understanding of people who hurt me. Self-sacrifice shows up in many ways and is always detrimental.
I hope this list gives you some solid examples of how we block our true selves from coming forth. When I share it with clients, they often say things like, “Wow, I can’t imagine you could be that screwed up!” I laugh because I know there must be things missing from that list. But I am most definitely proof that one can come out of all of this on the other side, happier and healthy.
The most important thing is to move through it all and find a way to be unapologetically you. The more you can do that, the better your life will feel. It’s called being “in alignment” (with who you are, not with everyone else), and it’s more amazing than you can imagine. Your energy will flow, your body will be in full healing mode, and you’ll be on your way to miracles. As a bonus, life will also be super fun and a million times easier than it is now.
The biggest work of our lives is releasing anything that does not fit within that paradigm. It doesn’t always happen overnight, but as long as you are willing to “be here now” over and over again, I can say with complete honesty that this work is for you.
In fact, I live my life as an example to you of being healed—a combination of living a spiritual life in a body that feels good while also sometimes eating too much pizza, losing complete Zen-like perspective, and practicing being a beautiful human mess. This journey of true and lasting healing is not one that cuts you off from the world and reality. It’s one that integrates the best parts of you right into it all. “The big question,” as Joseph Campbell says in The Power of Myth, “is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.”
Now, are you ready to drop your bag of shit and take the coolest trip of your life?
1. “CDC Provides Estimate of Americans Diagnosed with Lyme Disease Each Year,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, August 19, 2013, www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2013/p0819-lyme-disease.html.