I don’t want to be like a rabbit anymore

Once you become desperate for relief, you’ll try literally anything. It doesn’t matter if it sounds crazy. Living with chronic pain is crazier! It makes you go insane because you don’t know when it will end. You just start throwing anything you can think of at it, hoping for even the tiniest sign that it’s going to help. If you read my chronological health saga page, you’ll see what I mean.

I feel like I’ve tried everything, but my quality of life isn’t improving. And the wait time between specialist appointments is long. I always feel like I’m in limbo, waiting for doctors to try to treat me. If they can. I don’t feel free. I want action, relief, and answers right now!

I hope with all that in mind, you won’t judge me, because honestly I’m judging myself a little bit. I went to an energy healing workshop this weekend, put on by the Tarot Mysticism Academy, taught by Joe Monteleone. The purpose was to teach you how to heal your own energy and the energy of others.

I was interested in this course because I spend a lot of time in a sympathetic nervous system state. I’ll suddenly become aware that I’ve been holding my breath, or that I’m tensing my muscles, even when I’m doing something enjoyable or relaxing. I’m like a rabbit constantly scanning for danger, ready to bolt at the slightest hint that something bad might happen. It’s exhausting.

It’s kind of like weightlifting in a way. I think the term is “train to failure” where you lift a weight until you physically can’t lift anymore. I think that’s what my body did. It’s been permanently tensed up for so many years, it’s completely giving out. It’s time to rest and recover, but I don’t know how. Tense is my new baseline.

So, Joe demonstrated what to do, and we broke out into small groups to practice. The point wasn’t to necessarily heal anything 100%, but more to practice the steps and experience what happens when you start to heal your energy.

There was a lot of tarot theory to learn before the course. This blog post is not the correct platform to get into it, but essentially everything is energy. Once you understand that energy is everywhere and part of everything, you can begin to manipulate it. You can strengthen helpful energy, heal wounded energy, and remove unwanted energy.

Joe explained it like this: the human body and mind is like a plastic drinking straw. We are all vessels that energy travels through. Look up pretty much any religion or mystical belief system and you’ll find that divine energy can come down to earth, and we can send energy back up and out.

You may have heard about energy blocks, or things that prevent you from manifesting your true desires. That’s a kink in your straw. How can energy flow through properly when you’ve folded the straw over, or bitten down on it?

Energy healing can indirectly help heal physical pain by healing the suffering energy around your negative feelings about the pain.

I know for myself, especially when the bladder pain was new and I didn’t know what happening to me, I was scared. The mental anguish made the physical pain worse. It was a loop of fear, tension, and pain, each one triggering the other.

One of my fears in the beginning was that I had cancer. [Spoiler Alert: I had bladder cancer. It turned out totally fine. The tumor was tiny and completely removed during biopsy. No treatment necessary.]

Some backstory – back in 2017, a benign but aggressive tumor was discovered in my jaw. It was “scraped” out, but some cells remained, so a year later it had already started to quickly grow back. In June 2019, I had a major surgery to remove and replace my right mandible. The tumor had eaten away at so much of the bone the doctor said I was 1 baby carrot away from snapping my jaw. The recovery from that surgery was so long, and so painful. It was awful and it wasn’t even cancer!

So here I am with this unrelenting burning pain in my bladder, waiting to see a specialist, and remembering the hell I had to go through in 2019, wondering how I’ll survive if I need another surgery. A cancer diagnosis not only felt like the worst possible diagnosis, but it felt the most realistic considering my symptoms and my past. I thought about it a lot and it wasn’t even confirmed yet. That, my friends, is an example of suffering.

When you suffer, you are tense. When you are tense, your nervous system is in a sympathetic state. When that happens, you are on edge and alert to danger, real or imagined. You are like the terrified little bunny in my back alley that I didn’t realize was there until it shot off like a bullet because it felt threatened by my presence. I wasn’t even coming for it, but it didn’t want to wait to find out.

That’s no way to live. I don’t want to be a like that rabbit anymore.

When I started doing guided hypnotherapy and guided meditation, I started to feel better. Not my best, but better. The pain started to feel more manageable. I learned that activating the vagus nerve in this way can help the body relax and enter a parasympathetic nervous state. I thought the energy healing course could be another tool for me to use.

And what a tool it is! I felt incredible afterward! It felt like all the rocks in my body had been replaced by feathers. I had a renewed hope that I could maybe, one day, possibly get my life back.

You don’t have to be a mystical misfit to reap the benefits of energy healing. You don’t need to see a special energy healer either because you can do it on yourself. The challenge is learning how to relax your mind and body. If you’re impatient and results-driven like me, slowing down feels dumb and counterintuitive. I don’t want to sit down and close my eyes, I want to jump on a dirt bike and start ripping around offroad in search of answers! I want to feel like I’m doing something.

I’ve done so many guided hypnotherapy and meditation tracks, I know what to do now and can get there without help. It took a lot of practice.

Energy healing sounds really weird and superstitious at first, but it is not bullshit. It’s a mystical philosophy combined with scientific evidence. Most importantly, it’s helping!