I have friends who have not heard from me in months. I have not posted to this blog for months. It is because we are busy as anything, but that is only part of it. I could have made the time to write, if I had had anything I wanted to say. But there is no point in singing until you know the tune.
Don't get the idea that I am referring in any way to a deep, dark time of sorrow in my life. When I speak of darkness, I refer to the intellectual muddle, the not knowing where or when or how - or, sometimes, even what - that inevitably comes with a new and intricate turning of the path. I have recently been through a tunnel, bumbled around in the half-light for a while, and emerged out the other side. The path out here is still a bit twisty, but the sun is shining, and the prospect is rather nice. So I think now I could begin to explain.
Have you ever heard of Nambudripad's Allergy Elimination Technique, a.k.a. NAET? No, I thought not. Well, if you are allergic to anything, then you are aware that all the Western allopathic world has to offer you is the advice to avoid that substance like the plague, and maybe regular allergy shots, or an epi-pen for life-threatening allergies. Take heart. A certain Dr. Devi S. Nambudripad combined some principles of Eastern and Western medicine and came up with a technique to actually eliminate allergies. They can be gone - poof! kaput! - forever. No more hives, or headaches, or swollen left knuckles.
And let me here say that for the purposes of NAET, an "allergen" is defined as anything that causes a blockage in the flow of energy throughout your body - in other words, anything that interferes with the proper functioning of the nervous sytem. Everybody is "allergic" to black widow spider venom, because the venom causes the nervous system to shut the body down, resulting in death if untreated. You might not be allergic to carrots, but my nervous sytem might respond to a carrot by constricting blood vessels in my head and causing a violent migraine, or by sending improper signals to the small intestine, causing dysbiosis. The radical idea here is that there is nothing inherent in the allergen itself that makes it an allergen. A carrot is a carrot; it should be harmless. It is the particular interaction of my nervous system with the carrot that makes it an allergen for me - but not for you, because your nervous system deals with carrot just fine.
What about the black widow spider, you say? Don't try to tell me that there is nothing inherently wrong with that venom! What's wrong with it is that it triggers the nervous system - everyone's nervous system - to a particular, violent response. What happens when you eat a carrot? Your body, governed by your central nervous system, extracts the nutrients from the carrot and discards any useless parts (undigestible fiber? pesticides? stray dirt?) via very efficient waste elimination processes. What would happen if you could change the nervous system response to spider venom? Turn off the alarm bells, stop the body's it's-horribly-bad-and-we're-shutting-down-now crisis mode, and instead of a deadly substance, the venom becomes just another bit of unusable waste that needs to be eliminated.
You chew on that for a minute, and I'll describe your typical NAET session for you. The first thing you do upon entering your doctor's clinic is wash your hands and make sure they are clean and dry. Then you are invited to sit in a quiet room and hold in your hand a little vial that contains the "energy" of the allergen for which you are being treated (say, eggs - or you could hold an actual egg in your hand, but the energy vial is non-perishable and more convenient). Using muscle response testing, the doctor verifies that there is a weakness in the body in the presence of the allergen. In plain English, that means that when the doctor presses lightly on my extended arm, I can't hold my arm firm if I'm holding the egg vial. It goes weak and spongy on me, unlike the nice, firm control I have over it when the egg is nowhere near me.
Having determined that you really do have an egg allergy, the doctor begins the actual treatment. You sit or lie there quietly with the egg substance in your hand, while the doctor goes down either side of your spine with some sort of tool - a vibrator, or a little spring-loaded puncher - and activates your Watu Jabi points. (No, this is not an island full of strange and furry inhabitants in Star Wars lore.) Then your "gates" - the eight points on the body where you tend to leak energy - are "closed" by brief stimulation with a laser vibrator. This whole process takes all of about 120 seconds. Now you simply lie there and relax, with the allergen still held in your hand, for a quarter of an hour or so. Afterwards, the doctor checks you to make sure your body and nervous system are handling things well in general, and you're free to go.
So far it has been a piece of cake. Here comes the hard part. There are twelve energy meridians in the body, and it takes about two hours per meridian for your body to fully process any substance to which it is exposed. After you stimulate the nervous system to a "correct," benign response to an allergen, which is what you are doing with those Watu Jabi points during the NAET treatment, you need to give your body time to fully assimilate this new and corrective information. So when you treat for eggs, you have to avoid eggs completely for a full 25 hours, to play it safe. As in, don't taste, don't touch - and if your allergy is really bad, don't even smell.
I know, I know. It sounds like complete and utter queckery biffle.2 If you are even still with me after all this, you are probably bug-eyed in concern for my sanity.
But I'm here to tell you that it works.
If you have been reading this blog for very long, you know all about Liam's food allergies. Some of you know Parker's story. He followed right along in his brother's footsteps, healthwise. The only food he tasted for the first few months of his life was mother’s milk. My diet consisted of organic vegetables, meats, and whole grains that I ate raw or cooked from scratch. I ate virtually no processed food and none of what our naturopath calls the “5 deadly whites” (white flour, sugar, refined oils, iodized salt, and cow dairy). I made none of what I now recognize to be the mistakes I made with Liam. I was doing everything right.
Yet, no matter what I put in my mouth, Parker seemed to react to it. I never dwelled on it much in my blog, but Parker's issues were there, forming a strong undercurrent to our daily life. He had insomnia. He had rashes and broke out in hives. He screeched almost constantly in discomfort. He was in better shape, in many ways, than Liam was at his age, but there were definitely things that were very wrong with Parker. I was writing down every single thing I ate, down to sea salt and pepper, in a food journal. Trying to make sense of the data I was collecting was a nightmare, but certain trends were clear: Every time I ate eggs, Parker projectile-vomited. If I took vitamin C supplements or ate acidic foods, he spit up viscous, curdled milk for days. As for offering him solid food, just forget it.People have tried to tell me that it is normal for babies to spit up. That these were all normal issues, and he would outgrow them. That some babies are more difficult than others. Call me a silly, emotion-driven mother, if you want. Call me a fool. Call me anything you like. But I knew in my heart that there was something fundamentally wrong with this child. I knew it with Liam, and finally when he was twelve months old we found a doctor - a naturopath - who had some answers for us. Within a matter of days, Liam was the baby I had known was in there, somewhere. But Parker was raised from day one in the context of the things that had changed Liam's life, and it was not enough.
I admit that it was out of sheer desperation that we tried NAET. To be perfectly honest, when our chiropractor mentioned to us this revolutionary treatment that his wife could do, I thought, "Uh-huh. Yeah, sure. You guys have fun with that." But we were so frustrated that we began to ask ourselves... What if it did work? There was no question that eggs and carrots produced violent reactions in Parker whenever they showed up in my milk. What if I could have those foods, and others like them, back in my diet? Wouldn't it be worth a few dollars to find out?
With a child, especially, you start by doing the "basic 15" treatments, representing the essential building blocks for the body's immune system. This is your chance to wipe the slate clean of whatever junk the DNA brought with it and give these little bodies a fresh start in life. As it turned out, Parker was allergic to every nutrient existent: protein, vitamin C, B vitamins, minerals... You name the item — his body did not know what to do with it. Incidentally, you treat a young child using a surrogate. I hold the allergen to Parker's skin and it is my points that are stimulated, and then both his and my gates are closed. We both have to go through the avoidance period. Weird, but effective. In fact, the bond with mother and child is so strong that the treatment sometimes works with the child merely present in the room, and not physically a part of the treatment at all. For this reason, children are not allowed into the office during the treatment of the mother.
Those first weeks of treatment were a series of ups and downs as we tried to figure out what this NAET business was getting us. It was made doubly hard by the fact that Parker could not give us any direct feedback. NAET is not an immediate cure-all. Even once the treatment is complete, you can expect it to take 12 to 18 months for the body to be fully repaired and "all systems go" where that particular substance is concerned. Still, there are undeniable immediate results in many cases. After we treated for protein and vitamin C, I could eat eggs, strawberries, tomatoes, without the vomiting and spitting. We were slowly crawling out of a deep hole.
After treating for the Basic 15, we did treatments for teething and lymph drainage (teething is still teething, but it ceases to be such a heavy load for the body to carry), a chlorophyll supplement (a natural substitute for iron), gluten, casein, and two spice mixes. When the allergy is severe and the body has few resources, the aftermath of the NAET treatment is rough, as the body takes some time to settle in and find homeostasis again. This kind of “energy rearrangement” in the body takes a lot of energy in itself, and feeling tired and drained might be the least of the repercussions. Those first few NAETs were difficult. Parker was exhausted and would sometimes go through a short period of aftershock – mild hives, or spitting, or fussiness. We did an average of one treatment per week, and there were times when we felt that we had barely crawled out from under one bus before we were hit by another.
It’s no wonder, really, that I didn’t want to talk about it. I could tell we were heading towards the right destination, but it was only in retrospect that we could see how far we had come. By the time we got to the spices, Parker was sailing through each NAET, with no real question that he would clear everything on the first try. It was dramatic. If I ate mustard, within a few hours my mustardy milk went straight through Parker and ate holes into his entire diaper area. It was just like the days when we used to wonder if someone was coming behind our backs and dipping Liam’s tiny rear in acid. Twenty-five hours after the NAET, I was eating organic hot dogs with mustard, with no consequences.
At four weeks old, as the pictures show, Parker had a very sad reaction to the goat dairy in my milk. At ten months old, right after the casein treatment, we gave him his first taste of goat milk kefir. His body is still searching for balance, still building and repairing. There remains a whole list of allergens we would like to treat him for. Basically, if he has not been "NAETed" for it, then don't feed it to him right now. We just recently discovered he is allergic to the all-purpose soap we have been using to bathe him and wash his dishes. Still, with all the basic tools his body needs now at his disposal, thanks to all those basic NAETs, in a year or so I know it will be an entirely different story. We look at him and marvel at how far we have come.Look at that rosy, perfect skin. Look at that yummy baby body, just the right amount of plump. Look at those sparkling eyes. Parker is a happy, healthy baby, far ahead of where Liam was at this age. I feel it when I put him in bed at night and walk away, knowing Parker will put himself to sleep. I see it in his refreshed face after a night of unbroken rest. It is there in the relaxed way he lies on the chiropractic adjustment table, in the smiles he doles out to other patients at the Creating Wellness Center. It is obvious that he views that clinic as a comfortable place where good things happen.
And if there was any doubt that what happened to Parker was not just mere chance, I have my own story. I tested allergic to about half the basic 15, and as soon as we got Parker stable, we began treating me. The first thing we did was the protein mix, which includes eggs, chicken, feathers, and tetracycline. As far as I know, I was fine with eggs, but I had begun to notice that any time I ate chicken, I ended up feeling tired and drained, with a violent headache. If I ate a meal that included roast chicken, onion, and sweet potato (all allergens for me), I was completely done in, dragging around miserable for hours. After my 25 hour avoidance period for the protein mix was up (which was not fun, as I had to sleep that night in the living room on an air bed with a borrowed pillow in order to avoid all our feather pillows and comforters), I ate chicken and felt perfectly fine.
As soon as I cleared the vitamin C treatment, my carrot allergy (which usually produced a severe, boiling dysbiosis in the gut) completely disappeared. The effects of the B-complex treatment were more subtle. I have heard horror stories of people who went through terrible emotional swings and irresistible food cravings, barely scraping through the avoidance period after various different treatments. I have never experienced anything like that, but avoiding B vitamins was not fun, let me tell you. B vitamins are in everything, which leaves you eating nothing but white rice (boiled and rinsed, to remove any trace of vitamins) and cauliflower (and salt, mercifully!) for 25 hours. That's not so terrible, except that you're hungry. Your body says, "Hey! I've only recently realized that B vitamins are a good thing; and come to think of it, I have a huge deficiency because I've been rejecting them as toxic for years now. So feed me already!" No can do. Must... wait... two more... hours! But once the avoidance period ended, I randomly noticed that certain foods - foods very high in B vitamins, coincidentally, like grain and kefir - just plain tasted better.
All of that was pretty cool. But now here comes my wow-story. For background, you have to understand that I began to play the violin when I was eleven. I had some talent. I was no prodigy, by any means, but I was dedicated. I was playing professionally in the Asheville and Hendersonville Symphony Orchestras when I was in high school. I started college as a music major. But the fact was that I found myself dealing with increasingly extreme physical discomfort. I finally dropped out of the music program and changed majors. I thought it was largely due to emotional burnout, but it was equally true that it was physically too frustrating to keep trying to play. After practicing for just a few minutes, I would start to feel drained and exhausted, like I was a helium balloon and someone had stuck a pin in me. I would then spend the rest of the day with terrible, burning pain in my back muscles, and maybe with a bad headache to boot. The last time I got out my violin, Liam was about Parker's age, and I wanted to watch his reaction to it. He thought it was interesting enough. But after a few days of picking the instrument up for just a few minutes here and there, I said, I can't do this. What should have been a fun and rewarding activity was sheer misery.
When I went in for my first NAET treatment, I responded to a sneaking suspicion and took my instrument with me. Sure enough, Dr. Denman tested me for it and I turned out to be allergic to the instrument itself. She postulated that it was probably something left over from a previous owner - some trauma of some sort that became associated with the violin, and left a strong imprint of negative energy on the instrument itself. According to the principles behind NAET, that is a perfectly plausible possibility, although it may sound incredibly hokey to you. Let's do the basics, she said, and then when we have addressed your body's more immediate needs, we can come back and treat you for the instrument.
A week or two later, Damian got out his guitar for the first time since we have been married. I was helping him tune it, when I noticed I was getting that same burning pain and drained feeling that I had come to associate with the violin. Damian muscle-tested me for the guitar. I was allergic to it. So I fetched the brand new lap harp that my mother gave the boys for Christmas. I was allergic to it, too. It was depressing to think that I was banned from music-making - at least until we could determine the source of the problem and do a NAET.
When you treat for minerals, you have to avoid coming into contact with metals of any kind for 25 hours. You cannot even touch tap water; you have to use distilled water for washing and drinking. That pretty much means 25 hours with gloves on. If you touch something by mistake, which will happen, you can stop and close your gates yourself, which might keep you from having to repeat the treatment. (Without the handy little laser vibrator, this is done by rubbing with your hand clockwise over each gate, and at two minutes per gate, this eats up 18 minutes of your time on the spot. Eventually, I stopped closing my gates. I determined once and for all that if I cleared, it would be because the Lord engineered it, and not through one shred of effort on my part, because I was failing miserably!) Having gone through this procedure once with Parker (picture trying to keep yourself and a crawling baby from touching anything metal for 25 hours!), I became much more aware of metal in my environment.
I began to notice that when I sat at a table and used a pair of scissors - holding them by their plastic handle, mind you, but they were metal scissors - I began to get that same terrible, burning pain in my back. That could be postural, of course, from bending over my work. But I could sit in the exact same position and do something similar without scissors, and I was fine. I didn't even have to use the scissors. Just bringing them to the table and setting them down next to me resulted in pain. When I stood at the kitchen sink to do dishes, which automatically tied my back in knots, I was standing next to a huge metal sink. And I suddenly realized that it was stringed instruments I could no longer play, and when I tested allergic for them, I had been touching the metal strings.
I will not dwell on the inconvenience and stress associated with trying to feed the rest of my family while working around Damian's complicated conference call schedule, without touching anything, and without having eaten anything for 23 hours but white rice and boiled eggs. Suffice it to say that several hours after I had cleared minerals, my burning muscle pain started up and I hurt worse than had since I was pregnant with Parker. Delayed reaction to the NAET? Something to do with my body's sudden registration of many years' worth of mineral deficiencies? I don't know, but I had to wait several days before I had a clean, pain-free slate on which to try to play my instrument.
Guess what? I can play the violin. Last time I tried it, two years ago, I could barely place my fingers on the strings. It just did not feel right. They fumbled awkwardly; I could not find the right finger positions to play in tune. My bow hand (which requires by far the greater level of expertise) slogged through mud and could not produce a beautiful tone no matter how I searched for the sweet spot. I concluded in frustration that the instrument needs work, which is true, and that my technique had gone completely to pot and would take years to reconstruct. Now? Not only is there no pain when I play, but it was like riding a bicycle. Like coming home again. Both the instrument and I still need work, but I know what it will take to get there.And Liam. You should have seen him. I offered to play him a song, and he chose "It is Well With My Soul." After that, he wanted the "Amore" song, referring to the Andrea Bocelli CD by that name. I was quite daunted, but I said I would try... and when I began to play "Amapola" by ear, his eyes grew round as saucers with delight. The next time I got the instrument out, he wanted me to play songs from Andrea. He was initially miffed when I turned the CD on to get the song in my head. But when I began to play along with the CD, the child was in heaven. More, more, he wanted more! Never had he conceived of such delight, that one could make one's own music like this!
I said in my Blogger bio that if I had to choose between reviving my music or learning dance, I would choose dance. For myself, that might still be true, because I crave the physical fitness and grace that accompany the pursuit. Yet I would not trade anything for the look of wonder in Liam's eyes when I play the violin. The Lord, through NAET, has given beautiful gifts to both of my children.
A NAET practitioner will be the first to tell you that there comes a point where NAET and the principles behind it cannot be explained. It does not make sense. It just works.You don't have to understand it. Simply shut your eyes to your questions, open your hands and receive a gift.
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1. My Utmost for His Highest, February 14. Interestingly enough, this is the reading for Parker's birth date.2. "Why does my queckery biffle you so?" - Meryl Streep in "Nobody Understands Me" from Philadelphia Chickens
