Immunity Group
Healing requires intimate witnessing of our particular stories
Yesterday, I worked on a woman whose struggles with her weight seemed insurmountable. It didn’t matter what diet or program she followed—she could not overcome her cravings.
When I checked in with her body, I was drawn to pay attention to a spot in her lower left abdomen. There, lying across the wide open ileocecal valve, seemed to be a brown mass of fecal material that clearly wasn’t supposed to be there. In its form and feel, it was communicating something about “transgressing boundaries,” “giving up,” and “shittiness.” I tracked the phenomena to four years old and the woman told me about having been repeatedly sexually violated at that age and younger.
As we continued receiving messages from her body, the etiology that emerged was something like this: After repeated violations, the young girl’s body eventually stopped trying to hold a boundary around choice. Her small intestine, heart, stomach, and liver went into shock mode and gave up trying to discern what was good or bad for her. Her ileocecal valve stopped closing and the shittiness just stayed. No matter how much water she drank, she suffered from chronic constipation and digestive problems. Because it was in shock mode, her body was also constantly mobilizing resources to fight or flight, leading to chronic hypoglycemia that eventually exhausted her ability to manage her blood sugar and eventually became full blown diabetes. That morning, her blood sugar had been 280.
Every single person responds to stress and trauma in a personal manner. Experiences are interpreted by each personality and through each body in unique ways. While experience might have taught me to presume that the small intestine should be checked for pathology in the case of overeating and diabetes, no algorithm could inform me that the key to creating movement and healing for that particular woman would be to hold attention and allowance on an interpretation of the world that, in the language of the field, looked like a smear of poo. But that was the essential residue of her experience and, before it could dissipate, it needed to be named with specificity and brought into the light of the conscious mind where it could be held in a space of loving allowance. Healing requires intimate witnessing of our particular stories.
If each illness is that unique, then endeavoring to heal our society provides an incomprehensibly complex problem to solve. How can doctors possibly hold each patient with such specificity and care? Especially when their training could not be farther from it? The only way out is to radically change the way we do medicine—to learn to see value in every modality and to create deeper cultures of self-care.
If we learn to hold ourselves and our loved ones with resonant attention, then we can tend to our own stories, re-skilling medicine so to speak. This will leave the MDs to do the allopathy; the homeopathists to do the remedies; the cranio-sacral practitioners to do the bodywork; etc. All together, we will be well resourced for the challenge ahead of collectively turning to healing.
As many of you know, I began teaching Resonant Attention during the pandemic. I was just trying to get the word out about how easy it can be to tend to yourself. After a few years of developing a way to teach the basic concept of healing and refining a method for applying the core principles, now I think it’s time to deepen the offering. I want to hold a more intimate space for people to re-skill medicine within the context of community. For this first offering, want to focus on Immunity.
It will be similar to the group healing sessions that I offer for subscribers (first Sunday of the month at 10am EST—next one coming up on July 6th!), but especially for people suffering from cancer, autoimmune issues, long covid, etc. Of course, you don’t have to have a particular diagnosis in order to join. As usual, the sessions will be me working on one or maybe two people (chosen by intuition only once we gather) and everyone else joining in the healing field.
I’ve posted sessions for every other Thursday at 12pm eastern starting in July. If we get enough people, then we’ll extend indefinitely. Here’s the link to sign up. Of course, you can also just go to the bottom of resonantattention.com and sign up there, too.
Love,
Stella