by Greg Rowe August 31, 2021
Yesterday, we had one of those challenging cases. As soon as I stepped inside Calli’s home, there was the sound of wheezing and crying. Two year old Alex, son of one of her neighbors, had gone on a hay ride. He had developed a severe asthma attack as a result. Calli had already done some really nice Work, clearing sinuses and trying to stop the sense of panic that Alex felt, reflected in the desperate crying, gasping for air. She had used a blend of essential oils, including Melissa officinalis to calm him down. On the surface, it was, and correctly seen as, a child exposed to lots of dust and plant detritus and whose respiratory passages were inflamed.
The pediatrician had prescribed Albuterol Sulfate, a known, short-acting bronchial dilator, but now, not only was Alex still gasping the next day, but his heart was racing and skipping. A subsequent ER visit found that the pediatrician did not consider whether or not the child’s reaction to the drug was a potential hazard. He had a congenital heart valve defect and Albuterol with even a normal heart, can cause palpitations. Next step, if we could not help him, would be the Pediatric ICU.
The first task was to interrupt the gasping cycle and remove his panic and further open the airways. Then I had to consider whether this was purely a physical attack brought about by being on the hayride.
There I was, holding hands either side of his chest while his mother, Taissa, held him, as I asked Calli, “Is this actually his?”
To her credit, Calli had nurtured the same suspicion and had been about to ask when I had arrived. This was something- a haltija of sickness that was left there on the hay ride by another child who “forgot” that she was asthmatic and went through it, symptom free, which to which Alex was now playing host, so I sang it an enchanting song from Kalevala to lure it out from him and confine it to Tuonela, where it can be reformed into something harmless.
I will return to the healing in a moment, but the key transaction that had to happen firstly was the Seeing, accurately, what is before us. As Tietaja, this is a precondition of therapeutic efficacy: we cannot reliably or fully affect that which we cannot perceive. I was reminded of how often we look right at something and do not See it. I have often encouraged my students, when in public, and without appearing to stare, to use the ability to See auras and patterns of damage in the body, then contrast it with what a person will tell them or what they observe of how the person moves later to make certain that they are Seeng correctly.
Yet, even with friends, we fail to do this. I was reminded of it just a day earlier when visiting with a friend. Her soft brown eyes made into a scowl as she looked at my bulging upper belly, and I’d seen her do it a few times before, recently. Never did she ask, “Why is the bulge only upper, not lower, as it would be with that Hollywood-programmed nemesis, “fat?” Or, “Why, in the years we’ve known each other did it only now, in the last few months appear?” The fact is that I had tested positively for liver cancer and no amount of righteous indignation over a bulge to the Hollowwood-conditioned eye would change the source. Sadly, it’s not “fat” and dieting or exercise will not change it. Chanca Piedra, which I try to afford every month, and addditional Rife treatments will, in time, remove the unsightly upper abdominal bulge symptom. But, there it was, even in a (normally) skilled observer, the reactive mind, programmed to react to a certain narrow set of conditions as to how a man “should“ look, just as we men are programmed to expect a woman‘s body not to show that she has nursed children or borne them, leaving stretch marks, rather that seeing these as signs of battles she won to host and nourish new life. The cosmetic, Hollowwood expectations, of course, fuel a gigantic plastic surgery industry with superficiality-programmed patients’ running health risks to have “perfect” breasts or flat bellies.
We must always remember the lesson revealed to Calli that time (and in her Forn Sidr or Vidar’s Forest blog) by All-Father, Odin, of a different variation of Kaunaz in which the diagonal descender is dropped more than halfway down the ascending line, which He told her is “orlagu,” the need to drill deeply, to look below the surface of things for the underlying reality.
The reality is not always revealed by the surface shape or texture of a tissue or a system. It is not always clear from the way a disorder is presented in a patient. It may require that we Ask the body what we see before us, so that we can See more deeply into it and help return the one suffering to health. Our default, reactive mind must be set aside, and an inner calmness cultivated in order to do this. This is the calmness of a pocket of stars and the Void in all things, of the Ground of Being, or of the fluttering eyelids of the child I remember now sleeping peacefully after the healing.