A writer recently interviewed my niece, Lindsey, for a magazine feature about an inspiring young woman who transformed after a harrowing experience. (Quick recap for the uninitiated, October 2009 Lindsey – barely 20 -- and her boyfriend were robbed, and he was shot and killed as they left their house to go out to eat. I blogged periodic updates.)
The interview was painfully magnificent; Lindsey offered details I’d never heard, and, as always, her wisdom astounded me. But afterwards she and I talked about her one glaring omission. When asked what helped her recover she readily described support from friends and family, wonderful sessions with a therapist, stability with school and work … she even described her own fortitude.
But she didn’t mention several valuable sessions with spiritual intuitives and ongoing help from a man we can only inadequately describe as an energy healer. Laughing she said, “I didn’t know how to bring that up. How do you describe those things without sounding crazy?”
Yet those things probably helped her the most, even if they seemed too weird to talk about in public. In fact, I’m finding this increasingly true for so many I know, myself included. Incessantly worried? Perpetually sick? Cycling through the same relationship woes, the same circumstance over and over again? I’ve seen decades of intractable, repetitive bad choices, ill health or patterns of catastrophe shift almost immediately after a session with someone skilled at shifting those energies we don’t believe exist. While I’ve never witnessed spontaneous cures from cancer or clinical depression (although I no longer doubt they happen), I have seen crippling illnesses – mono, severe allergies, chronic fatigue, dangerous blood pressure, paralyzing anxiety, and life-stopping grief – disappear so subtly and so completely, it’s as if they never appeared in the first place.
Lindsey has come to believe that this wacky chiropractor – this “crazy” man who taps her head, waves his hands, and talks a language that is about as comprehensible to her as ancient Greek -- is the health care provider she counts on the most. She doesn’t know what he does, but she knows that he has been the catalyst behind her healing and her resulting transformation. It’s like he cleared away all the debris blocking her path so that she can get on with her true life.
I sure don’t blame her for not mentioning this in a magazine interview, given how people tear at things outside the mainstream. But I wish she could. (And she did say yup to this blog.)
