November 7, 2015
Last night I woke up at around 3 a.m. (no surprise there!) and realized that for the first time in at least three weeks I was moving my left knee, now doing so while sleeping. My first reaction was panic—“Oh no, I’m gonna really hurt my knee by moving it like this!” But I realized very quickly that I was in fact being led through an important lesson in Self Healing.
On Sunday, October 18, I believe it was, I twisted my knee while gathering firewood with my wife, Anna, and her mother, Irma. I was tossing a cut log down a hillside when I lost my footing. I quickly dug my left heel into the dirt and leaves, but my wildly spinning body kept spinning wildly towards the left leg, wrenching my knee out of place. I didn’t feel much pain immediately, but I could tell I had injured it pretty seriously. Even so, given the macho dude that I can sometimes be—when I’m not sitting in bed reading books for work—I continued throwing the rest of the logs with Anna and Irma down the hillside and retrieving the ones that had rolled into our sacred creek.
So needless to say, I paid a visit to Urgent Care the next morning, got a diagnosis of a sprain and a knee sleeve to try to hold it in place, and continued working all week on crutches while waiting for my Friday appointment with the orthopedic doctor. By Friday my knee hurt even more, my doctor was not pleased with my situation, and so after several X-rays, an MRI, a CAT scan, and several other exams, the doctors determined that I had pretty serious tears in my meniscus cartilage. So I then went into surgery on Thursday, October 29.
As others who have experienced such surgeries had predicted, my healing has been slow and relatively painful. I slowly grew more depressed as the two weeks after surgery passed and I saw no real healing at all. “Damn, when is this gonna happen?! I want to go for hikes right now! What if I never get better? What if this means the rest of my body will start deteriorating now that I’m a year and a half from turning 60? What if I don’t get to climb Wheeler Peak in New Mexico on my 60th birthday as I’ve planned since I was about 25? What if I never heal?! Waaah!”
I think those who know me will attest to the fact that I rarely sink into self-pity like this. So by now I was getting depressed simply because I was getting depressed. “What’s wrong with me? I’m tougher than this! I’m a damn meditating expert, for Christ’s sake! I’m bigger than pain and self-doubt and despair!” And given that our car radiator had blown out the night before and we now had no car for a few days at least, I was beginning to slip into despair and self-pity. Deeply. (Another stroke of luck, by the way, was the offer from my friend and boss to borrow her car until ours is ready.)
And yet at 3-something a.m. I awoke to find myself slowly but decidedly rotating my legs from front to back—I was lying on my right side, with my hurt left leg on a pillow that was on top of my right leg. I found that I was slowly rubbing the bottom of each foot with the toes of the other foot, again in what seemed to be a very deliberate and purposeful motion. So pretty quickly the seemingly-deliberate nature of this motion made me stop panicking and to pay attention to what I had started doing in my sleep.
As soon as my panic ended, I realized that this motion was in fact very deliberate and very comforting, not threatening further harm at all. As soon as I recognized this, I realized that I was being led through this exercise by some entity hovering over our bed. I asked who it was, but knew even beforehand that it was Shamuel, my Higher Self (what popularly would be known as my Guardian Angel or, less popularly, my Daimon). Shamuel, a Solar Angel (as all Higher Selves helping humans are), continued speaking his instructions to me, but it was only at this point that I realized I had been hearing his instructions all along, even in my sleep.
Probably the most important instruction was one he kept repeating in a very soothing and reassuring tone: “Relax. Acknowledge that you’ve got the power to heal yourself whenever you need to. But you have to accept this in order for it to work. So relax and ease into this process. Feel the warm, soothing energy that is flowing through your legs from toes to hips and back down. This is a very healing energy that you can call on at any time you need.”
So I relaxed into the exercise, let myself sink into consciousness of the soothing, water-like flow of the energy, and let myself slowly let go of my previous despair, doubt, and depression and flow into a beautiful state of easy, releasing glow. Almost immediately I realized that my left leg felt immeasurably better than it had during the days before. For the first time in weeks I felt not only that I was actually healing, but doing so rapidly.
I asked Shamuel about the significance of some things. One was about the bicycle-riding-like movement of my legs. His answer was manifold. One point was that I was synching the energy of my “good” leg and my “bad” or my “healthy” and “hurt.” As each leg slowly rotated, my left leg grew in strength simply by identifying with the cycling motion of the right leg.
A second point involved the rubbing of the bottoms of my feet with my toes. Shamuel’s answer was that this motion was methodically and regularly stimulating the hundreds of acupressure points in my feet and, by extension, the energy points throughout my body, providing a total-body state of equilibrium. The cycling and the rubbing together sent waves of healing energy throughout my body, importantly beginning with my toes and the bottoms of my feet and traveling up through my legs. In this way, my hurt leg became the conveyor of healing energy for the rest of my body and not just for itself. It became the vehicle of healing extension and thus acted in a unifying way towards healing of myself and, ultimately, the entire cosmos. I was told that this “instruction” was not simply for me but for me to pass on to others as my own contribution to the awakening of self-healing consciousness in all humanity and beyond.
Throughout the exercise, each time I felt a bit of pain in my leg or my hip (which has been stressed as a result of the stress to my leg) I was urged to send my consciousness to the points of pain and discomfort. Through such focus I was then to identify with the pain, make it my own, allow it to express itself fully, and then let it simply melt into the warm fluid flow of healing energy throughout my body until it disappeared like sugar in a full bathtub. Then still with the bathtub vision in mind, I was told to simply let my entire body float and melt into the warm water flow of healing energy.
The results of all of this were stunning. I awoke with the same warm glow flowing throughout my body. And miraculously I could bend my left leg at the knee up to about a 70º angle with no pain at all. I found that I could take four or five steps at a time before needing to brace myself again with my crutches. And most miraculous of all was that for the first time in weeks I was able with assistance from my crutches to climb up to the top of our upper meadow. The late afternoon sun felt so gorgeous on my face, and the landscape was simply electric! What a breakthrough day.
The key is that this particular healing regime is a simple aspect of being human. We all have these capabilities and simply need to awaken them, as various people have done throughout human existence. But given that medical care has in our culture become the provenance of specialists, hospitals, and pharmaceutical corporations, we have been led to forget our own self-healing capacities.
It is now time to wake up to our own powers within.
I thank the divine powers of the universe for this wonderful and sacred experience.
Peace, Love, and Healing,
Gabriel (with help from Shamuel)
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