Cherokee Healing - Part 1

So...

Boy, do I have a story for you! I've been trying and trying to capture this in a way that explains more then it confuses.

At the same time I've been reluctant to share this story. I know a lot of people are skeptics about alternative medicines and healing but I feel like I should post this story for some reason. If you are the skeptical one, please be kind in your comments.

And now for the healing story.

To get to it, though, I have to lay a little ground work and hope it doesn't come across like I'm whining. So I'm going to give you this preface to the story and then you're going to forget all about it when this story is done. OK? Pinkie swear?

Good. I trust you.

I'm going to try to do this in a nutshell here...I've had a lot of chronic health and stress issues in my life. About four years ago things accelerated to the point that nothing in my body was working right. I had a few surgeries, lots of not very fun tests, and was tortured, poked and prodded, and then tested and tortured some more.

I lost track of specialists we saw and tests those specialists did. And each and every specialist found something wrong and tried to fix it but the decline continued.

I went to a French healer, and an acupuncturist, and to anyone who I thought could help me.

And each did help a little bit. But it was as if the symptoms they fixed made the other symptoms worse. To the point that in order to control the pain I ended up at a pain clinic and a doctor whose solution was to severe nerves in my spine. A solution they reached after performing procedures that could be used in a torture chamber for interrogation techniques.

Um.

Yea.

No. I don't think so.

I continued on this road for a few months, cancelling and rescheduling the surgery several times. I had about given up hope for any other solution, when I stumbled across a lady at a natural foods store who sent me to a naturopath who was reputed to be amazing at solving unsolveable health issues.

Mr. Jenny took me because I was almost unable to walk by that time and I sat in the waiting room in agony with tears dripping continuously down my face.

This woman was a miracle worker. Literally. She gave me a 'cocktail' in her office containing magnesium and other stuff and all kinds of vials to do different testing and ordered a ton of blood and pee tests and gave me a shopping bag full of supplements and ointments. She gave me a shot of something. She gave me a strict diet to follow for 30 days.

Within a few days the charlie horses I was having inside my bones stopped. A day or two more and my heart problems eased down. Within two weeks I could walk without wanting to scream. I could sleep without sedating myself. Mr. Jenny could sleep through the night without being awakened by my screaming every hour.

No. Don't do that. Don't say, oh poor her. I am only telling you this to prepare you for the Cherokee story. I would just like to briefly add that I could probably write two books just about everything I experienced during this quest for health solutions.

My naturopath and my primary doctor started working together and comparing notes and they found that all the specialists had been right...there were lots and lots of little things wrong, and a few bigger things that added up to a miserable life.

And I've been really pretty good for a little over a year now. But several months ago things started up again and I could feel something was wrong. We tried a lot of the treatments that had offered relief before, but they didn't help. Both doctors started up testing again but nothing has showed up. And, again, the specialists aren't finding anything so we return to the a terrible case of awful health deja vue all over again... BUT...

When I went to get my hair cut (same girl for a long, long time) she told me, "OMG! I had the most amazing experience last week! I went to a Cherokee Healer." She told me all about it and then I asked for the number and called for an appointment.

The first attempt was a no go because something came up.

But I went last Friday and it was pretty jaw dropping.

And now, the story can officially begin. Sorry for all prefacing but it's the only way you will understand this story.

Ahemmmm....

So...Friday afternoon as soon as Morgan left I took a bath and washed all the lotion and hair gel and stuff off preparing to go to my Healing appointment.

Then I donned my swimsuit, threw some shorts and a shirt over it, and told Mr. Jenny goodbye.

He seemed nervous. I was nervous. He offered to go along, but it was fairly close to the house and I wanted to concentrate on the appointment.

It was late afternoon. The sunshine felt wrong...on the drive I felt like it should be almost foggy. Instead, children rode their bikes on the sidewalks, a man watered his flower beds. Traffic came and went from four-way stops.


I arrived at the house. The yard was kind of cluttery and moderately messy. I felt nervous and uncomfortable...and not just from having my swimsuit on under my clothes.

I went up to the door and knocked and when it opened there was a woman standing there.

She had jeans and a t-shirt on and her long brown hair, shot through with gray, hung down around her shoulders. Her feet were bare. She had high, very strong cheekbones. And she had weird eyes. They reminded me of husky eyes...no, not eyes that are chubby, but those odd, pale-gray eyes with the black rims around the iris' that you see on husky dogs.

She said, "Jenny? I'm Lisa," and that was it. She shook my hand and I followed her into the house.


She led me into a tiled studio that I'm certain must have once been the garage. There were two chairs facing each other. The room was filled with a very strong scent and smoky. I worried for a moment. I am one of those people that get a horrific headache around any strong smells. But I sat down.

She leaned forward and just started talking to me, calling me by name. Yea, I know, she knew my name from the appointment but it was odd and oddly comfortable. I felt like I had known her forever.

She held her finger to her lips and said, "I am going to tell you what we are going to do, but I don't want you to tell me anything. You are worried about getting a headache but you will not get one from the cedar boughs I am burning."


Then she laid her hand lightly on my knee and started talking. As she talked I got the strangest sensation of heaviness. It felt like my body was getting heavier and heavier and being drawn into the floor. It felt like moving my finger would be impossible. I tried wiggling my pinkie but it took too much effort.

She told me, "I can tell you are open to this" and I started to answer but she told me again, "I don't want you to talk now."

And then she proceeded to tell me what she would do. She said she would try to find the source of my illness, she would rub her hands on my limbs and my face and my heart. That she might talk to herself throughout the 'examination' but I was not to converse back. She told me she would listen to her 'spirit guides' for healing and that afterwards she would tell me what she had learned. And that then, and only, then could I ask questions.

I was not uncomfortable. I didn't feel weird or scared or skeptical.

She told me she wanted to check something. She rubbed her palm against my palm and then asked me to keep my eyes shut. She asked me to tell her when I could feel our palms getting close together. I heard her get out of the chair but then heard nothing more. After a few moments my palm started twitching a bit. It felt like my fingers were bending all on their own, with no control from my body.

And she said, "Open your eyes." I did. She was about four feet away from me.

She said, "You are an intuitive," and repeated, "You are open to this."

In writing this story now I'm feeling like I should have thought, "Yea, you think so? Here I am in the garage of a person I've never met who is burning cedar boughs prior to me laying on a table in my swimsuit." But those words never flitted through my mind...at all.

Then she told me to take off my clothes down to my swimsuit and lay on what looked like a sturdy massage table.

Now this was another surprising thing for me. I am over-weight and very, very careful not to let anyone see me in my swimsuit. But I didn't feel self-conscious at all. Not the smallest bit. As I walked to the table it felt like I had cement boots on my feet. I was actually trudging. There was a sheet laying on the table and she folded it up and said, "We don't need this." It took some effort to climb up on the table because my limbs were so heavy and when I laid down it felt like I was imprinted into the mattress.

A very, very odd sensation indeed.

To be continued...