The Kite

Many of my clients have heard me speak of the ‘Kite Analogy.” My hands fly up in the air as draw the outline of an enormous kite in the sky. This kite, the kite that we can see, represents the gross physical manifestations of un-wellness or dis-ease.

In Bali, according to the ancient Balinese calendar, there are specific days that are designated “good” days to fly a kite. On those days, the sky is literally full of kites, massive kites often with generous tails, often homemade from enormous black plastic bags. Sometimes it takes 2-3 boys squealing with delight to run the kite fast enough to launch it into the air. This is done with great skill on an extremely narrow, 4-inch mud wall along a rice paddy. When I’ve observed these boys flying kites, I’ve always wondered why we ever stopped flying kites. It’s one of life’s simplest pleasures; empowering the pilot and reaching high up into the realms of all that lies beyond the grounded world. But that’s not my story.

I use the kite analogy to explain dis-ease and healing. So, the kite is the gross (meaning obvious, not disgusting) visible aspect of un-wellness. In the body, this represents what we can scan, blood test, palpate, measure, dissect, biopsy, observe, feel, and see. It’s real, and often hard or dense. It may be the cancer, a variety of tumors, vascular issues, heart disease, auto-immune disease, etc. It may be a dis-ease on a far lesser scale, representing where the body is sore, or tense, or tight: a bum knee, the arthritic finger, the cholesterol filled artery.

The kite is the gross physical manifestation of unwellness.

The string that holds the kite is the emotional underpinning of the un-wellness. It is what literally leads us to the kite. The kite could not fly without the string. Physical disease manifests from emotional disease, and the spool holding all the string is the spiritual underpinning of the emotional disease.

You may ask, what in the world does this mean? Let me share some examples that are from actual client experiences. Each client has given me permission to share, but without names or other qualifiers.

It’s not that we ever deserve to be ill. Some people have misread some wonderful authors who have written eloquently about the messages from the body. I think what they meant, and what I see daily, is that illness is the destination on a path we’ve been walking, running or careening down for weeks, months, or years. We’re in emotional crisis when the diagnosis comes. That, I personally know all too well. But, we’re not actually in physical crisis, as the ailment or disease has been incubating for months, often years, or sometimes even decades. We arrived at the unwellness because it’s exactly where the body was headed. It was the path that the body was on physically, emotionally, and spiritually. And for me, this is the good news, as healing requires an awareness of this reality, an ownership of the path creator (you), and then the desire to shift, change, and co-create a new path.

I can never make a decision. I always feel torn apart.

A woman in her early forties was suffering from horrific anxiety. On a daily basis, she was paralyzed to make decisions about what to eat off a menu, where to shop for groceries, what to wear, or where the kids should go to school. It was this last decision that brought her to me. Her husband, in a fit of pure frustration, suggested to her that she was losing her mind and needed help.

 After guiding her into a state of relaxation and encouraging her to regress through her life until we could find the root cause of this indecision, she began to shake uncontrollably. Together, we could see her sitting on a bed. The bed cover had red flowers on it. She could see her left hand being held by one parent, and her right hand by the other. She thought that she was about twelve years old in this memory. Her parents were telling her for the first time that they were going to divorce. Within minutes of this terrible news, she was being asked with whom she wanted to live. She was told that as the eldest, she could choose first, and then each of her three siblings would also be asked to choose.

In a split second her life shattered like a glass menagerie.

Her parents had skillfully kept their disintegrating marriage a secret so my client literally had no idea that there were “issues.” Also, her parents were going to live in two new locations, on different sides of the planet that were as far away as you could get: one in the far north, and one in the far south.

My client safely returned to the memory; the memory that was the string underpinning her physical unwellness, which in this case was clinical anxiety and indecision. She was literally torn apart as a young girl, and asked to make the most awful of all “Sophie’s Choices:” a choice that felt like the making of it meant death. Death to her childhood, death to her family unit, death to her sense of safety and security. Death.

I can never make a decision. I always feel torn apart.

This was truth! A truth created by a breach of trust in her parents, in the world, and in God.

This beautiful client, with full awareness of the kite (in this case anxiety), the emotional string string (her childhood  trauma), and the spool (the breach of trust and a sense of security in the world) was able to cut the string that bound her to the un-wellness.

Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could…

So somewhere in my youth or childhood…

In her case, she left after two sessions, was able to decide on where her children would be schooled, and choose lunch from any menu. I keep in contact with her and she can readily make all kinds of decisions from simple to complex with little to no anxiety, nearly 15 years later. We can talk more about the “how” in another blog.

Butter Man

Another client came to me with arms crossed and a furrowed brow. I have only two kinds of clients: those who come skipping (usually with a history of natural medicine in their family), or those like this client, who are most certain I am a nutter, and the door of last resort.

This client is a well-known CEO of a publicly traded company. He had experienced dozens of panic attacks over a multi-year period. His latest was in front of more than 5,000 analysts, bankers, and media, as he took the podium to speak.

As he clutched his chest, he was raced to the hospital and put through hours of tests. He was then informed by his medical team that this wasn’t a heart attack. It was, and I quote him, ONLY a panic attack. This news was relayed to my client in front of his wife, his PA, his lawyer, and two journalists, who should never have been present (The journalists, after much pleading from the wife, agreed not to cover the story for a few days).

After guiding him into a state of relaxation, and encouraging him to regress through his life until we could find the root cause of these panic attacks, he began to shake uncontrollably.

He was a small boy in his childhood kitchen. His father stood to his right, and his mother to his left. His father was frying my client an egg before school. His parents were having an argument. His father held in his hand a spatula (the old metal kind, not Teflon like most spatulas today). As the father gesticulated in anger, the spatula flew out of his hand and hit his wife’s neck, causing an arterial bleed. The father was in shock. The mother was bleeding profusely. An ambulance was called. The mother was rushed to the local hospital and successfully managed. My client was left in the kitchen with blood everywhere, and a fried egg burning in butter. My client remembers that hours later an uncle was sent to the house to fetch him, clean him up, and watch over him until the father returned home. My client remembers sitting on the kitchen floor crying.

There is a literal string that tied the last three panic attacks together, and that string was the stored memory of the smell of butter. At the public event he had just been served chicken, potatoes, and broccoli, with a butter drizzle. As we traveled back to the two previous panic attacks, he remembered being in a movie theatre and buying popcorn, and the third event was at a public fair.

After 2 sessions, my client left to return to his home country, and more than eight years later, he has suffered zero panic attacks. He emails me annually to tell me how he’s doing in life, and calls me about four times a year to check on me, which I find very sweet.

In the kite analogy, the kite string is the emotional underpinning of the physical symptoms. The emotional trauma will almost always manifest in physical messages from the body. The body is trying to tell us (often loudly) that something’s wrong!

The Finger

You may remember from an earlier blog: Messages From the Body: Arthritis, the case study of a client with a history of rheumatoid arthritis and a sudden and painful outbreak in her left hand pointer finger.

Instead of having a cortisone injection in that finger joint (ouch), she went home and had a bold conversation with her mother about pancakes and judgment. Her finger pain subsided during the mother-daughter conversation and she no longer required an injection to manage the issue.

Torn Apart Mom, Butter Man, and the Finger woman, are each examples of the connection between thephysical = the kite and the string = emotional states (often traumas). They each establish what for me is a basic tenant of healing, and that is that:

And now the spool. The spool alluded me for years, and then came into my practice like a freight train. I am now very eager, and slightly more skilled in reaching the spool in people’s healing classroom. What is the spool? The spool that unwinds the emotional string that holds the physical kite is the sense of awe and wonder with the world, the belief that “the world is a good place and that I am a good person.” The dense sticky words for this include breach of trust, breach of faith, breach of love, loss of connection, and a sense of instability and wellbeing in the world. The list does go on.

Elephant Man

Another story. A client came to me under very bizarre circumstances. He was living in his seventh decade, and had recently been diagnosed terminally ill with cancer that had metastasized into several other major organs. He was given only months to live.

He came and fasted over a ten day period. I fasted with him.

On day four of the fast, he arrived bent over and sad. I asked his permission to guide him into a state of relaxation, and I encouraged him to regress through his life until we could find the root cause of his disease. As we did, he began to shake uncontrollably.

He was a white man born and raised in Africa. As a young man, he was taken on the hunt with his father and four of his favorite African farm hands who were equally loved as man-dads.

 -- I’m ahead of myself, and need to fallback to relate another aspect of his healing.

When clients come to me supremely ill, they’ve often been told that they have a few months to live. One of the first things we do together is plan the funeral in full detail, and create a financial plan to make things easier for the family in the event. It sounds morbid, and it is, but it’s like taking care of the inevitable. If I lighten it up, it’s like shaving a head that will soon be bald due to chemo. My clients seem to truly benefit from this process and their attitude in the process. It creates space for living when we’ve grasped the reality of dying.

In Elephant man’s funeral plan he had specifically said that he did not want these four men to attend. You’ll soon find out why.

And now we return to the story. So, as a young man he was taken on his first hunt. They walked for hours, talking and joking as a group. His father asked him to take aim and shoot as something was moving in the jungle before them. My client aimed and shot. There was a terrible sound. The four Africans ran ahead of my client. A sound my client had never heard began to fill his ears. He panicked, and remembered throwing up. His father was not pleased. As he and his father walked forward, they saw that my client’s shot had been “a hit.” What he hit was a mistake. It was an elephant, a female elephant, a pregnant female elephant who (as mammals will) delivered upon her death. My client walked on with his father to see a dead elephant and a dead preterm baby elephant encased in placenta – all images my client had never seen, and could not make sense of.

The Africans were clearing the energy and making amends with the elephant, with God, and with the universe, as this was a terrible, terrible accident. My client remembers his father slapped him on the back and took him home. The events of the day were never discussed. My client’s adult understanding of events included some conversation between his father and the other men on that hunt that shut down all communication. So much so, that my client felt his African friends never looked him in the eye or took him out again. Not to hunt. Not anything.

This event was stored on the spiritual plane. In his heart, the world was not a good place, and he most certainly was not a good person. He was forever after emotionally separated from his father, and his surrogate African fathers. He stored this trauma spiritually as if he was not loved or loveable.

He grew up and created a wealth of businesses that sold ivory, took wealthy people out on rare game hunts, and he was wanted by two governments for crimes against nature.

In an instant I asked him to take out a piece of paper. He was to decide what he was going to do with all these activities that were not good. We had already been on speaker phone with his financial accountant earlier in the week as he planned and tidied up his finances. He called his accountant again to discuss these businesses. He literally began the process of closing each one down, and created a business plan to take all those proceeds and start other ventures that were good. He created a rehab center for elephants, a wild game eco friendly nature resort, and donated heavily to global environmental and animal rights causes. He wrote letters to his already deceased father, and to the four African men-dads. He asked them for forgiveness as he also forgave them. He read each of these letters out loud to me and they were then offered to the heavens in a fire ceremony.

He lived another 8 years.

At his funeral, to which I was invited but unable to go, the four African man-dads were in attendance.

I know this all may sound so simple or frankly insane. All I can say is that after working with more than 5,000 people, it is You!Healing’s core truth.

In my practice, those who arrive physically, emotionally or spiritually sick need only be brave enough to venture into these realms. Nearly 100% of the time, my clients will find what they need to know in order to address what needs to be address for the healing to occur.

Miracles happen when the physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects that make us whole, are wholly and completely aligned with the goal of wellness.

There is an only in this sentence.

Miracles can only occur when the physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects that make us whole, are wholly and completely aligned with the goal of wellness.

The kite, the string, and the spool, must all be aligned to fly.

Like the kite, we must align our physical, emotional and spiritual energies to heal. Why?  To be of service to self, family, community and the planet. That’s why we’re here!

With love,