A long time ago, a man asked my Granddad to help with with vascular disease that was resulted in inch-high lumps forming on the blood vessels of his calves and feet. He’d taken the usual herbs that help restore blood circulation and the rest of him showed good blood circulation. He had healthy hair and skin, and his digestion was good. He was pretty athletic and climbed trees every now and then to pluck fruit with no problems.
It was just this weird problem where there were these lumps on both veins and arteries of his calves and feet.
Now, my Granddad, if someone told him they had a problem, he wouldn’t look at the place of their body they were saying the problem was. He wouldn’t even really believe what they were saying was the problem.
He believed that in a majority of situations, what we believe is the problem, isn’t, because we look at things from the point of view of what’s troubling us the most. And the body knows what will trouble us, and uses that to get attention.
The body’s email to us isn’t the problem. It’s just how it’s calling our attention.
This is one reason why the face in our times is such a playground of what’s happening in the body. Because our system knows if we see a dot or a dash or a lump on our faces we’ll react like a foreign country has nuked us. Not so much a boil in places no one can see.
The poor face has had to take all kinds of unnecessary treatments because it’s the messenger, not because there’s a problem with it really.
Anyhow, back to Granddad. He wouldn’t set a lot of weight on what people said was the problem.
What he would do was dump the way of logic altogether.
Now you’d question the sense of that. I did and I do.
Yet, when you’re dealing with the human being, the ‘logic’ works only a very tiny little bit. To really get results you have to go by way of heart.
“What is it you want?” Granddad would ask, “You want to impress your wife with this long terrible disease name? Or you want to become alright again?
If you really want to become alright again, you must find out why your heart is angry.
Granddad would say, “If your heart is happy, your body is happy. If your heart is tired, your body is tired. If your heart is hopeful, your body starts making new cells and recovering from illness; if your heart is angry, your body will rage.”
How is your body this minute?
Often in our times, the body has mixed emotions. In times like that, we have mostly good health with one or two nagging problems that could be so insistent, they begin to eat up the rest of the body and our lives.
Cancers and tumors in otherwise healthy people are an example of the body being mostly happy but very angry about something at the same time.
Granddad considered it the problem of the 20th century. Mixed emotions. Hot and cold blood mixing unevenly.
He called it ‘unregistered shock’.
See when he was growing up, if a neighbor came over to their house and looked spitefully at their faded curtains, they registered it. They registered what was happening in their lives. And they faced it. They faced their sorrows, their shame, their hopes and their triumphs. The blood coursed through them in the moment.
But as time went by, humans became restricted even in registering insult, shock, affront, to the point where some people didn’t know who their friends are and who their enemies are.
Granddad asked the man with the lumps on his calves. “Do you know know who your enemies are?”
The man looked away and at the horizon with a sort of shock. He’d been suspecting his own brother of cheating him financially. It was something he was loathe to believe. And yet when Granddad asked him that question he was deeply affected.
Granddad didn’t want the answer.
He said to him, what he said to me, “There are no answers in the mass consciousness. You’re not going to find someone who will tell you exactly what to do with your problems whether its lumps on your legs or a betraying friend. You’re going to have to follow your own heart and instinct out of your own problem. You can’t do that if you keep shutting your heart down, keep suppressing your feelings.”
I was very often frustrated when he spoke of me suppressing my feelings, as to my knowledge I’d been giving them free rein for years and still had a lot of problems.
Granddad would simply go on to tell me how he used to butcher chickens for the family every now and then. He’d tell me that sometimes, long after a chicken was even decapitated, its tissues, its muscles would pulse as blood moved through them. He’d seen the internal organs sometimes working as if the body was still living.
He told me that a lot of us; our life energy is blocked up, and our internal organs are working by habit, not with fresh blood and energy as should be the case.
It’s an emergency system we are using and it’s not meant to be that way for longer than just the aftermath of a shock, for example.
Mixed emotions – or rather, things we feel that we don’t want to give importance to because they shake our world view or life view, they end up stalling us; some parts of the body keep working, some start giving up and so on.
But how then, how, I would ask Granddad, how could I do anything more than being willing to let my feelings out?
He’d look at me with laughing eyes and say, “You let your feelings out alright, but when you have to make a decision about anything, you’re back to logic and listing the pros and cons.”
“But I cannot wreck my life! I’ve got to be sensible!”
“Ahh,” he would say, “Be sensible then. And call me when you’re done.”
It made me realize that the way we solve problems, the way we were taught to in school, applies to math perhaps, but not real life.
In real life, we have to use our emotional instinct, to find a way that’s right for us, for our own heart, rather than find a way that mimics or pleases others.
Since Granddad disturbed my snowflake existence with the imagery of a dead chicken with organs still working, I did get serious about following my heart and instinct and found my way out of some very serious health issues.
Granddad taught me to use herbs for recovery from long term shock whenever there is a case of mixed emotions, where a person is mostly alright but has some nagging, even very troubling problems.
Recovery from long term suppressed shock, is different from recovery from immediate shock.
Shock in the moment, is usually a paroxysm of the nervous system, instability of the heart and the hormones of stress going through the body. You comfort and soothe the nerves and the glands and you’re done.
Shock in the long term manifests as a systemic imbalance – where the body responds with crazy hyper-immunity some times and completely ignores what it should be responding to at other times. It is diagnosed as various illnesses but it all comes down to the same thing – unreleased shock.
Herbs that treat the ‘Me Versus Me’ syndrome or auto-immune disorders help, as do herbs that support the heart in releasing tension, thereby relieving PTSD and allowing suppressed emotion out.
As I find unreleased shock playing such a big role in almost every person or animal I make a treatment for, I write about it often, looking at it from various angles.
Here are some more articles with information you might find useful.
And now for something to make you happy. Here is a triumphant Flame of the Forest tree that broke the barbed wire fence before it even became a teenager.
