Of Fireweed And Fresh Water

I'm not so interested in measuring my success. Many of the conversations I've gotten into in the past few months consist of a series of questions directed at my healing process. How did I get here? How long did it take? Did I really manage to get off all my meds? (Yes, I did. You can, too.)

Collage of pictures from a recent working road-trip around the Gaspe Peninsula. Laure and Shanthi had a working holiday in which some zoom meetings were had from the height of the mountains.

Hi, I'm Laure Marin de la Vallée, and next time we'll talk about why "The Responsive Body" has become "The Emergent Life".

My capacity for growth is wondrous for me to behold. This is not vanity, it is observation of fact. For years, I believed I was stuck. I have been told, repeatedly, that I bear an incurable disease. My fundamental thoughts repeated endlessly: "I am sick, I am sick, I am sick."

One day I awoke to a new thought: I am healing. Healing. Moving towards health, away from illness. Not a linear journey, rather like a möbius strip. Awareness blossoms in the depths of my chest slowly, slowly, and I realized over the years that nothing mattered to me more. Nothing, I told a friend once, is more important to me than healing.

I'm discovering that I don't know ahead of time what the best course of action will be. Remission is not a fixed state, it is a practice, a process. Over 3 years I shifted from one constitutional homeostasis to a different. Most of the practice is about learning to say No. Setting boundaries, self-listening.

Still, now, nothing is more important than healing. Yours, mine, the world's. We have everything to learn about our potential for health.

So I sought the ground state, that place where my body is uninhibited by poisons. Finding solidity is a recalibration of my expectations. What is a body without medication? I had forgotten. My first round of intravenous antibiotics and cortisone was at age 5. When I stopped taking prescription medication in 2020, I had already found sobriety. I stopped binge-drinking in 2017, and my use of entheogens has been moderate for the last 5 years.

The drug I had been prescribed in 2015 is an "eltrombopag olamine", a "thrombopoetin receptor agonist". The drug is marketed as medicine that helps people with a problem called "low platelet counts." Platelets are tiny parts of your blood that help it clot when you get a cut. If you don't have enough platelets, even small cuts can be a big deal.

The drug in question is used to band-aid this issue in a few different situations, like when the immune system acts up. Sometimes, one's immune system can reach a point of disregulation in which it misrecognizes platelets as pathogens. The drug I was taking told my body to make more platelets and cover-up this disharmony. The drug works like a messenger. It talks to the cells in bone marrow, where platelets are made, and tells them to work harder and make more platelets.

I have come to understand that kind of medicine as a chemical coercion: taking a pill that forces the body to work harder in a specific direction with total disregard for the harmonious balance of the whole. Healing is impossible under these conditions. The body is constantly under duress, cannot rest, is being commanded to work even while it sleeps.

In the first pandemic autumn, I left Mooniyang. I spent a pandemic winter alone in Saint-Anne-Des-Monts, northern Gespe'gewa'gi. Sitting wool-swaddled on the lilac velvet couch in a sunroom gazing over the Saint-Laurent, I would watch boundless water freezing and thawing for months. The river became my dearest friend, to whom I would utter my joys and miseries during dawn walks across the icy pier. I sang to it, it held my grief in its flows.

Soon after moving to Saint-Anne, I had stopped taking my medication. Full stop. From 75mg daily (the highest dose I had ever taken) down to 0mg overnight on November 11th 2020. This was not a decision taken lightly. In fact, I was certain of my future success. And it went amazing, at first. I had no idea what I was doing. I was keeping a log at the time. It reads:

Nov 10 2020, 14h47: No more eltrombopag.

Nov 11 2020, 11h50: Last night began research on human nutrition. I feel a need to make explicit right away that I would not recommend quitting unsupervised to anyone. I undertake this bodily transformation as an individual, with full awareness of the potential risks. Platelet deficiency is no joke. That said, my body is telling me it is time to stop relying on pharmaceuticals, and heal. Platelets are formed in the bone marrow, and eltrombopag has the potential to destroy bone marrow. That seems like reason enough to quit while I can. 5 years is long enough--I am thoroughly addicted. This is a voluntary detox protocol. An experiment in body knowledge and human anatomy. There is a lot to learn."

The first time I tried to quit the medication, it led to a relapse 3 months later. My body was not ready; I had not cultivated the necessary practices. I thought that 5 hours a day of meditation and prayer was enough to heal me. Symptoms of auto-immunity slowly crept back into my life. The deficiencies of an inadequate diet too-full of meats, coffee, sugar, came into full view as my energy progressively collapsed and bruises began to appear spontaneously on my body. It was clear that I was at risk of bleeding-related complications. So I went back to the hospital. They put me back on medication.

In 2020 I decided to quit taking my medication, unsupervised, without any backup plan. I started doing the research that eventually led me to Healing With Whole Foods after taking a leap of faith into unknown territories. That was 4 years ago. Today I believe nutrition is the foundation of my remission. In 2024, I prepare just about everything I eat from scratch.

Feeling is perception of the inner motion the tides before paralysis nearby hand staved off by sensing it is a lack of feeling or movement. Feeling with honesty melts away the paralytic inoculate overwhelming the sense of purpose. My will is to open my heart and be shown the way in which I ought to live my life, the source to which I must return, in which to let go. A well of inner truth which bespeaks the impact of this age upon my self.

I don't need much of anything, now. A perfect day looks like this: I get up without an alarm, I drink some water. I head outside and do some Neigong (nei: internal, gong: skill) training with my community of practice; we practice for 1, 2, or 3 hours. Then, I have breakfast. I take some time to read a couple of pages, some material to think about and digest for the rest of the day. By now it's 11am or so. Back to movement, either out for a walk, a bike ride, or to do some Gongfu. Next, lunch. After lunch, rinse and repeat. Then, sit down to write. Handle the computer and communications logistics at this time. Late afternoon, read, contemplate, watch the sunset. Sleep, with my lover.

Most of my days look like that, now. I've organized my whole life in such a way that I have maximum time dedicated to training, to practice, to learning. I'm working some communications contracts right now for organizations that are aligned with my values--it pays the bills and feels good to help out in small ways. I'm building my massage and coaching practice, allowing that to flow easefully into being--but I haven't yet got the language to describe exactly what I do, what my mission is. If you're reading this, you're among the first. Thank you.

That's what I'm in the process of figuring out, with all this training and study. There's many projects ongoing, all with a slow and sputtering start. Adapting to the return home has been full of challenges.. I'm running a Healing With Whole Foods Study Group with some friends in person, in the hopes of understanding how to share the work with a wider audience later. We've been cooking a lot, enjoying Gaia's great gifts.

The hardest thing about leaving for India has been to come back. It's been hard to witness the culture that brought me up with these eyes that have had confirmation Elsewhere exists. There was long an inkling that reading books about the world had brought me. I thought I knew that there was something else out there. Now I know it for a fact. And that, that's what's hard.

One of the biggest changes is that I don't feel a pressing need to come back and settle out here. I can just live, there's no pressure. I can just.... live, daily. Day in, day out. Establish a routine. Remember to vision regularly, and to write the beautiful words every now and then. It feels easy. Like, I don't need to worry, because there's nothing to worry about, because it's all being handled. It's all already handled. And why wouldn't it be? I'm alive, aren't I? Rest, rise, and repeat.