That I know of.
Here goes.
How acupuncture miraculously cured my allergies.
By Ellen Yale.
The kids were about 8 and 10-years-old as I was standing in my driveway (underneath the five enormous willow oak trees in my postage stamp sized yard) talking with my mother about how I was getting the flu again. Every fall I would get the flu and then get laryngitis, then totally lose my voice and be bedridden.
I would miss three weeks of work every fall.
That can really be a stress on work.
And raising the kids.
So, we are standing there and Mom said (brilliantly I might add), “How are your allergies doing?”
Which I didn’t think was so brilliant at the time, because I didn’t have any seasonal allergies.
But it was one of those things that once said made perfect sense. Every Halloween since the kids were born, I was very sick. And in hindsight, it was right when all my big willow oak trees started changing.
Normally this would just be good information, “Hey – I’ve got allergies. I should probably think about getting shots”.
But my next-door neighbor’s mother had once mentioned that her chiropractor had healed her allergies.
He had used acupuncture.
Coincidentally, I had been in a car accident and was going to that same chiropractor three times a week for nine months to try to heal my back.
I knew them. I trusted them.
I was willing to give acupuncture a try.
It’s not that I didn’t believe acupuncture was a real thing, it’s just that I don’t go out seeking alternative therapies.
I would not have made an appointment had I not already been going there.
I default to the skeptic in me.
The first three or four sessions went fine. The little needles don’t even go through all layers of the skin, they are as fine as a hair, and it’s only an ouchy twinge if it the energy needs to be unblocked in the correlating area of your body. (That’s as close as I get to technical explanation.)
The trees were a little late that year, but shortly after Halloween it started.
My voice dropped down to Lauren Bacall levels. I was losing it fast, but people could still understand me.
When Dr. Steele heard my raspy voice, he said, “Oh – I’ve got a spot for that.”
He put a needle in my forearm.
Acupuncture normally doesn’t hurt.
This felt like a lightening bolt entered and went up my arms.
I screamed out in pain.
His reaction was, “Well, that worked.” And he walked out of the room.
I laid on the table for the usual 15 minutes of electricity. (After putting in the needles, they hook them up to electrical current to increase effectiveness. It doesn’t hurt, it just buzzes. I think the only thing that could make it look worse is if they set the needles on fire. When I told Dr. Steele that, he said they set them on fire in China, but he doesn’t do that. Glad I’m in America. Gulp.)
But back to the table.
I laid there the requisite 15 minutes, and his assistant comes in and removed them as usual, and I walk out of the examining room. When I turn to say goodbye to the group, MY VOICE WAS BACK TO NORMAL.
It was immediate and it was total.
It was like a miracle.
I mentioned that I am usually the wary skeptic. If the change had not been so extreme and immediate, I would have wondered if my allergies had gotten better because of the car accident or chiropractic work or a change in my trees or all of the other variables in life.
Not only do I want to share with everyone including strangers on the street how my allergies were cured, but I don’t think I would have been so open to other changes in my life if I hadn’t had this wake up call.
This changed how I see the world.
This was one of the events that made me hyper-alert to what else in our world could be here to help me that I hadn’t tapped into.
This event made me question other beliefs I had that seemed like facts.
I don’t think I would have been successful in life coaching if it hadn’t happened.
And it’s really at the core of what great life coaching is: questioning what we believe and being open to looking at other truths.
I have found that since that moment in time, I have gone down another path. I have turned towards things that seem on the fringe of society and put them to the test.
I have questioned my relationships and career and body image, to name a few. And all for the better.
So, take this for what you will. It is information on how you might cure your allergies, as well as a call to question the rules of nature and the world around you.
Here is the question I ask myself every morning as my feet hit the floor:
What is here that I haven’t noticed, that is here to help me?
It’s been pretty amazing.
PS – You might find it interesting to know that I figured out later that the acupuncture also cured my allergy to bee stings and bug bites and bacteria in combination with dust. Which is my whole house. So far, so good and it’s been about 8 years.
It’s all part of the process.
I catch my thoughts and define them…
Toxic (crazy-ass) thought: “We are going to starve in the one-inch blizzard.”
Pick a new thought: “I can stock up on a few extra healthy meal supplies.”
I’ve devised a game plan about the pushback I’ll get from my kids, too.
No Bigfoots were harmed in the writing of this post.
I have my one-on-one clients send me their food journal. In that journal they write what they ate that day and what thought triggered them to overeat.
The journal asks, “Why are you going to eat?”
The answer I’m hearing a lot this week is, “Eh… Why not?”
What the Wha!?! You have hired a weight loss coach. You have told me on your pre-work that on a scale of 1 – 10 that losing weight is a 10. And your thought is why not?
I could ramble off a long list of why they shouldn’t over eat, but frankly that’s not what they are really thinking.
That’s not the real problem.
Here’s what’s really going on:
“Why not” is just a cover thought.
It’s a thought we tell ourselves when we’re ashamed of what the underlying thought really is. These are thoughts we don’t even want to admit to ourselves.
The underlying thought might be, “I don’t think I can really lose weight.” Or, “I don’t want to feel this feeling. It’s too uncomfortable.” (That’s a big hairy thought.)
“Why not” comes from a mind that thinks that losing weight is done with grand gestures.
I want to tell you that it is the little actions that make the long-term impact.
It’s putting on your running shoes in the morning so you at least walk out to get the paper. (Yes, some of us still get the newspaper.)
A little action like planning what you are going to eat rather than reacting to your environment changes your path.
Taking a moment to breathe deeply and calm yourself before you blindly reach for the chips on the table can make the difference.
You don’t have to go on a crash diet or a cleanse to lose the weight. (Although that’s okay too.)
When you make small changes, and when you change the way you think, you will change the trajectory of your entire life.
What’s one small change you can make today?