Lisa Tilson

Why is the doctor’s office the place we go when we are sick? I suppose the most logical explanation is that they went to school to learn how to make us better. They specialize in it. They know what to give us to take pain away.

I used to believe this completely, until after my spinal chord injury, when I started getting chronic bladder infections, which turned into chronic kidney infections. I would go to the doctor, and before they had even received the swab back, they had me on antibiotics. Not only antibiotics, but Cipro, one of the most powerful general antibiotics - the kind that wipes out any living thing in its path. I wanted this. I wanted the pain to stop, and I didn’t want to die from a Kidney infection. Soon I started questioning why I was getting them - the doctors said it was from being paralysed, but if that was the case, according to their medicine, wouldn’t every paraplegic eventually develop chronic bladder infections and finally chronic kidney infections? I started looking into the effects that the antibiotics have on people, and learned that the body can develop a resistance to them - and that eventually they will stop working.  (check out CBC Radio’s White Coat - Black Art to learn what you might not fully understand)

So, in between the doctors visits, I started checking out alternative medicine - Yoga, Meditation, Acupuncture, TCM, Muscle Testing, Body Talk, Juicing, Massage, Cranial Sacral Therapy. They certainly all helped here and there, but none were accurate every time. My most recent endeavour - body dowsing, started two years ago, and has bared the most consistent results I have ever experienced. So much so that I decided to learn how to do it myself.

Body dowsing works on three basic premises:

1. The body is functioning in one of two ways -in balance and out of balance. When the body is in balance, it means that it can deal with what the world throws at it. It will be able to release any past residues on its own and fend off any viruses, bugs and unwanteds. When the body is out of balance, it will not be able to do these things. One might equate it to having a strong immune system, and a weak immune system.
2. The body wants to be in balance, and will balance if corrections are made in priority order. The body works naturally in this way, but sometimes a dis-ease can get out of control and become complicated by too many factors for an already out of balance body to untangle. In this case, the body will need to reverse its steps, essentially, to rid itself of the dis-ease.
3. Every person’s balancing / healing path is different. There is no general medicine or correction that works for every person, even if the symptoms look the same. There is no dis-ease that begins and follows exactly the same path on a person. If this were the case, every single person would catch every single dis-ease that came across their path. And we don’t.

The tools for body dowsing are a pendulum and your personal body book:

• The pendulum is used to find the weaknesses, in priority order, in the body. For this, you can use yes no questions, as well as ranking questions to find the appropriateness of one remedy in comparison with another. (Order your own pendulum)
• The body book is used to hold lists of weaknesses and potential corrections. For example, in my book, I have indexes of certain books, body parts, microbes, etc where a weakness might occur, or what might cause a weakness. In the corrections section, I have lists of every type of remedy I am aware of that could be used to balance the weaknesses. Your body book is only limited by your mind and creativity.

The great thing about body dowsing is that it is the mother of all modalities.  The corrections for weakness include every other alternative healing remedy in existence, including alopathic medicine.  The wonderful thing is that it gives the practitioner a reliable way to decide between them.  It is a simple way of connecting to exactly what the body needs, without having to guess or make assumptions.

I recall talking to a friend about earthquakes in Vancouver.  Her mom is from Ontario, and had constantly said to her that Vancouver is a dangerous place to live.  To that, my friend said that if something was going to happen, she believed that she would have enough awareness to move herself and her family.  At that time, she was somewhat of a teacher to me - teaching me how to find a comfortable place inside myself, where I could integrate all of the teachings available to me and use them as tools to strengthen my intuition.

This conversation has stuck in my mind through the development of my own awareness, and I have come to feel the same thing – If I need to get out, I would feel it.  This summer, my friend moved back to Ontario, a decision that has been circulating through my head too.

The pressure of recent events in politics and the economy are making everyone uncomfortable: business folks, students, farmers and homeless alike.  The world from our Western point of view seems to be getting more and more out of control – which on the highest level reminds us that we are not ultimately in control of the outcome, but in a physical space, means that we haven’t taken enough responsibility for our safety, security and wellbeing over the past 100 or 150 years.  We’ve arrived at a point where big changes need to happen and will, whether we are ready or not.

It is clear that our society has no idea how to grow food for the amount of people living in it, in a way that can be sustained without massive fossil fuel based resources.  We don’t know how to make things within the community anymore.  People don’t know how to talk to people and live in community with others; hell, people can’t even stay married.  Not only are we manifesting the bleak destiny of complete dependence on others, but we are showing our children how to do it – something likely to explode in their faces (or ours if the prophesies are correct)

I have two minds about this: one who wants to follow someone, and one who wants to respond and lead others.  Generally it is the one who is used to following someone that comes out when I am fearful, tired or sad - the times when I want to be taken care of and not think about what I am doing.  When I am with my husband, focused on the beauty of humanity, I am ready to take responsibility – to respond to the crisis.  To act.  I can see that this is my true self.  I want community and help to make a new way of being happen.

Its not earthquakes I am worried about, necessarily.  It is the shakiness of our society and realization that money in the bank isn’t security.  You can’t buy your stuff when there is no one making it, no one selling it.  Security is a home, food, trees, water, skills.  We’re making a big decision now.  Do we continue to pay into the insanity of the rest of society, or do we listen to what seems insane inside our heads, and start taking care of business, following intuition?  Saying the question out loud makes it sound even more clear than it did in my head. Let’s get while the gettin’s good.

In August I was outside on the back patio sweeping and I came across a gigantically girthy, hairy spider. Instantly, I turned my broom over and with the end of the handle, I squished it (more like exploded it).
For an pang I felt a pang inside (guilt or fear, I’m not sure). I told my friend about this, and she said “I cant believe YOU would kill a spider, YOU of all people, who loves to work with thread, spinning and knitting”. Ouch. OUCH.

The truth is, I have been an avid spider killer for my entire life. I have had nightmares of walking through spider webs and have woken up half way through the air on my way to jumping out of bed. I had a spider crawl into my hand at night (I never sleep with my hands above my pillow now) and I heard it hit the wall as I flung it across the room. I didn’t sleep in that room for days, even after my dad took the whole place apart and vacuumed. WHAT IF HE HAD BUDDIES? I thought. Shudder.

So this friend and I went shopping for a gift for her niece and what did I find? A spider puppet. It was the most huge, hairiest tarantula I have ever seen. I put it on and felt the beginning of the connection with the spider-web-weaving archetype. I went home and searched around on the web. I checked out spiders that can kill you in BC. It turns out that there are only two dangerous spiders in BC - the black widow, and the brown recluse. And, unless you get stung and then leave it, you can’t die from their venom. (I closely examined these photos so that I would know it if I saw it)

Not long after this, around the middle of august, a spider moved into our house. In the kitchen, by the cupboard. It didn’t look anything like either of the above mentioned, so I left it. 2 days before Matt moved in (September 1st) it dropped down into the middle of the window, creating a beautiful web. I felt honoured! It lived there in the middle of the window until yesterday when Matt brought the blinds up and sent it flying up onto the valance. I looked at it… thinking it might be dead. It didn’t do its special little bunching up thing it does when you blow on the web when i touched it, it just rolled into a ball and fell on the floor.

I felt devastated.  I thought about burying it in the garden… I was even a little pissed at Matt.  He knew the spider was there!  We often admire it together as it builds its web, why wasn’t he more careful!

Shocked at my feelings for the beautiful arachnid, I covered it with a container, in hopes that it was playing dead. 1/2 hour later, I came back and lifted the container.  It was still in a ball. But its web was still attached to the container… funny.  As I was detaching the web, the spider sprang (and I mean sprang) to life.  HOLY SH… Okay, it was playing dead. (I’m glad I didn’t bury it!) I got it into the container and placed the blinds cord in the container so it could climb back up, where it hid under the valance, all day yesterday.  Hopefully it will drop back down to its honourable place infront of the window.

I’m definitely not cured of my spider fear.  Even looking at the pictures above and reading about them makes my skin crawl.  Spiders are too fast, and too unpredictable, but I feel like I’ve come a long way to appreciating the spider archetype and seeing how much we are alike.

Read the Greek Myth of Athena and Arachne. Check out the mythology of Spider Woman &  Crystal links Spider Woman Legends.

“Little girls are cute and small only to adults.  To one another, they are not cute.  They are lifesize.” Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye p 125

Above the basic human needs: air, food, water, shelter and clothing are our emotional needs.  The need to be loved and accepted, to feel in control, to feel important and to feel safe.  They resonate in each of us differently, often one much stronger than all the rest.  What we forget as adults, is that children are much more afraid of being found out and are much more protective of the fear that one of these emotional needs won’t be met.

This quote reflects the essence of what it is to be a child protecting your fear that your weakness will be found.  To them it is real, even at 9 years old.  My fear as a child was that I wasn’t going to be liked - loved - accepted.  I knew I was good at things, I knew that I could make things happen in my life and succeed and I had a strong feeling that whatever was out there would be taking care of me.  But I collected evidence that I would never be accepted. Read the complete Post.

My mom was right, I only do things when and if I want to do them. This is the precipice blocking my journey to conscious evolution. Not only that, but I have denied it for my whole life - hence a precipice and not a small brick wall. For years, I blamed it on her and her timing. ‘No mom, its jut that you always want me to do what you want when you want me to do it.” Read the complete Post.