Fighting Parkinson’s, and cleaning the pool

One year ago today, I posted my first blog entry. What a year it has been. Thank you for all of you who have been reading this blog and participating in the dialogue, online and offline.

Recently, I have gotten feedback from a couple of people who I am coaching with the recipe for recovery, and their chief complaint is that in the last week or so the Qigong has gotten harder to do, not easier, particularly the Medical Qigong for the Liver. They are feeling worse, not better. They are questioning whether they are on the right path.

Here is my response to them:

I firmly believe that Parkinson’s pollutes our bodies and that is why I am so focused on the liver…getting the toxins cleaned out. It is a double edged sword — first you have to break up the toxins, which causes them to release into your system, and then you flush them out, primarily with respiration, perspiration and urine, not primarily from bowels, so make certain you are drinking enough water. Quite frankly, this is one of the hardest parts because when you are succeeding in breaking down the toxins, you feel the worst of it because of how much toxicity is floating around in your system. This is where many people want to quit because they feel so poorly. This is where you have to be strong and have faith that what you are doing is correct. I know, this is contrary to everything we learn in life. Here, the better you are doing at breaking up toxins, the worse you feel, but then you get better. It is why I did not feel better for nearly the entire time I had Parkinson’s, and then when I started feeling better, 2 weeks later, I was better.

I know it is hard to believe that the better you are doing the worse you will feel for a while, but think about this: suppose a pool looks like it is filled with sparkling water, but the walls are completely covered in algae. If you scrape every wall from top to bottom, what will the sparkling water look like? Completely polluted, right? But aren’t you making progress in cleaning the pool? Don’t you need to get all the algae off of the walls to clean the pool? This is the point I am making in my paragraph above. If somebody saw the pool and did not notice the algae covering the walls, they would think it was a perfectly clean, sparkling-water pool. After you scrape the algae and before it is flushed out, the same person would look at the pool and wonder how it suddenly became so polluted. And such is the case with you. You have worked hard and were starting to feel a little better. However, this hard work released many toxins into your body, and this will make you feel “worse” or “more polluted” until you can release the toxins from your body.

As I have mentioned before, when we fight Parkinson’s, it fights us back. When we are a couple of months into the recipe for recovery and we have been feeling like we are making progress, it is a blow to our faith to suddenly feel like we are physically going backwards. Parkinson’s tests our faith. Parkinson’s tests our resolve. Parkinson’s tests us to the core of our being. And we fight back. We start at the core of our being and chip away at Parkinson’s day after day after day until we recover. We have to be strong and we cannot lose faith in ourselves.

As Dr. Sha would say, “I have the power to heal myself. You have the power to heal yourself. Together we have the power to heal the world.” Let’s be strong together and make this next blog year a powerful one for all of us.

All my best ,

Howard