Intro - The Motivation

Well hello,

Welcome to this blog. I hope it helps you. I hope it helps me. If you are coming here, you probably need help. Or think you need help. I think I need help. I am trying to get over that.

It's really hard to know where to begin.

I believe I have SIBO, which stands for Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth. I am quite sure that I do, even though I have never been diagnosed. I have seen 5 medical doctors over the past 2 years trying to get someone to test me for this thing. I am also seeing a homoeopath and a chiropractor. I know they can't do the test, but they have been helpful in other ways which I will describe at some point.

Right now, the main issue is that I have finally been able to get a requisition for the hydrogen/methane breath test, but I am looking at about a 9 month wait time. Apparently here in Ontario, we have ONE place that does the test 2 days a week, and that's it. So you wait. So I wait.

Yes, I have been trying to get this test for 2 years, and now I am looking at waiting maybe up to another year to even get the test. There are no other ways to get the antibiotics that clear this overgrowth. Is this a cruel joke? I even know the names of the two antibiotics that I need, can't someone just give them to me, please???

At first upon finding out that this was my time frame, I freaked out. What else can I do? Who else can I see? Where else can I go? What else can I take? Now, I have already tried a ridiculous amount of herbs. I don't like them. It feels like they just mess up the good bacteria that I do have, and they pretty much always leave me in a worse condition. I do like taking some Olive Leaf, because it seems to be very gentle and more about immune support than killing bugs, so I still dabble in that. But as far as the heavy duty nuke type herbs like oil of oregano and wormwood, I would rather stay away. If anything I feel they have made this worse.

So what are my options here? I am not going to lie, I have considered suicide multiple times, at least 30, over the past two months alone. The stress of this condition is seemingly unavoidable when I have to eat 3 meals a day. I never know when an attack might be lurking around the corner. I have developed a leaky gut and am sensitive to over 150 foods. I teach a few fitness classes as a part time money maker, and I feel self conscious and disgusting if my belly feel gross and poopy. But I know suicide is selfish; my mom, my fiancé, my brothers; I know I would probably be damaging the psyches of several people. I do not want to be responsible for psychologically damaging people that I love.

The homoeopathic remedy that I have been taking for the past 1.5 months has taught me a few things. I may describe them in more detail at one point, but the most relevant bit right now is that there is a connection to my emotions and the state of my health. For example, this whole SIBO thing started when I broke up with my ex. I did it very badly. I did it because I had fallen in love with a friend, who is now my fiance. I will not get into all the gory details, but the end result was a me creating a huge hurt for him, and for me a guilt that has literally eaten holes in my gut. I feel the guilt in THE EXACT same place that I get my SIBO symptoms. I got SIBO when I was feeling completely overrun with guilt, a guilt that to this day is still not completely gone.

Not only do I feel guilt in this area of my body (the solar plexus, third chakra) but I feel stress, anxiety and anger all in the same place.

My chiropractor has been talking to me for about a year about the mind body connection, and the affects of stress on the body. This is not a foreign concept to me, nor do I reject the idea. It's just not something I really figured applied to my condition. Then I started to realize that it does. Like, really does. Like, maybe completely totally IS the source of the problem?

Wayne Dyer -  Louise Hay - Deepak Chopra - Bruce Lipton -  Lissa Rankin. I have been reading, watching listening, whenever I can. Starting to see something here; maybe I can actually CURE myself by changing the way I see, think and feel?

A few times at the chiropractor's I tried something called MindFit (See Self-Mastery.com or ZenFrames). Basically it is an audiovisual program; you wear glasses that emit lights in certain rhythms while listening to audio of voices and music. All together, it puts you into alpha and theta brain states, which is where you can retrain your subconscious mind to let go of stress, overcome addictions, make more money, overcome IBS, etc etc. There are dozens of programs to chose from. So, I bought the unit.  For $450 I have this thing at home to try to retrain my brain, because clearly, it is being a real pain in my butt!

What I have learned is that your conscious mind constitutes about 5% or your daily functioning, whereas 95% is run from your subconscious. The subconscious is like a tape machine on constant play back, replaying its programming  that you have been acquiring since you were a fetus. Actually, until the age of about 6, you aren't even using your little conscious mind yet; you are purely on input mode and being programmed. As someone who's parents got divorced as a young child, and not particularly nicely, I can already see why this is a problem for me.

Anyhow, I am at a total standstill with my doctors. I have exhausted trying herbs and fasts and cleanses. I have tried the GAPS diet, the SCD diet, the candida diet, the damn fruit diet (which is a huge reason I developed SIBO in the first place.) I have tried pretending I don't have SIBO and just eating normal food. No, none of these things have worked. I have not tried illegally obtaining the antibiotics from the black market, though I did look into that again today. And no, I suppose I will not commit suicide. (As my uncle recently told me, I SHOULD feel grateful for what I have, my life isn't near as bad as many on this planet, and that is completely true.)

So. I wait, I guess. Not my strong suit. Therefore, as I wait for these tests, I have decided to try this ONE MORE experiment. I will see if through the power of my mind I can reverse this nightmare of a condition. This is more than just positive thinking, writing affirmations and saying I love you in the mirror. I need a full rewire. I need to retrain my subconscious mind. I need to "rewrite the story".

There are thousands of documented cases of spontaneous remission. There are people who can walk across hot coals without being burned. There are religious zealots who can drink strychnine without any ill effect, all because they BELIEVE they will be healthy. Belief. Not kind of believe, not a little bit of belief, full on 100% no doubt in the mind knowing that it is the truth.

Well. I have had some great success in the past with stretches of meditation. I feel I have had a lot of stress from the divorce of my parents and from everything that resulted from that, and meditation has helped me to at least be able to convince most people that I am not crazy. Maybe even the struggle plus the work to overcome it has led me to some decent amount of spiritual evolution. AND, amazingly, as Bruce Lipton writes about in his book The Honeymoon Effect, I DID experience PERFECT health, I mean the best of my whole life, while me and my fiancé were in the absolute throws of falling in love.  I could eat and poop with the best of them without a glitch. That was, until the paralyzing guilt kicked in and brought hell's wrath into my small intestine.

In conclusion, I have decided to give it my all to rewrite my story, to reprogram my mind, and to allow my body to heal itself from what I believe to be SIBO. I will be using my MindFit. I will be doing my meditations on my Chakra's, on forgiveness, on love. I will be doing Pranayama, Yogic breathing exercises to increase my life force. I will be changing the way I talk about my condition, the way I talk about myself, the way I talk about my life, the way I talk about others, the way I talk to other. I will change what I expect from myself, what I expect from life, and what I expect from others. These are the measures I will be employing to bring about this healing in my body.

Measures I am avoiding are supplements, fasts, cleanses, weird dietary choices, and being overly concerned with non-perfect digestion and elimination. I am already struggling with all of the above. I bought lactoferrin for $60 dollars on Monday. It made me sick in the gut, constipation of course. So I took it back and decided to try one last persons protocol for SIBO. That made me have an attack. Then today I am doing a coconut oil detox, where I drink coconut oil all day as an attempt to balance my sad gut flora. It can't be that bad, I already eat coconut oil everyday, and everyone knows it's full of the same things that are in mothers milk, of which I had none as an infant. I have tried this before, and it strengthened my digestion. I have done liver flushes before and have also found them to be helpful, so I will do one of those next month, but seriously, I gotta stop trying too many different things all the time. I am addicted to tinkering with my body.

So the mission is;  place my body with faith into the hands of the positive energy of the world. Get rid of my negative, destructive and limiting beliefs and actions. Allow love to heal me from what seems to be completely un-healable. Is it possible? Apparently, I have to believe it is. So I do? Everyday I am working to strengthen this belief. But I know that along the way there will be successes and failures. That is what this blog will chronicle. I hope you will enjoy.

I was considering doing this experiment without blogging; the Tao advises living in obscurity. But I KNOW I will be more accountable if I publicize my efforts. And of course, if any of this helps anyone else, then at least we are making some progress. But to avoid having this be my legacy when I really am trying to do other things with my life, I will not be using my real name. Unless at one point it means making money from it or something, ha!! For now, just call me L.

With all my love,
L