My Journey from Illness to Health and How I Got There

A lot can happen in a year. With the good can come the bad, with the bad also come blessings. About year ago today, I was extremely unwell. I couldn’t get out of bed due to bouts of chronic fatigue and low blood pressure that made me so lightheaded I’d almost topple over every time I tried to stand up. My weight plummeted to a bony 47 kilos. My hair was lifeless, my skin sallow.

It came as a shock to everyone who knew me – I was one of the most healthy people they knew. My diet was spectacularly healthy, to the point of obsession. I walked regularly, I thought positively, I was all about self-growth. So how could someone so healthy become so sick? For those who don’t understand the vegan way of life, for them, it naturally came down to my diet. I could instinctively hear people’s thoughts (or sometimes they’d say it): “being vegan has made you sick”. If I were on the outside looking in at my skeletal frame, I would have put my money on an eating disorder. Something obviously was wrong.

But as any healthy vegan will tell you, it’s just not possible to get sick from some of the most nutritious food on earth. I had to dig deeper, much deeper, to find the root of the illness that had stopped me in my tracks. I stopped blogging, I couldn’t work. My diligence and constant drive for creating new projects had to cease. My body was shouting at me, “no  more, I’m going to make you stop and take check of your life, examine what it is you’ve not dealt with”.

My wise and straight-shooting Reiki Master, Patti Penn, asked a simple question that lead me to the life-changing tool that brought me back, some months later, to better health than ever. She asked me, in no uncertain terms, “What’s eating away at you Shannon? What haven’t you dealt with?”. Having studied through all the Reiki levels to Master, I was stunned to think there could be anything left that I hadn’t sent healing energy to… old stuff that I had sub-consciously swept under the carpet, believing it would be much safer kept there. But what I did know, without a doubt, was that I couldn’t heal others, unless I first healed myself.

“Go tap on it,” Patti advised. And so I did. Then, as if the universe was listening, I received an email just a few days later from someone who had experienced transformation using Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), or tapping. There was going to be a free, 10-day, online event focused purely on EFT, with practical workshops you could “tap along to”. For the next 10 days, I tapped until I was bruised, and what I uncovered was miraculous (I later heard that 100,000 people had tapped along too).

While I was already familiar with EFT thanks to Patti, who had guided me through routines many times before, I’d not used the technique to dig deep enough – into the caverns that housed all the emotional stuff that had impacted me throughout my life. As I tapped away, my sub-conscious mind took over, telling me in no uncertain terms what was eating me, the stuff that had contributed to years of feeling self-conscious and unsure. While it wasn’t major stuff, perhaps in many people’s eyes, it was related to events that had impacted me deeply enough to cause emotional scarring. I purged so many negative emotions and false beliefs about myself during those 10 days, and for some time after, that a whole new world opened up to me. I felt light, I was gradually regaining my health, my thoughts had even changed, my mind was quieter. A year on from my first fainting episode, I’m healthier than I could have ever imagined.

I was stunned to think there could be anything left that I hadn’t sent healing energy to… old stuff that I had sub-consciously swept under the carpet, believing it would be much safer kept there. But what I did know, without a doubt, was that I couldn’t heal others, unless I first healed myself.

So many people, from Deepak Chopra to Jack Canfield (see video below), recommend this life-changing technique not only because it works, but also because of its simplicity. It’s a modern form of acupuncture, if you will, that stimulates the meridian points to help you release old, limiting patterns that manifest in dis-ease and other negative experiences. As one website states: EFT is a powerful method based on the discovery that emotional trauma contributes greatly to disease. Scientific studies have shown that EFT is able to rapidly reduce the emotional impact of memories and incidents that trigger emotional distress. Once the distress is reduced or removed, the body can often rebalance itself, and accelerate healing.

While I have been wanting to write this blog post for a while, in the hope my experience might inspire others enough to find their own healing path, it hasn’t felt quite right, until now. Yesterday I received an email telling me the Tapping World Summit 2011 is due to start on February 21. If you have even half an hour available each day during the 10 day free online workshop, you may just open your world to incredible healing, and a life free of dis-ease and issues caused from past events or long-held negative beliefs.

Click here to hear Dr Bruce Lipton, author of many books, including bestseller Biology of Belief, explain the workings and life-changing benefits that can be achieved through this simple, yet powerful technique.

You can also sign up for a free tapping workbook here, or check out the film The Tapping Solution, which was put together by Nick, Alex and Jessica Ortner, the same people behind the Tapping World Summit.

Besides the Summit, and if you’re lucky enough to live in or near Los Angeles, I highly recommend my Reiki Master Patti Penn, who has recently opened a healing centre, Pause in Joy, where she teaches Reiki and EFT.