Page 41 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

gratitude to the medicine itself, be it natural or synthetic, changes the way we see

the world around us and inside of us. It transforms our reactions and behaviors

from careless and irresponsible to taking care and considering both harmful and

beneficent consequences.

When my friend Nora had exhausted all options to deal with unremitting hip pain

she agreed to get an MRI. As she found herself inside the machine that she had

tried so hard to avoid, the response that arose within her was a profound and

beautiful example of kinship in action:

“Mine was an hour long and most of the time I prayed—for people who have

claustrophobia having to endure tests, and all the really ill ones. I did guided

breathing. Then somewhere it became very primary to me to pray for the

machine, all the constituent parts that come from the earth, extracted and

manipulated and used for our healing. So with every sound I'd say ‘thank you’

and ‘I'm sorry.’ ‘Earth, air, water, fire, magnetism, electricity, vibration.’ Then the

dolphins were there and I thought about how they have been known to

echolocate illness and emotional pain in people the way the magnets were

resonating to my body and I wondered if the makers of this machine had studied

the dolphins. And I thanked them, too.”

When Sharon was about to receive her first doses of chemotherapy for

pancreatic cancer, she felt great concern about the toxicity of the medicines

being utilized. So she called on two friends to be with her. In the doctor’s office

just before the bag of chemotherapy was infused, it was passed around between

them, prayed over, thanked, blessed and sung to. In this way, Sharon’s fear was

largely reduced and a relationship of gratitude and kinship transmuted Sharon’s

response to it, physically, mentally and emotionally.

The standard practice of conventional western medicine, while perhaps the best

in the world for acute care, has become dangerous and is limited in its ability to

prevent or reverse the course of chronic disease. There is a great division