It is not always easy to give up your old ties to the world and fall head first into the spiritual side of life. Not is it always right for everyone either. I was continuing with my day to day life quite happily, or so I thought, not wanting to give up the many things that I felt were important to me. A part of me knew that I wasn’t quite on the right path but I remained content to continue with healing at a healing centre and giving psychic and mediumistic readings to an audience once a week. I knew that I was so close to where I should be. The final sacrifice of leaving your old world behind, stepping out of the ‘9 to 5′ materialistic world, is such a hard thing to do. When you do, you find yourself grieving not just for your old life but for the things you thought were important, and sometimes the poeple you thought were important too.
The knock for me came when I got ill. I have had M.E,/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, for about 10yrs but have learnt to live with it. My final blow came 7yrs ago. This time my life was under threat from a little known foe. I turns out I have a very rare genetic illness called VKH, it stands for Vogt-Koyanagi-Harada syndrome. The immune system attacks all pigment in the body, the eyes, the inner ear, the lining of the brain and spinal cord, the digestive system, and so on & so on. One morning I woke up with only half of my vision. All I could see were colours, light and shapes. I was terrified. I went straight to eye casualty centre where they battled to save my sight. My retinas were detatching, quickly, which required injections of steroids into the eye itself. I had 3 injections into my left eye and 4 into the right. I had to be awake at the time too. Ick! The doctors then took me into another room where they took lots of photos and scans of the eyes. Luckily for me, a locam from Moorfields Eye Hospital in London happened to be there, it was meant to be his day off. He was a malaysian man, his name was Mr Kok. Nobody else knew what was wrong and my eyesight was getting worse by the minute. He asked me hundreds of questions about my childhood, my ancestral line, whether I ever found pigmentless hairs or not. I was so confused. It turned out that the recessive gene that causes the VKH came from my Grandfathers line. We have latin blood in the family and the Spanish ancestor we traced had shipwrecked in Scotland when the Spanish Armarda came here. How bizarre. A gene that hadnt shown up in the family since Marc O Polo times just happens to switch on in me. I couldnt believe it.
The syndrome is only usually found in the poeple who used to travel the old ‘Silk Trade Route’. Why I dont know, but thats how it turned up in me. So, im one of about 25-30 poeple in the UK with this crazy illness.
In the first year that it struck my life became a living hell. I had Meningitis 6 times over three months, this happens when the lining of the brain becomes swollen and is a part of the condition. The pain was truly unlivable. I would lose consciousness quite alot due to the pain, thankfully it means I dont remember very much about the worst attacks. The first attack was one of the worst,my bloodpressure went nuts at 255 over 160, I really thought my head would explode. I couldnt talk due to pain but luckily, as I said, I kept passing out.
Over the next 3 months I went from 8 1/2 stone to 18 stone because of the medications. I had to go on a type of chemotherapy to stop my immune system attacking my body which left me with numerous health problems and I had to start using a wheelchair. I had stretch marks appearing so fast that some of them would actually split and bleed. I was a mess. Within a year I was 80 percent bedbound. I couldnt gig with the band anymore, that part of my life had gone and it was the thing I lived for.
Eight years on and im about 70 percent housebound which is much better than I was. I still have to use a wheelchair when I am very fatigued or have to go any distance, and still have to walk with a stick for short distances. I still need strict rest periods through the day but I am coping better. It would seem that the VKH is now in remission but could easily come back. It usually attacks poeple in their twenties and poeple in their fifties, causing various inflammatory problems throughout the body in between.
My eyes are now healed and, although I have been left with some blank spots of vision, my sight is almost back to normal and all the scarring has gone. Months of sitting in hospital beds taught me alot about life. I got the crash course on what is truly important in life.
So many of my beliefs or ideas on how you should live your life were blown apart. I started to listen to what my body was telling me, and what my subconscious was trying to say. I was already spiritual but now I explored my own personal beliefs instead of trying to fit in with someone elses. I thought I was alone in my ideas until I came across the Toltec shamans of meso-america. All their ideas and beliefs fitted with mine rather than me trying to fit with them. The Mayans came after the Toltecs and some chose to continue with their religion (for want of a better term) in the form of the priests and priestesses. Thanks to them the Toltec way of being was rescued and is still practised. The only famous known followers of Toltec ways I can think of are Don Jaun Matus, the man who trained Carlos Castaneda, and Victor Sanchez who has written many books, also Florinda Donner, a female shaman and author, and Don Miguel Ruiz who has written books such as Beyond Fear: A Toltec guide to Freedom and Joy. Teotihuacan, “the place where men become gods,” is the sacred center of the Toltecs, thirty miles northeast of Mexico City. The Toltecs retained and passed down through oral tradition secret knowledge of healing and spiritual transformation which has remained intact for thousands of years. Traditionally the word Toltec defined a group of poeple who achieved a rarified level of spiritual enlightenment. They became known as The Toltecs.
Most who follow a path akin to Toltec shamanism have been through a major trauma of somekind, and in the fifth year of that trauma the person becomes aware of the Toltec way. No one quite knows why but it has been long documented and even researched. I was in the that fifth year and it was this year that I found the Toltec way. Life has some strange avenues, twists and turns, most of which are meant to be. Some we can change and some are our destiny.
Most of us sleepwalk our way through life but some of us, if we choose to ‘wake-up’, get to open our eyes and really see the world and its energies.
Akasha Shamanka 