Hi all:

Let me begin by saying thank you for all of the love and support you have shined my way these last several months. I wanted to synopsize my current thinking about this joint pain stuff. I have found by searching the forum that many people have joint or muscle pain after the first several months of treatment. Dr. Brizman expalins this process in her dissertation when discussion latency and compensation. To the extent that I understand it, stuff can get stuck if the body is strong enough to move it away from the gut and internal organs but is not strong enough to get it all the way out. In my case, it got stuck in my knee joints, an area where I have had problems historically. This time, though, has been different. PT, yoga and rollerskating, which used to help, just made it much worse. I spent a lot of time and money trying conventional knee therapies to have them not work. This is, Boaz says, because it is a joint injury, that happens to be in the knees. It is not an alignment problem per se, it is an inflammatory cycle that is made worse by any amount of walking, standing, biking, OUCH.

THe NYT articel that Dr. B posted today is interesting because that child's parents treated his idiopathic juvenile arthritis as a byproduct of a leaky gut caused by many many antibiotics in his first year of lfe. A dietary protocol fixed him in 6 weeks.

Today a light went on for me about this and I really get that this is a phase of treatment and balancing and it is not unrelated to my whole body condition. (For some reason, I have struggled to accept this.)

Since i cannot move much, now that I have surrendered to that SOMEWHAT< i am using the time to go inward and meditate- something which I would not have taken time for before because I was too busy exercising (which I still love deeply.)

THere seems to be a beautiful peace available in stillness which may allow me to come to terms with some of the hard issues such as why I am so hypervigilant in my whole life. I have been listening to the meditation talks of Ajan Brahm. The image today was that we are calm when we listen to our breathing because we spent so much time on our mother's breast and abdoment while nursing. I found this image to be a bit painful at first as my mother was awkward, did not bond well with us and only nursed me for three months and my poor younger sister (sick her whole life and a dear soul) not at all. This image actually caused me to tense because I could not imagine being at a place of comfort on her. I was able to flip the image, though, by remembering my beloived last child upon me. He nursed for nearly 5 years and we had many beautiful times together. He spoke his first word while in my arms aboard the mothership.

From what I understnad about arthritis (there is an excellent book about treating it with gentle movement by Darlene Cohen), you can make it better with little teeny movements. So I am working on that. There is a very fine line btw some movement and reinjury.

I have spent these months being disbelieving and feeling betrayed by my body or feeling as if I was robbed. Tonight for the first time, I was able to mvoe very gently (and for a short while) and say, wow, your body has been through a lot. By which I mean everything that got me into treatment and all that it has endured in treatment. I feel a bit more able to begin being kind to it.

As a ps, Dr. B has given me tremendous sinus releif and it was bad. She knows stuff that other healers don't. It almost seems like voodoo or magic the way she combines the herbs.So awe inspiring.

THank you all for being there and letting me share this beautiful peace and contentment that I have enjoyed today.