Today is my 61st birthday and what better way to spend it with a daughter I love in a country I’ve grown to love, Ireland. The people are so sweet; the countryside is breathtaking, and the food is delicious and even better when followed by a pint of Guinness listening to Irish music. Yesterday, we had breakfast in the castle’s conservatory (Waterford Castle Hotel,) toured the grounds on our own and left for Dublin. I’ve never stayed in an actual castle before and was shocked how it costs no more than an average hotel in the States! I’m not used to pampering myself, but I’m glad I did. 

The drive to Dublin was easy. We left our stuff in our non-castle (boo) hotel, and went to The Hairy Lemon, a local pub, for Guinness Beef stew and, what else? A Guinness. Guinness tastes completely different here. It’s smooth with chocolate and coffee tones and not as bitter as the Guinness in the States. Have I said this before? I think so. Oh well, You have to live with it! After lunch, we did what Kristina loves best (but I abhor)–shopping. The pedestrian-only streets are so quaint and busy. I’ll post videos and photos eventually, but if you want, you can watch Kristina’s daily vlogs (video blogs) on her YouTube channel HERE. She’s got four of them up already, all great!

Me: Hello, Jamie and Erik!

Erik: Hello, Mom.

Jamie: I know I was, um—it’s based on what I read, right Erik?

(Pause)

Jamie: No. Some of us are not privy to information, Erik, until it reaches our computer, so… He was discussing John Hopkins. Is that right, Erik?

Erik: Yes.

Jamie listens.

Jamie (with amazement): What? Like two years ago? A doctor talking about cancer?

Erik: All the cancer treatments are pretty much about making money. You know, all the healers—of course we’ve been saying that shit for a long time—but now finally the medical field is coming onboard. This is one small step for Spiritualkind.

Jamie and I laugh.

Erik: This is how science and spirituality are merging.

Me: Good.

Erik: I think it’s really awesome that herbs, aromatherapy, massage, acupuncture—

Jamie: He’s listing off some other things in that field as well.

Erik: Stuff that’s considered complementary kind of go under the whole spiritual healing. That is awesome, and that’s what we gotta get back to.

Me: Yes. M.D. Anderson is a big cancer hospital here and I think they have an entire department for energy medicine and complementary healing like reiki and so on.

Erik: That’s what my sister needs to do.

Me: Yeah, exactly. Anyway, here’s a question from one of the blog members. It has to do with physical pain. How do we view pain in the body? Is there a way that we can process various types of pain to lessen it or should we view it in a more positive way?

Erik: Well, the first thing you have to do—have to, need to, I’m being serious about the words—is to recognize it, acknowledge it. We’ve been trained to shove it off. As kids when we fall down, the first response is, “You’re okay. Everything’s fine.” Fuck that! Not everything is fine to a two or three year old when all the skin is scraped off their knee.

Jamie giggles.

Erik: Shit hurts!

Jamie: He’s being so funny!

Erik: So, we automatically train our children to not acknowledge the pain when it comes in. If there’s pain either we choose to ignore it or it means that something is terribly wrong. Why can’t pain be a trigger in our bodies to let us know that it’s not wrong but it needs change? We’ve gotta stop doing this yes/no, right/wrong thing. So, it helps to acknowledge it. Don’t ignore it. When there’s severe pain, go into it. Get calm. Go to where it is. Start documenting how the pain is. Let’s see if there’s a pattern, because we want to see why the body’s giving us the signal and what are we not paying attention to.

Me: Okay.

Erik: Because it’s a side effect, but we tend to want to pacify it. We have to look at why is it coming back to us again and again and again. And then this blog member’s going to find that her pattern is what—

Jamie (to Erik): Wait. Say it again.

Erik: –that her pattern is unrecognized—

Jamie (to Erik): Oh, dude, just say it really lame. Don’t get all high falooting.

Erik (laughing): You normally catch on.

Jamie: No, it’s just one of those days, Erik!

Me: Go easy on her, Erik. C’mon!

Jamie: Yeah! Just right now. Do it like I’m dumb.

Erik laughs.

Erik: What she’s going to find out is that the pattern is going to show her what she’s choosing to ignore in her life and she’ll find that it’s emotionally rooted.

Me: Ah!

Erik: It’ll be an emotional ignorance she’s doing. Most people feel like they’re completely open. They’ve done everything. They’ve done everything, but they still have the pain. Well, if they’ve done everything and they still have the pain—right there that’s bullshit. They haven’t done everything. They feel like they have. They’ve done everything that they can comprehend and that they can understand, so why not let their body be a better teacher for them and tell them to shut up, center, calm down and go into the pain. This’ll let them know what’s really going down. I agree more with medicines that kind of pacify or dull the pain, but not remove it 100%.

Me: Yeah.

Erik: If you remove the trigger of your body saying, “Hey, this is my voice; this is what I want to tell you. This is not cool,” then you’re going to fuck it up even more.

Me: Exactly. Okay. Very interesting. It all rings so true.

Erik: You know what, Mom? I kind of find it funny now that when people—just the spiritual people—it tends to be just the spiritual people—when they say they have a disease or a cancer that they’re being punished? “Oh, I have this breast cancer because I’m being punished because I couldn’t’ love myself. Okay, maybe that’s two percent that that’ll make sense—

Jamie (laughing hard): he just laid a bunch of f-bombs.

Erik: Jesus Christ even got into that f-bomb and some other words.

Erik laughs. I have the feeling he’s just pulling our leg, though.

Erik: Really? What part of the granola spiritual world is there, “you’re rewarded and now you’re punished”? People have really gotta get off that boat! Mom, what do you think we can do to help get away from it? How can we present it?

Me: Sometimes I think it’s easier for people to say they’re being punished instead of doing their homework and try to really get down there and figure out what’s going on.

Erik: So the term “punishment” is just an excuse for them? That’s so fucked up in the head!

Me: well, it’s a lot of work to try to figure things out! It takes courage and perseverance. Okay, next one. How do children who suffer from severe illness—how do they manage to endure their suffering as well as they seem to?

Jamie (giggling): Erik’s mouth is just wide open! You can tell he’s about to start laughing but he refuses to.

Erik: Really? Mom, you can answer this quicker than I can. Kids are masters. They’re fresh from the whole energetic world. Their pain is not taught to them the way adult pain is. They take it the moment. They don’t take it as a punishment; they don’t take it as, you know, “This is my life forever.” They really know how to stay in the moment.

Me: Yeah. And, no, I could not have answered that as quickly as you could! I couldn’t have answered that at all!

Erik: C’mon. You’ve seen kids and how they handle stuff! They’re like tiny little angels. They get through cancer with a smile on their face every day.

Me: Yeah, that’s true. Because they always have hope. They’ve not been taught to lose hope.

Erik: Yes. They haven’t been tainted by us, by adults, by society. Wouldn’t it be great if we could just get in our brains and just erase—

Jamie (laughing): He shows it like an eraser on the tip of a pencil and goes, “EE OO, EE OO.”

I laugh.

Erik: Yeah, just erase that one part where we were taught that this is how it should be. You know what’s fucked up is that they’re trying to do that shit—erase memories. They’ve succeeded at some of it, so they have it. It’s a laser and it fries the areas of the brain that’s associated with the trigger and the memory. Then, you can’t recall it anymore. That’s it. Gone.