Eczema As Koan Update

I thought I would add a brief update related to my previous posts about becoming healed from severe eczema. These passages are adapted from replies to people on the Eczema/Topical Steroid Withdrawal group on Facebook. Given the ephemeral nature of Facebook I wanted to save them somewhere in case they might be useful to anyone in the future.

[In reply to someone experiencing a severe eczema/TSW flareup]. I think there are 3 things here: one is pure TSW which as you say, probably did play a part in my experience, however I had had eczema pretty much my whole life up to then, and while it did get worse when I stopped the steroids, I had had very bad flareups previously in life without having taken any TS drugs at all. For those with ‘pure’ TSW my blog posts will not be useful as it’s just a matter of waiting for the side effects to stop.

The second thing is if someone can cure it with diet only then that is much easier than having to go through hell like I did. As you can see, diet did play a part in my healing but I still think it was relatively minor compared to the emotional/spiritual healing I went through with the Holotropic Breathwork. However I think there will be cases where diet only will fix it, even though it might take a while and some fairly radical changes in what is ingested.

Thirdly is the surrender, the giving up of control. I think paradoxically it may need a concentrated effort to understand what is going on and a total determination to be free of the condition before one is able to surrender totally. Doctors will tell you that eczema is incurable – I am pretty sure that in most cases this is frankly bullshit. They just mean that with the resources and time they have they are unable to do anything about it.

But there is also a responsibility on our side. One very important book for me was Caroline Myss’ ‘Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can’. This challenges the reader to face the reasons why they might ‘need’ to be ill – usually to get ‘sympathy’, to be a ‘special case’, to not have to take responsibility etc. She says that if there is a psychological need to be ill then the person will not heal because at some level they don’t want to. The desire to heal has to be greater than the desire for whatever ‘benefits’ the illness apparently provides. To face this is extremely difficult and unpleasant and I suspect many people reject this whole idea because subconsciously they don’t want to be ‘exposed’.

Not saying of course that everyone who is ill needs to be ill on some level, but it’s worth recognising the possibility that this is what is going on. Surrender often comes once these things are faced, but they can be very buried and require a great deal of ‘digging’ into oneself to find them. But if someone is determined to heal, and convinced they can, they will get there. Never believe it is hopeless, even though eczema is the greatest way to feel 100% hopeless that I know of.

Ultimately the way we relate to the world, our cultural conditioning, is not congruent with nature itself, with our own inner nature (which is the same as Nature as a whole of course), and so these autoimmune diseases appear in order to show us that something is wrong. The identification with this whole conditioning can be questioned and ultimately, discarded. There is probably nothing harder to do in this world and also nothing more worthwhile than this, so if any of this applies to anyone here, keep going! It may seem like the suffering is endless but I am convinced I am not a special case and that anyone who is in a similar situation can heal as I did.

I have been eczema-free for about three years now and only get very slight patches if I am both very stressed and have been eating very unhealthily. I am grateful for this because it reminds me to get ‘back on track’ and start looking after myself again.

May all beings be happy and healed! 🙂

[In reply to someone caring for another person with eczema] Yes I had some very strange experiences, what apparently seemed to be past lives, or shamanic initiations, however I don’t really ‘believe’ or ‘disbelieve’ any of it, and in fact one doesn’t need to. It’s just ‘stuff’ which comes up during a healing crisis and if something needs to make itself known then it will do.

It does certainly appear that a person is born with a kind of ‘blueprint’ (could also be called ‘karma’) however my ultimate ‘peak’ experience was one of transcending the personal entirely and realising that the notion of there being any separate ‘person’ here is, maybe not an ‘illusion’ entirely, but certainly a completely relative phenomenon. Ultimately there is only ONE or rather NOT-TWO and we can in fact let go of all this apparent ‘karma’ upon realising there is no entirely separate person, or maybe we could say ‘no peg to hang it all on’.

All that may be irrelevant to someone healing or caring for someone else who is healing but in my case I saw that it was in fact the reason I got ill in the first place – to show me that the way I was living and relating to experience was ‘wrong’, or maybe better to say ‘optional’. 😉

Photo by Anthony DeRosa from Pexels