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An Instant Healing Miracle – At the home of a miracle hub

In India there’s no need to set your alarm clock to wake up for what seems like ridiculously early morning meditations. The roosters will do it for you.

After spending a few weeks crammed into a dormitory with a dozen or so spiritual seekers from around the world, I began to covet the roosters’ raucous calls to awaken, not only because of anticipation of another bucolic day that awaited, but because they also heralded the sweet and distant sounds of the devotional music piped through speakers that would arrive shortly; its enchanted soundtrack entangled in the peaceful stillness of the early hour with its dew laden greenery below the muted pink, violet and pastel blue skies ready to dawn on the horizon. The vast and expansive peace of morning meditation usually followed, which would bring a bliss-filled silence that left its thick and peaceful scent throughout the day.

This morning began in stark contrast to my beloved ritual when I was hazily jarred awake by bright lights and banging cabinet doors as a dozen women scrambled to get dressed and make their way down to the meditation hall for morning Aarti and meditation. I could barely lift my head off the pillow or take a breath at all, and as I tried to figure out where I was and what was going on around me. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was aware that I was grateful to be alive.

As I focused on trying to figure out my surroundings through the painful and dizzying haze, the previous night’s events came to the forefront just as a retired nurse from New Zealand, one of the two older ladies that helped me get back to the dormitory and into bed the night before saw me stirring and came to check on me. Last night she had fought with the Spanish ladies (and lost) to keep the air conditioning on so I could get clean filtered air, threatened me to undress and get into the shower otherwise she would do it for me, and came back to find me with a Swedish woman, together dragging first my heavy backpack, and then me to the dormitories when I had collapsed in the lobby of a near building, not able to make it from the dining hall to our more distant room.

South India is not hesitant about using DDT to combat the threat of deadly mosquitos, and this is something I should have known before I arrived there, because I am incredibly chemical sensitive. Somehow I never discovered this critical information until it was too late. I always had to watch what I ate and who and what I was near because on an average day, a strong waft of someone’s perfume could knock me out with a migraine for three or more days and many handfuls of aspirins later. When we entered the dining hall the night before after arriving back to campus, the dozen or so of us attending the same program were alone in the unusually quiet and empty space. The other hundreds of people in the two or three other programs on campus were early or late in arrival from their day’s activities to get dinner.

We were mostly in stillness, murmuring instead of talking, eating a late dinner alongside my new friends from around the globe after returning from a sunset meditation. I began coughing and getting dizzy well before I saw or smelled what was going on behind me as I sat with my back to the entryway, and long before I saw the men with the foggers on their backs, spraying all around the large hall. The lights were dim and the air was heavy, and soon their smoke seeped in from the open windows and doors and hovered along the floor in streams, rising up to waist height. There was no escape but I wasn’t looking for one yet because I couldn’t imagine that this spiritual campus would use harsh chemicals and not something natural to combat the mosquito problem. My New Zealand nurse friend said was certain she recognized the smell of DDT from her childhood- trucks and adjacent fields, before it was banned.

It was time for me to go and she hurried me off quickly, but it was way too late. As I looked around the hall, the haze was all around us, and the damage was done. I could barely walk out of the hall, leaving my dinner abruptly as I tried to exit before the chemicals would get to me any further. I didn’t know how bad it already was until I stood up to exit, thinking I was going to be fine, but my knees got weak and I collapsed first on the steps of a nearby building until and stayed there motionless until I could make my way into the lobby seating area, asking with faint and jarred words if someone in there could call the doctor for me. No one did.

My friends found me when they discovered I hadn’t made it back to the dorm, and after lugging my heavy bag between them, they came back again to carry me, one arm wrapped around each of their shoulders as they guided and sometimes dragged me up to the second floor and into my bed. My last memory was my head sinking deep into the pillow and wondering if I was ever going to wake up again if I closed my eyes. If not, I remember thinking it would be a natural and peaceful death simply fading away so easily into oblivion as my body first, and then my mind began to fail. I lost consciousness quickly as the haze of chemicals set into my nervous system, even though I tried desperately to stay awake until I could be sure I would be OK. I had plenty of toxic events before from chemical VOCs, but even the worst didn’t compare in magnitude to the helplessness of my body, and surrender to my fate I felt at this moment.

Lying in bed, pained from even the light and the sounds of everyone hustling around me, I tried to awaken more, though my head was throbbing to even think, and when I tried to move my body it was so incredibly weak. I could barely move but something in me wanted to get up and join the others downstairs because uncertain still about my fragile condition, I was afraid to go back to sleep in an empty room where no one would return to for most of the rest of the day. Somehow I managed to get up, haphazardly throw on some clothes, locate my shawl and arrive painfully, slowly and very late into our dedicated morning meditation room. I took a seat in the back near the entry door in case I had to leave.

It was so hard to stand for Aarti (morning devotional blessings) even though I missed most of it, and of course impossible to do any of the yoga asanas that followed, so I mostly slumped in the hard chair and was unable to follow our morning routine, led by the monk in the front of the room. He kept glancing over at me in a manner that questioned why I wasn’t participating. As the 90-minute session went on I certainly wasn’t feeling any better and could only think about getting up enough energy to climb the stairs and return to my bed.

Soon the monk went to leave the hall after he initiated our meditation session, but I was already set to get his attention to see if he could locate the doctor for me. As he walked past my chair I motioned, and in a couple of quick sentences explained to him what happened, asked him to please stop the DDT spraying so close to people on campus, to find a doctor, and to pray for healing of my condition. I closed my eyes for a second and sunk back in my chair, trying to gain enough energy to set off to find my way back to my bed since I couldn’t focus on meditation either, because its intense focus exacerbated the pounding in my head.

“ I will pray for you,” he said, and left the room.

It was not even seconds after the door closed behind him that I began to feel a gentle tugging on my skin, all over my body. I opened my eyes to see what was going on. Every person in the room sat motionless in their chairs or on the floor, deep in a meditative trance. I looked up. Nothing. The gentle tugging intensified. The only way to describe the sensation was one of a giant and gentle vacuum cleaner softly sucking the air around me, pulling everything upwards. In my brain fog and haze I closed my eyes and focused on my body again, and it felt like millions of teeny tiny particles were being pulled out from my body upwards towards the sky. It was like nothing I had ever felt or experienced to this point, and it happened only once again, many years later.

Though my mind struggled to comprehend that what I was feeling could possibly be happening or real, and not a bizarre artifact of my toxin caused mental haze, my thoughts soon became clear, the combination of pain and numbness from my limbs was starting to disappear and my joints stopped aching. My splitting headache for which I had no aspirin and blurred vision was gone within 3 minutes as well. I could breath, fully and deeply. The gentle tugging sensation gently faded then stopped, and there I sat, incredibly, within minutes, perfectly fine. The prior night’s poisoning and subsequent events were erased from my body completely. It took about 3 minutes in total. I sat straight with no problem, entered meditation easily and finished the session with the rest of the group.

I couldn’t believe it! A healing miracle had happened silently, swiftly, in a room full of people who knew nothing of it, just seconds after I asked for prayers to help my fragile condition. The Oneness programs speak of miracles all the time, but this one was quick and direct. The monk wouldn’t (and didn’t) have time to say a formal prayer to help me. When I told him about it later, he seemed as surprised as I was about what had ensued after my simple request. The miracle not only included an instant healing, but a bizarre and unheard of mechanism to remove the toxins from my body. Medicine and biochemistry don’t have giant molecular vacuum cleaners to magically remove particles from cells in our bodies, yet that is not only what it felt like, whatever did actually happen, its effects were instantaneous.

My healing also became obvious to a number of people who I joined in the food hall for breakfast after our morning session. I was not the same person who stumbled into our meditation room late and clumsily, 90 minutes earlier, nor the one who could barely speak the night before. When the campus doctor finally appeared at lunchtime and a number of people tried to send me in his direction, I continued to tell them I was cured. They also had a hard time believing I didn’t need to see him because they saw the state I had been in prior. I told everyone about my miracle. Somehow skepticism abounded, though they could see its tangible effects.

The Simplest of Surrenders

Healing miracles are also tailored to an individual’s needs. When we surrender our minds to how we think we need to be cured, we may not receive all that is possible in our very bizarre and mostly unknown reality. I had no idea how I was going to get out of this mess in a far away country, especially when in my own country doctors had failed at helping me through these bodily challenges. My ongoing ‘cure’ on a daily basis to keep my health in a positive state was avoidance of many kinds of food triggers, as well as removal of all environmental and chemical toxins, and I often wasn’t successful. Fumes from being stuck in traffic behind trucks, or caught in an elevator with strong perfume could take me out for days. There was a recognized process that my body followed each time for recovery. It took at minimum 48 hours but mostly three days or longer to feel better and back to myself, and that was usually when I was mildly afected.

I didn’t know how I would get out of this situation, if I would survive it, and how long it would take to clear out of my body because my mind was lost in a chemical haze to have its normal operating system in place to even ask such things. This actually turned out to be the most fortunate thing that happened, because I wasn’t capable of thinking about any of it. I didn’t remember my history, didn’t have my remedies around, and couldn’t manage to think about finding them if I did, or cure myself in any way possible. I was too far gone and helpless like a young baby, and that enabled the swiftest and wisest of solutions. Not my solutions. Something else’s marvelous and impossible cure could come in seamlessly because I was not trying what I knew. My mind was not functional so I was in complete surrender.

Because I couldn’t anticipate what would happen or how I could help the healing process along, my surrender was immediate. I didn’t know anything. I simply asked for someone to pray for me because prayer was a common reply from the monks at the temple when a student was seeking resolve to a challenge in their lives.

Sometimes all we have to do is ask; to receive, all we have to do is remain open. This is the simplest and basic form of surrender. Give up a belief that was holding you back from experiencing all that the universe has to offer, and you may just find that something you never imagined before may now be able to enter your life, for your benefit.

Surrender also demonstrates that we don’t have all of the answers, all of the time. We learn. We get more than we anticipated. In surrender, we enter the state where we admit we don’t know. It’s OK that we don’t know. This isn’t school where we were taught lessons and scolded if we didn’t remember. That process set through entire generations of people who were shown that the best solution wasn’t to think it out or let things progress to see where it landed; instead they needed to deliver an instant answer or solution, ready at their disposal for whatever challenges life would hand them. We go through life applying solutions that we throw on any situation that looks similar. Maybe it’s not the right solution but it’s the one we know, and hey, it’s close enough, right? Miracles will show us that it is definitely not the only solution and we are not thinking big enough, or being in stillness to allow something far bigger than our minds provide a better solution than anything we can think up. In surrender we let our mind take a back seat to something bigger that can and usually will show up for us. Surrender leads us to a place where we don’t have all the answers and we are simply present in the moment where anything can be possible. In surrender we grow. We stop limiting ourselves to what we think we know.