Positive Health Online

One Tiny Step at a Time

My journey began by returning to the heart, to the heart of nature – the year was 2004.

My name is Pamela, I am married to Stephen and we have two grown-up sons, and live in Lancashire. I cared for children in a professional capacity before being medically diagnosed in 1986 with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, commonly known as ME or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. For the next 18 years I suffered from ill-health, pain and chronic fatigue, with every system of my body affected. I became pre-menopausal at 36; my immune system was the most badly affected, I had constant sore throats and flu-like aching muscles. The simplest of tasks exhausted me, and I was unable to walk very far. For a while I moved into a caravan; it was literally steps to the bathroom, kitchen, etc., – soon my depleted energy levels began to stabilize.

My Awakening

One day I awoke and heard the music of nature. I lay and felt so happy to hear it, and also for all I had.

To accept and to be grateful, I became like a blank canvas ready to begin to paint my life afresh. I started to paint with watercolours, to appreciate each tiny flower just for its simple beauty, nature teaching me about the simple things in life. To be present in each moment, letting go of the past, this is how I started to learn about cognitive or direct learning, and nature became my teacher. To let go of the memories, to be present with who I am right now.

I began to rest before I became depleted of energy, and as I lay and watched the clouds, birdsong for company, I felt such stillness and the energy of nature filling my body.

In 2004 I discovered Rainbow Tai Chi Chi Kung and Liz Gardner, who was a trainee teacher and had ME herself. I started to attend Liz’s classes where I learnt to listen to my heartbeats and felt the same feeling of tingling warmth like holding a new born baby. I had already experienced this through slowing down my mind whilst watching the clouds, nature teaching me how to meditate.

However, I was too ill initially to practise Rainbow Tai Chi standing and would sit or lay down. My energy increased and I would conserve it, resting before I became depleted, also the constant fogginess of my brain began to clear. I felt more positive and this accelerated the healing process. Positive attracts positive; as I felt better about myself more positive things started to happen to me.

I knew that I needed to go to the school in Devon to study with Choy, the founder of this unique teaching. I was putting my body under a great deal of stress because of my perception of how I should feel, and not of how I did feel. In other words, my body was speaking to me but I was not listening. I wanted to do things, but my body was saying: “NO you have been giving out for so long and not giving back to yourself. This is the only way that you WILL start to listen, now you have no choice.”

The school is dedicated to teaching self-healing, and Choy taught me how to take the power back from my illness, looking at aspects such as my own belief system, of how that was affecting how I saw myself – this ill person.

I no longer needed to be taken out in a wheelchair, for my health improved so much within a few weeks that I could manage short walks, but I still used an electric scooter because I loved being out in the countryside, feeling the energy of our beautiful planet Earth, and now conserved and respected my energy and did the best I could to aid it to heal by not over-extending, and pushing myself.

Three years on and I have moved from wheelchair to a warrior of life. I now face life head-on and go with the flow, like the tree facing the wind. If you are too rigid you will snap; I was snapping, now I flow. This is the Taoist philosophy, learning from nature, because we are just a part of nature like the wind and the trees.

I am currently training, with Choy through Rainbow Tai Chi Chi Kung at the school in Devon, to teach self-healing, and to-date have taught 70 students this heart, body, mind and spirit way of self-healing.

I got tired (pardon the pun) of waiting around for science to find a cure but found natures’ cure – chi energy. Now I have the power to walk for hours and feel just as energized at the end as at the beginning.