I have covered my journey of healing and discovery up until this point, which took the form of a voyage into the depths of Hell and out again.

Looking back now, I can see that – after all the very difficult experiences of reliving my own birth, and releasing so much anger and resentment (I have barely scratched the surface here), plus experiencing mythic situations both hellish and heavenly – the real breakthrough came during the sixth session of Holotropic Breathwork I experienced in Barcelona.

Here is an excerpt from the account I wrote of the session afterwards:

“…then after maybe half an hour I had the image of a door and I suddenly knew that this was an invitation to go through into another state of consciousness, but I also knew that I had to leave my habitual self and my problems behind completely. I knew I could sit and think about problems forever but I now had the choice to ‘get with the program’ and leave all of that behind. There was a feeling of a very practical consciousness within giving me this choice. I also had the growing realisation that I was able to ‘see’ my soul or real self – it was so obvious, it had been there all the time and I had been ignoring it! I knew if I went through the door then I would be going into this real self and everything would change. I felt enormous fear and had to breathe into the fear for a while before I could think clearly again. I knew I had to go through this door, whatever the consequences.

Unfortunately it is impossible to describe the real self other than it is limitless and one with everything… I went through the door.

On the ‘other side’, I was just one with impersonal Love, there is no other way to describe it. I had the song title in my head; ‘Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love’ and I imagined shooting them out of my hands into the sky. This then transformed very briefly into a situation where I was god and putting the stars in the sky. I felt one with the ultimate process which is creating the world and everything, but only for a few seconds. Although I felt fear, I don’t think it was that which pulled me back, it was almost like I knew I wasn’t ready for that at a deep level and my consciousness just naturally retreated from that after giving me a glimpse.”

“I had the realisation that our soul (and there is only one soul, or rather ‘not two’) is so beautiful that if our bodies were as luminous and perfect as it is, we would be unbearably conceited and arrogant. The imperfect physical world offers a completely necessary balance to the utter perfection of our inner being. The problem is that most people only know the imperfection and are unaware of the perfection, thus life appears ugly and meaningless. This time however I was just so happy that although I felt boundless compassion for everything, I did not feel in the least sad. The imperfection and pain in the world was seen as a perfect and necessary part of our ‘journey’ which is only really a deepening of the present moment and a merging into who we really are.”

This experience really changed everything for me and I could see that the whole experience of getting ill had all been for a reason, and in fact was a great gift. It had shown me the limits of our human arrogance, the belief that we ‘know it all’ – we are so clever and complicated but in reality that is just hubris and pride; ultimately we know next to nothing but are not willing to admit it in case it damages our carefully-preserved self image.

The illness and its side effects had also shown me how the visionary or mythic dimension is so close to our everyday world, and in fact is like an operating system that we live in without even knowing it, making up as it does the building blocks of our assumptions about ‘reality’, most of which is just arbitrary and man-made, while we consider it to be immutable and constant.

Being so ill also gives one a lot of compassion for others’ suffering and ‘ugliness’ (being covered in eczema is probably as close to complete ugliness as it’s possible to feel). It also gives a great appreciation of those who stick by us when we are at our lowest ebb.

Without the experience of being so ill I would never have found a way to connect with the deepest part of the One Self and realise that we truly are all One, or maybe better to say ‘not separate’ – this is a truth that has to be experienced and I believe it is what all the religions are pointing at when they talk about their deepest truths. Our everyday world is not set up for these kinds of breakthroughs and so it seems inevitable that many must pass through the way of illness and limitation in order to reach this ‘place’. I was extremely fortunate to be able to find a therapy which allowed me to fully reach this place of healing, and my eternal gratitude goes out to those who have helped and accepted me, even as I was so apparently broken and undeserving.

Our Western industrialised culture has no explanation for eczema, even as it, and other autoimmune diseases, reach more and more epidemic proportions; we as sufferers are encouraged by non-sufferers and our fellows alike to just accept it as a fact of life, as if things just happen for no reason. This is part of the ‘old story’, as Charles Eisenstein calls it – that our Earth is just an accident in the vast expanse of uncaring, machine-like Universe. And our own consciousness is merely an epiphenomenon, an accidental by-product of our meaningless and ultimately doomed evolution. Or alternatively (the previous story which forms the root of the prevailing one), that our bodies are ‘fallen’ and ‘sinful’ and we must punish and restrict ourselves in order to be redeemed in the eyes of the Lord, who may then grant us release from this prison and into a world of pure Spirit, where nasty things like physical bodies and sex do not even exist.

People seem to accept the explanation of eczema as accidental, as having no known cause or remedy, because they are used to accepting a great many things in this way. Items on the corporate television or radio news are presented free of context, as if there is no reason that these terrible things happen – it’s just more evidence that things are random and broken and the only thing we can do is fight for survival and give away our liberty for the ever-more elusive ‘security’. It is undeniable to say that everything is impermanent and that death is the only certainty, but this is in no way the same as affirming that the Universe is dead and meaningless and that we are separate… ‘alone and afraid in a world I never made’.

What happens if we don’t accept the ‘old story’? What happens if we try to find out why we are ill; what are the real causes: biological, emotional, psychological, spiritual? Sometimes living with eczema feels like you’re sitting on a volcano – everything can be calm and then suddenly there’s an uprush of heat, of angry, destructive energy. Where is it coming from? Is it just random? Can it be released or even used in some way? Why do some people experience this and others not at all? Why could I not eat even one piece of bread without making the eczema much worse and yet someone else can eat five Big Macs and drink four litres of Coca Cola a day and not experience any obvious negative effects on their health? (Of course they probably will further down the line if they keep up that diet, but that’s another story…).

I have noticed from various online support groups for eczema and related maladies that the overriding emotion is ANGER – why me, why now, why the hell am I going through this?! And it is hell, Hell on Earth to be suffering with severe eczema; it can destroy one’s whole life if sufficiently severe. You know you are not going to die from it but at times this is scarcely a consolation, in fact everyone knowing it is not terminal often seems to make others think that you are overreacting to what is officially not a serious disease.

What I want to ask though is: what if anger itself was part of the cause of the eczema? Of course it is definitely a by-product as well, and all sufferers know that getting stressed makes it worse, but what if that was in fact the root cause in some cases? So the question would then be: how come babies can have eczema; is there any way that a baby can be angry? The answer is no of course, not in the conventional sense as applied to adults, but if we look at what anger actually is it might give us a clue as to how this could happen (and please bear with me, I know I am going out on a limb here, but I think it’s worth pursuing this line of thinking).

The work of HR Giger often contains allusions to birth trauma

Anger is essentially blocked energy – we want a thing and don’t get it, we need to achieve something but it eludes us, and anger is the build up of energy which allows us to force our way ‘over the line’ – it gives us courage; it is intrinsically linked to our power. It becomes toxic when repressed (as our ‘positive thinking’ culture so often ends up doing), but in its pure state, what is called ‘anger’ is a great force for achievement, of breaking through barriers. The work of Stanislav Grof has shown that the first great challenge of our physical existence is birth itself, and when I was reliving my birth in the Holotropic Breathwork sessions, there was a great sense of hot, angry energy, such as would be experienced when fighting one’s way out of a physically restricted situation. This energy is needed during birth it seems, at least for some people – and in reliving it, my birth was experienced as a great struggle for freedom (Grof has also shown how political propaganda often uses the metaphors of restriction and freedom, e.g. of being choked by an oppressor and the need to break free of them).

We can maybe speculate that somehow, for some reason (as apparently in my case), the birth was on some level never ‘completed’ – even though of course it was physically – the angry energy was never fully released and remained stuck within the body. This would have the effect on the eventual formation of the personality of becoming someone who is easily frustrated, who feels they are not going to get their way, who feels like everything is futile and who resents the world and people in general. It’s like we have always seen the world through the prism of the unresolved birth trauma and believe (because we have never seen it any other way), that ‘the world is like that’. As it happens those characteristics were very much mine as a child as and a teenager, and I took it to mean that I was just naturally misanthropic and a loner who people just didn’t understand. I didn’t actually have eczema until the age of ten but it is possible that it sometimes requires an external ‘trigger’ or particular situation for the eczema to start showing on the body.

So – leaving behind for a moment the speculation as to why it may have happened in the first place – after this sixth Holotropic Breathwork session I was still suffering with eczema, but over the next few months it seriously calmed down. Within about six months (and a couple more HB sessions), it was about 80% better. I was feeling massively grateful and happy that I had got this far, however that last 20% just wouldn’t seem to go away, and it was enough to still be affecting my life, especially when it appeared on my face, bringing up issues of ugliness and abandonment.

During this time I went to visit a Polish friend of mine in Andorra and she suggested I try some of the chlorella supplements she was taking to help with some skin problems she had been experiencing (not eczema) – she gave me a bag of them and I accepted, however without much hope that they would have any effect – it seemed like I had already tried pretty much every alternative remedy, supplement and vitamin out there and none had really helped. Chlorella tablets are made from dried and compressed algae, somewhat like seaweed, as I understand it.

After about a week though of taking the chlorella tablets every day (and you have to take a lot at first), I did perceive enough of an improvement to encourage me to continue. It appears that the chlorella has a positive effect on the digestion and possibly enables the release of residual toxins from the digestive system which might otherwise escape into the bloodstream and cause eczema. (This is just conjecture and I must emphasise I have absolutely no medical training or knowledge other than what I needed to actually make the eczema go away.)

So with the continued usage of the chlorella tablets the eczema diminished to about 10% of what it previously had been at its worst point, in fact for stretches of days or even weeks I would be completely free of it, and I knew I was on ‘the home straight’ – at least for the time being. I kept up with the relatively restricted diet, still completely avoiding wheat, alcohol and caffeine (a by-product of which was that I had more or less lost the small ‘pot belly’ I used to have – probably down to not eating bread and drinking beer).

I would still have the odd flare-up though, and one of the facilitators at the Holotropic Breathwork suggested I try a food intolerance test as she had been to a practitioner who offered this in a town not far from me. I decided it was worth a try and ended up being hooked up to a very strange machine which seemed to come out of a 1950s sci-fi film. I was holding a sort of handle, joined to the main machine by a wire. The operator read out a list of foods and vegetables one by one and after each one, the needle on the machine would move more or less depending on how intolerant I was to each food. It also made a satisfyingly retro-space-age whine of varying volume depending on the supposed intolerance.

I was hugely sceptical and basically considered the recommendations I was given based on the output of this device as probably a load of nonsense. However I did decide that it would be a bit of a waste of money if I didn’t at least try to put them into practice, and they did have a certain logic to them. I was supposedly intolerant to onions, peppers and peanuts, among other things; three of my favourite foods, and three staples of the healthier diet I adopted when the big eczema flare-up began. So, with some difficulty I did manage to cut these things out of my diet and to my amazement, that seemed to be the last piece in the jigsaw – the remaining stubborn patches of eczema gradually disappeared and the flare-ups became gradually gentler until they too stopped re-occurring.

So maybe about six months after cutting these things out of my diet I realised I was completely eczema-free on a day to day basis, and to my immense gratitude and amazement I have remained so. A complete recovery is more than I could have hoped for, although of course I know that if I changed my diet to a completely unhealthy one and really indulged in toxic patterns of thinking again, the eczema would come right back. Fortunately there is just no desire to do that. I can have the odd beer or glass of wine now, or eat a white bread sandwich, and it will have no effect on my skin; however I have no desire to go back to my old diet.

I find myself having a background of gratitude and a feeling of oneness which persists even while I might be feeling annoyed, excited or whatever emotion is passing through. I am less quick to judge and more compassionate, especially for those suffering from eczema and similar issues. I really want to hug every one of them and tell them to keep going, to keep searching for the reason why this disease has come into their life. I have also become much more compassionate towards myself, recognising that the mistakes for which I had berated myself so viciously in the past were understandable, given what I knew at the time, and that they can be left in the past.

Mandala drawn by me after a Holotropic Breathwork session in April 2014

I can’t wrap my experience up into a prescription and give it to people (as much as I’d like to) – but the general principles of my journey to hell and back might well be applicable to others. The feeling of abandonment, of separation from life itself, and thus from other humans seems to be at the core of the experience of eczema and other autoimmune diseases, as Charles Eisenstein points out. Unresolved birth and other trauma makes us hold on inside, both emotionally and physically, and creates the physical conditions within which eczema can develop. There may well be genetic and other factors at play to explain why we get eczema rather than another disease, and in fact some of my experience may be applicable to those suffering from other maladies. I know for example that Holotropic Breathwork has been very effective in curing people of asthma, which in many cases also seems to be related to unresolved birth trauma – obvious really when you think of it that birth, with so much potential for being choked and suffocated, could cause a severe trauma related to breathing within the organism.

So in conclusion I would like to say to people with eczema: it is not incurable. You may have to turn all your beliefs about yourself and the world inside out in order to find the remedy, you may have to totally change the diet of what you eat and what you think, you may even have to go right into the centre of Hell, that place you’ve been avoiding all your life, but believe me, if this resonates with you and you decided to go down that path, whatever it takes, it will be worth it. I truly believe that eczema, and illness in general, can indeed be a gift, and in the curing of it, we can find out who we really are. As CG Jung said: ‘The Wound is the Gift’. Please don’t take anyone else’s word for it though – rigorously follow your own path and know that freedom is possible.  If you need any help or non-medical advice, please do contact me.

Having ‘turned the corner’ as it were, (in terms of hope for the future if not in an actual improvement in my health),  although I didn’t know for sure then if it was a genuine ‘touching rock bottom’, or merely one more step on the way down, I began to search for something which might genuinely make a difference to my health. I had the deep suspicion that the cause of the eczema was not merely physical, and that as I had already completely changed my diet, was taking much more exercise than before (including playing squash, swimming (although not in the sea – way too painful!) and doing Chi Gong) and was still suffering a great deal, I felt that there must be a way of liberating the subconscious energy which I felt must be at the root of the skin condition.

I was doing a lot of research online at the time, and buying a lot of books in the hope that somewhere I would find the key information that would make all the difference. I had always been interested in the work of Stanislav Grof, the Czech psychologist who has laid out in various books the results of his research into altered states of consciousness and near death experiences. A book I particularly had found useful was one he had co-written with his wife Christina, ‘The Stormy Search For The Self’, and I remembered that in this there had been a description of a therapy they had devised together called Holotropic Breathwork. So I searched online to see if there was anywhere near me that facilitated this kind of therapy – expecting, I have to be honest, that there wouldn’t be.

What I didn’t realise is that one of the main centres for the training of Holotropic Breathwork (HB) is fairly near me, so there were a couple of centres offering it not too far away. I immediately, and with a fair amount of trepidation, knowing that this would probably not be an easy thing to go through, contacted them and, once they had satisfied themselves that I met the mental and physical health criteria necessary, arranged to go to a one-day HB workshop they were holding at the end of the month in Barcelona.

I am not going to go into the full story of what HB is, (other than to say it involves rapid breathing until one enters a kind of trance), or what happened at this workshop, but suffice it to say, it was extremely intense, and the latter part of it involved reliving my own birth, both from my own perspective as a tiny baby, but also from my mother’s perspective (even more strange, although it felt perfectly natural at the time).

Christina and Stanislav Grof, creators of Holotropic Breathwork

After this first session I felt like an enormous weight had lifted, and to my immense delight, the eczema actually improved massively. As you may know if you have ever suffered from it, the good thing about eczema is that it can heal extremely quickly – you can be a red-raw mess one day, and a couple of days later it can be well on the way to being completely better. However the opposite is also true, and even more so – you can be fine in the morning but by the evening look like a bad sunburn case and be feeling absolutely terrible.

So after this first HB workshop I went on holiday to Mallorca for a few days, and I was overjoyed that the eczema was almost completely better after a couple of days there. It was then that I more or less knew that I was going to be able to heal (at least to a great extent) from this extremely debilitating illness.

Once I came back, the eczema also came back, and with a vengeance, but having been eczema-free without drugs for the first time since the ‘healing crisis’ started, I felt much better than before, despite the state of my skin, knowing that there might be a way out of this situation.

I continued to research online and in books and started to believe there was something to the ‘leaky gut’ theory of eczema – basically, and not to put too fine a point on it, we are ‘full of crap’ and this undigested waste is leaking out through the damaged walls of our gut, into our bloodstream, and causing our immune system to react against the ‘pollution’ in our blood.

Around this time I read the excellent article on autoimmune diseases by Charles Eisenstein (this was in fact my introduction to his work, and subsequently he has gone on to be one of my favourite writers).

An excerpt:

“Humanity’s adversarial relationship to nature shows up on the inside as the War Against the Self. Autoimmunity is only one aspect of this war, which is primarily psychological. Self-hatred, self-judgement, and self-rejection are the psychological correlates of somatic autoimmunity.”

This was pretty much how I felt in a nutshell. It can also be summed up in the words of the poet A.E. Housman, quoted by the great Alan Watts: “alone and afraid in a world I never made.”

We feel alienated from life itself, from nature… indeed we do not realise that ‘human nature’ and ‘nature’ are one and the same. We have been kicked out of Eden and are now ‘skeletons fighting for power’, as Osho put it. The immune system is fighting the body itself, as if we have become our own ‘Other’. We are clinging on tightly inside, clinging on to our own shit (literally and figuratively – as we cling to past resentments and self-hatred), taking sides in a war against ourselves, a futile war (as are all wars) which we can never ever win.

This is of course all related to the concept of the self as separate, a kind of lonely robot conditioned by society to repress all true feelings in the name of ‘competitive advantage’ and ‘fitting in’ – of course only a ‘square’ can fit in, amongst the other ‘squares’; or as Josesph Campbell called them, ‘stuffed shirts’ – people who kill their true selves in order to cling on to their position in society. One represses one’s true desires and true feelings and is duly compensated by society. We are told in school, ‘sit up straight’, ‘concentrate’, ‘don’t look out of the window’, ‘behave’ – and slightly more subtle versions of this mindset often permeate the jobs we have to do as adults. Only a very narrow amount of our total energy is required for society’s purposes, and the rest of it must go… where? That is our problem. Well this was now my problem, lying on the mat and going through Hell.

Here is an excerpt from a journal entry I made after my second session of Holotropic Breathwork describing the visionary experiences I went through during the therapy:

“]The convulsions]… then gradually merged into the experience of being burnt- at first it was just a powerful feeling of my body burning but then an image formed in my mind of me lying on the ground burning and a circle of people around me watching me burning and not doing anything to help me, in fact seeming to take a demonic pleasure in seeing me suffer. Overall the energy seemed to have an infernal or satanic quality to it. Gradually I realised I had the option to become the fire itself that was burning me and I briefly experienced being a pure flame, my arms describing the movement of the fire.

I then became a shaman or sorcerer, capturing the flame and throwing it away, like Thor casting thunderbolts, but was unable to achieve any real release in this and reverted to being the victim lying on the ground burning, filled with a feeling of abandonment and resentment at the people who could help me and yet didn’t. I also had the persistent feeling that the session had stopped and everyone was just standing around where I lay on the mattress and was staring and laughing at me. Of course I knew that in fact nothing of the kind was occurring but I had to keep reminding myself that this could not be the case.

This part of the session seemed to be related to me having to choose between becoming the pure flame and taking on the qualities and powers of fire itself or holding on to the resentment I felt towards the people who were burning me. Although I realised that to become the fire was the real victory, I just could not let go of the hatred and isolation I felt within my human form and was not willing to let that go and just become the impersonal fire. It felt like that was letting them get away with it, somehow a forgiveness they did not deserve. Of course my conscious mind realised that this was an error and probably the reason why the original experience (whatever it was) did not complete fully.”

I had many experiences which could be literally be described as ‘hellish’, in this session and the subsequent two or three. Strangely the day after this particular session I met the six year old child of one of my fellow ‘breathers’ and he commented (in Catalan and merely as a comment in passing, without fear) that I was a demon and made the sign of horns on his head!

Stan Grof’s writings about Holotropic Breathwork therapy (e.g. http://www.atpweb.org/jtparchive/trps-05-73-01-015.pdf) include a kind of ‘map’ of the part of the subconscious related to biological birth which he calls the ‘Perinatal Matrices’. These are basically archetypal states in which the child being born can find themselves and which they often have to relive years later during the therapy itself before they can finally find healing. After these very fiery or hellish sessions I read his description of the Second Matrix and it certainly struck a chord with me:

“PerinatalMatrix II. (Antagonism with Mother)
This matrix is related to the first clinical stage of delivery, when the child is exposed to uterine contractions in a closed system. As far as the phenomenology of this matrix is concerned, it can be experienced on the biological level, or in the form of its psychological and spiritual counterpart, the No-Exit situation or Hell. The colors of the visions are usually dark and ominous; the subject feels encaged and trapped in a biological and/or metaphysical sense. He experiences indescribable suffering and cannot see the way out of this situation, neither in time, nor in space. The whole world is seen as an apocalyptic place, full of wars, epidemics and horrors, and human life appears as totally meaningless and absurd.”

My theory, and it is only that, is that I had a great deal of ‘firey’ energy locked in my subconscious – repressed sexuality, unresolved anger, unused power – and in the process of releasing it I had to literally travel into Hell itself (which is nothing more or less than this unacknowledged energy stored in the body/mind) and learn to liberate it and use it for the good of the Whole. During my reliving of my own birth, at times I seemed to be in a massive underground cavern with hellfire all around and an incredibly dark and evil energy permeating everything.

I speculate that it is possible to have a ‘bad birth’ which actually colours the perception of the world from the very day one is born. The reason why this happens to some people and not others may be simply biological, it may have to do with the mother’s feelings relating to the birth itself, or it may indeed be, as Grof himself suggests, that there is a karmic element to all of this; that as the soul is about to incarnate onto the Earth plane, the karmic forces gather from what might be called ‘past lives’ (although I think that is probably a simplification of what the actual process is, we can use that term for now), and gather around the incarnating soul, creating these hellish or ‘stuck’ experiences. All I know for sure is that my birth took 48 hours and was extremely difficult both for me and for my mother.

So how does the leaky gut theory fit in with all of this psychological stuff? My idea is that, as I said, due to all our repressed ‘uptight’ emotion, we are ‘hanging on to a lot of shit’ internally. This is both a metaphor and a literal reality – the squeamish can look away now – I often found that after I experienced an energy release via Holotropic Breathwork, a similar digestive letting go was not far away. Then the eczema would briefly worsen for a couple of days as all the toxins were ‘stirred up’, but subsequent to that I would feel much better both emotionally and physically.

So if the leaky gut theory is true, this chronic internal holding on would mean that there were a lot of toxins which should have been expelled by the digestion entering the bloodstream, against which the immune system was forced to fight, and this reaction is the cause of the eczema. So we see how releasing the emotions via a deep therapy like Holotropic Breathwork allows us to also release the toxins more quickly, plus with the correct diet and an abstinence from harmful and imbalancing medications the walls of the gut are eventually healed and the immune reaction subsides along with the eczema.

I assume that some people are more predisposed to hanging on to emotions in the stomach area (normally said to be the area of relationship) and thus experience diseases like eczema or IBS, whereas others might hold on in the head region and maybe experience cluster headaches or migraines, and still others might hold on in the heart area and experience cardiac problems. I am sure that there is a great confluence of different causes – genetic, dietary, hereditary, emotional, psychological and spiritual – which means that one person becomes ill in a particular way, whilst someone else has a different reaction. The important thing is to somehow make the ‘dark’ subconscious energy conscious in whatever way we can, while simultaneously striving to optimise our physical conditions and circumstances.

In my case I had just gone through a traumatic breakup with someone I had assumed to be ‘the love of my life’, so having problems in the stomach area was probably to be expected.

Stan Grof’s Drawing of a Phoenix

I had to go through another three very heavy and unpleasant HB sessions before I finally experienced some sort of breakthrough (although there were pleasant moments as well in all the sessions). Here is an excerpt from my account of the third session:

“I was identifying with Christ on the cross, bleeding, with many open wounds, and the blood running over everything. But there was no redeeming quality to the blood, it was just blood and if anything symbolised Christ’s feeling forsaken by God on the cross. After a while of this, I saw a transcendent bird made of light taking off behind the cross. I had experienced a reaction on seeing Stan Grof’s drawing of a phoenix rising from the flames and this may well have influenced this small vision.

I kept on breathing but could not break through the feeling of futility. I summoned all my determination, concentrating on the feeling of wanting to be healthy and free of eczema as hard as I could. This made me scream some more but it was like screaming into a void.”

Again the Christian symbolism, which surprised me as I have always been much more interested in Eastern religions than Christianity, but it seems on entering the subconscious in order to do this healing work, one also enters a ‘mythic’ dimension (which I had seemed to be entering spontaneously once the ‘healing crisis’ had started, as I mentioned in part one). In this dimension it becomes evident that all myths and religions represent deep truths and this is why they have persisted throughout human history. I also experienced myself as Prometheus and Icarus from the Greek myths in one session, and had many moments where I seemed to be involved with indigenous shamanism as well. All of this was a complete surprise to me and involved no effort whatsoever on my part other than that required to enter the ‘trance’ or ‘Holotropic’ state in the first place.

I include this material to make the point that I had to go deeply into my subconscious (what indigenous people might call the ‘Underworld’) to be able to release the energy which was apparently causing the eczema. When I told people (fairly cautiously, it has to be said) about this, their reactions were mixed. Some flat-out thought I was delusional, some were interested, and others were convinced that I was going to be healed of the eczema eventually. No matter what anyone thought though, I knew I had to keep going, even when the ‘No Exit’ sign loomed large over my whole life, and the light at the end of the tunnel, if there even was one, appeared to be nothing other than a train approaching at high speed.

I was intending to make this post in two parts but it has turned out that two is not enough… so stay tuned for part three!