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.

An excerpt from a recent article on my blog:

“About four years ago I spilt up with my girlfriend and subsequently became rather ill – I was eventually hospitalised and on admission the first nurse who saw me in a hospital gown assumed I had been burnt in a house fire, so badly destroyed was the weeping, bleeding skin all over my body. I took the drugs they gave me and the skin got better quickly. The drugs eventually weakened my teeth to the point that I broke three in just a couple of weeks so I stopped taking them. Within about a week the skin was really bad again. I tried every therapy, alternative or otherwise I could find, changed my diet completely. Nothing really worked.”

In the article I didn’t want to distract from the main point by going too deeply into the nature of the illness, but I will do here. The illness was eczema, and if you have ever suffered from it or related diseases like psoriasis, you will know what a hell on Earth it can be. Firstly, it is in itself very painful and uncomfortable – you want to scratch but you know you shouldn’t… eventually you can’t help it and you do, which helps for a few minutes, but it starts bleeding, eventually maybe the wound gets infected and your immune system has to work overtime fighting the infection (even as it is already working hard to create the eczema in the first place, more of which later). Also it looks very ugly, especially if it appears on the face, as it does in many instances (and did in my case); you feel that you are a disgusting monster and it destroys self-confidence like a bulldozer knocking down a run-down old shack. People generally don’t know how much you are suffering and tend not to take it seriously; they assume it is a minor irritation and expect you to get on with your life as normal.

For me, one of the worst factors of having eczema was that it was too painful for me to be able to sleep properly, and that brings with it a whole world of trouble – you have no concentration, you are just like a zombie during the day having barely slept at night, your energy is super-low, you don’t want to see other people, you are less able to take care of yourself, and eventually you become seriously depressed.

Modern medicine, in my experience anyway, views eczema as incurable – I was told this several times by doctors both in the UK and in Spain, where I now live. They offer creams and tablets which relieve the symptoms, but you are given no hope that it could ever get better.

I won’t go too deeply into all the alternative therapies I tried in addition to allopathic medicine; some were completely ineffective, and some, like acupuncture, had been very effective in the past, but now, during the serious attack I am talking about here, even this would have only a temporary effect; within a day or so I was just as bad as ever.

My cousin had been a dietician and had recommended that I stop eating wheat and other foods containing gluten, plus also stop drinking alcohol (I didn’t drink much alcohol as it was, so actually giving up this and caffeine was easier than giving up wheat). However in my desperation to not make the eczema worse, I ended up eating mostly rice, vegetables and fish, and not really enough of any of that, so I lost a lot of weight and this added to the depletion of my overall health. I realised later that diet was an important factor in the attempt to cure the disease, and I will expand more on that in the second part of this article.

Despite all this, I had the inner conviction that eczema was not incurable, and that what I was going through was a ‘healing crisis’, rather than merely a particularly bad bout of an illness that was going to plague me until the day I died. Had I known it was going to last for over three years I might have chosen to end it all right then, as even the next five minutes looked a daunting proposition to get through at times.

I was having some strange ‘side effects’ to the illness though (and if you are not particularly interested in what we might call the psychological or spiritual aspect to this story, you can safely skip this part) – often, lying in bed unable to sleep, I would have odd ‘visions’ – images coming from who knows where, which seemed to be carrying some sort of oblique message for me. I intensified this by sometimes doing one of Stuart Wilde’s guided meditations, listening on headphones, where he would lead you in your imagination into a secret garden, and from there, once in a kind of shamanic trance state, a ‘journey’ could take place into realms unknown.

I can’t remember if it was during one of these ‘journeys’ or just spontaneously, but one time a very powerful vision arose of the Holy Grail, but in a kind of classic optical illusion where the cup is made by the profiles of two faces. This was accompanied by a vision of the beach at Cadaqués, near where I live, where my ex-girlfriend and I had shared a particularly emotional moment in our relationship. I realised the meaning of the Holy Grail – it is a state of perfect equilibrium between the opposites; the polarities which make up existence – male and female, black and white, hard and soft etc. – and out of this polarity flows a ‘third’ force, which one might call the energy of perfection or possibly the divine. This image took me by surprise because I have never been a Christian by any stretch of the imagination, other than a cultural one by virtue of being born in a nominally Christian country, the UK.

Shortly after that I saw (I think on Facebook), the Salvador Dalí design for the tarot card, the Ace of Cups, which is that same optical illusion, and whose background is the beach at Port Lligat, just around the headland from the beach at Cadaqués. I am not claiming that I had never seen this before; I almost certainly had seen it sometime, but it was not something I had ever more than glanced at, maybe in a library book about Dalí years before. What was new was the understanding of the meaning of the card and how it related to me personally: the clear message was that my life was seriously out of balance and that in order to be healed I needed to connect with the part of myself which was already healed, already in equilibrium. This also awakened in me an interest in the Tarot; I had been occasionally using the I-Ching but had never really looked into the ancient Western magickal tradition, of which the Tarot forms a part. I’m sure Dalí intended to make the correlation between the Holy Grail and the Ace of Cups as he was what might be referred to as a ‘Cosmic Christian’ late in his life when these cards were designed.

So, despite my utter desolation at being in pain nearly all of the time and unable to sleep, I carried within me a kind of conviction that all this was happening for a reason and that I would eventually come out of it, although I have to say I knew that there was a chance of the doctors being right about me having to live with it in some form for the rest of my life.

However, after this initial series of visions, and the insight that I needed to look into the issue of the Shadow as it is described by Jungian psychology, things went very dark. You might be asking why I was not receiving enough medical assistance to alleviate my suffering – unfortunately in Spain the healthcare system is mired in both bureaucracy and austerity, and as a foreigner, unless it was classed as an emergency I was unable to receive the free State healthcare at that time. I was not working much due to the lack of sleep so private health insurance was also out of the question. I kept the worst of my suffering hidden from my parents (who would otherwise have helped me) as I didn’t want them to worry unduly, and I always felt that a cure was just around the corner.

The cure remained elusive though and things worsened to the point where my acupuncturist (who is also a qualified doctor at a nearby hospital), on seeing my bleeding skin and the worsening eczema which covered almost my whole body, insisted that I come in to the hospital emergency department the next day, and this is where I encountered the nurse who assumed I had been burnt in a fire. I felt too low in energy to explain that actually it was an inner fire which had burnt me rather than an outer one…

At the hospital they gave me the steroid Prednisone in pill form, and I have to say this worked a treat – I had several months completely eczema free and was starting to enjoy life again, until the moment that I was eating some cereal for breakfast and one of my teeth just broke in half. I had heard that steroids could cause osteoporosis or other nasty side effects, but I had seemingly avoided these. I realised the full extent of the damage when I broke two more teeth within the next two or three weeks, and resolved to stop taking the steroids again. I had known that steroids could be harmful from personal experience as I had seen how the steroid creams I had been given when I only had small patches of eczema would thin the skin quite dramatically.

So… back to the eczema, back to the pain and back to the sleepless nights… for months… I can hardly remember much of what happened back then as I was really only surviving, not actually living. Everything felt wrong, I was angry, frustrated, depressed, massively tired, in constant pain which ranged from uncomfortable to agonizing, and totally desperate. I could not see any way out. I had no idea I could feel as bad as this, and I had been an eczema sufferer for years, on and off, had had my heart broken several times, struggled with depression and low self-esteem… but this really took the cake. I felt like the epitome of a victim.

Another extract from my blog:

“One night, unable to sleep for the pain, I was reading Caroline Myss’ book ‘Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can’. She said something like ‘surrender completely and stop trying to fix things’ (this is what I understood her to have said, although you might not find that exact phrase in the book). Having tried everything and nothing had worked, I just gave up. This was the equivalent of the alcoholic hitting ‘rock bottom’, I think. I completely gave up, not in a defeatist or nihilistic way, not in a way that has any kind of identity attached to it, not in a way which hopes that if I give up things will be better in the future… I gave up the idea of ‘me’ as someone who could do something about this, I gave up the idea of a future where I might get better, I gave up any belief or faith I might have had in anything. It was a big relief, actually.”

The thing I really took away from that book, which is related to the notion of a complete surrender, is the idea of giving up one’s ‘victim mentality’, one’s identity as ‘someone who suffers’, who complains to friends about it, eliciting sympathy, and ultimately garnering a feeling of being ‘special’ – this is a ‘consolation prize’ for being unwell, and it may be that it keeps people stuck in their illness, as this victimhood as ‘the one who is ill’ becomes who they are, and they are unable to imagine who they would be without it. It is almost like the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ of people who start to sympathise with their kidnappers, or the institutionalisation which takes place when one has been incarcerated in a prison or psychiatric hospital for a long period of time.

Here is an extract from an email I wrote (but don’t believe I ever sent) to a friend who is a fellow eczema sufferer… possibly I believed it was a bit presumptuous to be sending her my philosophical rants while she was suffering so much physically; however if you have got this far in the article I assume you know where I am coming from by now:

“Just wanted to share with you some thoughts I’ve had about eczema and why it seems such an ‘insoluble’ problem; that is a problem with no solution.

Before going to sleep the other night I was reading the excellent book ‘Owning Your Own Shadow’ by Robert A. Johnson, and he mentions that spiritual breakthroughs always come when there are two opposites opposing each other with great force – when no further movement is possible, a paradox is created and the solution comes out of that.

Then later that night I woke up because I was itching with the eczema and I knew I wouldn’t get back to sleep so I listened to some Eckhart Tolle on my mp3 player. He was saying that in extreme suffering, often the gateway to the divine opens, and that this is the meaning of the Christian symbol of Christ on the cross – it is simultaneously a symbol of suffering but also of transcendence, and this was exactly what Johnson is saying in the book as well.

All of this made me realise that in a way there is no solution to severe eczema because it is a ‘spiritual’ dis-ease – it is meant to bring you to a point of complete despair where your mind has no more solutions and basically surrenders to what is. So I was trying to surrender but I realised that I was still imagining an ‘I’ who has to surrender and it wasn’t working. So then I just gave up pretending that I knew anything about anything, admitted I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to surrender, didn’t know who I was etc etc. And in this way I really surrendered and there was a breakthrough – and I realised that the eczema had been leading me to this point of surrender all along.

There is the desire to be cured of the eczema, and there is the fact that one has it, and these are two opposites fighting each other. This produces great despair, but in fact rather than being a negative thing, this is actually the only thing which allows one to transcend the mind and its solutions (‘if I try this, maybe I’ll be cured…’). Also this is a paradox because I believe that the only way to be cured is to surrender totally to the fact that one wants to be cured but cannot be.

The next day I felt like a weight had been lifted from me, there was no more despair at a deep level, I felt like I had understood that life is always pushing us into these ‘no exit’ situations and this is the only thing which allows true breakthroughs to happen. Also we can see this in the situation in the world today; we are being pushed as a species towards a crisis point of utter despair, and from there the new solutions will arise.

The Zen masters understood this when they set ‘koans’ for students: questions with no answer, like the famous ‘what is the sound of one hand clapping?’ – they knew the students would be pushed into a breakthrough by the tension created by this unsolvable problem.

So I guess that in a way, eczema is a koan…”.

So if eczema is a koan, it is a brutal one, and possibly one which comes to pass when the individual has been out of balance for a long time. It is said that we can choose the ‘path of Wisdom or the path of Woe’ – eczema is definitely the path of Woe, but the point is, they both lead to the same place – where we only know that we actually don’t know, and our precious self-importance has been dampened or even extinguished.

Click here for part two.