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!

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.