Saving Solly’s Life- How My Cat Was Rescued By Mind
My cat very nearly died this week. This story starts with an infected anal gland, but it ends with a whole new way of seeing reality. (That’s how Einstein started his lectures btw, so bear with me, your in good company.)
I write this post as an outlet to express my overwhelming astonishment and gratitude. And also, to provide a beacon of guidance to any and all of you in my orbit who have run into a problem where the conventional approaches are no longer working. The root of your problem, whether health related, pet related, or otherwise, may be embedded in patterns of mind beneath your conscious awareness, and outside of the diagnostic capabilities of western medicine or conventional wisdom. What can release those patterns is part of a learning journey that’s calling to me, “Step into this unknown. And invite others to learn along with you.”
We brought my stocky, super affectionate orange cat Solly to a vet three months ago after observing his frequent bouts of discomfort. His movements were slow and pained. These symptoms lasted for several days and were followed by relatively normal behavior for around a week, and within two weeks the whole cycle would start over. This repeated for months.
The vet said his anal gland “looked like cheese,” and prescribed seven days of antibiotics. All of the inflammation explained why he was moving so tenderly. Despite Lauren’s mind boggling mastery of the lost art of coaxing pills into an uncooperative cat’s mouth, his symptoms soon returned after the week of treatment, only a little worse.
(Above: Solly BEFORE pattern release)
We brought him back to the vet suggesting we try something new. They gave us seven days of a different antibiotic. Again, his symptoms returned. Maybe seven days wasn’t long enough and it didn’t fully kill his infection? We were getting concerned. We would only pursue a chemical or surgical intervention in the first place if we already tried all practical lifestyle and nutritional alternatives. We were weary of the toll so many antibiotics were taking on his digestive and immune systems. Despite our concern, not seeing worthwhile alternatives, we gave him his third treatment of antibiotics, this time for 14 days.
Yesterday marked three weeks since we completed this final round of treatment. He was the worse we’d ever seen him. The cycle of flared symptoms followed by several days of relief was broken. Now it was only pain, sad eyes, and fear, with no period of respite. He used to jump onto the bed to lay on my chest and purr every morning. It had been months since he could jump, but he would still climb up to me in a struggle using only his front legs. He would wince and cry when we held him.
Confused and desperate, we hashed out our options. One thing was clear, antibiotics weren’t working, and going back for more seemed like it would cause more harm than good. Lauren read that these situations sometimes result in a last ditch treatment of removing anal glands, an expensive surgery rendering a pet who leaks poop the rest of his life. Even that hell was optimistic as by now, Solly had lost all interest in food, which is a major cause of death in cats.
I suggested we give our friend James a call. His story is too big of a topic to fully describe here, but I’ll do my best to explain why I thought he could help. James spent years in a monastery- setting of sorts, trying to engineer a mind that could feel as good as being on drugs without all the dependency and health consequences of actual drugs. He eventually buckled down, packed up his spiritual lessons and pursued a more practical life, only with the added benefit of his keenly sharpened awareness.
Dr James Rolwing
He became a chiropractor. Like many health professionals, he noticed some correspondences between his patients emotional and mental patterns and their physical symptoms. Performing spinal adjustments proved to be very temporary measures if his patients had physical, psychological or emotional contexts that pulled the spine back into old habits. Using both his grounding in anatomy, and his “monastic” understanding of connectedness, he developed an evolving model that helped patients re-pattern both their entrenched psycho-emotional and physical ways of being. He calls it pattern release energetics. My personal experience with health conditions that had seemingly no direct physical cause (painful cysts, chronically swollen lymph nodes, neck pain and more) that were only resolved in conjunction with major life changes helped me to accept the possibility of James’ model.
Video of Solly after his pattern release session with James)
I had read James book, “Activate Your Inner Physician” where he outlines the basics of pattern release work to give readers tools to take charge of their own health pattern energetics. I reached out to him to interview him (recording available here soon) and he gave me a free trial session. He asked me to write answers to his health questionnaire. It wanted to know things like my top current physical and emotional problems as well as some of the highlights from my health history. At the time, my biggest issues was that my hand, achilles heel, and my back had suddenly developed extreme stiffness, especially first thing in the morning. He, (while in Hawaii!!!), checked my energy field psychically, made some adjustments, and gave me a detailed report of all of his physiological and emotional findings. The next day and thereafter all of those pains were gone. I was impressed. But I wasn’t as emotionally invested in the healing of a few of my recently acquired inconveniences as I was in the life threatening condition Solly faced this week.
You can see the results for yourself in the videos above. Solly yesterday, barely able to use his back legs. Solly today, sprinting up stairs and jumping on the bed for the first time in months. Hallelujah! Thank you James!
If this is what it seems, what does this say about reality? It says, as James’ book puts it, “The essence of healing is shifting our attention.” He believes that even while he is in the role, of “healer”, all that he is in fact doing is channeling his client’s permission to witness their inner dynamics. This willingness to let go of or express your deeply embedded energy patterns is the true healing agent. If this works, (which it did for me, twice now) and therefore shifting our attention cascades into demonstrable changes in physical reality, then all of western reductionist newtonian science is a partial truth. This is fantastic news. It makes our personal and global crises addressable.
The crises we face, just as with my cat Solly, show us that the conventional approaches are no longer working. In fact, they may be causing more harm than good. Markets and governments (our culture’s primary problem solving tools) are failing to address existential threats to civilization and life on earth. We can’t solve ecological destruction, or the looming need for a new source of order and meaning driven by the replacement of human labor by machines, the opioid epidemic, or the cold civil war fomenting in our politics with more of the same ‘us vs them’ mentality. These crises are symptoms rooted in a world-story where meaning is attributed to things with no value. Money is more valuable than life in our culture’s story. Our culture’s story denies that we humans are a family sharing a home. But we are.
The future of civilization depends on the development of these technologies of consciousness. Let me bring it closer to home. Your future, a life full of beauty and meaning depends on understanding the power of your attention. …I won’t speak for you. My future depends on it. I sure could use your help though. I think you matter, and the small effort you and I contribute could be the difference maker.
And if I’m right, and you do matter in this epic story, what now? Let me be the first to warn you against anybody who claims to possess “the way” to mastery of your awareness. I have read several books with excellent meditation programs that all could provide a great help to get started if your interested. James’ book, Activate Your Inner Physician, is accessible and covers the importance of feeling vs thinking in a way that I think is insightful and important. Dr Dan Seigel’s “Wheel of Awareness” is a great, simple, and very western-friendly practical tool for building awareness-power. Dr Joe Dispenza’s book “You are the Placebo” recounts fascinating stories as well as cutting edge science of the interface between consciousness and physicality and offers a meditation guide as well. “The Untethered Soul” by Michael Singer helped deepen my toolbox of mindfulness exercises and brought me out of a funk a few months back. Dr Steven Greer’s meditation material on the CSETI (Center for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) site are powerful. I love Alan Watts lectures on youtube. He’s so wise and fun to listen to. The book Tantra Illuminated is an incredibly in depth marriage of academic rigor and spiritual beauty. And for the pure skeptic who needs some real numbers and data proving the effect of mind on matter, the best book I’ve found is Dr. Dean Radin’s Supernormal, which crushed all the doubt I ever had about the power of the mind. More books and teachers abound, or course.
Reading can be a useful tool, but learning intellectually til you’re blue will do little to give you a different experience of your awareness-power, and experience is the point. The common theme for all these book is gaining experiential relationship with your full awareness and getting a glimpse at the enormous potential of a well tended mind.
I’m not sure if my tendency to read so widely on this subject is a virtue or a vice, or both. So I’m hesitant to recommend so many paths and to risk propagating my tendency to venture out to find more perspectives when I get stuck or bored with one teacher’s style. While multiple skill sets are a clear benefit to this approach, and one teacher’s different explanation or experience can illuminate while another’s might just confuse; their is a fine line between learning more knowledge and developing more skills on the one hand, and using learning as an excuse to avoid the focused practice in a single discipline that really provides result. I worry that I often dig too many shallow holes instead of investing in a deep and abundant well of wisdom. And I don’t want that for you. So I suggest you pick one school of thought on meditation and really develop your ability at it before you go exploring too far afield.
I think it’s important to remind myself and to clarify to you that meditation isn’t what makes or breaks the development of your awareness. It’s living in a state of grounded, compassionate awakeness throughout each day that really matters. Meditation is just the training wheels.
While meditation is a crucially important tool, I am even more fascinated with the potential of meditating in groups, which, I hypothesize, might really amplify your collective intention. I’ve also done experiments (documented on this site) about incorporating sexual energy into meditation. The experiment showed that sexual energy had a more pronounced effect on the growth of plants than non-sexual meditation.
If you’re looking to meditate in a group setting. I am starting a meditation every week live on social media. Which is a second-best alternative to a consciously created community in your physical proximity. Ie, if you got a meditation group, stick with it, and maybe try to encourage some experiments in group intention.
My purpose here (this post, this site, this life) is to catalyze a regenerative, democratic, empathy-rich and enlightened civilization while expressing creativity, gratitude and love for life. I hypothesize that more people meditating together, more people investing their energy into their capacity for compassion, more people releasing patterns that restrict their ability to accept both what is possible, and what is needed... is and will be the catalytic agent. I write to inspire action rooted in this shared purpose.
If you share this purpose, please share this post.:) If you share this purpose, please give yourself 15 minutes a day to become acquainted with your pure awareness, divorced from your identity, and your ideas about who you are. Or just reach out and let me know how you cultivate wonder and awe. Share a story of something that defies your previous understandings. These stories that defy explanation from our current dominant worldview are important threads. If we weave enough of these threads together, we will create the sail of a new culture. With a new culture, we will raise children worthy of humanity’s potential, not just more meat for endless wars and more labor for the world-eating machine we call a growing economy.
Our stories, like Solly’s recovery, like the time a high school friend looked at the sky and made it stop raining, like the friend who had a precognitive dream, the children who remember specific and verifiable details from past live’s, or the synchronicity too poetic to be coincidence… THEY DON”T FIT the conventional narrative. Because they defy what is possible in the “old story”, if we assemble them, and amplify them, their mass will change the center of gravity of what we are allowed to believe (in public) without the risk of being called a credulous, superstitious “magical thinker.” It is these accusers who deny reality so they can feel safe, or feel smart, or feel right… Let them pout and carry on, the new gravity will eventually pull them in too.
I think we need miracles to survive the predicaments we have created in our worlds. Luckily, miracles are simply something that can’t be understood from one set of beliefs, but are understandable, and possible, from another. All we need for these “miracles” is new understanding. These understandings are built on the foundation of new stories. All we need for new stories is… I don’t know truthfully. I deeply suspect it has something to do with acknowledging that our awareness transcends physical limits. I’d be willing to bet it involves your humble contribution. And your hugely magnificent contributions too. I bet it has something to do with being in honest dialogue with Life, especially the unknown, the kind of dialogue that you can only have by believing that Life with a capital L is listening. That means putting away every idea you think you know and treading water in the infinite ocean of possibility a few moments a day. That requires vulnerability. Let’s be vulnerable. I’ll start. I desire to live in, and to help build, a local and global community that treats all beings as family, and all places as sacred. I desire a culture that brings forth our creativity, our compassion, and our reverence for nature. I desire abundance: in beauty, in friendship, in free time, in learning, in play, in meaningful work, in vibrant aliveness. I’m asking for your help. Help by awakening to your purpose, your pleasures, and your power.