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Years of Gerson Therapy, Prime One, and the goddess brought an end to my epileptic seizures.

 

Epileptic no more!

by Roberta Walter

November is the month I celebrate the end of thirty-one years of grand mal epileptic seizures. The last one occurred in 1989. I have been medication free for five years.

My father died suddenly when I was twelve. My father had taught me that magic is real, and the divine is within, but the traditions of my mother's family required that I be raised as a Catholic. After he died I began to reading his books as a way to fill the empty place in my life left by his passing. He'd had an intense interest in metaphysics, and had an extensive library. I began to practice meditation, and to search in earnest for what I called the Ultimate Reality. I also needed to reconcile my split from Catholicism.

I didn't start having seizures until the fall of 1968, when I was fifteen years old, shortly after my first profound spiritual experience in the form of White Light. That pivotal event happened the previous summer, at Peter, Paul and Mary Klumansky's farm on Llano Rd. in Santa Rosa. While visiting them with my cousin I sat down in the sunshine and practiced some meditation techniques I had recently learned. I felt myself accelerate to the speed of light and I experienced an overpowering feeling of oneness with all creation. I felt absolute assurance that there is a divine being we can merge with. Perhaps though, that intense experience was more than my immature nervous system could handle.

The first time I had a seizure I had stayed up all night with a group of teens creating a document in support of a strike by teachers at our school. I remember feeling some excitement about being politically active. I don't recall any illegal drugs being used that night. I lost consciousness when dawn was beginning to break and went into convulsions. I remember waking up in the ambulance without a clue who I was. When asked I could not identify myself, but did remember the name of my best friend, Marcy. No one knew what had happened to me.

A few months later, my mother went away for the weekend. I was supposed to be staying with a girlfriend. Instead, we thought it would be more fun to spend the weekend at my house in Daly City without parental supervision. My two friends and I decided to walk to the local store for cigarettes. On the way to the store I had a seizure and woke up in an ambulance again. I was taken to the local hospital. The hospital staff inferred that drugs were involved, but this was not the case. I got into lots of trouble for not being where I said I would be. My mother made an appointment pediatric neurologist. After an electroencephalogram he determined that I was epileptic, experiencing both grand mal and petite mal seizures. He told me that it was likely that I would eventually "grow out of" seizures and gave me a prescription for Phenobarbitol. I confessed to him that I smoked pot and enjoyed LSD. He wasn't too concerned about those things, but advised me not to use speed or alcohol.

My addiction to caffeine began with my new medication regime, which caused me to wake up very groggy and cranky. My mother wouldn't talk to me until I drank my coffee. I remember seeing kids at school intoxicated on barbiturates, which were called reds. I couldn't imagine taking that medication voluntarily.

The spring after my diagnosis I discovered the Goddess. I had been doing research on spirituality for my World History class. With the support of my teacher I wrote papers on Cosmic Consciousness, Zen Buddhism, Taoism, the Gilgamesh epic, and Cybele, a form of the Goddess worshipped in Anatolia. With fascination I read Myth, Religion and Mother Right by Bachofen. I started attending Monday Night Class and Sunrise Service. Steve Gaskin, a professor at San Francisco State University, had put together talks featuring an eclectic mix of Eastern Religion, magic and psychedelic culture. He eventually led a group of people to Tennessee to found a commune called The Farm. I chose to stay in San Francisco to go to college.

Because of my diagnosis, the teenage rite of passage of receiving a driver's license was denied to me. I was told I needed to be seizure free for two years before I could have a driver's license. I stopped taking the Phenobarbital after about a year because I hated the side effects. There were no more seizures in the next year. About the time I was considering looking into getting a driver's license I attended a weekend event with my sister and brother-in-law at the Unitarian Church in Marin County. It was called a live-in. There were many events scheduled: workshops, massage, lessons, etc. I ended up staying up all night with some young people I met there. Towards dawn I began to help clean up the kitchen. When the dizziness came on I didn't know what was happening, expecting to just tough it out. I fell forward on my face that time, chipping one front tooth and killing the other. I went back to the doctor afterwards and got a prescription for Dilantin, which was supposed to have fewer side effects.

After that I stopped reporting my seizures, which occurred every six to twelve months. I moved to Marin from San Francisco while continuing to attend San Francisco State University. My primary mode of transportation was hitch-hiking.

Around the time of my twenty-first birthday I was sexually assaulted while hitchhiking. I bought an old, beat up Volkswagen bus and learned to drive. I made the decision not to report the occurrence for the greater safety of providing my own transportation. At that time my seizures were rare and I had learned to identify the symptoms. High stress, sleep deprivation and toxicity seemed to bring them on. While consciously trying to avoid these triggers, I occasionally sabotaged myself by creating conditions conducive to seizures.

In my early twenties I encountered the Goddess as the Great Mother archetype in a collection of essays by Carl Jung called Four Archetypes. I also began to read about feminism. Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan and Kate Millet challenged me to start to notice the inequalities that I had previously ignored. Incidentally, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan was one of the books I inherited from my father. I was a charter subscriber to Ms. Magazine.

My twenties passed with occasional seizures that inconvenienced me but did not interfere regularly in my life. I continued to avoid alcohol and speed for the most part and enjoyed my drugs of choice. I was working as a photographer, a trade I had learned in art school that offered a living. Perhaps it was the seven years in the darkroom, maybe it was getting older, maybe it was cumulative stress. In my early thirties the seizures became more frequent and intense. I remember feeling like I was in a constant aura state, which is the warning sign of imminent seizure. The fear was tremendous. I remember one of the symptoms was hearing a series of familiar words in my mind, and being overwhelmed by trying to understand them. The threat of impending seizure affected me like a yawning abyss, waiting to swallow me up into my deepest fears. I would resist it until I was overwhelmed.

During the seizure I would become unconscious. I would thrash and convulse and my jaw would lock. If my tongue happened to be in the way it would become lacerated. Sometimes I would stop breathing long enough to turn blue. When I emerged from unconsciousness I would have a splitting headache and no memory. It would take the better part of a day to recover. Losing even an hour or two of sleep would disable me the following day. It was necessary to be very careful with my time to always insure enough sleep.

I had moved back to Marin and was commuting to work at a photo-lab in San Francisco. The seizures were happening almost every month. My husband began to look ahead to a life as the caretaker of an invalid. I began to get desperate. The last straw came when I was three months pregnant and had a miscarriage. I learned that Dilantin caused birth defects and that it was likely that the miscarriage occurred because the child was damaged by the medication. I was determined to be a mother in this life. I returned to taking Phenobarbital, which has few bad effects on fetuses.

A few months after the miscarriage I accompanied my husband on a business trip to San Diego. I utilized the trip to contact my childhood friend Yvonne Nienstadt. She had had cancer, hypoglycemia and asthma while her husband, Gar Hildenbrand, was fighting lupus! The two of them had embarked on a nutrition regimen called Gerson Therapy. Both had healed. At that time Gar was working at the Gerson Institute as executive director and Yvonne was lecturing on the therapy at a cancer hospital in Mexico. Additionally, she was six months pregnant and had auditioned and had been accepted into an opera company. I made a trip to the cancer hospital in Mexico and interviewed some of the patients there. I remember one in particular who said, "Before I came here I was undergoing radiation therapy and didn't care whether I woke up in the morning. I have been here a week and now I care." After many conversations with my friend I resolved to undertake the therapy. I was willing to do whatever was necessary to heal myself.

When I returned home I began to devise a strategy. I bought the book, A Cancer Therapy, Results of Fifty Cases by Max Gerson. I started to assemble the necessary foods and phase out foods that had salt sugar, fats or additives. It took a while to acquire a juicer and a food press. Also, I was dependent upon marijuana for self-medication. I set the goal of being drug free by July 1, and gradually cut down use until I quit entirely on July 1, 1983.

The Gerson Therapy was time intensive. I found a place in San Rafael, Fowler Brothers, where I could buy bulk organic vegetables wholesale. I changed my work schedule to work three days in San Francisco and one day in Marin. That left one day to do the shopping for my diet. Every other week I bought fifty to seventy-five pounds of carrots, a case of lettuce, a case of oranges, a case of apples and large quantities of potatoes. At the health food store I bought linseed oil, cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli and cabbage, and non-fat raw milk to make farmer cheese. I ordered three different kinds of potassium from a chemical supply house and found a friendly doctor to prescribe Lugol Solution, liquid vitamin B-12 and syringes. I bought coffee in bulk for coffee enemas and found a slaughter house in Petaluma willing to donate the livers of drop calves because the owner of the slaughterhouse had a friend who recovered from cancer on Gerson Therapy.

Every day I made fresh orange juice, green juice, then a quart of carrot-apple juice to take to work. I had a special soup and salad with farmer cheese for lunch. When I got home from work I made green juice again, then carrot-apple, then carrot-liver juice each with potassium in it. I took three to four coffee enemas a day, and ate potatoes and vegetables daily. Once each week there was a castor oil treatment, Lugol solution and vitamin B-12. I took my juicer, press and enema bag on vacations. I kept up this regimen for about four years. I ate no food with sugar, salt, oil or additives. I noticed that abnormal neurological symptoms were often present during full and new moons, so I planned my schedule with extra time for sleep during those times. My friend Yvonne stressed that healing was a continuum that included body, mind and spirit.

During this time I also pursued other avenues of healing that presented themselves. A friend's boyfriend was studying Postural Integration and needed someone to intern on. I volunteered. My brother-in-law was studying hypnotherapy with an MFCC colleague, Jerry Townsend, and was very impressed by his work. I spent two years in therapy reliving my own birth and healing from the death of my father. I came in contact with a Filipino psychic surgeon in San Francisco who held weekly groups. I attended them each week after visiting my mother, who was dying of a brain tumor.

After a few years the frequency of the seizures diminished. I had a dark night of the soul whenever I experienced symptoms. I had been following a strict regimen for so long I was devastated when the seizures presented themselves. I wondered if I would ever be healed.

I was down to about one seizure a year when I became pregnant again. My mother died when I was in my fourth month of pregnancy. That same month I experienced a whiplash injury in a car accident and moved from Novato to Guerneville. I think I had one seizure while pregnant.

Shortly after my daughter, Olivia, was born, I made contact with Dr. Reinhardt in Santa Rosa. He is a neurologist who treats epilepsy with a combination of traditional approaches and biofeedback, diet and exercise. I spoke at length with one of the nurses in his office who told me that epileptics in indigenous cultures either find a way to work through the illness and become shamans, or become outcasts. I bought Dr. Reinhardt's workbook and began to study shamanism.

My husband frequently spoke to me about the ancient Hindu practice of Pranayama, a series of breathing exercises designed to strengthen the nervous system. It made sense that I had run too much current through an immature nervous system when I was young. Though I had discontinued the behaviors that overloaded my system, the damage remained. I began the regular practices of yoga and Pranayama, specifically daily Nadi Suti exercises.

My first child was born in Community Hospital in Santa Rosa. Despite sleep deprivation there were no seizures. I had two seizures in one day when Olivia was an infant, when I was still nursing day and night. The next one was the last one, when she was about twenty-two months old and I was away for the night working for some friends in San Francisco.

In 1991, when Olivia was three years old, I attended the first WomanSpirit retreat in Weed California. It was a collaborative effort by Leslie McIntyre, Rev. Mary Murray Shelton of The Santa Rosa Church of Religious Science, and her friend Jody, who was pastor of a Religious Science church in Portland. There I was exposed again to shamanism, to the feminine form of the Divine, and to the archeological work of Marija Gimbutas. It felt like coming home. We did a number of workshops, rituals and art projects. I felt very connected to the Goddess and to the other seventy women there. One night, after drumming and dancing, a large group of us experienced what was later described as the immanent presence of the Goddess.

After the very powerful experiences at the retreat I began to learn more about the Goddess. It became very clear to me that I wanted art to be at the center of my life. I didn't know how that could happen, because I was making a living selling water treatment equipment at the time, but I knew I needed to find a way. I continued to attend the retreats yearly. After the second retreat I felt drawn to study shamanism with Leslie McIntyre. I joined a group of women who met weekly to do shamanic journeying. I was profoundly moved by the images that arose, and by the coincidental sharing of images by women who happened to be in close proximity to each other. In the spring of that year I was inspired to make little fertility figures out of Femo. After five years of being open to conceiving, I got pregnant.

I continued to take the medication for a long time after my last seizure. Then I gradually began to wean myself, fifteen milligrams less every month or two. I was still on a partial dose when my son, Aaron, was born at home when I was nearly forty one years old. When he was about one I found a nutritional supplement, Prime 1, which helps the body adapt to stress. It was developed in Russia by the famous scientist Israel Brekhman. He discovered adaptogens, which are found in plants that grow in harsh climates. With Prime 1 to counteract my main trigger, stress, I felt confident enough to finally discontinue the Phenobarbital entirely around January 1995.

Just before discovering Prime 1, I walked on fire for the first time at a WomanSpirit retreat. After that, I felt I could tackle graduate school! For a long time I had been waiting until I had enough money to be able to spend time on my art. I finally understood that I needed to get started. A number of Art Therapists had serendipitously come into my life. In the Spring of 1995 I began the process of becoming an Art Therapist.

In my training I was told that the Art Therapist works like a modern day shaman. The training included the subjects dearest to my heart: art, healing, spirituality, shamanism, anthropology, feminism, history, psychology and creativity.

The process of healing myself was long and gruelling, but I received many unexpected gifts as a result of undertaking it. I had always tended toward procrastination and lack of follow-through. The rigorous regimen of Gerson Therapy demanded organization and discipline, which have carried over. I am no longer dependent upon any drugs except coffee. I was exposed to shamanism, the Goddess and the human potential for healing.

As a result of the many changes I went through during my healing process I was able to complete graduate school and have begun a new career as an Art Therapist, which combines my love of art with healing. I am finally doing work that I love and incorporating spirituality, art and healing into my daily life.

 

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