It was August 1, 1978. At 8 a.m. the heat was already oppressive. As I bathed, I contemplated the day before me. In a few hours, my 20-year-old son, Ken, would drive me to the airport. There, I would begin a 23-hour flight to Manila to seek out Filipino psychic surgeons, healers who "operate" with their bare hands, leaving behind only a thin red line that soon disappears. I wondered if this journey would be a stepping stone to renewed health and life or a disappointing and perhaps dangerous trip.

Recently divorced, with six teenage children, I was in my third year of graduate school, working toward a doctorate in clinical psychology. Eleven months earlier, after a year of excruciating pain and progressive paralysis, I had undergone an operation to remove a tumor on my spinal cord at my neck. Having been a staff physician's wife, I expected Western medicine to fix me quickly and efficiently. Suddenly, my world changed. I was told that my tumor was inoperable, and that it was one of the most malignant ones of the central nervous system. The only treatment was radiation. I received the maximum therapy allowed, the pain went away, and I returned to school. But now, less than a year later, the pain was back.

At the airport, I hugged Ken good-bye and was overwhelmed by my love for him and my other five children. The thought of not being alive to take care of them was unbearable. As I changed planes in San Francisco, I stumbled and fell flat on my face. I spent the rest of my trip traveling in a wheelchair.

I had my first appointment with a psychic surgeons on my first morning in Manila. I watched several operations before it was my turn. The healers "X-rayed" patients by draping a white sheet over the body and gazing at various parts. After removing the sheet a healer would suddenly plunge his fingers into the patient's body and pull out some kind of bloody material. The skin immediately closed and was wiped with aromatic oil.

The healers all wore short-sleeved shirts, and their bare hands were constantly in view as they moved from one part of the body to another. Between patients, they would dip their hands into a basin of clear water, while the bloody material was put into another basin and taken to the bathroom.

I had butterflies in my stomach and wondered if I would faint. When it was my turn, I lay on the table and the healer asked me what was bothering me. I said, "Pain in my neck." He directed me to lie on my stomach, and I felt his hands putting pressure about two inches deep into my neck. There was a sound like gristle tearing. When I turned over, the healer held up a whitish-gray mass that looked like scar tissue with gristle. "Here is your tumor," he said.

Throughout my schooling, I had studied the hard sciences. I have a degree in medical technology and had worked in the clinical lab of a large hospital. For 18 years, I had been immersed in a medical community as the wife of a physician. I considered myself a rational, analytic thinker. Only my desperate need had brought me to this crowded room in Manila.

After a second "surgery" on the second day, my pain disappeared. I waited for the time to be up between the two Empirin tablets every four hours I had been taking for the past year. The pain did not return and has not, 19 years later.

Still in my scientific mode of thought, I asked several of the healers if I could interview them. They were cheerful men, varying in age from very young to perhaps 60 or 70 years old. When asked about their methods, each of them gave the same response: "I do nothing. God does it." After trying my questions from several different angles, I finally gave up.
Through a mutual friend, I made contact with a psychology professor at the University of Manila. She invited me to attend a special service at her church, done only once a year, to invite the angelic beings to be present and manifest during the service.

The church was very old but well-kept. My new friend told me simply to be open to anything as I prayed for protection and healing. As I prayed, I felt a peaceful energy cascade throughout my body, and tears ran down my face. At one point, I thought I saw a tall outline of a figure with outstretched arms appear on the wall of the church.

A few days later, I journeyed outside the city of visit a woman called Sister Josefina. Sister Josefina had a small chapel built next to her immaculate pigsty. The chapel was overflowing, and people stood around outside. Sister Josefina was a smiling, happy person, who seemed to take nothing seriously. She joked and laughed as she worked tirelessly on patient after patient. I watched her work on a man's spine by running her fingers down his body as if she were massaging it -- except that her fingers were about half an inch into his skin, and a watery, bloody fluid was dripping out. When she worked on me, it also felt as if she were massaging my spine. I asked her if I could be healed, and she said I would be when I learned to relax.

On another occasion, I visited a healer who had pictures of various saints on his wall. There was a photograph of a sky with dark clouds and a gigantic figure of light dressed in robes, with arms outstretched. It had the same shape as the image I had seen in the church. Instead of doing surgery, this healer simply laid his hands on various parts of my body and prayed.

When it was time to leave the Philippines, I felt both disappointment and encouragement. I had hoped to be healed of my paralysis and restored to full functioning. While this hadn't happened, all of my pain had disappeared, and I felt very hopeful that I would continue to make progress.

When I arrived home, I began to work on my dissertation. The stress I had felt before began to come back into my life, while the energy that had been so strong in Manila seemed gradually to disappear. I moved to Marin County from Fresno. It took me a year to complete my dissertation and graduate. By this time, my body was again going downhill. I had more stiffness, less mobility and little energy.

One evening, while going to a lecture at the College of Marin, I had to cross a parking lot filled with potholes and loose gravel. A friend offered me her hand for balance, but I refused. Suddenly, my foot caught and I fell, hitting my forehead and bending my neck backwards. I was unable to move. Despite 10 weeks in the hospital, I was not able to regain enough balance to walk and had to face the reality of spending the rest of my life in a wheelchair.

For the 17 years since, my life has been a continual struggle for survival, both financially and to find the attendant care necessary to stay out of a nursing home. And I have continued to explore alternative healing modalities, including shamanism.

This work continually challenges my ability to let go of my past beliefs and attitudes concerning what is "reality." I have found my ego to be very tenacious in trying to prevent new belief systems from taking root. This is a daily, almost moment-to-moment struggle, "stalking" my automatic responses to anything unknown that may offer growth and change. I feel as if all the disowned parts of myself want to choke me and prevent the expression of the real me that exists but has never been born in this lifetime. This constriction of my inner being is embodied in the paralysis of my outer being. And this constriction is fear.

Sister Josefina told me I would be healed when I learned to relax. It now seems to me that getting rid of all my fear would bring about such a change in my daily life that it could well be my body would let go of its physical manifestation of this constriction. It has taken me 17 years to begin to believe this could be possible. Western doctors have no explanation for why I am even still alive; after looking at my CAT scan in 1978 they told me I might live a few years at most.

I have had experiences that tell me there are other levels of consciousness where fear does not reside. These experiences are momentary, however, and in ordinary, day-to-day reality, the struggle for survival returns and with it, all the anxieties that bring back the tightness and armoring of my body.

Perhaps my healing is not meant to be physical, but rather of the mind and spirit. If this is so, I can say I have made progress from the closed, analytical mind that was locked in the scientific method for so many years of my adult life. The hope I have each day is simply to live the best life I can and to open my heart to give and receive love. I have found so many people who are willing to give that love to me, that I see my work now as simply trying to allow myself to receive it.