 So, that's when I really, really began to let myself feel that self-attack, actually embrace it and welcome up this deep anger. And initially, I felt anger at being sick. That was the first level I could get to. Just pissed off. After all these years, after all that I've done, I still feel sick. I still feel a lack of well-being. And then dropping below that to, is there anything else I'm feeling angry about? And dropping through the layers, it included anger at people in my life, anger at my husband at the time, anger at my parents. All of these I felt through, felt through, kept dropping down below that, anger at God, and then finally deep, deep anger at the self that I thought I was. And so, just perfectly in a line with what you were saying. And in that, I felt a discharging of this tension that had been in my system for so long that I just learned to live with. You know, just like this tension in the shoulders and the tension in your stomach and just an overall kind of shaky feeling. The more anger I released, the more calm it became. Because I always thought being calm and peaceful was a matter of calm down. You know, just simmer down, calm down, as opposed to welcoming up that which seems to be the epitome of lack of calm. Welcoming, chaotic, very, very stressful and peaceful feelings to the surface. And through doing that and embracing that and accepting that, those underlying thoughts and beliefs became very, very apparent. And at that point, I started to get dramatic, dramatic symptomally. I mean, I used to just cry myself to sleep. I used to be so physical and so vital and I could hike up mountains and stand at the top like Rocky and just feel on top of the world. And for years and years, I didn't have the energy to do any physical exercise of any kind and basically just get in my car, go to my office, come back, make some food, relate with a few people, go to bed really early. And if any of you have experienced chronic fatigue, you really start to have a very narrow life because there just seems to be so little energy available. So the energy started to come back and I had to own, why did I want chronic fatigue? What torqued purpose was it serving for my ego? Because at that point I really got, we are always without accepting, experiencing what we want on some level. So looking at how I wanted to withdraw, I wanted to not be available. It was my way of saying no to all the obligatory giving that I was doing in my life, all the people pleasing. And so I had this handy excuse, I can't do it, I'm just too tired. I mean you certainly understand, how could I possibly say yes, I'm exhausted. And people were very convinced by that and I got really convinced by it. But as I saw that it was all a means of punishing myself, punishing others. And just on the deepest level, like we were talking about in our expression session this morning, just the outpicturing of the guilt. That's when my heart started to open and I began to feel that, wow, there really is no external cause whatsoever. It has nothing at all to do with anything in the physical. It has only to do with my relationship with myself and my relationship with my feelings. So chronic fatigue was this beautiful gift to me to confront lifelong patterns of self-denial and self-abuse. And self-hatred and identifying with that which I am not. And I'm telling this story quickly, but just so you get the realistic sense of it, it took about six years to go through this whole internal journey until the energy began to flow back again. And even then, I was still focused on symptom relief. I thought that was the miracle. Oh my God, I got my energy back. Wow, I wanted to shout it to the rooftops. I wanted to write a book about it. I wanted to start to do seminars. You can heal anything. And the spirit showed me another layer that I think we're all really falling into now. That the healing is not the symptom relief at all. That that was a byproduct. And what was really healing was the mind misidentifying and adhering to beliefs and harboring repressed feelings that weren't the truth. That was the healing. That the body seemed to follow suit. But it really wasn't about that. So you can see that we could reframe it from just kind of symptoms to starting to take it underneath a little bit like, hmm, I'm trying to avoid something with the sickness, like she was saying, really trying to avoid the people pleasing. And I think most people can relate to that a bit like when we're in school and school starts to get so routine, so methodical, so boring, so intolerable that all of a sudden, you know, oh, I'm sick today. Looks like I get a sick day, right? Andy acted it out with that. That's the happy look of sickness. Right, right, like having a joint. Or no, thermometer. Thermometer, oh. It has almost generations in it. Thermometer or a joint. But instead of avoiding the sorrow, for me, I really did not like to go to church. So I would just kind of wake up in the morning with this ghastly feeling of having to be forced to go to church. And so I would just stay in the bed and I would just go round and round around in my mind about how I did not want to go, because I focused my full attention on not wanting to go to church. And then slowly I would work my way into a fever, a pretty good fever. And then once it really, I got worked up pretty good. And I'd write Mom in and say, come in. I don't feel really well under the covers. And she'd say, oh, well, I don't know. We have church today. And then she'd kind of say, you know my forehead. Oh, you are sick inside, right? Yes. And then, you know, it's like pretty interesting that you go to all that mental work to make yourself sick, to avoid something that I believed I had no other way of avoiding. It wasn't like offered as a choice. Well, what do you think, little David? Do you want to go to church this week? No, it wasn't offered. So when you believe you're a child, you see it's not like the children are helpless. It's just that the mind believes it's a child who's helpless and believes that there's parents out there and there's authority figures out there and it's stuck in a world and that's self-concept. So the self-concept is so firmly held in place and it's such a feeling of being suffocated or trapped that sickness seems like a pretty good option. Like, well, there's one option I can do to get out of going to church and that's to make myself sick. And of course, people do that in various professions, you know, where they just start to get a real burnout of the job or the career and then how convenient sick leave or sickness and it can even be more of a plan of like, okay, I can't really tell my boss that I'm going to quit or I can't really voluntarily do it, so I'll just make myself sick, get all the pity of everyone involved, all the poor baby, and then if I make myself real sick, that might get me out of the whole thing completely. You know, severance pay or some kind of insurance pay. You see, this whole thing is all invented and really what we're seeing is sickness is often used as an avoidance to face some kind of issue deeper down in the mind, which really would be good to put your full attention on, what is that that I'm not facing? What is that that I'm hiding? And it's this causation thing that Noel's mentioning that the basic underlying assumption underneath it is I've got problems and there are problems in the world and I'm going to have to do lots and lots of very complicated things to try to extract myself from a very, very, very tangled mess the way that it seems on the surface and when you start to say, wait a minute, no, no, no, this can't be that way, it can just be an invitation for me to go much, much deeper inside and if I'm really willing to do that authentically to go much, much deeper inside the Spirit will give me the means of support the people, the symbols, everything I need if it's such a glorious purpose and the little chart that she laid out she was delighted to say, oh, this was like your little chart, your rings it was very, very similar it's like what that is in her sense the heart speaking, giving her intuitively a map of the mind or a map of consciousness and saying, okay, you've got to get your causation straight what you seem to have or do or perceive is really the bottom of the line it's really the end point, it's not the causation at all and you see how different that is from the typical human belief that, oh, I would be much happier if I didn't have this dead if I didn't have these symptoms, if I didn't have that's what much of your life was thinking, if I just see the right specialist and I can just be lifted from this specific problem that will make my life so much more easy and yet, it just, the ego's like, okay it's fine, a temporary solution there it just shifts over here, try this one or try this one or try this one it's like a dam breaking loose and you're running along with pebbles and stones and clay to plug the dam and the water is coming through everywhere it just gets to be unmanageable you think, my life is a total mess, it's a wreck and you can always turn on the TV and do the comparison thing and say, well there are people that have their lives together but my life is a total mess the dam is breaking on all fronts and that little piecemeal approach of running up and down the dam and frantically plugging rocks and clay and to try to stop the many holes that are just popping and you plug a few and ten more pop open that's where the depression can come in that's where people get suicidal when they have holes just popping and popping and popping and they still have an ideal that there are these healthy people well adjusted people that are living happy lives like they all look at the commercials for vacations, there they are going out laying on the beach towel and vacationing and the cool breeze blowing by and all these problems, how can it be and you can see where it can get projected onto God it can get projected onto yourself the body self and it just won't go anywhere so that's part of what we've been talking about all along I can give the metaphysics but then at some point it just has to be this this switch to I am not going to play this game anymore of looking for causes in the world and believing in causes in the world and trying to handle an internal problem with all of these externals I mean, all of us sometimes it's the school of hard knocks before we start to be ready I guess to hear that we have to look inside and we really do, it's not just kind of like well that's one option in life to look inside it's like so important it's actually crucial that we do that and that's what we're here for we're here to facilitate that