... and now, a little story about me

I'm Lisa, born and nurtured in rural south-east Queensland, Australia.

​ As a kid I was chatty, curious about everything and I played a lot of sport. I adored animals and my best friend Sia (named after Sirikit the Queen of Thailand), the Siamese cat slept on my chest from the time I was an infant until she breathed her last at 18 years of age. When my parents weren't in view I'd eat out of her food bowl like a cat while she watched, bemused. My home life was dominated by cats, silk worms, canaries and Inga the golden labrador (who'd collect the neighbourhood dogs for daily strolls, back in the 'good-ol-days').

'DON'T kiss the CAT' was one of my mum's most common reprimands. Ignoring her was one of my most common responses.​

​​​​​​​

   I was a bit of a grub. I was dux of grade one. My mum made me do classical ballet (when I desperately wanted to be a jazz ballet star). I wanted to be a lettuce farmer when I grew up. I was loud and I annoyed my mum incessantly. When I wasn't living my life outside, I felt depressed. I hated rainy winter days and loved the smell of jasmine flowers in spring the most. If I wasn't in my bare feet, hanging out in our 'bush block acreage' with my brothers, I was running amok with my next door neighbour Liz as far and wide as the sound of my mum's 'come home NOW' brass bell carried. I could hear that bloody bell from several kilometres away and I learned to master the art of rapid breath recovery after a several hundred metre sprint (from whatever petty crime we'd been interrupted from committing), to the back door and my cranky mum ringing her bell like a madman demanding to know 'Where the HELL have you been!?'.    

I discovered at a very young age I was allergic to bee stings (my dad had 25 beehives in our backyard, along with two black sheep and a shit tonne of clover), so I slept with a bottle of 'metho' (methylated spirits) next to my bed to dab on and cool my swollen, itchy feet every summer. I loved to run, EVERYWHERE, and I was super competitive both with my brothers and on the sporting field, so coming home and getting acupuncture and onion poultices on my breaks and sprains (from my dad), and Mercurochrome (from my mum), was the norm. My dad tried to curtail my hyperactivity by banning me from eating sugar or anything with red food colouring. My mum found several hundred pharmaceutical pills on the floor behind a cupboard in the back bedroom with their pink sugar coatings sucked off, 20 years after I'd sucked the pink sugar off and spat them out behind the cupboard.

​​​​​​​​   

We weren't allowed to watch TV when school was on, which as a kid was a shame I never shared with my friends, but as an adult was a badge I still wear with pride. My dad was a clever dick who forced kombucha on us all in the 70's and dry iced my warts off with no anaesthetic. He was a living dichotomy with his beliefs and rules, which saw a bizarre blend of allopathic, natural and super-natural interventions, experiments and experiences shared with and inflicted on us all.

Ionisers and Glen 20 room deodoriser.

Cod liver oil and margarine.

Homeopathics and sunscreen.

Acupuncture and antibiotics.

Kombucha and beer.

Brown rice and crisps.

A potpourri of lifestyle choices, 50% of which I required detoxification from sooner or later.

  I liked my own company and did weird shit like playing a single note on the piano (which sat in the back bedroom next to the spat-out-pills cupboard), and listening to it fade into nothingness for ten minutes. I'd do this for hours on end. I loved to hit things with things and just listen to the reverberating sounds. After reading a book about an autistic kid when I was 11, I thought my love of hitting things with things and just listening to the sound for hours meant I was autistic. I'm not autistic. I just love sound.

 I also had perfect pitch which meant dissonant harmonies (or anything 'out of tune') effected me like fingernails on a chalkboard; it still does. It also meant solo voice performances from a young age, high school choir and musicals, and developing stage fright after singing for years in front of judges. Singing in front of audiences for the love of singing, without the pressure of judgement or disqualification or ridicule or competition, sadly didn't reenter my realm until I left Australia and started singing again in front of less intimidating audiences. Singing and whistling when I'm in a good mood has always been my norm. As a nurse I'd always sing to my beloved demented oldies while I was bathing them or changing their nappies. Nowadays, with some clients I'm driven to make gentle and resonant sounds with my voice while I'm in their fields with my forks or on their bodies with my hands - pretty cool how things turn out I reckon.

​   I learnt how to do a precordial thump as a kid in the event my dad suffered a cardiac arrest while he was performing his unlicensed electrical work. I never got to thump his chest and save his life, but I day-dreamed of carrying his massive frame to his volvo and driving him to the hospital should he ever fall unconscious at my feet while I dutifully held the ladder, waiting for him to be electrocuted.

My dad taught me how to play by rules that hadn't been laid down by governmental / cultural / religious / corporate authority figures ... to think and act according to a moral compass that sat outside of the status quo of a society that didn't quite make sense to me anyway. Despite his renegade tendencies, he wasn't fully off board.   

My constant sore throats (solution: salt water gargle followed by an aspirin crushed up in honey), blocked ears (solution: metho dripped from a cotton wool ball), and chesty coughs (solution: help myself to the buffet of drugs in the kitchen cupboard from the endless supplies garnered from my dad's drug rep mates back in the good old days when medical doctors didn't have to hide the fact that they were on big pharma's payroll), were 'normal' for me for many years. My childhood respiratory tract ailments eventuated in a lengthy treatment (aka poly substance abuse regime) which kicked off when I was about 8 during swimming training season (but whose true cause was the death of my best friend Suzie), and dragged out until my late 20's.

Learning through my acupuncture studies that the the emotions are 'attached' to specific organs (the respiratory system is 'sadness' (and grief), the liver is anger etc), was like pennies dropping for me. Realising the depth of the association through biofield discovery has been monumental - eg When I lost Suzie, my best friend from kindergarden in a fatal car accident, I was encapsulated by a grief my mum and dad didn't have the capacity to nurse out of me, so (quite naturally), pneumonia (and all the other respiratory tract issues I suffered), was the result.

   I also developed both an allergy to penicillin at 9 (whereby I simply swapped the drug out for a different one that didn't give me a body rash that lasted several weeks), and candida, which was an utter pain in my arse until I finally worked out how to fix it myself. I diagnosed virtually everyone as 'a candida' after I started learning how to heal my body using my food as my medicine. I started diagnosing virtually everyone with PTS(D) after learning how to heal my mind using 'energy' as my medicine.

I had a lot of catching up to do in my 20's, and it wasn't just me. My childhood sports star / action figure / daredevil / living legend career saw my injuries catch up with me, seemingly to mock the fantasy I had in my mind that I had been born :

a. as strong as a man,

b. invincible, and

c. unworthy of love unless I physically worked my guts out.

   So one day I called my dad and threatened to kill myself unless he helped me do something about the excruciating back pain I'd been silently suffering from for years (because no one likes a whinger). My dad called a mate of a mate and I was soon diagnosed according to the rules of allopathy. It took me a couple of years to wake up to the scam, but when I finally decided I was no longer going to remain a victim, I ditched the drugs and got my shit together virtually overnight. When I choose to commit, that single bloody mindedness (that drove my mum insane), worked in my favour. It still does. But like my dad, I'm a living dichotomy.

​

   I reserve my right to speak my mind and change my mind; to stand my ground with indignant self righteousness and blow things off like water off a duck's back; to put whatever I choose into and onto my body, full of knowledge and free of guilt; to run with the hares and hunt with the hounds; to trial and fail and trial and fail without remorse; to slog it out and laze like a sloth with equal gusto.

But learning how be relaxed and sit in contented silence, happily alone for days or weeks, to trust my incredibly 'different' mind and my innate clairsentience - (capabilities that had been dulled since Sia the cat first lay on my chest, protecting me from a world I wasn't prepared for or ready to see and feel), being at ease with being at ease took a lot of unlearning and practice before I stopped feeling guilty for sitting on my arse apparently 'doing nothing'.

I always knew I could read people's minds but didn't openly acknowledge it until one day when I was performing a pre-employment physical assessment on a young guy with a very bad vibe. When I put my hand on his shoulder, I got a flash of me in my mind being violently raped and I nearly pissed myself in fright. I shot a look at his face - leering, full of self satisfied sleaze and it took all my willpower not to run from the room. It took me years to get over it, but my long repressed ability had slapped me in the face so hard that I was forced to reconcile with it and learn how to use it in more beneficent and constructive ways. The progression from looking at the dense human form to remembering, seeing and feeling the energy of life was one whereby every choice and experience became retrospectively perfect.

​

​   Coming to terms with what I am (and we all are) truly capable of is (for me) like accepting that lotus flowers grow brilliantly in mud, so the mud needs to be respected for its muddiness. I've always loved playing with mud, and going into my own muddy depths to gaze upon my own lotus flower buds, buried deep within, stopped frightening and upsetting me as soon as I accepted that NO ONE is to 'blame' for anything in my life except me, and if I'm wanting to excuse my own bad feelings/behaviour/thoughts because of the influence of others I'll never get over my shit and allow those lotus buds to flower.

But getting over my shit is a work in progress - introspection, lifestyle and energetics are my top priorities and I have a fabulous tool kit to help me do what I need to do to be the happily satisfied person I want to be.

Discovering and clearing the dissonant energetic residue that's impacted my capacity to 'live life to the fullest' has been has been the most enlivening and enlightening practices in my life. Accepting, nurturing and sharing my amazingness is the most difficult and enjoyable challenge of my entire life, and I wouldn't have it any other way ...

(All photographs are originals and remain property of the photographer, me, Lisa)