Twelve years ago, I was diagnosed with dysplasia in the colon which, in my case, meant that my colon was bleeding.

It was ­Christmas night of 2005, and I awakened from a nighttime nap to sharp stomach pains.  The first thing that came to mind was that maybe I had eaten something that had given me food poisoning.  What did I eat that would cause this?  My stepdad had made gumbo for Christmas, but no one else in the house that ate it seemed to have the bug that I had.

I rewound my thinking to look at what I had eaten for the course of the last few days.  In the back of my mind, the only thing that seemed to stand out to me was the prime rib I ate at a restaurant in Santa Cruz.  You see, my mom and step-dad always visited us during the winter holidays, and my mom’s birthday is two days before Christmas.  We always took her out to a nice birthday dinner.  Well, this time I ordered the prime rib.  It made me salivate just to look at it on the menu.

I wasn’t quite as sure though once they served it to me.  Even though I had ordered it medium rare, I remember wondering if they had cooked the meat at all, it was so red.  So I sent it back (twice) to be cooked even more.  I still wasn’t satisfied with it even after all that, but ate it anyway because I didn’t want to be a “difficult” customer, especially on my mom’s birthday.  Besides, I was hungry, and everyone else had their dinner entrée except for me.

Well, my stomach never quite recovered.  Sorry to be so graphic, but my colon began to react by putting out burgundy waste.  This had never happened to me before, and I was scared.  It was clear that what was coming out of me wasn’t just the waste from my food.  It looked like blood.  Yep, I had a bleeding colon.  I was able to temporarily stop it from bleeding by taking capsicum, but the minute I stopped taking it, the blood would return.  I dragged myself through the next few days, trying to work on clients and manage my own energy.

I finally went to my doctor for testing, and she confirmed that, yes, there was blood in my stools.  She had me undergo both a colonoscopy and endoscopy and confirmed afterwards that I had angiodysplasia of the colon.  What the heck was angiodysplasia?  I had never heard of it.  Turns out, angiodysplasia is swollen, fragile blood vessels in the colon.  This can result in blood loss from the gastrointestinal (GI) trace.  Mind you, I was in my early ‘40s at the time, and most people don’t typically see this problem until they are over the age of 50.

My Western medicine doctors wanted to cut out part of my colon to solve the problem, and, to me, this just didn’t feel like the right option.  I was adamant that they weren’t cutting out my colon.  I felt this would have been just another “band-aid” solution.

I did a lot of research on this disease, and with all of my wisdom and knowledge from being a holistic practitioner, I knew that this issue that I had with my colon was deeper than what met the surface.  You see several years before this occurred, I had stopped speaking to a close family member.  I was upset and deeply hurt by the things that I heard she had said about me behind my back.  I would arrive at family gatherings and feel very uncomfortable because this family member was also present.  I knew that my emotional upset over this situation was related to my physical symptoms.

I eventually got my colon to stop bleeding with supplements, nutritional changes, and energy healing…but I wasn’t done with healing my issue with my family member.  I wanted to be “right” more than I wanted to be compassionate and understanding.  It wasn’t until I did some work around the Medicine Wheel of the Shamanic Inka tradition that I finally healed my relationship with this family member.  I knew that if I didn’t heal this piece of my life, my colon issues would eventually reoccur.

When I went around the Medicine Wheel, I not only found peace within myself, but I began to find peace with others.  I no longer had to be “right” all the time.  When I saw how I played out my own core wounds in life, it helped to understand how we all do the same.  I learned to have more compassion for others, including the family member whom I had been angry with for so many years.  It is only then that I began to have a more stable sense of inner tranquility, independent of how others were interacting with me.

My colon is now completely healed.  I do my best to live a conscious life and not react as much to what others say or do so that I don’t put disease in my body.  As the Self-Care Queen, I do my best to be proactive with all of my relationships, practicing compassion and forgiveness.  And when I don’t do so, I often notice that a mild cold or virus sets in, giving me a hint that some internal work needs to be done and time to correct it.

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