ADAM HUBER
RED TOE, RED DOOR
HOW METABOLIC THERAPY CURED MY ARTHRITIS
Published in 2011 by Inside Out Media at Smashwords
ISBN 978-0-9738222-6-7
Copyright © Adam Huber 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author or publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please go to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Cover design by Lewis Evans
Frank Ludde
This book is written in loving memory of Frank Ludde, the creator of Metabolic Therapy. Frank is remembered for his exceptional ability to treat and reverse chronic conditions, degenerative disease and even terminal illness, as well as his selfless commitment to bringing health and vitality to those who had all but lost hope.
Red Toe, Red Door is a tribute to his extraordinary work.
My world ends, my journey begins
Guidelines for Metabolic Therapy
- The importance of water
- Guidelines for water intake
- Water and digestion
- The need for protein
- Protein digestion
- Bowel management
- Beneficial bowel foods
- Getting the lead out
- Chelating supplements
- Chelating foods
- Liver/gallbladder cleanse
- Emotional detoxification
- How to swallow supplements
- The supplement list
- The 3cc (3ml) vitamin injection formula
- My original vitamin formula
- A formula for ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease)
- Optimal ‘one size fits all’ formula
- Formula for those on a budget
- The bare minimum formula
- Metabolic Therapy maintenance formula
Food guidelines for Metabolic Therapy
- Basic dietary guidelines
- Chicken broth
- Chicken broth recipe
- Daily menu guidelines
- Wheatgrass
Find out more about Adam Huber and Metabolic Therapy
Adam Huber has written a refreshingly honest and practical account of his courageous journey from crippling arthritis to radiant health. Told by the medical profession that there was no cure for his disease and that he would have to take drugs for the rest of his life, Huber chose to fight back―with incredible results. Convinced that the drugs were poisoning his system and not helping at all, he embarked on a decade-long quest for a cure, ultimately transforming his body and his life. His determination and focus led him to experiment with a wide range of modalities and diets, eventually bringing him, in 1991, to the red door that opened up to a remarkable healing process. He has been free of arthritis ever since. Huber takes us through that door, and provides details of the process so that others can benefit from it also. Red Toe, Red Door reveals a triumph of body, mind and spirit over seemingly impossible odds―a must-read for anyone who suffers from arthritis (and some 20% of us will) or any other degenerative disease.
―Lewis Evans, author of Hominine—it’s time to choose
One year ago, my body broke out in a rash. It started as a small red spot and quickly moved everywhere except my face and lower legs. My arms and thighs began weeping and were unbearably itchy. After trying many therapies, I started the metabolic therapy and, after two months, I felt healed. My body felt more nourished and energized than ever before. To this day, if I miss the soup, I feel underfed. It has become cellular nourishment that I crave.
―Kim Christie
I’m
so grateful for having been introduced to Frank Ludde’s Metabolic
Therapy. When I began the therapy with Adam Huber, I was recovering
from uterine cancer, cardiac arrest, coma, massive surgeries, blood
transfusions and ensuing surgical complications. Although I survived
it all, three years later, my body still was not functioning
properly; I had infections, heart trouble, vomiting, insomnia and
extreme pain and fatigue. I also had problems with my potassium
levels, my blood, my vision and my bowels. I am convinced that
Metabolic Therapy saved my life. Since completing the therapy, I have
gained a much-needed 25lbs. I am no longer vomiting, the potassium
crashes and heart palpitations have stopped, and my bowels are
functioning properly. Nowadays, when I run into people I haven’t
seen for a while, they no longer recognize me. I feel it’s very
important to let those with life-threatening illnesses and
‘incurable’ diseases know about the power of Metabolic Therapy.
It helped me and I know it can help many others too.
―Denise
Johnson, www.oceanofclarity.com
For me, Metabolic Therapy was life-changing, to say the least. I used to have multiple pains all over my body, plus I was suffering from adrenal exhaustion. All of the pain has now gone and I have energy to burn. I was afraid that after I finished the therapy, my symptoms would return, but I have been able to maintain perfect health on just the maintenance program. At first, I was very leery of ingesting chicken feet broth, but now I can’t live without it. I would encourage everyone to try this therapy, regardless of their condition or apprehension. It has forever changed my understanding of what true health is.
―Amanda W
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank all those who played a role in the production of this book, giving freely of their time and energy. I particularly want to thank the following people: Petra Ludde for her historical references, anecdotal information and deep loving support for me and this project; Joanne Fisher for her insights into Metabolic Therapy itself, as well as historic references; Olga Sheean for her brilliant editing and proofing work, as well as finding all the missing pieces; Lewis Evans for all the masterful art work and promotional knowhow; Angela Lavery for being there through it all with full and generous support; Elena Crippen for keeping me on track and well fed; Denise Johnson for her deep spiritual insights and heartfelt words of encouragement; Linda Clark for providing a peaceful space where writing could happen; and both of my parents—Violet and Rev. Adam Huber Sr—for a deep and abiding belief in the miraculous, and for nurturing that spark of light within me.
FOREWORD
When Adam asked me to read the transcript of Red Toe, Red Door, I was excited to hear that he had taken on this project, and grateful that the information would finally be available to anyone who needed it.
Metabolic Therapy, as described in this book, saved my life when conventional doctors and alternative practitioners had given up on finding a solution to my paralyzing chronic fatigue and asthma; I was in constant fear as many of my body systems were failing simultaneously. By following this therapy, I went from sleeping 23 hours a day to having a healthy pregnancy—within two years. Metabolic Therapy gave me another chance at living a healthy, fulfilling and active life. It works.
Through the years that I was with Frank, I witnessed many healings that the medical establishment considered to be impossible—everything from cancer to mental conditions. It was remarkable to see that essentially the same formula, with minor variations, worked with the majority of these diseases.
Adam’s story of his own healing is magical, fluid and compelling. Once I started reading the book, I could not put it down—even though I know his story well, having personally witnessed his transformation. The account of his journey out of the darkness and limitation of a life with severe arthritis will be an inspiration to all who read it. And Adam’s thoroughly researched and simplified description of Metabolic Therapy provides the ultimate tool on the road from sickness to health.
I feel truly blessed to have had the opportunity to witness Adam’s continued well-being personally over the past 20 years. You are very fortunate to have found this amazing book. May it guide you to health, joy and ease.
Petra Olm-Ludde, Vancouver, BC, Canada, July 2011
Red Toe, Red Door tells the story of one man’s 11-year struggle with unrelenting physical deterioration due to rheumatoid arthritis. It chronicles a personal journey from debilitation, pain and hopelessness, to physical and spiritual transformation, culminating in a powerful and dramatic healing that will instill renewed hope in anyone with chronic or acute disease.
Although this book focuses primarily on arthritis, it has broad implications for every degenerative disease. Based on the remarkable Metabolic Therapy that cured the author and many others suffering from so-called terminal conditions, it provides a blueprint for the reader’s own healing journey, with practical guidelines, suggested protocols and the hard-won wisdom that comes from personal triumph over adversity.
The names of certain individuals referred to in this book have been changed to protect their privacy.
1: MY WORLD ENDS, MY JOURNEY BEGINS
I had no idea that my world was about to end, but end it did. I was 35 years old and on a roll. Money was flooding in and my world felt secure and abundant. I had an active lifestyle, regularly swimming, hiking, cycling and canoeing. I loved being outdoors in nature. In the fall of 1981, after returning from swimming in one of the pristine lakes in the mountains near Vancouver, British Columbia, I noticed that one of the toes on my left foot was red and swollen. I had been on the beach and assumed that I’d picked up a cedar or hemlock sliver from one of the logs that lined the sand. Yet I couldn’t find any sliver that evening, when I looked, and neither could Kaitlyn, my girlfriend at the time.
The redness persisted for days, so I decided to see a doctor and find out what was going on. The diagnosis I received was unsettling: the doctor said I had arthritis. He ordered a blood test for a gene marker called HLA B27, which is an indicator for Ankylosing Spondylitis, and the result came back positive. Most people with this marker don’t get any symptoms, so it was just one indicator pointing in that direction.
The doctor gave me some yellow pills called Feldene and said to try them and see if the symptoms went away. Feldene belongs to the family of pharmaceutical drugs called NSAIDs—non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. These worked like magic and the redness and swelling disappeared overnight. This reminded me of a bout of bursitis I’d had about five years earlier that affected my hip, causing it to seize up dramatically and make walking difficult. The drug I was given then completely resolved the problem, and I resumed my active life with a sigh of relief.
I was hoping for a similar result with the magic yellow pills, but it was not to be. I never liked taking drugs for physical symptoms, preferring to feel what was going on in my body and deal with it as naturally as I could. So as soon as my toe returned to normal, I stopped taking the drug. A few days later, the redness returned, only this time other toes were also affected. I was starting to feel worried and went back on the yellow pills.
Little did I know that the worst was yet to come. Over the next year and a half, more and more of my joints succumbed to rheumatoid arthritis. The diagnosis that I received from the top rheumatologist in the province was Reiter’s Syndrome and Ankylosing Spondylitis. The latter is also known more colloquially as ‘poker back’, which causes a very bent and stooped carriage; in people suffering from this condition, their back can be bent forward at a 90° angle as though they are constantly looking for something that they dropped on the ground. I think the doctor could have been guessing at the Reiter’s Syndrome diagnosis, as he seemed unsure of it himself, at the time. But it didn’t matter much, as my body was rapidly becoming a biological straitjacket.
During that first year, I saw several more doctors and rheumatologists. Ultimately, I was put on Indomethacin—another NSAID with a long list of side effects, including death. Not a pretty picture. (Years later, I heard of two people who bled to death in their sleep due to a perforated stomach from prolonged NSAID use.) Heart attacks and strokes are among the other numerous side effects. I knew right then that there had to be another way to get through this; I wasn’t going to survive on the drugs.
I was still working as a traveling salesman for some friends who owned a woodworking factory that made wooden wall décor, which sold in gift shops. I had been doing that job for seven years and, by the time I came down with arthritis, I was making $40,000 a year and owned a brand-new 1980 VW Scirocco. By the end of 1982, I had lost the job, totaled the car, and had split up with my girlfriend—a modern-day version of the Biblical story of Job, who ended up in sackcloth and ashes. My scenario was perhaps a tad less intense, but it left me devastated, nonetheless.
When I was working, I tried staying on the edge of the drugs, just taking enough to get by but still feeling the underlying symptoms. When I felt my system was becoming poisoned, I got off them, and the symptoms returned, heavy and hard. With anti-inflammatory drugs, you need to maintain a constant level in your bloodstream in order for them to be effective. Going on and off them was not ideal, but I hated how they felt in my body. In retrospect, I realize that I was kidding myself by staying on the job, using the drugs as a prop; this became a path of diminishing returns.
During that first year of the arthritis, I experienced one joint after another succumbing to this fearful devastation. Inside, I was panicking, wondering where it would go next. First one knee swelled up to twice its size; then, a month or two later, the other knee erupted. The most worrisome condition was iritis—inflammation of the iris. I was told that I had to topically apply a steroidal drug or risk losing the vision in whichever eye was inflamed at the time. Overnight, I went from 20/20 vision to 20/50, and this happened several times over the course of the disease. The one saving grace throughout the 11 years that I had arthritis was that it never got to my elbows or hands. The disease invaded every joint in my body except my elbows, hands and ankles. Every other part of me felt as if it was constantly on fire. Had I taken the full course of drugs at this time, I’m sure the condition would have evolved much more slowly. Ultimately, however, it would have ended up at the same place. If the disease itself hadn’t got me, the drugs surely would have.
Shortly after Kaitlyn and I split up, I became romantically involved with Meena—a New Zealand woman originally from Madras, India. She was studying for a doctorate in chemistry from the University of British Columbia and was renting a room in the house that I co-owned with some friends. We mostly rented rooms to university students, who became like surrogate children to me, as I had no children of my own. At this point, although I was becoming more physically depleted, I was still able to do my sales job. The arthritis hadn’t yet become fully entrenched and the lighter doses of medication I was taking at the time seemed to handle it well enough.
I had always been very active in my life. As a teenager, I grew up near Minneapolis, Minnesota, and was a co-captain of our rather inept high-school hockey team. The two courses that I always got an A+ in were music and physical fitness. These passions, along with spiritual connectedness and alternative healing modalities, remain with me today.
Meena and I were well suited for each other, although she was 12 years younger than me. She had a sparkle in her eyes, a sharp wit and was quite accomplished on the piano. Early on in our romance, we bought ocean-going kayaks and took many trips together off the coast of Vancouver Island. We both really enjoyed getting out into nature and shared many precious moments and adventures for the two years that we remained together. In all, we did about 10 week-long trips, taking all the supplies we needed on board. For the last three trips, I needed a cane to get around; it became a piece of standard equipment strapped to the hull of my kayak. Years later, when my symptoms were much more pronounced, I discovered that riding a mountain bike was much easier on my knees than walking. When I purchased my first mountain bike—a Norco Barbarian—I had a renewed sense of freedom and mobility. The bicycle seat took most of my body weight, greatly relieving the pressure on my legs and knees. Once again, I traveled with my cane—this time, strapping it to the rear pannier rack of the bike. I will never forget the look on people’s faces when I got off the bike and then hobbled off down the street, doing the arthritic two-step.
Years later, when walking any distance became very difficult, I built a kind of scooter that I could sit on—much like the scooters kids used to make with rollerskates bolted to a box crate. I bolted a pair of skateboard wheels to a wooden frame, made a foam seat and placed wooden handlebars at the front.
I screwed a broom holder on the front to hold my cane. I slapped a handicapped sticker on the side and took it to a mall to try it out. What a hoot! I could effortlessly move through the mall at breakneck speed, using pedestrians as living ‘traffic cones’. My friends called this contraption ‘The Wally Dolly’. (My first name is Wallace and, back then, my friends called me Wally.)
As you’ve probably guessed, I was a fairly positive person. Most of my friends from that era didn’t see the disease; they just knew me for my personality. The disease progresses slowly and becomes a kind of subliminal identity; either you become your disease or your disease becomes you. While my cane symbolized my condition, I never wanted to invest in a classier one; I was determined to get rid of it as soon as I possibly could. I recall attending a support group meeting sponsored by the local Arthritis Society in the earlier years of my struggle. It was meant to assist people in coping with the disease and using strategies for maintaining a semblance of normal life. The overriding message, however, was that there was no cure and there wasn’t going to be one anytime soon. I had no intention of adopting such a hopeless identity and I never went to another meeting. I became even more determined to find a cure and to create an identity for myself as a seeker, not as an acceptor of the status quo.
Things came to a head on my last sales trip into the British Columbia interior. I was staying at my friend Dave’s house in the North Okanagan valley where I once lived. I had finished the trip and was due to head back to Vancouver the next day. I had stopped taking my meds a day earlier and, this time, I was determined to try to stay off them. This was around the fall of 1983. On that last night, I was sleeping on my Thermarest mattress on the floor. In the middle of the night, I tried to get up to use the bathroom, but my whole body seized up. Every joint felt like cement and it took me half an hour to crawl to the bathroom and pull myself up onto the toilet. The next morning, Dave assisted me to my car and I drove non-stop to Vancouver—about 550km. I immediately went to the university hospital to acquire a pair of crutches, determined never to take the drugs again.
I hadn’t planned on being admitted to the hospital; I just wanted the crutches. But the attending doctor took one look at me and said, “We need to run some tests so I’m going to admit you.” It was a relief to be taken care of, for a while, and I didn’t resist going in. They kept me there a week; I saw 13 doctors and had every test there was. This was also a teaching hospital so I had a legion of interns giving me the once-over every morning. At the end of it, I was prescribed—you guessed it—more anti-inflammatory pills, at a dose that was just a bit more finely tuned than the last round. This was very discouraging. There was no other choice, no medical Plan B: it was the poison or nothing. I found it amazing that the sum total of all the medical research, all the highly trained medical practitioners, all the specialists and all the money spent on building modern hospitals and medical schools could provide nothing more than a prescription for a handful of poison pills. But this did not mean I was at the end of the road; it was just the beginning.
I needed to chart a course of action that kept me moving forward—mentally, if not physically. I needed to feel that I was doing something that might make a difference. I started reading all the available books and magazine articles on alternative health and healing, especially those that related to arthritis. When the medical system has no answer, you’re pretty much on your own, and I was starting from scratch, trying to figure things out. It’s a bit like climbing Mt Everest when all you’ve ever done is a few short hikes. It was a daunting task but the prospect of finding the solution propelled me forward.
Many of the books and periodicals I read had a decided slant toward vegetarianism. I gleaned much of my reading material from Vancouver’s premiere new age bookstore, Banyen Books. It was—and still is—a very comfortable place to browse through all the alternative literature. The atmosphere is fairly reverential, as is the staff. Some of the books I read on vegetarianism reminded me of the time when I was a member of a hippie band in Portland, Oregon called Sterling Stem and the Bum Counts. In 1967, I lived with the band in a large, dilapidated house just off Burnside Avenue. We didn’t have a lot of money between gigs, plus we were young and hungry. Someone living in the same house had just read a book about something called a macrobiotic diet, which was new to me, at the time. He claimed you could get all of your body’s required nutrients solely from brown rice, which was about all we could afford to buy, back then. So we all chipped in and bought a 100lb sack of short-grain brown rice. Well, the first few bowls tasted quite good with some butter and soy sauce. It felt very counter-culture, as if we were suddenly changing the world. After all, the music we played was meant to do just that. Maybe, in some small way, we could do the same with this bag of rice.
That lasted about a week—until the next payday arrived. My friend Ken and I immediately headed off to the nearest ‘gut bomb’ burger joint just down the street, and what a relief it was! So much for macrobiotics in the late 60s. At around the same time, I read Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, I read it in one sitting—the only time I’ve ever done that with a book. Both the book and the dietary changes were signposts that I didn’t decipher at the time but each pointed toward the path of spiritual connection and physical healing that I was destined to follow years later.
I needed to make a complete break from the status quo and try a different path. I determined that the vegetarian macrobiotic diet was the way to go. This time, I would be smarter about it and would do the whole diet, not just brown rice. I remember traveling up to the interior on a sales trip with Meena, who came along for the ride. We had dinner in Williams Lake at a Keg restaurant before returning to Vancouver and I ordered a large steak as it was going to be my last carnivorous meal. I was very hopeful that the macrobiotic diet would be the answer—the key to turning off the heat in my joints.
In the early 80s, there were three vegetarian restaurants in Vancouver: The Sweet Cherubim, Lifestream, and The Naam. The Naam had a macrobiotic slant so I mostly ate there. This gave me a better idea of the culinary territory I was venturing into as they had a broad range of options to choose from. The dining tables were placed in long rows, and the waiters sat down with you to take your order in hushed tones. It was all very Zen and it felt as if I was really doing something, this time around. At the same time, I gave up alcohol. For a couple of weeks, I recall having a mild craving for a glass of wine around 5pm each day but that soon went away. I was feeling motivated, so I stuck with the diet, avoided all alcohol, and gave up sweets as well. I never did drink coffee so, thankfully, I didn’t have to go through caffeine withdrawal symptoms.
Weeks went by and nothing really changed in terms of the inflammation. Even more joints were becoming involved. I recall a two-week period where the toes of both feet started bending outwards at a distinct angle. When Meena first saw this, she laughed. I was quite taken aback by that but, in hindsight, I can understand her reaction. Often we don’t know how to react in such situations, and laughter can be a gut reaction prompted by embarrassment or discomfort. Years later, when I was much more crippled up, children often laughed at me on the street. I did my best to brush it off but some of the hurt went deep and stuck.
As I explored every conceivable form of alternative therapy, I considered adopting various detoxifying, cleansing modalities. This became a recurring theme over the next 10 years. I figured that there must be toxins in my body that were causing an adverse auto-immune response and that I had to literally ‘get the lead out’. The idea of adopting a more minimal, vegetarian diet was to stop ingesting more toxins. This was not an entirely wrong assumption, on my part; it was just that the way I went about removing toxins turned out to be more depleting than revitalizing.
The one detoxifying regimen that stood out and that I was familiar with from my past was the use of sauna baths. Being a homebody, and having been a carpenter, I decided to build a wood-fired sauna in the back yard. As I was a co-owner of the house I was living in, I decided that I needed to build the sauna on a trailer frame so I could take it with me if I sold my share of the house. I had built saunas in the two previous houses that I’d owned and always ended up having to leave the sauna behind when I sold the house. A friend just happened to have a trailer frame that I could use, so I was off and running—metaphorically speaking, at least. My joints were still nimble enough to do the carpentry and I became excited about some deep healing possibly resulting from this approach. It was one of several unsuccessful attempts to halt the degeneration of my body.
After two years as my girlfriend, Meena was becoming uncomfortable with our relationship. She said that I was “emotionally unavailable”—the same reason that Kaitlyn had given when she walked out two years before. This issue almost certainly stemmed from my upbringing. As the middle son of three boys, with a father who was a German Baptist preacher, I was expected to toe the company line. Appearances are everything when you’re coming from the right hand of God and emotional expression gets closed off, as a result. There is a line of self-righteousness that can be easily crossed without due vigilance. This was reinforced by what was taught in school about how great America is—all that ‘God and country’ dogma that still has a hold over so many Americans today. When you set yourself up as the moral judge of others, your deeper emotions tend to switch off and the heart becomes hardened. You become more comfortable with mental analysis than emotional expression. I don’t blame my parents for any of this; they did the best that they could, given their circumstances. They were victims of the same thing, since this conditioning gets repeatedly passed down until someone says enough and realizes that there’s a problem deep within. I began to ask myself if all my suppressed emotions were the main reason for my disease. But that was a scary concept for me, so I didn’t dwell on it. Much later, it became paramount to sift through and actually feel all those long-buried emotions.
By this time, I had given up on macrobiotics because my symptoms were getting worse, not better. I went on and off the drugs sporadically, while still questing for the answer to the disease. I had come across a book by Bernard Jensen on bowel cleansing and became very intrigued with his theories. This seemed like the ultimate detox and, again, it was backed up by numerous glowing testimonials—as were all the healing approaches I read about.
Then I met Armand—a French Canadian gentleman about my age, who I chanced upon at The Sweet Cherubim restaurant, where I overheard a conversation he was having about bowel cleansing. It turned out that he was well versed on the subject and rather eloquently explained his views to me. I was taken by this and listened as he extolled the virtues of raw food and wheatgrass, especially when combined with bowel cleansing. He was quite judgmental about people that didn’t see it his way—referring to people who ate cooked food as “cooked food addicts”, for instance. He was also very enthusiastic about the practice of Primal Therapy, as put forth by its founder, Arthur Janov. It felt as if I’d hit the jackpot! I was convinced I’d found the missing pieces for my ultimate healing.
Armand and I became fairly close over the next few years, falling into a kind of symbiotic relationship. It felt like I was on the inside track with Mr Natural, right down to the Birkenstocks. He liked spending time with me because I was all about action—actually doing the disciplines that he talked about. It turned out that he was quite shut down, in many ways, and seemed to lapse into depression whenever the wind was knocked out of his sails. As a result, he couldn’t hold down a job and was, I believe, on government assistance. He sometimes found a job and was initially enthusiastic about it but then some black cloud descended and it was all over. He became fatigued and unable to work. He blamed it on the circumstances of his birth—36 hours of labor, followed by him being removed by forceps from his mother’s womb. The doctors said he would have died otherwise. This pattern was then mirrored by his adult life, with initial enthusiasm being quickly followed by hopelessness. It certainly sounded plausible. He figured that Primal Therapy would enable him to feel that original pain and, in the re-living of it, he would attain his freedom. He used to love watching emotional movies so he could have a deep release of what he perceived to be this stuck, dark, primal energy.
This was the last nail in the coffin for my relationship with Meena. We were already on thin ice when I met Armand and started adopting his healing regimen. She was okay with the vegetarian diet (although she ate meat), but this new direction was just too weird for her. Meena and my friends never really warmed to Armand and were put off by the shadow that he cast. I had one friend who actually became hostile within five minutes of meeting him. Over the years, I’ve had a pattern of creating mentors who fit this same pattern. They all had something incredible that I wanted to absorb but most of my friends couldn’t stand them.
I didn’t see any other direction to go in and felt I had to stick with the new program, weird or not. So I built an enema board, which is used for high colonics. To use it, you lie flat on the board, which is placed over the toilet. The Jensen program involved using five gallons of warm water that you slowly introduce into the bowel, letting in as much as is tolerable at a time. The idea is to fill the entire colon with water, while gently massaging the colon so that the water gets into areas with hardened mucoid plaque. Before doing this, a person ingests liquefied psyllium husks, along with a quantity of bentonite clay. This mixture greatly expands the bowel wall as the clay starts to pull off the mucoid plaque, which must then be flushed out by means of the colonic.
Initially, this worked like magic—so much so that I became quite free of symptoms for a month and a half. I bought some downhill skiing equipment at this time and went skiing. It felt as if I had finally figured it out. It was not to be, however. After the exhilaration of those six weeks of freedom, I experienced a huge flare-up of symptoms. They were worse than ever and I became very discouraged.
I did stick with the bowel cleansing and, over the years, I did around 70 colonics. Ultimately, though, they were more depleting than healing, especially when combined with fasting. They became a stressor, as I was losing more and more of whatever vitality I had left. I was becoming thin and translucent.
My weight dropped from my normal 145lbs to 105lbs as a result of combining raw food, fasting and bowel cleansing. However, although I weighed very little, I felt very dense and heavy; the disease had a weight to it.
Early on in my journey with Armand, I decided to try a Primal Therapy session. This was actually more his idea than mine, and I wasn’t really all that enthused about going into my emotions. One day, he suggested I try a simple exercise. He said to pick a scene from my youth that was distressing and that included one of my parents. I picked the time in seventh grade when my father forced me to finish eating my cold oatmeal before I could go to school. I remember that it was the last time I cried in front of my father. Armand told me to tell my father, out loud, how I felt about his forcefulness. Armand said that he would leave the house so that I could get into it without feeling self-conscious.
So I did, although at first I had to force it as it felt really weird. Then I stepped it up a notch as I got more comfortable with the territory. I was expressing long-buried feelings that were never spoken out loud, especially to someone in authority. I had always related poorly toward authority types unless they met me at my level.
What happened next was quite shocking. I suddenly doubled over and started to cry from a very deep, untapped reservoir of tears. My whole body convulsed as the pain started to hit the exits. In Primal Therapy, they talk about cellular memory, and how the memory of a beating that happened many years ago is still retained in the tissues. I once saw a picture of welts that appeared on a person’s skin from a beating that occurred over 40 years previously. I could understand this from that one session on the couch. This got me thinking about what else was down there. Could this be at the root of the arthritis and, if so, why didn’t my brothers have the same condition as me?
Over the years of working with Armand, I never really went into it any further. I saw that Armand’s own struggle was never alleviated by all the emoting that he did. I asked him one time if there was ever an end to it, because it didn’t seem like there was an end for him. It was almost as if the constant tears were a defense against fully engaging in life, and that there was always another level of feeling that needed to be discovered. Armand and I used to take car trips down to California in the winter to take in the raw food scene and escape the unending rain in Vancouver. On one particular trip to Ojai, near Santa Barbara, we ran across a couple of female friends from Vancouver who had come down for the same reason. One night, we were all sitting together in the home of an elderly man for whom one of the women was providing home care and Armand decided to put on his therapist hat and launch into a tirade about everyone’s level of “feeling expression”. He was contending that no one was expressing their deep feelings and that we’d better get on with it. I am paraphrasing here as I forget exactly what all the commotion was about but it alienated everyone in the room. The women said his behavior was inappropriate—particularly since we were in this elderly man’s home—and I was fairly steamed myself.