The Soaked Bean

Seeking Nourishment, Finding Traditions

  • About
  • Recipes
  • Library
  • Events

Mysterious Illness, Magical Thinking

December 23, 2018 By Lauren

©LOlivet-soakedbean
(Photo from Lucas Olivet’s ongoing series in Prince George, BC)

If you’ve been following along for a while you know that, a few years back, I was diagnosed with chronic Lyme. This diagnosis, at the time, was balsam. Finally, after months of mysterious symptoms–profound pain in my joints and limbs, drenching night sweats, weight loss, and severe depersonalization and derealization (a mental state not dissimilar, I imagine, from the one experienced after ingesting a plate of pot brownies)–I had an answer, a, what those in the naturopathic community like to call, root cause. I could equip myself, be directed to the specialists, pore over the literature and message boards: if I could name it, I could overcome it.

I haven’t written much about this diagnosis lately: thinking about it, I realized it’s due to more than just the fact that I recovered (and we tend not to share stories of recovery as much as we tend to share while still navigating), but that, over time, I began to recognize that whatever it was I was experiencing, was too slippery for any one definitive diagnosis. Saying that I recovered from chronic Lyme felt false, like bypassing the truth of my experience. I think it’s more that I recovered, but from something that can’t be so easily named.

And that’s not easy to talk about.

Mystery, or what is not able to be known–at least, in a concrete way, is, to put it mildly, uncomfortable. We like answers, absolutes. It’s why receiving a diagnosis is often bittersweet: once you’ve named it, all that you’ve been experiencing has been validated, is no longer looked upon with skepticism, doubt–well, you don’t look sick, we all get tired. We can wear our diagnoses as badges, proof of the pain, the suffering: see, it wasn’t all in my head.

The naturopathic community can be even more obsessed with absolutes than the allopathic one, insisting that there’s no such thing as an idiopathic ailment; you just haven’t found the root of the issue.

I used to approach health this way. If I could just dig a bit deeper, see a bit clearer, I could extract the tangled roots of what ailed me once and for good. I could be the perfect picture of health, the walking equivalent of holding mountain pose on the top of an actual mountain, kale coursing through my veins, no worries, no stress, just pure, unadulterated #bliss. Ohmmmmm.

But after bouncing from diagnosis to diagnosis these past years (my Lyme specialist believed, at one point, that it wasn’t borreliosis, but babesiosis [another pesky microorganism] that was the trouble, a 70-year-old acupuncturist from Beijing told me it was kidney jing deficiency, a therapist diagnosed me with cPTSD), I’m not so sure I believe in root causes anymore. At least, not across the board.

Our health is affected by so many variables. The familiar ones, like diet, exercise or lack thereof, exposure to pollutants, genetics, socioeconomic standing and the more esoteric–birth and embryological trauma, inherited trauma, from our ancestors, or our past lives, our natal charts, our constitutions, a hex someone cast upon us (which I know for some folks is about as likely to have an effect as any of the preceding things). There’s a practitioner out there for, ahem, everything, but what if what you’re experiencing evades even the kookiest definition? What if something best described as mystery illness really exists?

Disquieting, isn’t it?

Mystery is something our ancestors, with their rudimentary skills, their smaller brains, had to wrestle with. The pitch-black sky, the sun’s waning, the trees going bare, the woman who bleeds but does not die, the head emerging from opening. It’s the moon’s rotation around us, the earth’s rotation around the sun, the shedding of the uterine lining, the sperm fertilizing egg.

With all of our tools and our big, modern brains, there’s no puzzle that can’t be pieced together. We, unlike our ancestors, have flicked on the lights: we’ve dissected, we’ve decoded, we’ve defined. We’ve left little room for intuition, for feeling; what is too slippery, or shifting to be contained has been cast aside, belittled, placed into the catch-all category of crazy. Woo. Magical thinking. The charge of poncho-wearing hippies complaining about chem trails, claiming that the sun’s energy is the only nourishment we really need.

What’s made it so difficult to write about my recovery is that what would be categorized as magical thinking has played a major role. No, spirulina didn’t fill me with stores of energy, nor did carrying hematite in my pockets up my iron intake. But leaning into the idea that I didn’t have to categorize, that I could try out different approaches, address my symptoms as they came was a revelation. Leaning into the idea that, perhaps, it was a multitude of variables, that, perhaps, naming it didn’t really matter, that everything is always shifting and that I, too, could bend and move. The idea that instead of shirking away, I could welcome the mystery, even learn to embrace it.

The treatment that Lyme specialist gave me for babesia? It helped. The acupuncturist I mentioned? My symptoms almost entirely ebbed after working with her for a couple months. Learning techniques to soothe my particularly sensitive nervous system? Invaluable. These are concrete things and I don’t mean to diminish their importance. I just wanted to share this part of my story with you, and offer an alternative way of approaching chronic illness for those living through something similar.

May we all find an approach that helps us bend and move, and feel less afraid of the shifts. May we all infuse a little more magical thinking in our lives. And may we all find what best helps us heal, regardless of how crazy it may sound.

Filed Under: Sidenotes, Uncategorized Tagged With: acupuncture, babesia, chronic illness, cptsd, lyme

Kitchen Medicine: Letting Go of Old Maxims, Cooking Intuitively

January 8, 2018 By Lauren

kitchen

(Photo from Lucas Olivet)

I’ve been thinking a lot about medicine lately, the multifarious forms it can take.

There’s plant medicine which, in itself, contains legions: the pocket-size bottle of alcohol-extracted rosemary, milky oats, the mug of wild rose petal tea, the time spent in repose beneath cedar, linden, pine.  There’s story medicine, the unearthing of our ancestors’ stories, listening, the writing, or speaking, or singing of our own.  There is medicine in sharing our lived experience, in connecting with those who have lived something similar.  (The #MeToo movement as one example, AA as another, books clubs, open-mic nights, the list goes on).

When most of us think of medicine, we think of hospital medicine, and pharmaceutical medicine, and therapeutic medicine, and those can all be needed modalities, indeed.  But they should not be mistaken for gospel, for the only forms.  There’s also music medicine, and dancing medicine, and laughter medicine, and gathering medicine, and kitchen medicine (the list goes on).

I’ve been thinking a lot about kitchen medicine, in particular, lately and the following quote:

“Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food.” 

Attributed to Hippocrates and found nearly everywhere: on menus of smoothie bars and raw food cafes, the labels of chocolate bars, kombucha bottles, the about me sections of whichever wellness-expert-du-jour.

I’ve been thinking about what eating healthy has come to mean, what it means to me.

I haven’t spent as much time on this project of sharing recipes, perspectives on food as I’ve felt put off by the shape kitchen medicine has taken.  The zucchini-noodle bowl, the avocado toast, the raw “cheesecake”.  The coconut fat ball, the collagen latte, the 8-dollar to-go cup of broth.

The convergence of wellness with lifestyle has complicated what was once simple (eat your vegetables, move around, don’t eat too much sugar, give thanks), rendering it nearly beyond recognition.  The idea of eating clean has, of late, been tarnished and every wellness-guru worth her weight in Himalayan salt has distanced herself from it.  However, wellness, or eating healthy, or, put more simply, nourishing oneself is still being conflated with things like sherbet-hued yoga tights, impossibly tiny wooden spoons, a spotless kitchen inlaid with bleached tiles, ombré, and, more often than not, complicated recipes that require expensive tools (the vitamix, the dehydrator) and expensive, imported ingredients.

“Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine by thy food.”

This maxim’s meaning has, for the most part, been lost; I highly doubt Hippocrates was talking about week-long green juice cleanses and “moon dusted” mugs of hot almond-water.

But, more than that, this maxim has always felt a bit one-note.

Just as there’s not just one type of person, there’s not just one type of medicine either.  (Thankfully!)  And while I can get down with the importance of eating nourishing meals, I can’t groove with the fixation on superfoods, on super dogmatic diets, on this version of wellness that is, quite frankly, monochromatic, without room for nuance, other perspectives and also pretty limiting and sometimes downright wrong (for example: vegetable juice cures cancer!  coconut oil will help you lose weight!  cooked foods are poison! vegan “cheese” is an abomination!  [ok, that last one may be true]).

I’m not interested in recipes with precise instructions, imported ingredients.  I’m not interested in “props”, or a hundred splashy photos of the same damn thing.  I’m not interested in selling a lifestyle, one way to be well, one kind of medicine.

I am and always have been an intuitive cook, setting out a bowl of rice, or beans to soak for the next day, seeing what vegetables I have on hand to use, or going to the market for some eggs, or a cut of meat.  The recipes I enjoy read more like stories than instructions.  They make use of what is growing in my region.  They’re simple, made with humble things–turnips, the patch of backyard nettles, butter, chicken feet–, things that may not be as sexy as açai, but are nourishing to, not only me, but my community, too.  Kitchen medicine is one part of being well, but it’s certainly not the only, or even most important one.

So on this new (Gregorian) year, I offer this new maxim:

“Let our medicine be our medicine and our food be our food.”

Maybe you’re big into kitchen medicine and your medicine happens to be your food.  Maybe that will shift and you’ll find your medicine elsewhere.  Personally, I’ve been thinking a lot about where kitchen and story medicine converge lately and I’m looking forward to sharing more of that here soon.

Filed Under: Nutrition, Sidenotes Tagged With: eat clean, holistic nutrition, nutrition, sidenotes

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • …
  • 8
  • Next Page »

Copyright © 2025 · The Soaked Bean