It is late August 2005. I was enrolled in my second year of a Masters in Creative Arts Therapies program at Concordia University in Montreal. I went to my family doctor for some odd symptoms and was sent for an MRI. My doctor’s hunch was right - I was diagnosed with a pituitary brain tumour – usually benign, though this one was quite large. The two brain surgeons I consulted recommended surgery. I was terrified. I booked it. Then cancelled. I consulted a woman who claimed to be a shaman. “Get the surgery,” she insisted. I rebooked the surgery.
But then I took a deep breath and decided to ask the universe for guidance. “Should I get the surgery?” I asked the vastness. And then I unplugged from everything and everyone in order to listen for the answer. It was hard to hear above the clamouring and panicked voices of family and friends urging me to get the tumour removed. But then the answer came. Loud can clear.
DO NOT GET THE SURGERY! I cancelled the surgery for the last time and never looked back.
At this point, I must digress to explain that being diagnosed with a brain tumor was my biggest fear. My husband lost his mother to a brain tumour when he was nine years old. She got the surgery but died shortly after in the hospital, leaving his dad alone with three kids. It made me stop and think, why have I taken on my husband’s story? What healing needs to happen? It was yet another reminder of the work I still needed to do on creating healthy boundaries. I wondered if I could change the storyline, would it be healing for my husband too?
I took a medical leave from graduate school. I went on a spiritual retreat and studied Five-Element Medical Qi Gong and energy healing. I then worked with a teacher for several months to unblock the chakras. I developed a healing arts modality for myself that blended guided meditation, visualization, and the arts. Some days, I would meditate on and off for four hours working to better understand how I needed to change my life and what the tumour had to teach me.
This was the year I had chosen “Keeping Still” as my theme. Every year on my birthday, I choose a theme – something I need to work on or wish to master. Be careful what you wish for! Keeping Still became a way of life during my healing work.
I taught our son, who was in grade six, how to heal himself by dialoguing with his frequent stomach aches and pains – to picture the pain as an object or a creature with as much detail as possible (colour, texture, shape). Ask it if it has a message for you, I told him, and shrink it with a ball of white light. He has always been a great artist and then might draw what he imagined was causing the pain. When it came time for my husband and I to tell our son about the brain tumour, I did it in a way that felt like it was no big deal. “Can I go watch TV now?” he asked after I told him.
My husband was incredulous. How different it had been when his dad finally told him and his siblings. They had taken what would be their final family vacation without telling the kids that as soon as they got back, his mom would be admitted to the hospital. The last time my husband saw his mom was lying in a hospital bed with a shaved head and blue markings drawn like a map to indicate where the surgeon would cut (my husband wrote a children’s book about it: Milo, Sticky Notes and Brainfreeze). I was determined to change the story. Luckily, it didn’t look like the tumour in my head was cancerous.
It was also during that time that I first became interested in sound healing. It made sense that sending vibrations through my skull by vocalizing might shrink the tumour. I searched for sound healing teachers but ended up doing what came instinctively as a singer – breathing and singing various vocal tones, usually immersed in a bathtub of steaming, hot water surrounded by candlelight.
More than six months or maybe a year later, I went back for a second MRI. It was only then that the surgeon realized he had made a misdiagnosis. Had he conducted the surgery through the nasal cavity as planned, it would have failed. I did not have a pituitary tumour; I had a meningioma. I cannot tell you how relieved I was at the decision I had made NOT to get the surgery. Thank-you, Universe. One of the side effects after they remove the pituitary, which they intended to do, is a total loss of empathy! The pituitary is what sends signals to the brain for a mother’s milk to let down when she hears her baby cry. I am a therapist and a healer (as well as a mother). I wouldn’t have been able to do my job. Can you imagine a therapist without empathy? Or a mother, for that matter? (Oh, that was MY mother! ha ha.)
And so, every year or two or three, I get another MRI, just to make sure the tumour hasn’t grown. And it hasn’t. It’s been 20 years. I still don’t know how my brain has adapted to this major invader, but I am living proof of the brain’s plasticity. The medical profession isn’t interested in the spiritual healing work I did. But they are impressed that the tumour hasn’t grown. And I continue to make changes in my life that the tumour helped me to see.
This past year, my husband treated us to a sound bath in Montreal. That’s where I met Haley Gaia. And she became my sound healing teacher. I am so grateful to her for all she has taught me. Despite the twenty years that have elapsed since my initial interest in this ancient art, it is never too late to learn and expand one’s knowledge. It has been many years since my path veered away from my passion as a singer/songwriter and musician. But my sound healing journey perfectly combines my musical talents with my training as a therapist and healer.