Messages from Angels – Angels for Breakfast: Nourishment at Whole Foods

Note: One of my favorite parts of my spiritual job description is when I am asked to be a messenger for benevolent angelic forces. I often receive messages for people whose angels or spiritual guardians ask me to communicate when it is a matter of urgency or they are having a hard time getting through to their human counterparts. Many of these people are strangers to me and our interactions last only moments. These messages can be warnings of illness or accident.  They can also be intended to clarify or give direction. Whatever they are, I play my role as messenger faithfully

At the Whole Foods grocery he leaned on a single crutch and peered into two stainless steel buffet trays -- one full of scrambled eggs and another full of bacon.  He and I seemed to be asking the same question of ourselves, “What, if anything, to eat?”

Yesterday morning, at this same Whole Foods, I had opted for eggs but by the time I had stood in line at the cash register to pay for them, they had cooled into an expensive and unappetizing yellow lump.  I would not make the same mistake this morning.  I walked past the eggs and the man on the crutch, toward the baked goods. 

Actually, I did not even want to be in the store.  I was not sure why I was there, given that I was not hungry and I was running late for the last day of a shamanic dreaming workshop in which I was enrolled.  In fact, before leaving the house that morning I had decided to skip breakfast altogether.  The workshop was exacting and although I was enjoying it, I wanted to slow down and stop rushing, even if it meant missing a meal.

Thus, you can imagine my surprise when I found myself pulling into the parking lot of Whole Foods, getting out of the car and entering the store through automatic sliding glass doors.  “Well, I’m in the store,” I reasoned, “I might as well look for something to tide me over until lunch.”

Now here I was in the baked good section, looking at apple, strawberry-rhubarb and mixed-berry pie.  I looked from the pie back toward the man.  He wore a grubby yellow windbreaker and jeans.  He carried a back pack.  Even his stocking cap was soiled.  His beard and the skin on his face and hands were smeared with dirt.  I turned back to the pie.

“Go talk to him,” the voice of an Angel said.

I turned and looked more closely at the man, thinking as I did that he must be homeless.  He leaned into the food as if calculating how much it would cost to feed himself this one hot meal.  Then the Angels showed me something.  Within my own body, I could feel his hunger -- and not just the hunger for food.  There was also a hunger that many in difficult situations experience – the hunger for laughter, peace, safety, cleanliness, community, beauty, reassurance and release from the strain of desperation.

Though I felt for him, I will admit that the command, “go talk to him,” felt rather general. I did not know what to say and I did not want to embarrass myself, so I stalled, suddenly shy.  Even though I knew it was not true, I justified my reticence by telling myself that anyone in immediate need would not even be in an upscale store like Whole Foods and that my help was not really needed. 

The voice came again.  “Go talk to him.”

Not knowing what to say, I walked back to the buffet and up to the man.  When I got there I improvised and said, “Are you looking for breakfast?”


(for more see next post)

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Book Review - Ooops! Did I Say That Out Loud? - Correspondence with Authors (Post 4 of 4)

Correspondence with Dr. Edzard Ernst, M.D., author of Trick of Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine, went from doubtful to hopeful to exciting to bad to worse, all within the space of a couple of days!  I hope that it served a purpose for the both of us, my getting angry with the good doctor, I mean.  It is said that "no shift in consciousness, however small, is ever wasted."  

At the end of the last post I had just suggested to Dr. Ernst that his arguments might be more convincing if he experimented with alternative healing.  What happened next is that......

(click here for post 1, post 2,  post 3). 


..... I fully expected never to hear from him again, he wrote back, informing me that I had failed him.  “You [Ahnday] failed to produce the good you had initially envisioned,” he states officiously in this reply,

you can tell your readers what you like!i have done and published about 30 clinical trials in this area.this correspondence shows,i think,that even the most well-meaning test on 1 or 2 individuals is scientifically not meaningfull.you approached me asking whether i would be willing to do a test with you ,i responded positively provided that this test would be meaningfull.as it turned out,it is not.now you are asking me to come up with a design that is conclusive.to the best of my knowledge,such a design does not exist given the restrictions of the experiment such as sample size and distance.the way to test the efficacy of treatments is to conduct a rigorous clinical trial which,under the constraints of the present situation,we cannot do.

i conclude that i gave it a try but you failed to produce the goods you had initially envisaged.
in my view,this was an interesting lesson to learn.
best regards

So, after reading this, I’m thinking, “This correspondence doesn’t show anything, except that the doctor wants to say ‘no.’ What ‘goods’ is he talking about? The only thing I promised him was free healing and we never even got that far!”

The good doctor had finally gotten my goat.  As far as I was concerned there was no good reason for him to blame his own unwillingness on me or on alternative healing!  On April 4, I banged out the following response,

All due respect, Mr. Ernst, what I have learned through my professional career is that when either doctors or lawyers start accusing others of not being smart or good enough - as you did in this email exchange with me when you said that "I’m beginning to suspect that you fail to understand the essentials of trial design" or "you failed to produce the goods you had initially envisaged" - it is because these doctors or lawyers really don't have a worthy argument, so personal attack becomes the only avenue of saving face.

I never promised you scientific design. The only thing I promised you was 12 free healing sessions. I agreed to a scientific design when you requested it. However, I also asked you several times to set forth parameters for your suggested design and you did not - facts which show that perhaps it is you who is not following through.

You are helping me to remember how quickly the scientific community can move to bullying of those with new ideas, as if science has somehow forgotten all the pioneers who allowed themselves to be laughed at and who moved forward anyway to make important new discoveries - Louie Pasteur and Wright Brothers among them. (For what it's worth, I believe that the scientist that finally proves the existence of chi will win a Nobel prize, and, I expect to eventually encounter a scientific mind open enough to try.)

It appears that you can dish it out but are less comfortable taking it. You spent an entire book denigrating the work of countless devoted alternative health care practitioners but are unwilling to engage in an objective dialogue about the soundness of your ideas.

Just know that you are not fooling me with your scientific blustering ... I also know that exploring ideas like the ones I have suggested, and openly communicating with the public about your personal experience, could well be professional suicide. I can see that at this juncture in your career you have every motivation to protect yourself. Accordingly, I respectfully accept that you have declined my offer and I leave you to your paradigm, as restrictive as it may be.

I wish you the best. As always, if you change your mind and actually want to get on with the business of designing an experiment then, my offer is still stands. Just know that I am more likely to respond to emails with substantive content, polite tone and proper punctuation.

Take care,
Ahnday Meweh
Spontaneous Mystic

And so it goes....I haven't heard back from Dr. Ernst.

Book Review - Dr. Ersnt Draws his Sword: a Duel Begins – Correspondence with the Authors (Post 3 of 4)

Dr. Edzard Ernst, M.D., author of Trick or Treatment: the Undeniable Truth about Alternative Medicine, discusses with me, over email, whether he will accept my offer of free healing.  In the next part of our exchange, Dr. Ernst, gets a little personal.

(click here for post 1, click here for post 2)

I explained to Dr. Ernst what my offer of free healing would involve as follows: 

..........As with any client, modalities would be determined through a two-step process. Step 1: I consult spiritual beings to determine what is needed, Step 2: you and I would discuss the information received, your comfort with recommendations, and how to implement recommendations in a way that is consistent with experiment design. Through this we would develop a kind of treatment plan that would guide our work for remaining sessions.

I hope this provides you with the desired information. I am interested in what objective monitoring you suggest.

Ahnday

Perhaps it was the specter of getting spiritual beings involved in his personal life, or the idea of publically sharing his experience that threw him for a loop.  Whatever the cause, in his next email, gone was the open-minded, visionary Dr. Ernst, the man who is also known as the world’s first professor of Complimentary Medicine.  On April 1, he dashed my hopes when he declared that he had no interest in partnership…

interesting!

i am not interested in proving nor in creating a partnership.i want to test a hypothesis.this is how i understood you very first email.youe experiment is not a conlusive test:even if i feel better after you intervention,how do we know that i would not have felt exactly the same way without it?

regards

The handwriting was on the wall. I could see that more than likely I would never be blending flower remedies for Dr. Ernst, nor would we work together to solve the mysteries of Chi. Nonetheless, I wanted to him to know that I was still open and that I believed partnership would be productive.  I wrote back,

I understand that... that's why I suggested objective and subjective testing ... for the objective testing we create a hypothesis for testing and for the subjective part we record your experience, and in this way we create a well-rounded experiment. Aren't you even a little bit interested in discovering why people are healing with alternative methods even though your analysis says they won't? Think of yourself as a latter day Marie Curie, although I guarantee that distance healing won't give you radiation poisoning!

My offer's on the table. If your pluck returns, let me know.

Ahnday

I’m not sure what happened and why he responded again - maybe he wanted the last word.  Whatever his motivations, he wrote back this same day, telling me that among other things I didn’t really understand trial design. Amazingly, he also stated that he understood why people are healing with alternative medicine.  He wrote,

objective tests do also improve due to the natural history of the condition or the placebo effect etc.i'm beginning to suspect that you fail to understand the essentials of trial design.i do understand why people are healing,believe me.but this is not how you approached me in the first place.you suggested a rigorous test of youe healing method.where is it?
regards
e Ernst

WAIT! Did he just say that?  Did Dr. Edzard Ernst, MD, - the guy with a million abbreviations trailing along after his name and staunch advocate of conventional medicine – did he just say, “I understand why people are healing, believe me.”  Did he just admit that alternative healing works!?.. OMG!

Whatever he was or was not admitting to, I could tell he didn’t want any healing sessions.  I replied, letting him know that I was still open.  I tried also to give him a way out, with this email,

Do you have any suggestions for trial design - I am more than open to hearing about them and incorporating them into any experiment.

Edzard, I sense that your enthusiasm for this experiment may be waning.  (Just know that your arguments in Trick or Treatment would carry more weight with readers - that is you would have more credibility - if you were willing to submit to the methods you criticize).

If you have something specific in terms of trial design, please let me know.  For the time being, I will tell my readers that you are not interested in working with me.  My offer remains on the table.  Perhaps in the future you will change your mind.

Best to you,
Ahnday

Though I fully expected never to hear from him again, he wrote back, informing me that I had failed him.  “You [Ahnday] failed to produce the good you had initially envisioned,” he states officiously in this reply,...

(for more, see next post)