A few years back our family was featured in a documentary by Dr. Joe Dispenza about the incredible healing power of the mind. In the movie, we talk about the miraculous experience we had shortly after learning to meditate when our daughter’s body spontaneously healed from food allergies she was experiencing at the time.
It’s been almost six years since they filmed that footage of us and our sweet baby girl (she was so little!), and since the movie has now officially been released for wider audiences, I wanted to share the story behind our participation in the documentary and where we are now.
I first met Dr. Joe at a Hay House event in Austin, Texas in the spring of 2013. He was giving a lecture on his new book, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, and I was immediately captivated. His scientific, logical approach to meditation and changing the brain resonated deeply with me, and I was excited to learn more from him.
That June he was teaching a meditation workshop in Austin, and my husband and I attended. Over the three-day event we learned how our thought/feeling loops trigger chemical reactions in the brain and body that keep us locked in the same patterns and behaviors resulting in the same experiences in our outer world. We also learned how to use meditation to interrupt those loops by accessing the “hard drive” in the brain to release and rewire those habituated patterns.
To say my mind was blown that weekend is making light of what happened. My entire being was altered. I left that event undoubtedly, 100% a different person than when I arrived, and as I look back on it now, I realize that it was the catalyzing moment that would change the course of my entire life.
At the workshop we learned a meditation called the “Blessing of the Energy Centers” to help align and balance the energy centers in the body. The energy centers correspond to the physical points in the body where our glands meet with large plexuses of nerves where incredible amounts of information is transmitted and stored. When these centers are fed chaotic and stressful energetic input, the result in the body is dis-ease and incoherence. When they are fed balanced and loving energetic input, the result is healing and coherence.
Available on Amazon, iTunes, Google Play and Dr. Joe’s website. There are now six versions of the Blessing of Energy Centers (BOTEC) meditation, but this is the original version and the one I did with Chloe.
At the time we were in the throes of food issues with our then 10-1/2-month-old daughter. She had been breastfed up until 7 months, but when I introduced formula she had an extreme allergic reaction that landed us in urgent care. She’d also been having reactions to almost all the solid foods we’d been trying to introduce (everything from strawberries and mangoes to bananas and sweet potatoes). We learned that she had a severe dairy allergy and extreme sensitivity to a host of other foods. She could hardly eat anything at all.
One day a short time after the meditation workshop, she fell asleep on me while we were in the glider in her bedroom. I didn’t want to disturb her and selfishly wanted to soak up all that sweet goodness, so I held her and did the Blessing of the Energy Centers meditation while she napped against my chest. Although the food allergies were a huge issue in our lives at the time, I didn’t do the meditation with them in mind. I was overwhelmed with love holding my daughter and simply focused on feelings of deep gratitude and abundance. As I moved through the meditation, I blessed and centered my own energy, and then I would pass it to her corresponding energy center. It was effortless and flowing and filled with love.
My testimonial on Dr. Joe’s website. This is some of the footage that was used in the documentary.
A few days and several meditations later, I felt this divine knowing that she was healed of her food issues. I told my husband, and we decided to try offering her tiny amounts of the offending foods. If she was still allergic, she would present with a skin rash around the mouth, and we’d know right away before giving her enough to cause any real issues or distress.
Little by little over several days, we fed her everything. All the fruits that had bothered her. All the odd veggies that had caused rashes. And then the dairy. It was at this point that the most glorious thing happened. Nothing. There was no reaction. No redness. No swelling. No vomiting. Nothing. She had literally had a reaction just days before from accidental exposure to a food on the no-no list, and now she was enjoying the food with a smile.
Joe had said in the workshop to email him with any and all miracles anyone experienced, so right away I emailed his assistant Paula and told her all about what had happened. She wrote back reveling in our joy, but we didn’t really expect any further attention from them about it.
A few weeks later in July, Joe was teaching an advanced-level workshop in Denver, and Brian and I desperately wanted to go. You can imagine how we felt. We had only been practicing Joe’s meditations for a few weeks, and already our lives had turned upside down.
We didn’t have the money to fly to Colorado and pay the fee for the workshop, but just like the magic of Chloe’s healing, the money miraculously appeared. A family member called out of the blue and said that she received a message that she needed to give us a lump sum of money for a very important reason. You guys, it was cray-cray. She gave us enough to not only attend the Denver workshop but also the next workshop after that in Carefree, Arizona seven months later.
Brian and I in the Denver airport on the way to the advanced meditation workshop.
At the workshop, the unknown happened yet again when Dr. Joe called us onstage to share the story we’d sent to Paula in the email. We didn’t know he was going to do that and were shocked and exhilarated to share our joy with a roomful of hundreds of people.
During the workshop I had a meditation vision that we would be featured in a movie with Dr. Joe. I lightheartedly told him about the vision while we were onstage, and he said that they had actually just started filming footage at this very workshop with the intention of eventually releasing a documentary. We didn’t know if we’d be in it, but even the validation of the intention for a film sent chills down my spine.
Brian and I onstage sharing our story at the Denver Advanced Meditation Workshop.
After the workshop, life continued to be peppered with meditation miracles. My body experienced its own spontaneous healing from chronic pain I’d had from an injury over a decade ago, and we continued to celebrate miracles around money, health and our overall happiness. It was at that time that Dr. Joe’s video team reached out and asked if they could fly to our home in Austin and get footage of us with Chloe. They wanted to feature us in the documentary!
In September 2013 they came out and filmed all the adorable footage of Chloe you can see in the testimonial video as well as the more-detailed footage shown in the documentary. It was such an encouraging, sweet experience, and we couldn’t believe it was all happening just like I’d seen in my meditation vision at the workshop in July.
But then a month later, we experienced a heart-wrenching setback. Chloe and I were driving home from Whole Foods, and she was kind of fussy. It was getting close to lunchtime, so I passed her back a kale chip I’d just bought from the store. She kept batting it away, but I kept passing it to her and coaxing her to eat it thinking she was just being picky about trying something new.
We were just a few blocks from home, and when I turned back to see if she was eating it, I noticed that her lips were starting to swell. My husband was at work, so I frantically called my little sister to see if she’d meet me at my house for support in case I needed to take Chloe to the ER. We got home, and I realized the kale chips were crusted in ground cashews, which I had no idea she was allergic to.
Chloe after eating cashew-crusted kale chips in October 2013.
I was devastated. Just months before we had undeniably witnessed a healing miracle, and now we were seemingly experiencing the same pattern of incoherence. My sister and I took Chloe to the ER, and my husband met us there. Afterwards, we went to the allergist and learned that even though all the old allergies were still gone, she now had allergies to cashews, pistachios and eggs.
I wish I could say that our energy stayed steady, and we just moved forward doing what we knew to do. Yes, we kept meditating. And yes, we stayed as positive as we could. But I honestly felt like a fraud. I questioned every single miracle we’d experienced, and I began doubting everything we’d learned and implemented in our lives. We were so young in our meditation practice, and we’d gone from the highest high to what felt like the lowest low.
I tried to do the healing meditations with Chloe like I’d done before, but this time they were riddled with fear and ridiculous amounts of striving. Even though so much in our lives was going so well, I couldn’t seem to rise above the fear and disappointment around this new development. And I watched myself fall back into old patterns of self-criticism and unworthiness.
I want to sidebar for a moment, because this is such an important point to address. In the six years since Chloe’s healing, Brian and I have attended at least ten (if not more) of Joe’s workshops and have developed a vast community of ‘meditation friends’ through these events. You would not believe the magic I have witnessed. I have seen firsthand people with dire illnesses completely and unmistakably healed in a single meditation, and I have also watched as people went into remission after an intensely healing week only to backslide back into their condition once they got home into their old patterns. We have lost friends as a community, and we have celebrated numerous lives saved.
And although it is tough to watch when the setbacks happen, I think it’s so important to emphasize that it doesn’t cancel out all the miracles, all the magic, all the energy that we all know without a shadow of a doubt that we’ve experienced. It took me a long time to separate the two without emotion or story, and it’s such an important aspect of truly mastering this work. Dis-ease is simply incoherent energy, and energy doesn’t take things personally or do things out of spite. It just is.
As I look back on our own setback, I have so much more grace and compassion for myself. I see how much of my own energy patterns around achieving and perfection were crumbling before me, and yet at the same time I realize now that I made some really important choices at that time.
First, I actively and resolutely chose not to identify as a parent of a child with allergies, and I consciously chose to not foster that identity for my child. I didn’t want to give her condition any extra energy by giving it my attention.
I didn’t join the allergy group our doctor recommended. I didn’t constantly talk about Chloe’s newfound allergies or broadcast the story outside of my closest confidantes. I tried not to be overly worried about exposure or freak out when she was around people eating the foods she was allergic to. I wasn’t careless with her safety, but I also didn’t create an entire fear-based identity around it. I maintained the belief that this wouldn’t be our reality forever, so why get entangled with it.
Secondly, I fanned the flame of hope that we could tackle this energetically and that the allergies were simply an incoherent energy that could be healed. Even if it hadn’t healed spontaneously like before, I knew that eventually this wouldn’t be our reality. I held a strong sense of knowing that Chloe wouldn’t have food allergies forever, and I trusted the timeline, no matter what that looked like.
As Chloe got older and could understand more, Brian and I were incredibly purposeful with how we talked to her about needing to avoid certain foods. We told her the story about how the first allergies had disappeared when she was a baby, and we assured her that she wouldn’t have to avoid the new foods forever, just while her body was sorting its energy out. We told her to hold a picture of perfect health in her mind and to send her body loving energy.
Every year at her annual allergy visit I insisted the doctor do skin testing. He often pushed back saying that people don’t often outgrow tree nut allergies, so there wasn’t really a reason to test. But I was resolute. We weren’t trying to outgrow it; we were actively working to heal it. I knew that with those tests we would see evidence of our focus on health, and I knew that we needed the yearly wins to keep us vigilante in maintaining the steadiness of our energy. And every single year one of two things happened: 1) the allergies decreased in intensity, or 2) the allergies disappeared altogether.
Chloe’s last skin test in 2018. The top left is the only remaining allergy - pistachio, and the bottom right is the control.
In 2016 Chloe’s egg allergy went away. In 2018 her cashew allergy went away as well. The allergist was blown away. At first he thought it was an error and couldn’t believe it, but Chloe and I smiled knowing what had happened. The pistachio is the only reaction still presenting (shown above this past year), but we know that even that will heal in perfect timing.
While I know that hindsight can tend to oversimplify the months and years of growth and pain, I can honestly see the beauty in how this all unfolded for us. We have experienced both the joy of instant, miraculous healing and manifestation, and we have also seen the slow burn of what it means to shift energy over time. I 100% believe that Chloe won’t deal with allergies her entire life, and I no longer feel any sort of fraud energy about our story or what’s happened in our lives. What occurred when she was a baby was real. And what’s slowly transpired over the last six years is real as well.
Chloe, Brian and I have all experienced our own versions of spontaneous healing in our bodies, minds and hearts. And we have all also struggled with certain physical and emotional patterns that have taken more time to shift. Regardless of the timing of any outcome, it doesn’t change what I know to be true.
I know without a doubt that we have the power to heal ourselves using our minds. I know that meditation is the portal to that power. And I know that when we focus our attention and center on love, anything is possible.
We truly do all have supernatural minds.
