PATIENT TO PATIENT 2007

How did it all start? High stress, high profile corporate job? Life in the fast track? Childhood trauma? All of the above? I don’t know. What I do know is: I wasn’t able to breathe for about a year and a half. Every ten minutes or so, I had to concentrate on taking a breath because my breathing was so shallow in between. I was terrified.

I went to doctors, I had blood exams, I had a chest x-ray - - and nothing. I was “fine”. But yet I couldn’t breathe.

Fast forward - - I had a yoga teacher who also was a Kairos intern. I happened to read her website one day, and she wrote about how Kairos Therapy could improve one’s ability to breathe.

Right away, I called her up and made an appointment for this. I didn’t know what it was exactly, and I didn’t care. I was desperate.

After a few Kairos sessions with her, I was able to breathe easier.

But then, something else happened: I had a complete collapse. * One day I woke up and was unable to read, unable to stand, unable to move, unable to think. I was basically a vegetable. I called my yoga teacher/Kairos Intern practitioner and hold her what was happening. She referred me to Jan because – I think – she knew my condition was beyond what she as an intern could deal with.

So I started Kairos with Jan. In the beginning, I wasn’t even sure if I could drive to her place. I was destroyed and completely dissociated. Some months later, when I went to see a medical doctor (solely to help me complete some forms for disability), I was “diagnosed” as having had a nervous breakdown, a psychotic break, chronic fatigue syndrome, and fibromyalgia. Whatever these things are, I don’t know and I don’t care. They are just labels doctors give to people when things go very wrong and they don’t know why. My diagnosis to myself is: I had a complete collapse.

After three to four sessions of Kairos per week [and an intensive workshop] over a period of about three months, I was “cured”. I could walk, think, BREATHE. Basically I was brought back to health within three months at a financial cost of less than $3000.

Had I gone the route of the established medical profession - - doctors, psychologist, blood tests, etc. - - this cost probably would have been closer to twenty, thirty, thousand dollars**. and I would still be extremely ill.

Without Kairos Therapy, I would be like so many people today - - chronically ill, full of prescription medicines, hopeless, and depressed. Instead, after only three months of Kairos, following a complete mental and physical collapse, I am 100% healthy in every way.

Linda, October 2007

*The function of shallow breathing is to keep some unpleasant emotion out of awareness. By shallowing our breathing, we can continue to “function” despite deep emotional issues under the surface. The initial kairos sessions this woman received relaxed her enough that the breath came into the body more fully, and this enabled her to feel what she had been not feeling. Rather, it prevented her from NOT feeling the feelings she carried inside her body. She began to decompensate, i.e. her strategies for coping were what collapsed. It was then that she could actually begin to get well. Really well.

** : estimate by a M.S. in Hospital Administration for this scenario: Well over one hundred thousand dollars.