My Healing Story– And Yours?

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curing, healing, HIV/AIDS, Kebba Buckley Button, natural healing, stress

© 2016 Kebba Buckley Button, MS, OM.  World Rights Reserved.  A version of this article first appeared in this column in November 2015.

Is there something in your body or your life that you wish were healed?  The spectrum of positive outcomes is limitless.  Understandings and many other tools can lead us to comfort, peace, release, and relief.

Last year, I went to my first meeting of a healing ministry at my church.  The church is a large Episcopal Church in Scottsdale, Arizona.  The lay healing ministers shared stories of healings they had experienced, and we discussed dimensions of healing.

I am deeply committed  to focusing on the positive, the Upbeat Living, the joy– all the Highest and Best.  Not the past or the pain.  However, that day I was moved to share with this loving group my most dramatic healing story: mine. Here it is.

When I was 26, one evening, I began to feel cranky.  I thought “[H]ow odd!  What’s going on?”  My body replied that the large joints of my hands were burning  But I thought, “[N]o problem.  Mom has had mild arthritis since my age.  I’ll take aspirin, like she does.”  Oh no!  Within a year, I had a strong burning sensation from head to toe.  And there was a terrible stiffness with the pain; I could only walk slowly.  Over a few months, my joints began to enlarge and I could hardly use my hands.  In the cafeteria at work, I had to carry my lunch tray on my forearms, then hit it with my hip to slide it down my arms onto the lunch table.  On my worst day, it took me 2 hours to be able to turn over, reach the phone, call in to work, and finally sit up in bed.

The wish for healing has always been half of health.

                                        ~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

I was terrified at the idea that, if this kept progressing so fast, I would be needing a wheelchair by my mid-thirties.  As an engineering manager, I made this a top-priority vital project. Already a dancer, meditator, and yoga practitioner, I learned the latest on nutrition and supplements, controlled my diet, and took up oriental energy healing, primarily Jin Shin Jyutsu.  I learned ChiKung (Chinese yoga).  I learned to muscle-test for supplements and other helps.  I learned there are many approaches other than medication, to beat a painful condition.

When I was 33, I was at a party, and someone was talking about her arthritis as though she had married it.  She was obsessed with it, in love with it.  But that’s another column.  I heard myself say to her, “[W]ell, when I had horrible crippling arthritis, I found several things really helped…”  From there, I have no memory of what I shared with her, because I was so shocked to hear myself speak of my hellish condition in the past tense.  It had finished leaving sometime over the previous few months!  I learned that just because you have a condition doesn’t mean it has to be progressive. And just because you have a diagnosis doesn’t mean you have to keep it.  Later, as my joints actually healed and shrank, I learned that just because you have organic body damage, it doesn’t mean it can’t reverse.  These were huge revelations to me.  Now, at 63, most days, I have no pain of any kind whatsoever.  And people take me for much younger than I am.  My health age is years younger than I am.

Photo by Microsoft

I now see the opportunity to experience that crippling condition as a transformative gift in my life.  I became so fascinated with natural pain solutions and healing possibilities that I left engineering and morphed into an energy- and spiritual healer.  I began giving stress management trainings.  I became an ordained minister, a spiritual teacher and an award-winning author.

In the 1980’s, the AIDS epidemic hit Phoenix.  I volunteered at the Malta Center, a community healing organization funded by a Catholic charity.  We served HIV/AIDS patients and their loved ones, without regard to their income.

I learned that I had friends who had been HIV-positive for 10 years, with no symptoms at all, even fatigue.  I learned that some AIDS patients got very close to the Divine in their last weeks.  I learned that some seemed to go into a state of Grace in their last weeks, in complete harmony with Life, the Universe, and God. Some said their lives were healed, and then they passed on.  They weren’t cured, but they were healed.  Today, the Clinton Initiative and other organizations stream pharmaceutical protocols to many countries, and HIV is not the frightening specter it once was.

Today, I am the award-winning author of 3 books and hundreds of articles.  I serve people with any level of physical, mental, emotional, spiritual distress.  I offer holistic consulting, energy transformations and oriental energy therapy, nutritional consulting, muscle testing, intuitive assistance, and many specific stress-conquering methods and meditation techniques.  Do you want healing?  Let’s remember:

• There are many approaches other than medication, to beat horrible pain and other health conditions.
• Just because you have a diagnosis doesn’t mean it gets to rule your life.
• Just because you have a condition doesn’t mean it has to be progressive.
• Just because there was never a medical protocol before doesn’t mean there won’t be one soon, if you like medical protocols.
• Just because you’re not cured doesn’t mean you can’t be healed.  Or the reverse.

What body/mind/heart/spirit hurts do you have today?  Why wait to call and start your healing?  Living your life in positive power is truly Upbeat Living!

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Energy – Peace – Meditation

• If you enjoy this post, please click “like” in the FB widget in the right hand column. You’ll have our undying gratitude plus a huge rise in your Good Karma! Due to a recent FB change, our “likes” look low.  Thanks for your help!
• Kebba Buckley Button is a stress management expert and has a natural healing practice.  She is also an ordained minister. She is the author of the award-winning book, Discover The Secret Energized You (http://tinyurl.com/b44v3br), plus the 2013 book, Peace Within:  Your Peaceful Inner Core, Second Edition(http://tinyurl.com/mqg3uvc ). Her newest book is Sacred Meditation: Embracing the Divine, available through her office.  Just email SacredMeditation@kebba.com. 
• For an appointment or to ask Kebba to speak for your group: call 480-250-1177 or email bookings@kebba.com .

Forget Age Stress: 70 is the New 40

Tags

age stress, aging, Barbara Penn-Atklins, heatlh age, Kebba Buckley Button, lifestyle, peace within, stress

© 2015 Kebba Buckley Button, MS, OM. World Rights Reserved.

 

© stokkete – Fotolia

When I was in my twenties, for a while, I worked for a State agency. At that time, all Arizona State agencies offered employees a wellness screening. One of the big benefits of the health screening, done from a questionnaire, was that each person got a wellness score, their “health age”. I had never heard of “health age” before. As they defined it at the time, it was a measure of your actual age worked together with factors such as weight, exercise, length of commute, and whether you smoked. I was so pleased: my health age came in 5 years younger than my actual age.

 

I think of health age again every time I hear someone proclaim, “I’m old!” When I hear that, I wonder what rights or social rights they are claiming for themselves.  Also, some people talk about how old they feel at tired times, such as when they’re waking up.

 

Age is just a number, and mine is unlisted.

~ Unknown

We have many ideas about what age means. Age is a condition that supposedly moves in one direction and increases, independent of your choices. However, nothing can be further from the truth! I think youth is all about how you feel.  And we have many choices we can make to feel great.  If you feel young, energetic, flexible, and generally healthy, and you have peace within, then you are young. If you feel old, tired, stiff, achy, stressed, and generally unhealthy, then your health age is getting older–sorry! In an example from my own life, when I was 26 to 33, I had horrible, burning, crippling arthritis and felt very old. I moved stiffly, and other than my face, I probably looked old. But, I beat the condition in 8 years, and I began to feel very young and healthy. Read some of my adventure with that condition at http://wp.me/pw4HM-lB.

 

My husband recounts a story of an amazing woman he met while hiking the Grand Canyon one year. The Grand Canyon trails are long, and some are steep. If you go down into the Canyon, you also have to take one or another of the trails back out, no matter how much work it is. My husband used to go hike the Canyon yearly with some very fit middle-aged male friends. They would all work up to their Canyon trek, practicing on local Phoenix mountain trails, of which there are many. They would even wear loaded packs on these practice hikes, to be sure they were really fit for the Canyon.

 

Once on the Canyon trail, my husband’s group was puffing along, finding the hiking to be strenuous. A very petite, senior-looking woman with blunt-cut white hair came by, moving rapidly along the same trail, but coming out of the Canyon. My husband, who was then in his sixties, expressed his admiration to her, for her vitality and speed. She pulled her chin up and stood straight and tall at her possible five full feet of height. She gave my husband a stern look and said, “[Y]oung man, obviously you don’t know who I am! I lead walks like this [13 miles round trip] a few times a month for the Sierra Club!” Let’s say this woman’s health age was rather young, and she was very vital.

 

So are you ready now to challenge your age numbers? Consultant Bara Penn-Atkins (www.sunrisebeginnings.com) is an expert in leadership, retirement readiness, life options, and how to build a life of significance. Atkins has written a book, rightly called 70 is the New 40. In her chapter called Discover Your Power!, Atkins describes a transition all people go through:

Photo courtesy of Barbara Penn-Atkins

 

As a person celebrates age forty and beyond, something mystical and magical happens. How we feel life should be measured begins to take a different form. There is an awakening of the self, and our individual independence becomes profoundly important. …Internally, the psyche takes on a new maturity, and it only gets better and more positive with age.

~ Barbara Penn-Atkins

 

In Atkins’s book, she offers us exercises to write out our challenges, opportunities, and meanings. She shows us ways to transform the 3 D’s of aging– disease, disability, and depression—into 3 new D’s: discovery, discipline, and dedication. So how do you feel: fit, healthy, vivid, contributing? A person who is 70 now can feel the way a 40-year-old used to feel. Abraham Lincoln famously said,

 

In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.

~ Abraham Lincoln

 

I’m not saying our age numbers are entirely bogus.  However, age and aging do not have to stress us. Does your life fit you? How old do you feel? And what’s in your years? I would love to hear your thoughts.

 

 

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• If you enjoy this post, please click “like” in the FB widget in the right hand column! You’ll have our undying gratitude plus a huge rise in your Good Karma! Due to a recent FB change, our “likes” look low. Thanks for your help!

Energy – Peace – Meditation

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Kebba Buckley Button is a stress management expert.  She also has a natural healing practice and is an ordained minister. She is the author of the award-winning book, Discover The Secret Energized You (http://tinyurl.com/b44v3br), plus the 2013 book, Peace Within:  Your Peaceful Inner Core, Second Edition(http://tinyurl.com/mqg3uvc ). Her newest book is Sacred Meditation: Embracing the Divine, available through her office. Just email SacredMeditation@kebba.com.
• For an appointment or to ask Kebba to speak for your group: bookings@kebba.com .