Patrick Stewart

The darkest dream. The most lucid nightmare. Alas, I cracked. I could no longer act as though, “Everything was alright.” Because, it wasn’t. My heart…broken… my soul, nowhere to be found. Emptiness. Complete emptiness, and not in the Zen Buddhist kind of way. Nothing mattered, nothing seemed real, that is, except for the reality of living in a seemingly defunct body. If my body was once a temple, it was now a part of the dirtiest of slums. Thieves had broken in and had stolen my very essence, leaving me out to dry. Something was terribly wrong with my body. But don’t tell that to a doctor. To them, everything was fine. And what couldn’t be explained physically, must have been the result of an unbalanced mentality. While I suffered from a laundry list of physical ailments, the only words that escaped the mouths of diagnostics and psychiatrists alike were depression and alexithymia, two mental disorders. Did I mention that I had a physical problem? Physical.
         Although, I couldn’t deny my deep depression. But, after a year and a half of not felling like yourself, after a year and a half of looking at pictures, watching videos, and reading newspaper articles of your past self-all of these acts had been desperate attempts to “feel” like myself again- after a year of a half of looking back at my past self, at the giant of a person I once was, I felt miniscule, I felt like… dying.
         The obituary had already started, reading something like, “former high school basketball star, senior class president, conscientious student, and all around nice guy, was found dead yesterday in his college dorm room. He took his own life. He no longer wanted to live.” Harsh words for a young man that once lived so close to God. A young man that used to attend church every Sunday, pray, meditate, and read spiritual texts for pleasure. I couldn’t help but ask where was God now? Could he not see me in pain, crying myself to sleep and then remaining in bed to escape what had now been my reality? I sometimes swore at God, in a desperate attempt to summon the one universal force. But I felt nothing. Could not even God find anything wrong with me? Had the divine spirit sided with the countless doctors I’d visited? I was totally disconnected, heading down a dark path… alone.
         My condition not only affected me. Right beside me was my mother. She cried for me, blessed me, and undoubtedly spent her waking hours praying for me. I was her baby. I was once physically a part of her, but now, I didn’t want to be a part of anything. I wanted out, and my mom knew it. She kept urging me to hold on, to be patient, but I saw the light at the end of the tunnel, flickering, fading. I once overheard my mom sobbing, asking my older brother, Michael, how she was to live when everyday she had to convince me not to take my life. It hurt me. I wanted to get through this, to smile again, to see my mom smile again. I wanted to live, but a clear-cut path to recovery had not shown itself to me, no tangible solution. I was 99.9 % hopeless. But, perhaps it was that .1% of hope that kept me searching for an answer. I wanted to believe that there was a way out, and, through the help of a spiritual master, I eventually saw that there was.
         Call it luck. Call it coincidence. While flipping through a Science of Mind magazine, my mother glanced over an article singing the praises of an energy healer, a Shaman by the name of Iana Lahi. My mother and I both agreed that further pursuing the aid of western medicine seemed hopeless, and that the search for relief would now rest upon the shoulders of alternative healing.
         As my mother recalled, the Science of Mind  article exerted a sort of magnetic force, pulling her eyes and conscience to each letter of each word on each page. A beam of light, of hope, penetrated through the film of months of darkness. A new paradigm had opened.
         I had no idea what to expect in my first phone session. It began at 8 o’clock on a December night. Iana calmly guided me on a journey. While my physical body remained seated upon an old wooden chair in my upstairs bedroom, my conscience and soul departed the room. Shortly thereafter, I embraced a part of myself that had been hiding in dark shadows: my child self. I cried. How did this happen? How did I abandon the most precious part of myself?
         After the first session, I recognized something had changed, though, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what. For a few moments after the session, I felt energized, I felt SOMETHING. Something within my body. For a few moments, I had an identity again. While this initial euphoria eventually wore off, in each of the following sessions I connected with more and more of my internal energy. I became empowered. I could hold this energy, draw it in, and move it throughout my body. I became aware of a universal law, a law that I had once known but forgot along the way. Everything is energy. Everything, no exceptions. And, while energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it can be manipulated, transformed, and intensified. This obviously includes the energy within the human body.
         My work with Iana healed my physical body as well as my soul. In a month’s time, I escaped the threatening darkness of suicide and welcomed my eternal light to shine once more. Iana’s work granted me the greatest gift of all, the gift of empowerment. I am eternally grateful to her, and will sing her praises to all of the troubled, depressed, and sick.

Road to Recovery
Karen Stewart

My husband and I reared seven children, but nothing prepared us for the nightmare we would face with our son, who had been having undiagnosed physical problems for a year and a half.  He had a laundry list of symptoms and gave up playing basketball because his body was so “unhealthy”.
Visits to countless physicians and regimens of physical therapy failed to produce any change in our son’s health.  We watched helplessly as he sank into a deep depression, convinced that suicide was the only way out of his deteriorating situation.  Despite increasing dosages of anti-depressants and regular sessions with a competent psychiatrist, our son showed little improvement; he was diagnosed with a serious anxiety disorder, a “mind-body disconnect”.
During hours and hours of conversation, I assured my son that the answer to his problems was already in the Mind of God.  We had to trust that the Universe would reveal that answer to us.  However, he was unconvinced.  My husband and I lived in constant fear that our son would make good the threats to end his young life.
Desperate for divine guidance and inspiration, I was leafing through back issues of  Science of Mind magazine when an article on the mind-body connection (Dec. 2004) caught my eye.  The article contained a quote from Iana Lahi, a noted energy healer.  Intrigued, I researched Iana on the Internet and placed a call.  Iana convinced me that phone sessions would be adequate to get our son started on the road to recovery, and we could make arrangements for a face-to-face meeting at a later date.
After three weeks of working with Iana, our son experienced a remarkable turnaround.  His eyes once again shone with the joy of living and he returned to school with a renewed spirit.  Iana later visited us for an intensive weekend of energy healing, a magical and sacred time for our family.
I will be eternally grateful to Iana for her healing wisdom and to the Divine Mind for leading us to her through your magazine.  God does indeed give us everything we need.