Before I went camping this weekend, I was having the worst allergy attack of my whole life. In absolute desperation I emailed Crow Mitchell, who I knew previously through Marty’s gaming group, because she had mentioned something about Psych-K, which is a method of communication with the subconscious for the purpose of reprogramming a belief system. It has ostensibly been applied to many ends, including allergies (among other things), and Crow is someone I trust — so it was worth looking into.

Crow’s explanations and my own research revealed a solution that seemed to run along the same lines as psycho-cybernetics, which I adore, and the world views of people I respect, like Steve Pavlina and Wayne Dyer. I had recently picked up a book by Bruce Lipton, too, and that didn’t hurt! I did not research Psych-K exhaustively, but I did schedule a session with Crow last Wednesday afternoon. It was super interesting. Although neither of us expected all problems to be solved in one session, I don’t think I expected as nice a result as we got. As with any work involving the subconscious, or unconscious, or other-than-conscious, Psych-K seems to be a continuing process. Before we can alter a belief system and achieve the desired result, we have to know what’s really going on. And sometimes figuring that out is a challenge!

To make a long story slightly shorter, we did affect my allergies. The session lasted about an hour if I remember correctly, and we did a lot of muscle testing to determine our best course of action. Most of you are aware that I am super allergic to cats. Er, at least, I was. Now I’m not so sure, because after Wednesday’s Psych-K session, I sat on the floor and snuggled kitties! I petted and played with them, and snuggled my face into their fur. Yes. Yes, I really did. And for the first time that I can remember, it wasn’t about my allergies — it was only about whether I could keep from choking myself on flying cat fur. Ha! I didn’t sneeze, or experience explosive itching, or end up blowing my nose every five minutes. I felt… absolutely fine.

For me, it doesn’t matter whether we dispensed with a real cat allergy, or just a mental conviction that I was allergic to cats: If the result is one where I spend an afternoon covered in cat hair and don’t run home crying and miserable, it’s a great result. And the fact that I went to her with seasonal allergies but ended up fixing an animal allergy — temporarily or permanently — doesn’t bother me, because it’s clear that something really fascinating is going on with this Psych-K stuff. Incidentally, the awful seasonal allergy symptoms I was having did go away, almost entirely, for most of the weekend. Friends who are experiencing the same symptoms didn’t have them let up the way I did, which makes me really wonder. (I felt a little bit guilty listening to people blowing their noses and sniffling through the day when I felt mostly awesome. Oopsies.) We’re planning another session soon, and considering the subject material we covered last week, I can easily see not only how we ended up helping my cat allergy but how we might concentrate in a better direction and affect my seasonal allergies better this time around. It’s so interesting to have people around who work in these ways! And hell if I’m going to pump myself full of drugs for three weeks every summer. You know? That’s crazy.

I don’t know whether the cat allergy solution will stick or need to be reinforced. I don’t know what will happen next. But I never, never expected such an interesting experience, and such a promising set of results. This is an experiment I want to continue! It’s such a new area of interest for me, and I plan to do more exploring. I do feel the need to put in a plug for Crow, however, as brilliant as she’s been. You have never met a person so connected, complete and understanding as this woman can be. She works in Psych-K, energy healing, life coaching, sacred geometry, and we’ve started referring to her as a raw food alchemist. You would not believe the awesome food she fed me this weekend, either. She makes a mean raw cacao-avocado dip, I’ll tell you. Here’s her link and some more information. And her cell number is 512-626-7700, because I believe in her strongly enough to engage in some shameless promotion — and because she’s incredibly useful to have around. She’s just good people, man. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Thank you for reading about my experiment! I’m going to go finish off the chocolate dip… yum…

I’ve been allergic to fruit just about as long as I can remember. Of course, I ate it anyway (for the most part) and I still do. I stay away from cherries because they’re the worst. Kiwis are pretty bad, but I like them and still eat them. But fruit, I love fruit. I eat a lot of fruit.

Apples used to bother the hell out of me. I suspended my ban long enough to be Eve in The Apple Tree. (I actually finished a lot of those apples backstage, even though I was only required to take one bite onstage near the end of the first act.) But after that, I went off apples again until very recently. The itching of the sensitive skin inside my mouth, the way my throat felt contracted, it wasn’t worth it. I never had an allergic reaction bad enough to alarm me. The discomfort would last awhile, I’d drink a lot of water, and eventually it would go away. I never went to a doctor, for instance, and definitely not the emergency room. Not a big enough deal, really.

But since we moved to Austin, I’ve been eating the occasional apple. And in the last two weeks, when I started having groceries delivered from Greenling, I’ve been eating several apples a week. The apples from Greenling are organic and they bother me surprisingly less than I’m used to being bothered by apples. Could it be I’m getting used to the fruit? Or could it be a case of pesticides, or lack thereof?

I do feel that my fruit allergies have been generally less bad since I moved to Texas. I’ve been exposed to a lot more organic food, that’s for sure. But I don’t know—the fruit here is sweeter, too. And even in Ohio, I had noticed that the sweeter the fruit (or the more sugar I added), the less my allergies complained.

To make things more interesting, I picked up a carton of blueberries from Sam’s Club last week. They were definitely not organic… and they made my allergies crazy.

None of the organic blueberries I’ve had in the last few month have done that.

What do you think of that?