I’ve been on what feels like a multi-decade journey to get to the bottom of a myriad of mysterious, unexplained symptoms. For the most part the path has been daunting, dim and confusing, and it has yielded me absolutely no answers. At many points over the last two decades I’ve completely given up and surrendered to what I believed was just my karma (for lack of a better explanation). I’ve learned to live with these ever-changing and elusive health challenges as they ebbed and flowed through the years of my life.
As I got older the only comfort I really found was in learning that my experience was far from unique, although rarely discussed and even more rarely healed in any timely fashion. Healed being the operative word (and apparently a controversial one).
Last year, shortly after my dad passed away, in what felt like an inescapable pit of a two-year long “flare” (my word for the compounding experience of symptoms that would completely take over my mind, body and spirit), I woke up to a golf-ball sized inflamed lymph node on my right arm. I panicked. My dad had passed from Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma and it felt as though suddenly I could see the inevitable landslide I might face if I could not get my literal SHIT under control.
After witnessing the pain of his final years and the disease that ultimately took him, I realized I had become increasingly numb and tuned out, effectively layering in further undetected poisons in so many ways. Toxic relationships, dynamics, substances, pastimes, workloads, etc etc etc. And with each thing mounting on the next I slipped farther and farther away from the harmonious state I had worked for years to achieve (and the time I had felt closest to “healed” previously).
Realizing this was a hard pill to swallow. Where do you even begin to detox a life. Yet I knew harmony was possible, even if it had once felt fragile. So I began what I now call “the great clean-out” of my life. It was a slow process… I mean REALLY slow. I first shipped myself off to the dOMe hOMe for my friend Savannah’s first Spring Breakthrough retreat (truly life-saving at the time). When I returned I applied what I had learned the hard way in past: shocking our nervous system can lead to a further spiral, so I went easy on myself, broaching only one thing at a time… leading to what felt like a full unraveling earlier this year. When I finally felt stable enough to begin the actual healing process I began to enlist an army of support, kicking off the next chapter again with a trip back to the dOMe hOMe, this time as an act of celebration and a moment that signified shifting from neutralizing the negative to magnifying the positive. (side note: it looks like there will be a dOMe hOMe x Joybody Retreat collab in the near future so make sure to keep your eyes peeled!)
At the same time I stripped away every band-aid solution I’d been given, since I hadn’t had any luck in finding a Doctor or anyone actually interested in helping me with my underlying health issues. I wanted to start from ground zero and began my hunt for a naturopath who worked with something called bio-resonance feedback testing. It’s a form of therapy I had recently learned about and found fascinating, as it measures the frequency of energy wavelengths coming from the body and shows whether they are testing in normal range for that particular organ or body system. And as someone who has always been outspokenly sensitive to energy… feeling immediate physical feedback when around or near certain objects, or sounds, or when consuming certain foods… I thought it could be worth a shot.
After a few months of research and my usual intuitive selection process I finally got in to see the naturopath I’d been waiting on. She met me with a warm smile and immediately put me at ease, diving into questions I had never had a health care provider ask or even seem to care about. She was piecing together a puzzle. Out of the corner of my eye I saw what I assumed was the machine that would do the bio-resonance feedback and I got excited. She had asked me to bring anything and everything I was taking at home that I believed was contributing to my health: supplements, vitamins, sprays, etc., and I had a full bag of “remedies” I’d spent thousands of dollars on over the years in hope of finding the cure to all my issues.
She had me hold a slim copper rod in one hand while she gently tapped the other with a second instrument. No needles. No wires. Just a quiet series of clicks and a screen that lit up while she explained what was happening.
Essentially the machine reads the frequencies of different organs and shows whether they are in their normal range or completely off. Once she had a sense of what needed attention (shocker… my lymphatic system was beyond what she could measure, along with my adrenals and an unidentified bacteria), she began testing different homeopathic remedies with the same machine along with my endless personal products. Not just one at a time either. She tested them in groups to see which combinations brought my body back into harmony.
It brought me back to a concept I have been aware of since as early as three years old I think. Everything around us, whether it is something we touch or the environment that holds us, has the ability to heal us, hurt us or stay neutral. Sometimes one tiny thing out of harmony feels huge, like a paper cut that aches more than it should because the rest of the system is so perfectly balanced. Other times when life is already chaotic another small discord slips in almost unnoticed even though it carries the same weight of disruption (the mountain of stuff that piled up seemingly without my knowledge only a few years ago).
After two hours of walking through intricate details of my life and what she felt was a good initial protocol to restore some of the out-of-whack frequencies in my body I was on my way. I could not stop thinking about this concept and how, just as noise-cancelling headphones use alternating frequency technology to neutralize the external sound they pick up to deliver “zero noise,” we could quite literally apply this concept of frequencies to neutralize and balance countless aspects of our lives.
It had me thinking about a woman I met years ago, on my second trip to Bali for my yoga teacher training. She was one of those people who just oozes groundedness and seems to always be in harmony with her surroundings. Over long afternoons after our yoga training sessions, she spoke about the frequency of objects and how a piece of furniture that is hand-carved from natural materials carries a frequency that sits in harmony with nature and with our own bodies in a way that a mass-produced plastic piece never could. That it goes deeper than the materials themselves but the people they come in to contact to during production... that exploitative production practices leach on to the objects. When we are unconscious of the energies of the objects we surround ourselves with we unknowingly expose ourselves to the energies of those objects. We are like sponges, effectively absorbing and emitting energy constantly. She said it is the same with everything we bring into our lives: the clothes that touch our skin, the food we place in our bodies, the pieces we choose to surround ourselves with.
This is not to say that we can do any of this overnight, as it is an investment not just of money but of time and attention. What she challenged me to see was that it is about paying attention and tuning in more than anything. About auditing our lives and slowly building awareness of frequencies. That the sensitivity has always and will always be there, but when we are out of tune ourselves we lose the ability to feel it clearly and are thus susceptible to absorbing without our own authorization.
This is the thread that keeps weaving itself through my work now. It is what pulls me back to everything I design and to everything I plan to put forth through OJOIE. Taking the time not just in the design process to really capture whatever feeling is inspiring me, but the subsequent steps from material and stone selection to fostering the relational dynamics with my production team to develop a sample respect the energy and craft that goes in to a production batch and ultimately to present it to all of you and the world so when you wear it… you feel the frequency and the effects that even a simple pair of earrings can have on your life.
I guess what I am learning is that harmony is not fragile, it is responsive. The smallest thing can throw it off and the smallest thing can bring it back. So lately I have been trying to tune in, not just to the big shifts, but to those tiny frequencies that change everything.
xo
Janelle
