After trying the power of positive thinking for about forty years, I finally cured myself of the allergies that had tormented me for most of my life by using actual positive thoughts, and locally produced raw honey.

I had severe allergic reactions to pollen when I was younger. While my mind and I had initially decided to eliminate my allergy suffering using positive thought, my body seemed to have a different plan, and every year during the month of May, my eyeballs would itch all the way around to the back inside of my skull while I sneezed and sniffed in misery. I positively thought that I would sneeze my own head off at times during those spring days.

Positive Thinking!

So why did I still believe that my body is the shadow of the mind, and that my biological functions were dictated by my thoughts? Why, even as my eyeballs took turns lighting up my nerves with their fiery weeping, did I embrace such magical thinking when it had failed to work for me? I think I’ll blame my grandmother.

I was about seven years old when it happened: I was at my grandmother’s house one day, and during our conversation she suggested that the things that I think about the most often would be the very things that would then precipitate into my world. Intrigued, I asked her then, if I thought about a toy for long enough, then I would be able to play with that toy for real?

She then repeated that the thoughts that we entertain would be the ones that we would end up bringing into reality. Curious, I imagined a toy for a minute, and then later that day I actually found that very toy in her hall closet. I was immediately sold on the idea of creative visualization, and I excitedly showed her what I had manifested.

She didn’t seem convinced that I had gotten it, as I recall, and it was many years later when I found out where she got the philosophy that I’d so willfully inherited. As a family, we went to church on Sundays when I was little, but while my parents dragged us children to a plain old Presbyterian church, my grandmother preferred her own church, the Unity Church, founded by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore.

Charles Fillmore and the Unity Church

My grandmother is gone now, but her church is still around today. The Unity church, based in Kansas City Missouri, is a multi-denominational church that embraces any religion or school of thought that hints at the true nature of the physical world of creation, and their teachings include the notion of spiritual healing and the power of thought in the making of an individual’s reality. Unity Church (not Unitarian) was derived from a nineteenth-century group called the New Thought Movement, which studied the human mind in a way that was, and still is, generally condemned by the big-name Christian Church as being the devil's work. We are not supposed to think that we can possess divine abilities, because the Church would lose business if people started thinking that way.

While my parents meant the very best for their children, they knew no better than to indoctrinate me into their Presbyterian church, but my grandmother liked her Unity church, and I liked my grandmother.

My Magic Didn’t Work

For many years I walked around creating reality, but with all of that power at my command, I could never seem to overcome my allergy problem. What was going on? Was ‘creative visualization’ a real thing, or was I buying into an old-but-wrong belief system? I rubbed my eye with the back of my hand and wondered if I’d been wrong my whole life-- that I actually had no control or even influence on my reality, and that I had possibly been delusional, blindly believing in something that sounded fantastic, but something for which I had no tangible evidence.

A Visit to the Family Doctor

My parents didn’t have a lot of money, and when they took me to the family doctor to see about solving my allergy problem, the doctor said that I was allergic to pollen, and that he could perform a series of tests-- expensive tests-- to discover which specific plants were bothering me. On the way home from that visit, my mom told me that the doc had actually suggested that in time, my body might build up a natural resistance to the offending pollen. Further, she suggested that if I believe that my body could evolve in such a way, that my attitude would help the natural healing process along. Here we go again! I believed that she was right though, and our family budget insisted that she be right, as opposed to paying the prohibitive medical costs simply to find out which plants I should be avoiding forever.

Doing It Wrong

As it turned out, forty years later-- forty lovely spring seasons spoiled by allergies, I was doing it wrong. I hadn’t envisioned myself being healthy, I had only dreaded the spring every year, imagining another season of itching and sneezing. If our thoughts are real things, waiting for enough mental support to allow them to pop into reality, then I was creating a world where I had allergies in the springtime, and each year I was dwelling on the fear that I would never get over the affliction. Over the years, my allergy symptoms did become less acute, but the sneezing and itching persisted, to my great disappointment.

The Belief in the Power of Honey

A few years ago I read about the health benefits of honey-- specifically the claim that locally harvested honey could help a person with their seasonal allergies. This seems logical actually-- honey harvested in the region where the allergy sufferer lives contains pollens from all of the local flowers and weeds, and so if we ingest these particular geometric shapes-- the little soccer-balls would eventually be recognized by our immune systems, harmonizing with the foreign frequencies instead of generating dissonance and a defensive resistance to the unfamiliar shapes.

The geometric/musical explanation made sense to me, and what’s more, I believed that honey would have no choice but to retune my body to my environment in this geometric fashion, or that through entrainment, my body would be compelled to sing along in tune. I had already noticed that the honeysuckle and privet hedges (which seemed to be the spring blossoms which were affecting me), were also a favorite of the honeybees. I like honey, and it occurred to me that medicine-- the best medicine-- would be one that the patient already likes, and shouldn’t necessarily taste like we might expect a healthy food to taste; it might be just as sweet as honey!

I started buying a raw (not homogenized, or cooked) local honey, produced about an hour away but within this same rather subtropical climate, with similar vegetation and wildflowers, and I bought a little plastic bear squeeze-bottle, filled it up and began squeezing honey by the tablespoon into everything.

I began making daily smoothies containing a huge dollop of local honey as a sweetener, drinking this potion every day. Whether it was a placebo effect, or if it was musical cellular geometries at work, or if it was simple bee magic that was doing it’s thing, I finally experienced my first springtime with no allergic symptoms a few years ago.

Conclusion

Maybe we do create the universe with our thoughts. If so, then maybe we’ve all been doing it wrong. When a mother frets, and says aloud “Oh, I hope little Johnny doesn’t catch the latest death virus going around”, is she inadvertently making exactly such a world by putting it into the world as a thought? Are we affecting our world, and are we also affecting the realities of other beings?

I solved my allergy problems in the real world, but I am uncertain where the credit really should go. I’ll begin by thanking my grandmother, and then I’d like to thank the bees and their honey. After that I would thank Charles and Myrtle Fillmore for giving my grandmother the idea that thoughts are heavy things, destined to coordinate into reality when repeatedly imagined. I thank my mom for saving us all some money on doctor’s bills, and for reintroducing the idea that our bodies are self-healing devices, and that we can either assist that or deter health, depending on our thoughts surrounding our healing and maintenance of our health. Finally I would thank our family doctor, who actually admitted that his services in this case were completely unnecessary and overpriced, and that it was possible that I could simply heal myself instead. Thanks doc!

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thanks for reading along as always, don’t forget to give a nice up-vote if you enjoyed this piece, and go and find some local honey no matter what, it will be a way of supporting a local business and, believe it or not, may have health benefits.

Image credits: All images in this post are mine

@therealpaul