It all started with Macrobiotics
I consider Kangen Water to be the most foundational thing you can do for your health:
- simple yet profound
- powerful yet gentle
- life changing with little effort
The journey that led me to this water started when I was 16 years old, and my two older sisters introduced me to the Macrobiotic diet. That year I quit eating red meat, and I have never touched it since.
6 years into my dabbling with Macrobiotics, at age 22 I found myself suddenly and inexplicably in extreme pain, limping and having a very hard time getting around at all.
After a visit with a Naprapath my pain got much, much worse and the following day I could not move. (By the way, if you don’t know what a Naprapath is, I would describe it as a very gentle style of chiropractic.)
When I say I could not move, I mean this in a very literal sense. I got out of bed and started walking towards the bathroom, and in the hallway outside my bedroom the pain turned so excruciating that I could not go either forward or backward, I was frozen in place screaming out load for help.
I had to be helped back to bed, and once I was down, I could not get back up. I could not even turn over in bed without setting off the most intense pain. I ended up in bed for the next two weeks. When the Naprapath doctor heard what happened, he said he would never have treated me the way he did, if he had realized I was dealing with an inflammatory condition.
At age 22, I was still into Macrobiotics, and I wanted nothing to do with medication – so I refused to even take pain killers for the pain. I remember a doctor/friend of the family being very upset at this, telling me I had to take something to settle the inflammation.
I did not know it then, but this was the beginning of a long, hard slide into poor health and constant chronic pain. The pain would seem to get better, only to flare up again. The pain on one side of the body would move to the other side. Every morning I woke up in pain, and though it usually got a little better as the day wore on, I also discovered I got tired much sooner than I used to, and I could not tolerate standing for any period of time without setting off intolerable pain again. My days of athletic activities, like the running and high jumping I loved, became a thing of the past.
A good nights sleep was also a thing of the past. I would get at most an hour of peaceful rest, before waking up from the pain and spending the rest of the night trying to find some way to being comfortable enough to get some degree of rest.
The Diagnosis:
Getting a diagnosis took years, but when I finally did get diagnosed it was Ankylosing Spondylitis. It turns out that the pain I experienced at night, and the stiffness in the morning, is typical for Ankylosing Spondylitis – it gets worse when you are still, so you typically wake up with a lot of pain and stiffness in the morning. Ankylosing Spondylitis is an auto-immune disease, an inflammatory type of arthritis similar to rheumatoid. The diagnosis came from an unlikely source. When I suffered my first bout of iritis – an inflammation of the iris, my eye doctor asked me if I had any joint pain. I was quite surprised at the question, and told him my history. It turns out that iritis often goes hand in hand with Ankylosing Spondylitis, and after some lab tests and x-rays the diagnosis was confirmed.
In addition to the severe and relentless back pain, pelvic pain and neck pain my digestive system became a complete mess, I also suffered with constant allergies and the eye inflammations (iritis) turned out not to be a one time occurrence, but happened again and again.
In my search for relief I tried many things, and they had only one thing in common. I experienced nearly no improvement, so I had just about given up hope and abandoned the quest. Among all the things I ran across, and all the things people recommended to me, nothing seemed to work on my pain. I was moving into a mental space of “I have to learn to live with this”, and I did not want to hear about the next “miracle cure” from anyone. As they say, it is always darkest before the dawn, and this was when I finally found the first thing that brought me substantial pain relief in a non-drug form.
Essential Oils
The pain relief came in the form of essential oils, and they were life changing for me. Back then, I equated essential oils with aroma therapy, and it seemed very woo-woo that aroma therapy could help with my pain. I had no idea about the power of essential oils when applied topically, but there was no arguing with my experience – the first night I used the oils I slept straight through the night, for the first night in years and years. I woke up the next morning feeling rested, and what was even more amazing, I was not stiff and stooped over when I first got out of bed.
I had found something I was truly passionate about, I had regained my joy of living, and I even started a little business centered around the oils, since I just could not stop talking about them anyway (this website actually got its name from essential oils, back when I first started it in the year 2000).
I was already self employed at the time, working as a professional cat sitter, so I was no stranger to self-employment. As I started working with selling the oils, I formed connections and networks with people in the field of health, and those connections led me to new discoveries. I found some amazing digestive enzymes, and they not only freed me from the digestive trouble that still plagued me, but also eventually relieved my allergies after long time use.
As time went on and I continued exploring the world of alternative health, I found more products that worked for me and that I felt passionate about, and when I found something I REALLY liked, I added them to my business . You can see an overview of them on the home page.
My favorite product? That is a hard question, as I truly love all the products that came together and improved my life so immensely. But I do most definitely have a favorite, and you will probably be surprised at what it is.
Water
The simple answer is water. But not just any water. The water I love is ionized, alkaline water.
But… not any ionized, alkaline water either.
The only water I endorse is Kangen Water®.
This water came into my life 10 years after my discovery of the oils, at a time when I felt I had my health issues “under control”. I really did not need a “miracle cure” anymore, I was doing well. Nevertheless, as I was introduced to this water by a dear friend, it quickly became clear to me that Kangen Water® was truly the missing link, the missing piece of my health puzzle. The other products I have used will always be precious to me, but I have come to realize that the one single thing that lays a solid foundation for health is the alkaline ionized Kangen Water®, and I would never, ever do without it again.
In all the years of exploring health modalities, I never encountered anything so foundational: so simple yet so profound, so powerful yet so gentle, so life changing with so little effort.